“When language begins to break down a little bit, it becomes exciting and communicates in nearly the simplest way that it can function: you are forced to be aware of the sounds and the poetic parts of words. If you deal only with what is known, you’ll have redundancy; on the other hand, if you deal only with the unknown, you cannot communicate at all. There is always some combination of the two, and it is how they touch each other that makes communication interesting.” –Bruce Nauman, 1989

Installation Views (7 images)

Painting Not Painting presents the work of Bruce Nauman alongside that of Stefan Brüggemann, staging an intergenerational conversation between two major conceptual artists. The interplay between text, image and meaning is a central preoccupation of both Nauman and Brüggemann. In Brüggemann’s work, text is printed, pasted, scrawled and obscured; it is lifted from newspaper headlines, movie dialogue and the work of other prominent artists including Richard Prince, Joseph Kosuth and Ad Reinhardt. Language becomes a modular tool that Brüggemann uses to engage the legacies of Pop and Conceptualism, entangled with a very contemporary mode of being-in-the-world. His Headlines and Last Lines in the Movies works juxtapose newspaper captions from the week each painting was produced, alongside quotes from a list of historically significant films, creating a visual taxonomy of the shifting interstices between media and the world it shapes. Viewed in series, the works also obliquely document the passage of time, in a manner similar to On Kawara’s infamous date paintings. In his Beats Per Minute series, the repetition of what the artist describes as an ‘extended quotation… part William Burroughs cut-up, part concrete poem, part uncreative writing’ across several monolithic canvases forms an iterative notation, enlivened by fluctuations in the painted field, like variations on a melody.

Selected Works (7 images)

Brüggemann combines the gravitas of his art historical touchstones and a spare, monumental visual language with a humorous, punk attitude: in Untitled (Cartoon Painting), 2017, a cartoon by Ad Reinhardt (‘“What does this represent?” “What do YOU represent?”’) is copied and pasted to the point of illegibility. In Brüggemann’s work, as in Painting Not Painting as a whole, Reinhardt’s proclamation that ‘language in art is not art’ is humorously undercut. Bruce Nauman takes the arbi trary relationship between the definition of a word, its sound and its appearance as an elementary unit across sculpture, performance and work on paper. Through his lithographs, Nauman breaks language down into a Duchampian game, compelling the viewer to modify their customary approach to the ways words make meaning. In Ah Ha, 1975, a verbal interjection becomes a visual chiasmus, while the bold, decontextualised NO, 1981 illustrates the artist’s statement that ‘[in] certain cases, some of the word prints become objects. When that happens, they get very close to being signs you could hang on the wall – just like [an] exit sign’. Both Nauman and Brüggemann use text in their work to play with the ability of words to shift states – from object to sign and back again - unbinding language from the imperative of meaning.

Clown Taking a Shit (1988) refers to Nauman’s seminal video installation Clown Torture (1987), in which a range of clown protagonists are shown being submitted to a range of tribulations and humiliating scenarios – including a seemingly clocked-off clown performer sitting in a toilet cubicle. Within Painting Not Painting, the lithograph provides a point of connection between Nauman’s more baroque oeuvre of performance-based work and the comparatively spare etchings and lithographs on display here. Nauman’s clowns perform in a manner reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, the two vaudeville ‘tramps’ at the heart of Waiting for Godot (1952). Like the two protagonists of Beckett’s play, Nauman’s clowns participate in an absurdist theatre, locked in endless loops of aimlessness and abjection; time is passed – or perhaps saved – by playing with words. As Nauman notes in our epigraph, absurdity induced through the breakdown of language can often lead to poetry.