Bruce Nauman has been a force in the art world since the early 1960s with his challenging audio and video installations, photographic art, neon art, and sculptures. However, until now there has been surprisingly little sustained critical analysis of his extraordinary oeuvre.

Nauman Reiterated offers the first scholarly assessment of the artist's production with an in-depth thematic investigation of key works created between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Janet Kraynak argues that the coherence of Nauman's art can be found not in conventional categorizations of style, medium, or technique, but through understanding the artistic and cultural conditions that led to an interdisciplinary aesthetic of performance, which emerged in relation to technologies of reproduction, inscription, and recording. Kraynak provides a portrait of an artist who regularly defies expectations and genres, showing how Nauman's work responds to historical problems that have only increased in importance since he first addressed them, especially the technologization of society initiated by electronic media.

Nauman's reaction to the technological takeover of modern society, Kraynak suggests, is reiteration. Building from these observations, Kraynak explores how performance is intimately associated with the acceleration toward a fully technological society, which sees new modes of electronic recording and reproduction, the growth of information technologies, and the consolidation of technocracy.

Through extensive archival research Kraynak has written a revealing examination of Nauman's thought-provoking and protean work.

About the Author

Janet Kraynak is associate professor of art history at the New School. She is the editor of Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words: Writings and Interviews.

Reviews
"It had been Nauman's genius to have reversed Minimalism's conception of sculpture, from a phenomenological idealism to a post-utopian subjectivity in which the conditions of surveillance, control and exertion are recognized as central in defining experience in the present. And Janet Kraynak's brilliant study is the first to have given Nauman's aesthetic ambitions an adequately theorized interpretive apparatus." -Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Harvard University

"Nauman Reiterated is cogent and original, based on extensive and unique primary research, and theorized in a distinct, coherent, and compelling way. Janet Kraynak, a recognized expert on Nauman's work, deftly navigates the discourses of academic scholarship and the gallery/art-world, using a nuanced and detailed set of sources." -Liz Kotz, author of Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art




Book Information
ISBN 9780816683048
Author Janet Kraynak
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint University of Minnesota Press
Publisher University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 38mm