Artist Bruce Nauman skywrites over Pasadena

Down on the ground, it was a Saturday morning pretty much like any other in the Arroyo Seco's Brookside Park, a stone's throw from Pasadena's Rose Bowl. Kids were playing soccer, vendors hawked ice cream, families were heading to the Aquatics Center and dogs were out for a walk.

In the bright blue sky overhead, however, things were different. A 40-year wait was coming to an end.

A small airplane buzzed into view around 11:37 a.m., and soon it began to emit puffs of white smoke. A never-before produced sculpture by Bruce Nauman – a little-known but emerging artist when he conceived the sky-writing piece in his Raymond Avenue studio in 1969, but now one of art's premier international figures – was finally coming to fruition.

Soon the words took shape in a gentle arc overhead: LEAVE THE LAND ALONE.

The fluffy words hung in the idle air, then slowly dissipated, leaving barely a smudge. The plane circled around and rewrote the brief sentence several times. (I counted four in the first 20 minutes.) A few groundlings took pictures, having been prepared for the event: It kicks off “Installations Inside/Out,” a 20th anniversary exhibition of installation art at Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts. But mostly it went unnoticed or else puzzled recreationers in the park.

An early environmental sculpture, the piece is kin to the Earthworks or Land Art developed mostly in the American West in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nauman helped create what one critic a decade later would call “sculpture in the expanded field.” Partly that meant sculpture would no longer be only a discreet physical object with an inside separate and distinct from its outside and isolated on a pedestal in a gallery or a park.

In Nauman's case, in fact, sculpture would “leave the land alone.”

A master of language (and an admirer of Dada artist and punster Marcel Duchamp), he also chose a phrase that did more than merely describe the nature of new art. The aerial exhortation also recalls emerging environmentalist issues, kicked into contemporary public consciousness by the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's “The Silent Spring.”

And on July 20, 1969,  close to the moment when Nauman moved from Northern California to Pasadena, Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module Eagle and stepped onto the surface of the moon – the first human being to leave one land and walk gingerly onto a wholly alien one. Now that's an expanded field.

As is often the case with Nauman, a profound and poetic awareness of fragile individual mortality resonates through his art's otherwise blunt statement. Take a breath between its last two words, and “leave the land – alone” describes what everyone does when they slip this mortal coil. Up in the lovely blue sky, the work is a secular eulogy.

It probably won't ever be as famous as the dramatic “Surrender Dorothy!,” those skywriting pyrotechnics over cinematic Oz penned by the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying broomstick. No matter. Standing in the late summer sun while a hawk circled silently between me and Nauman's encomium, I was more than glad to be there.

Here's a short video of the piece:

--Christopher Knight

Photos and video: Bruce Nauman, "Untitled (Leave the Land Alone)," 1969/2009; credit: Christopher Knight/Los Angeles Times

Comments

[sweetie pie]

Five planes flew together to create the sculpture, not one.

[George M. Wallace]

I spent most of the hour roaming around near my Pasadena office, in the vicinity of City Hall, watching the skies and snapping away with the camera in my Blackberry.

An album of those photos of the event is here:

http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2032799&id=1485067237&l=e184fa4d50

The word "ALONE" hanging briefly in the sky was straight out of Ed Ruscha.

[Parker]

Bruce Nauman is so clever.

[Donald Frazell]

Clever, yes. Intelligent and meaningful? NO! This is the egotism of contemporary art taken to its penultimate heights. A common phrase given meaning not because of what it means, but who said it. Retarded, literally, as in limiting creative art in both purpose and craft. Any fool can make it now, as long as it leaves room for some idiotic critic to write reams of nonsense about something that relates only to theh art scenes desires. To get noticed, create a signature instead of art, and get paid absurd amounts of money by rich folks who only want to be entertained.

This is exactly what the Vatican means when it says art has become ugly. And is so holding a conference, but then Nauman doesnt really produce anything, but wasted plane fuel and dust scattrered over a wide area. The environmental footprint here is far larger than most art shows, and goes against the very "message' he supposedly wants to proclaim. It is really, Look at me!I am so clever!

Art Collegia Delenda Est
Art collesges MUST be destroyed.

[Aaron Wrinkle]

i like your article thanks! i don't mean to be a stickler, but there were like 5 jets writing that piece. the idea of one little plane w/ a personal writer behind it is romantic and all, but......

[Parker]

Donald.

wow, that was a very bitter and hostile little rant. let's go line by line.

I think the work WAS both intelligent, and meaningful.
Egotism? Penultimate? Do you know what those words mean, or are you just using them because they sound smart? This was a work of subtly. Ephemeral at its core. I think your choice of words here are simply unfortunate.
If you look at the work, regardless of who said it, the fact that the words "leave the LAND alone" are written in the SKY is a pretty well self-contained site of meaning, regardless of authorship. The details behind the work's creation, including that of the artist's identity and his existent body of work, only adds layers to an already complex yet elegant conflation of signs. How does this work limit art in terms of purpose and craft? It both speaks to a public audience, wider than the usual round of gallery and museum goers, addresses more than one specific concern, and utilizes a medium relatively unconventional to the history of art-making. Somehow I doubt Bruce Nauman, who, I might note, lives a pretty austere lifestyle, made any significant sum of money directly from this work.

