Venice is doubly enamored of Bruce Nauman

Given his stature among the crucial artists of the last 40 years, Bruce Nauman is no surprise as the artist whose exhibition was chosen to receive the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 53rd Venice Biennale, which opened Sunday. The award goes to the United States, but it's the second Golden Lion for Nauman. (He took an individual prize at the 48th Biennale, in 1999.) The artist, who first emerged as a compelling figure when he worked in the Bay Area and Pasadena in the 1960s, and who has lived in rural New Mexico since 1979, virtually never disappoints.

Among Nauman's established masterpieces is "Vices and Virtues," designed as a commission for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego in 1983 and installed in 1988 around the top of the boxy Powell Structural Systems Laboratory, near the center of the campus. In Venice, an exhibition copy scales down the work.

The original's 7-foot neon lettering transforms a classical architectural frieze into the contemporary language of a commercial sign. Seven vices alternate with seven virtues in 14 flashing colors: FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY and FORTITUDE/ANGER. In Venice the words now wrap around the "mini-Monticello" of the official, Georgian-style red-brick United States Pavilion (above).

As a Stuart Collection brochure explains: "The virtues flash sequentially clockwise around the building at one rate; and the vices circulate counterclockwise at a slightly faster rate. At brief intervals, both the seven virtues and the seven vices flash together." Virtue may be slightly more laconic than vice, but the slippery combination of the clashes is never simple.

The neon vices and virtues illuminate age-old internal conflicts, giving personal struggles a contemporary public platform. The work's gestation during the Reagan administration added an inescapably political edge.

Many of the calamities first writ large during the 1980s have now come home to roost in the millennial wake of the Bush administration -- a disastrous Wall Street philosophy that greed is good, a fearful bellicosity in foreign relations masking potential criminality, a deadly indifference to healthcare as a fundamental right, the intrusion of religion into American statecraft and much more. I haven't seen the installation at Venice, but photographs suggest a powerful turn of the screw: Transposed to an international exhibition stage, Nauman's powerful piece seems almost like a generational marker.

Incidentally, a current exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art -- not far from Nauman's old Raymond Avenue studio -- shows some roots of the artist's incisive sensibility. Nauman, 67, was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., and did his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. ("Vices and Virtues" is an almost archetypal utterance by a plain-spoken Midwesterner.) From 1964 to 1966 he studied for his MFA at UC Davis, where the sardonic, pun-happy William T. Wiley was among his influential teachers. "You See: The Early Years of the UC Davis Faculty" features about three-dozen "California funk" and other works made between 1960 and 1965 by Wiley, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri and Wayne Thiebaud.

--Christopher Knight

Photos, from top: Exhibition copy of Bruce Nauman's "Vices and Virtues" as installed on the frieze of the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale; the original  "Vice and Virtues" as installed on the Powell Structural Systems Laboratory at UC San Diego. Credits: Michele Lamanna, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art; Rizzoli International Publications Inc.

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

Nauman is simply a pawn of the decadent rich, a jester to amuse, and excuse their excesses. By combining the virtues and sins, he makes it appear that they are yin and yang, that they are part of a whole, to keep in ballance. But it is the sins that take one out of ballance, the virtues which give peace of mind, body and soul. And so, we are not at peace with ourselves, but always want more, Nauman gives a way for vice to win. It only has to upset ballance to rise in triumph over virute, and he gives the decadent an excuse to thier vanity, and amuses thier lack of passioneior life. It is all about them, indivudals over the whole. And Nauman their posterboy, literally.

art collegia delenda est

[David McDonald]

Donald Frazell's rants are getting less and less coherent. Has he ever actually seen Nauman's work in person, does he understand anything about his work? Nauman is no ones pawn or posterboy. His work is tough, smart, and raw and he's done it on his terms not the artworld's. Read the profile in the New Yorker for his history.

[Donald Frazell]

I can see, reading is not for artists, art is the visual language. The artist doesnt matter, art does, it should stand completely on its own, Only bad art or pseudo art needs an explanation to seem important. Those who need literature are weak, and his is just absurdly stupid. Combining vices and vitures, how clever. Idiot. And you fools fall for it. it is the height of decadence, sitting around pretending to be something, Imperial Clothing. Read it.

And yes, I am far more well read than you, history major, and literature. Not this garbage, but failed lit majors seem attracted to it, along with narcissists and sociopaths. Passion has left art. And so it is dead. Outside of Anselm Kiefer, havent seen a great new artists in fifty years. Its all about professionalism, a career, living a stupid effete life style, not art anymore.

Life needs art again, a true revolutuion must arise but never from the Bastilles of Art, the Academies. Nobody can be more in the sytem than a fool brainwashed enough to actaully complete an art degree, or waste dads money on a MFA. Toilet paper. No great artist finsihed an art school just like in music Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis left Julliard to go play with the real masters, working musicians like Bird and Blakey. The rest, jusut fund raiser fors professional art teachers careers. Garbage.

art collegia delenda est

[North of there]

Way to troll, Donald! +1 ANGER

I love the Vices & Virtues. It is mesmerizing to watch. I enjoy imagining the many instances of each that life has to offer. +1 HOPE

[Donald Frazell]

Um, try getting out more. This is insipid, arrogant, and all of the vices shown, i cant help your limited knowledge fof life and imagination, it was your fault to go waste it away in art schools, where no life exists. Only a business, creating more to feed the museo/academic/gallery complex of decadence. boring too.

It is time to put aside childish things. Grow up.

art collegia delenda est