The Brooklyn Rail

Editor’s note: I have known and worked with Bruce Nauman since 1976, but until this project I never addressed his work in terms of site specifics. And then I began thinking about how absolutely specific he is in how he deals with space in terms of measurement, acoustics, and psychology. Many of the artist’s pieces have what Nauman calls “space/sound”, which maps the acoustics of the room. For the online version, Bruce’s night time surveillance mapping of his own studio is followed by his discussion of mathematics and music.

Michael Auping: So what triggered the making of Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage) [2001], and how long did you think about it before you actually began to make it?

Bruce Nauman: …What triggered this piece were the mice. We had a big influx of field mice that summer, in the house and in the studio. They were everywhere and impossible to get rid of. They were so plentiful even the cat was getting bored with them. I’d be sitting in the studio at night reading and the cat would be sitting with me and these mice would run along the walls and the cat and I would watch. I know he’d caught a few now and then because I’d find leftover parts on the floor in the morning.

So l was sitting around the studio being frustrated because I didn’t have any new ideas and I decided that you just have to work with what you’ve got. What I had was this cat and the mice and I did have a video camera in the studio that happened to have infrared capability. So I set it up and turned it on at night when I wasn’t there, just to see what I’d get. At the time, I remember thinking about Daniel Spoerri’s piece for a book. I believe it’s called Anecdotal Photography of Chance [An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, 1966]. You know, he would photograph or glue everything down after a meal so that what you had were the remains. For the book, a friend of his did the subtext, writing about the leftovers on the table after Spoerri had preserved them. He wrote about every cigarette butt, piece of foil, utensil, the wine and where it came from, etc. It made me think that I have all this stuff laying around the studio, leftovers from different projects and unfinished projects and notes. And I thought to myself why not make a map of the studio and its leftovers. Then I thought it might be interesting to let the animals, the cat and the mice make the man of the studio. So I set the camera up in different locations around the studio where the mice tended to travel Just to see what they would do amongst the remnants of the work. So that was the genesis. Then as I got more involved, I realized I needed seven locations to really get a sense of this map. The camera was eventually set up in a sequence that I felt pretty much mapped the space.

Auping: I remember you telling me that in high school you studied math and that at one point you were very excited about it, even thinking about that in terms of career choices.

Nauman: I had a very good physics teacher and then a math teacher who offered to work with some of us on calculus, which was not offered, but was needed for the more interesting physics. So when I got to the university I got into some more advanced courses. While I found that I didn’t have a great passion for the kind of physics that was being done, or at least the way it was being taught there, the theoretical math that was going on was of interest and I stuck with that for a while…I always liked the structural aspects of mathematics. It’s a rigorous language that stays vital by creating problems that then carry the language further.

Auping: Do you see mathematics as a form of abstraction? Could that have lead vaguely toward art, or at least semi-prepared you for it when you started being more exposed to it?

Nauman: That could be. Math is abstract, but it’s also very precise. And the goal or the process is all about looking for problems. I think that is what art is about, also—looking for problems…Describing the problem is the answer to the problem.

Auping: Do you think math can be emotional?

Nauman: It was for me when I realized I wasn’t that good at it. [Laughter] I don’t know that I could say that math is emotional. But it is about setting up relationships, and that is what art does. At least it is what I try to do with my art; set human relationships, spatial relationships that are difficult to understand.

Auping: But then you got involved in music and you’re still involved in it. You studied and played some classical music, right?

Nauman: Yeah.

Auping: And you played some jazz bass.

Nauman: Right—in high school and college.

Auping: Do you think music has had an effect on your art? Can you think of any particular way— well, I suppose everything has an effect.

Nauman: A lot of the sound pieces have to do with structuring things in time, and some music enters in there. I can think of a lot of situations where acoustical parts are important, and rhythmic structures in the videos and films.

Auping: Terry Allen said you are a good musician; the problem is you just won’t play for anybody.

Nauman: I don’t know about that. I like music. I got involved with it later in high school. I started to slip into the music department. Again, I was interested in music theory and composition rather than having to practice, and that didn’t go over too well. What was interesting was that I had the same feeling for music that I had for mathematics and eventually for art. For me a lot it had to do with the rearrangement of conditions within a discipline; seeing if you could find the edge of the structure. The decision to become an artist comes out of all this somehow, but is still inexplicable to me.

Endnote

1. Originally published in Michael Auping, 40 Years: Just Talking About Art (Prestel, 2018), in association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.