Bruce Nauman Isn’t Bound by the Rules
Bruce Nauman, the artist, was sitting at the front desk of Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, a gallery in Tribeca, one recent Saturday morning. He was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans, and a cowboy hat; a cane was propped between his legs. Next to him was a friend of his, the painter Eric Fischl. Nauman’s short-run show “No Mistakes” had just opened, but the two weren’t discussing art. They were talking about hair loss.
“So the issue is, do you shave it?” Fischl, who has gracefully maintained an impressive thatch of thinning gray hair, asked. “A comb-over is not an option. I tend to only look at myself in the front, because if I see it from the back I go, ‘What the heck is going on back there?’ ”
Nauman, who is eighty-four, keeps what remains on his head at a close crop. He has cycled through a few styles over the decades. The shaved-head period. The beard period—“also known as the grow-your-hair-somewhere-else-on-your-head phase,” Fischl said.
The topic had come up because the back of Nauman’s head featured prominently in “No Mistakes,” a series of 3-D videos that capture, in slow motion, Nauman drawing with his eyes closed. The idea arose after Fischl asked Nauman how, exactly, he held a pencil.
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Nauman said. One day, he asked his daughter, Zoë, to film over his shoulder while he sketched. The exercise forced him to question not only how he drew but how he worked.
Nauman got up and slowly walked to the back of the gallery, where the videos were playing on two screens. He is reserved and mumbly, qualities that give him a quiet charm. The name of his show was inspired by an exercise that he learned from the German curator Kasper König: draw a pig without lifting your pencil. It was tricky. But Nauman found that, when he tried the exercise with his eyes closed, he was no longer bound by the same rules. Freed from creating a realistic-looking pig, he couldn’t make any mistakes.
In the gallery, he put on a pair of 3-D glasses and watched a film of himself, with a stylus in each hand, drawing a cup. Onscreen, his hands floated slowly across a sheet of paper, an entranced expression on his face.
Nauman’s team had arrived. In New York, he puts them up at the Bowery Hotel. “It’s close to the action,” Juliet Myers, his longtime studio manager, said. Nauman owns a town house in the East Village, but for almost fifty years he’s lived mostly on a seven-hundred-acre property in Galisteo, New Mexico, outside Santa Fe, where he and his late wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg, worked in separate studios. Since her death, in 2020, he’s been travelling more. “He used to not want to go anywhere,” Myers said. “Why leave the ranch?”
Nauman’s studio assistant, Ellen Babcock, a gentle professorial type, came over. They had been working on “No Mistakes” for more than a year. “We typically film for a few hours,”Babcock explained. “Then we break for lunch—he usually cooks something. Then we work some more. We get along because neither of us talk much.”
“Food is sometimes more interesting to the boss than art,” Benjamin Kidwell Lein, a bespectacled technician who helps Nauman with video postproduction, said. “First one up makes the coffee. He feeds me his green-chile stew, which is awesome.” In the evenings, the two watch movies together, usually Japanese films, although Nauman recently enjoyed a documentary about the Lumière brothers. He tends to leave the projectors he uses for the video project running overnight, which drives Lein nuts. “They have a life span,” Lein said. “He always says to me, ‘Ah, Benjamin, I just leave it on for the cats.’ ”
The gallery was beginning to fill with friends. Nauman had hauled his own ratty cream-colored sofa and a few chairs from his house into the space.
“The 3-D makes me nauseous,” the artist Rachel Harrison said.
Steve McQueen, the filmmaker, came by. “Maestro, how you doing?” he asked.
Nauman’s gallerist, Berta Fischer, was hosting the crowd later at the restaurant Altro Paradiso. A car was coming for Nauman, and he headed toward the door. Outside stood the painter Frank Owen, a friend since their days as art students at the University of California, Davis, in the nineteen-sixties.
Owen grinned at Nauman: “I recognize you!” Then he jumped in the air.
“Can’t do that with my legs anymore,” Nauman said. The two batted their canes like swords.
Owen had travelled from upstate, and talked about Nauman visiting him. There’s a pond near his house which is perfect for skipping stones. When Nauman was there, they couldn’t find any good rocks. The next time Nauman showed up, Owen said, “he was carrying a bag with him on the plane. You could hear the stones jangling as he walked. California granite. If the pond ever drains, that’s all they’ll find.” ♦