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This commentary by Marion Maneker is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

Bruce Nauman’s MoMA retrospective opens in New York on Sunday, Oct. 21st. The New York Times Style Magazine ran a long profile on Nauman and his art by Nikil Saval called Bruce Nauman, The Artist’s Artist. Kind of hard to argue with that sentiment. Here are some other other interesting points from the story:

• “One would have to look to Andy Warhol to find a figure who cast such a long shadow over the cultural landscape. Nauman’s career has done nothing less than create an entirely new language for visual art, a legacy that can be seen everywhere from the aphoristic installations of Glenn Ligon and Jenny Holzer, to the monumental assemblages of Jeff Koons and Richard Serra, to the conceptual mischief of Barbara Kruger and Louise Lawler.”
• “It is conventional to think of Nauman as having no particular style, no unifying idea that is uniquely his. Instead, he seems to have fascinations, or obsessions: stretches of working through the same basic set of materials or ideas over the course of several years. And yet, Nauman does circle around a fundamental problem: the experience, in one’s environment, architecture, language or body, of being controlled. He subjects himself, his artistic collaborators and his viewers to disturbing experiments in surveillance; he makes us participants in art that is hectoring, aggressive, buttonholing and violent, and fills us with a sense of complicity. That he does so in virtually every medium only makes the sensation more overwhelming — when trapped in the mind of Bruce Nauman, there is no escape.”
• “Nauman had always been attracted to sculpture — painting is perhaps the only medium he avoids — but with neon he found a form that brought with it the synesthesia of sound that fused with light and color: the buzzing and droning of the tubes, along with the occasional pop or crackle.”
• “By the late 1970s, Larry Gagosian had opened his first gallery and Julian Schnabel had sold out his first show of “broken plate” paintings: two events that signaled the crudeness, volatility and sheer commercial swagger that would overtake the art world in the years to come. Nauman’s work from this time stood apart from that world, even as he became recognized for his influence and enduring vision. Pursuing his own path, far from everyone else, he became at once emblematic and singular.”