Bruce Nauman

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1990

New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Bruce Nauman, March 1990

Neal Benezra, et. al., Bruce Nauman: Catalogue Raisonné, Minneapolis, 1994, cat. no. 400, p. 314, illustrated in color

Bruce Nauman’s body of work is one of the most diverse, complex and influential oeuvres of the latter half of the twentieth century. Defying categorization, Nauman uses nearly every available medium – from paint to sculpture to performance to video to installation. Approaching his art as an investigative activity, each series of works is Nauman’s attempt to give concrete form to a question or idea of political or social import. By physically confronting us with his investigations, the artist exposes us to his metaphors of man’s inhumanity to man in anguished works such as Bronze Cat which have the same immediacy as Picasso’s Guernica. Nauman credits his professors in the early 1960s with inspiring his commitment to the content rather than merely the form of art. Nauman has commented, ``they had points to make that were not only moral and political, but also ethical …[They were] people who thought art had a function beyond being beautiful .. that it had a social reason to exist.’’ (Interview with Joan Simon, ``Breaking Silence’’, Art in America 75, no. 9, New York, September 1988, pp. 140-49)

Bronze Cat belongs to a group of works, based on dismembered taxidermy forms, which allude to the darker side of human nature with implications of violence, torture and suffering. In the early 1980s, Nauman’s sculptures had focused on exploring the iniquities and horrors of South American and South African politics. By the mid-1980s, he pursued a wider variety of social issues with more universal themes. As Nauman stated in 1988, the year before Bronze Cat, ``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.’’ (Simon, pp. 140-9)

With the sculptures based on taxidermy forms, Nauman returned to the use of cast sculpture which he had not used since the late 1960s. In the 1960s and 1970s, Nauman’s experimental methods often took his own body as its medium, exploring all the permutations of a few simple actions or casting parts of his own body in fiberglass or wax. For the work of the late 1980s, such as Bronze Cat, Nauman now chose ready-made forms, used in molding stuffed animals, which he found in a taxidermy shop near his home in New Mexico. Beginning with Carousel (1988) in which the taxidermy forms are suspended from a rotating device and dragged along the ground, allusions to slaughterhouses, hunting and violence are unavoidable.  Furthermore, Nauman dismembered and reassembled these foam models of deer, wolves, bears, and foxes into reconfigurations that defy anatomical correctness, and border on the realm of nightmare in their bizarre juxtapositions.  As John Yau has commented on these works, ``Nauman can establish a zone so emotionally dissonant that a viewer’s initial and involuntary response is to take a step or two backward before engaging with the work.’’  Further Nauman has called our attention to the dissection and skinning that are a part of the process of taxidermy, introducing a disturbing aura to these works. As Yau continues, ``[Nauman] seems to be contradicting the practice of taxidermy, which is used to preserve an animal. On the other hand, it can be said that he is logically extending the behavior inherent in taxidermy, which eviscerates, dismembers, and reassembles an animal carcass.’’ (John Yau, ``Thirteen Ways to Skin a Nauman’’ in Exh. Cat. New York, Zwirner & Wirth, Bruce Nauman Selected Works, 2001, n.p.)

Bronze Cat, the only bronze in a series of six sculptures based on a single cat taxidermy form, shifts Nauman’s arena of investigation from wild animals, such as wolves and bears, to the domestic house pet. In so doing, the subject of subverted or tortured innocence is introduced. Nauman’s dismembered cats have appendages that reach out from dislocated and unnatural placements, in the case of Bronze Cat implying a penis rather than a leg or arm. The cat is impaled on a vertical base with its flailing appendages implying the frenetic motion apparent in drawings of a spinning cat by Nauman.  Most evocatively, the head of the cat is turned and its mouth opened into a silent scream, conveying anguished futility and terror. This sculpture is therefore a splendid example of Nauman’s ability to present us with the darker impulses which are inherent to the human condition.

As mentioned, Bronze Cat is the only bronze in this series of single cat forms which the artist created in 1989 and it is the only work presented on a vertical base. The other works in the series are rendered in wax, aluminum and foam, and are either suspended or placed recumbent on the floor. When Jasper Johns had admired these works at the Leo Castelli Gallery, the dealer commissioned a related work titled Jasper’s Cat. Consisting of two wax taxidermy forms hanging by wire at either end of a steel bar, this sculpture was a gift from Castelli to Johns on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1990.