“My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don’t like.”
Bruce Nauman’s Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain from 1983 brilliantly encapsulates Nauman’s career-long fascination with the paradoxes of language, and epitomizes his ability to convey the entire scope of the human condition in a manner that is at once direct, witty, and provocative. Mesmerizing the viewer with colorful staccato flashes of neon text that alternatingly flicker in a cyclical, syncopated rhythm, Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain presents a theatrical sculptural experience that is equally as meditative as it is foreboding. Ingeniously summarizing Nauman’s humorous, cerebral, and at times controversial artistic practice, Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain offers a satirical subversion of Minimalism while fusing the graphic force of Pop Art with the cerebral unorthodoxy of Conceptual Art.
Establishing Rarity: Bruce Nauman's 'Ring of Text' Neon Sculptures
Beginning at the onset of his work in neon in the mid-1960s and ongoing throughout his career, Nauman executed a total of only 12 neon sculptures featuring a circular ring of text. Of these, 10 reside in permanent museum collections, with the only other still in private hands residing in the esteemed Froehlich Collection in Stuttgart.
Digital Image © Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst
Art © 2021 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Upon graduating from the University of California, Davis in 1966, where he had worked as a studio assistant to Wayne Thiebaud alongside earning his MFA, Nauman moved to San Francisco and took up residence in a vacant former grocery store. It was here that a remnant of the previous store – an old neon beer sign – served as the catalyst and inspiration for his first word-based neon sign, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967). While Nauman has experimented with a diverse array of media over the course of his artistic career, his neon sculptures undoubtedly stand as his most iconic and influential bodies of work and are widely synonymous with his practice. His neon sculptures of the mid-1980s represent the apex of his engagement with the medium; the sister sculpture to the present work – which bears an identical composition and is twice as large in scale – resides in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Furthermore, over the course of his career, Nauman executed a total of only 12 neon sculptures featuring a circular ring of text. Of these, 10 reside in permanent museum collections, with the only other still in private hands residing in the esteemed Froehlich Collection in Stuttgart, marking Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain’s appearance at auction as a unique opportunity to acquire a work of this caliber.
Right: Dan Flavin, untitled (in honor of Leo at the 30th anniversary of his gallery), 1987. COLLECTION OF SFMOMA. Art © Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Exposing the complexity and absurdity of verbal expression, the titular words are represented, alternately in roman and italic capital letters, in a circular formation, with each word composed of double-lined letters in two complementary colors. This juxtaposition of color, compounded with the alternatingly lit cycle of text, produces an optical illusion that invokes a jarring, visceral effect. The genius of Nauman’s practice is his ability to evoke dueling reactions within the viewer: here, the highly charged words are disarmed and stripped of their meaning, while simultaneously heightened and imbued with further significance. Nauman’s choice of words “LIFE DEATH LOVE HATE PLEASURE PAIN” echoes the sinister dualities and cyclical nature of the human condition, a message which is further reinforced by the shape and construction of the neon sculpture. The seemingly infinite repetition of this illuminative cycle disorients both body and intellect, catalyzing a self-conscious exercise and a deeper reflection on the meaning of these terms and their dialectical relationship. Further, the complex network of tubes and electrical circuits that constitutes the sculpture takes on a corporeal quality and is reminiscent of the veins and arteries that power the human body. Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain ultimately insists on language’s inability to deliver a fixed or stable set of meanings, conveying a deep suspicion about what constitutes truth. As Glenn D. Lowry states: “Challenging the ways in which conventions become codified, his work erases all forms of certainty, mandating that we craft our own meanings rather than accede to more familiar rules. The lessons learned from Bruce’s penetrating intelligence become more and more necessary every day.” (Glenn D. Lowry in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts, 2018, n.p)
“Challenging the ways in which conventions become codified, his work erases all forms of certainty, mandating that we craft our own meanings rather than accede to more familiar rules. The lessons learned from Bruce’s penetrating intelligence become more and more necessary every day.”
Deliberately mocking the seriality and literalness of Minimalism, and expounding upon the usage of commercial images and invocation of consumer culture championed by Pop Art, Nauman here heralded a radical new mode of conceptualizing and producing art. With his neon sculptures, Nauman adopts a medium conventionally associated with commercial signage and imbues it with provocative and existential subject matter, mapping the human arc of life and death through a visual experience that is at once poetic and vulgar, meditative and confrontational.