The fact that you evoke the Vatican in your diatribe is very telling. I suspect next you'll be quoting Glenn Beck, who recently derailed public art in New York for its deviant, socialist underpinnings. Jerry Saltz then wrote a piece challenging Beck to curate two shows, for which he would provide a venue and subsequently review. I would, in turn, make a similar proposition to you, Donald. Please do not go away and leave us only with your condemnation of this failed work of art. Please, tell us what IS good? Or perhaps you are an artist? May we look at your work? Could you please show us an example of what you would deem meaningful and intelligent in an artwork? I would be so grateful.

[mputtre]

Actually, the Sky Typists are five aircraft (T-6s) that, when I remember them active, were based at Republic Field on Long Island (my old stomping grounds). Also, the one detail you remember most from their activities is the SOUND...

Note this photo of the Sky Typists from Bruce Saunder's site:

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=4948319

[Donald Frazell]

LOL! Click on my name above, and you wil get all you desire, if not comprehend. Intelligence is the ability to process the endless reams of information and getting to truth. Clevernness is playing to ones crowd. A very myopic and insular one in this case, ignoring the vast humanity that is true creative arts concern.

art collegia delenda est

[Donald Frazell]

Waited forty years, for that. Wow.
I can tell the natives were amazed. LOL!

[Scott]

I'm confused.

This 'installation' is presented here as a novelty, a first time affair.

I grew up in Pasadena, and saw things like this in my sky in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the immortal words of George Harrison, "It's been done."

[baseball mom]

I was at a Little League game at a nearby park. A boy of about six read the words, slowly, as they formed. "Leave ... the ... land ... alone." "Do you know what that means?" his dad asked him. "No," said the child, looking up at his father, hoping for knowledge. "Me neither," said dad.

[Sam]

Look at you! You am so clever! ... Congratuations Mr. Frazell - you made me curious enough to check out your work. I didn't go any further after I read that ramble of an artist statement except to read your blog on The Failue of Modern Art, which again, while I agree with your last few points, the majority of your writing is a ramble too.

Sorry am I rambling too much? Now you know how I feel reading your comments.

Mr. Frazell, respectfully, stop being jealous that Bruce Nauman is "clever" enough to market and sell his work while your "intelligent and meaningful" art is barely a blip on anyone's radar, much less the art world.

Give up on your art, you're better at complaining ... be a critic, make a career out of it and get paid for it. Unlike your art.

[ZINNIA82]

DONALD AND PARKER.

I LOVE the dialog between the both of you, yet you both make valid points. No wrong answer here.

[Paula]

Way to put it Donald. Bitter? Me thinks Parker doth protest too much. It is pathetically laughable and ironic - the message and then it's impact on earth from the number of times the 5 planes flew.

[John Bones]

Pretty dumb.

It's not sculpture, it's not art -- it's skywriting. There's nothing unusual about skywriting. Skywriting is a quotidian advertising medium. It's not like something beautiful was put up there, it was just words. Big deal!

It's astonishing how incredibly irrelevant this is to the ordinary person, how little relation it bears to the ordinary person. Small wonder people find artists so pretentious and clueless.

[Donald Frazell]

Shhhh. It is not permitted to speak to the pilot.
There are more ways to make an impact than the galleries of the art "scene".
And it is Contemporary arts failure, not Modern. They are far different, modern fulfills my three essential qulaities of creative art, contemporary from about 1960 on about the individual and his pathetic desires. you obviously have reading comprehension, as well as visual,issues.

art collegia delenda est

[Susannah Hays, Berkeley California]

Leave the Sky Alone was my response.

Each and everyone of us have to see (and not deny) our carbon footprint.

Even Bruce Nauman.

Susannah Hays
Berkeley CA
American Artist
b. 9.12.59

[artrage]

Leave the land alone--pollute the sky instead.

[Cate]

The words of the sky sculpture say, “Leave the earth alone.” Alone? As in all by ourselves? Most of us aren’t ready to fly solo. It may sound petty, but most of the other sky-watching Pasadenizens and I are only just learning to fly, and we still ain’t got our wings. When you’re learning to fly around the clouds, you learn that what goes up must, at some point, come back down. Sorry to curb anyone else’s enthusiasm, but it makes for a prettty, pretttty, prettty hard landing when you don’t have a pilot’s license. It’s better to stay on the ground and keep your eyes on the sky.

To paraphrase Emerson:

“But if a man would be alone, let him look at the sky writing. The puffs of smoke that come from those heavenly words, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly sculptures, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen from the streets and parks of the city of Pasadena, how great they are!”

--Where’s Waldo Emerson
(Can you spot him? There he is! Hiding way in the back of the woodshed again. I would think that would be the first place you would look.)

[Cate]

Correction: The sculpture says leave the LAND alone. (I mistakenly typed "earth" and must have had my head in the clouds again when I did it.) I made a mistake, so don't beat me up too much. This student pilot is one live wire that really deserves to be grounded for making a mistake like that. Going back to the woodshed now . . .