Bruce Nauman
American, born 1941
Human Nature/Life Death
INV-1475
Bruce Nauman
American, born 19411983
Human Nature/Life Death
Bruce Nauman American, born 1941 →20th Centurymodern and contemporary artsculpture
Date
1983
Medium
Neon tubing with clear glass tubing suspension frames
Dimensions
182.9 × 182.9 × 10.2 cm (72 × 72 × 4 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Acquired from City of Chicago Public Art Program Collection, through prior gifts of Florence S. McCormick and Emily Crane Chadbourne
Regarded as one of the most innovative artists of his generation, Bruce Nauman has produced an oeuvre of stunning diversity, encompassing works of film, installation, performance, photography, sculpture, and video. He creates profoundly aesthetic experiences that are often aimed at disrupting viewers’ habits of perception. In the mid-1960s the artist adopted the medium of flashing neon in order to critically examine the role of language in visual art. Inspired by its hypnotic aura and non-art aesthetic, Nauman began using this quintessentially commercial medium in an ironic way, as a vehicle for wordplay, puns, and jokes. The artist created this neon sign for an invitational sculpture exhibition held in Chicago in 1985. Three pairs of words, antithetical in their connotations, line the six-foot circumference: life and death, love and hate, and pleasure and pain. In the center, human, animal, and nature are repeated in stacked sets of two. Each word blinks independently, ordered so that over several minutes all possible permutations are displayed. Juxtapositions of colors produce optical illusions that create a jarring, visceral effect. This work ultimately insists on language’s inability to deliver a fixed or stable set of meanings, conveying a deep suspicion about what constitutes truth, especially in the public realm.
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