" The first authorized monograph on the world–famous sculptor, photographer, and video artist. In Bruce Nauman: The True Artist, Peter Plagens – a renowned writer, critic, and author who has known Nauman for more than forty years – delivers a personal and authoritative account tracing Nauman’s entire career, from his youth in Fort Wayne, Indiana, to his graduate work at the University of California, and through to the present day. Plagens first met Nauman in Pasadena, California, in 1970, where their studios were a block apart and they played basketball together every Sunday. Since then, Plagens has pursued a real understanding of his friend’s art. The book chronicles Nauman’s process, from the creation of works in his New Mexico studio to the organization, installation, and reception of his exhibitions. Throughout, Plagens is a savvy and engaging guide to the work, using his own attempts to puzzle out the meaning of the pieces, as well as the artist’s conversations about them, to offer readers a vivid and enlightening take on one of the key figures in contemporary art. "

The most comprehensive collection to date of the artist Bruce Nauman's writings plus all of his major interviews from 1965 to 2001. Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex and pluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based works to elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, and architectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums, including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparent eclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistic tendencies are conceptual continuities, one of which is an investigation of the nature of language. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nauman has refrained from participating in the critical discourse surrounding his own work. He has given relatively few interviews over the course of his career and has little to do with the art press or critical establishment. Indeed, he granted Janet Kraynak and The MIT Press almost complete autonomy in the preparation of this volume. In contrast to Nauman's reputation for silence, however, from the beginning of his career, the incorporation of language has been a central feature of his art. This collection takes as its starting point the seeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words. Please Pay Attention Please contains all of Nauman's major interviews from 1965 to 2001, as well as a comprehensive body of his writings, including instructions and proposal texts, dialogues transcribed from audio-video works, and prose texts written specifically for installation sculptures. Where relevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were composed. In the critical essay that serves as the book's introduction, the editor investigates Nauman's art in relation to the linguistic turn in art practices of the 1960s—understanding language through the speech act—and its legacy in contemporary art.

Bruce Nauman is widely acknowledged as a central figure in contemporary art, and the stringent questioning of values --both aesthetic and moral-- that has long sustained his project remains urgent today. For more than fifty years, Nauman has explored how mutable experiences of time, space, sound, movement, and language provide an insecure foundation for our understanding of our place in the world. This richly illustrated catalogue, which includes rare and previously unpublished images, offers a comprehensive view of the artist's work in all media --including drawings; early fiberglass sculptures; sound environments; architecturally scaled, participatory constructions; rhythmically blinking neons; and a recent 3-D video that harks back to one of Nauman's earliest performances. A wide range of authors --artists, curators, and historians of art, architecture, and film-- focus on topics that have been largely neglected, such as the architectural structures that posit real or imaginary spaces as models for ethical inquiry and mechanisms of control. Curator Kathy Halbreich's introductory essay explores Nauman's many acts of disappearance, withdrawal, and deflection as revelatory of his central formal and intellectual concerns. Eighteen further contributions tease out the various themes that run through this protean and elusive artist's work.

"From the beginning I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better yet, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn't give you any trace of whether you're going to like it or not."—Bruce Nauman "Bruce Nauman's art is about heightened awareness, awareness of spaces we usually don't notice (the one under the chair, out of which he made a sculpture) and sounds we don't listen for (the one in the coffin), awareness of emotions we suppress or dread... It's hard to feel indifferent to work like his."—Michael Kimmelman, New York Times One of America's most important artists, Bruce Nauman has worked in a dazzling variety of media since the mid-1960s: sculpture, photography, performance, installation, sound, holography, film, and video. What has been a constant throughout his career, however, is his persistence in exploring both art as an investigation of the self and the power of language to define that self. The latest volume in the acclaimed Art + Performance series is the first book to combine the key critical writings on Nauman with the artist's own writings and interviews with him, as well as images of his work. Bruce Nauman offers a multifaceted portrait of an artist whose determination to experiment with style and form has created a body of work as eclectic and perhaps more influential than that of any other living American artist.

Bruce Nauman emerged in the late 1960s Los Angeles art scene, as part of a generation of artists who dramatically expanded the possibilities of sculpture and performance. His emergence also coincided with the ascent of gestalt psychology, behaviorism and philosophers following in the wake of Wittgenstein’s philosophies of language. This book looks at this celebrated artist’s work in performance, drawing, video, printmaking and neon installation, in the light of its relationship to psychology.

Introduction / Carlos Basualdo -- Interview with Bruce Nauman / Carlos Basualdo -- Body at work / Erica F. Battle -- Walks in walks out : an appreciation / Caroline Bourgeois