Bruce Nauman

Galerie Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1984

Krefeld, Museum Haus Lange, Kounellis, Merz, Nauman, Serra: Arbeiten um 1968, March - April, 1981, p. 154, illustrated in color
Baltimore Museum of Art, Bruce Nauman: Neons, December 1982 - February 1983, cat. no. 5, p. 56, illustrated in color (incorrect dimensions)
London, Mayor Gallery, A Tribute to Leo Castelli, April - May 1985 (another version exhibited)
London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Bruce Nauman: Neons, March - May 1992 (another version exhibited)

Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman, New York, 1988, p. 154, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Bruce Nauman, Sculpture and Installations, 1985 - 1990, Basel, 1990, p. 17, illustrated in color
Neal Benezra, et. al., Bruce Nauman: Catalogue Raisonné, Minneapolis, 1994, cat. no. 129, p. 228, illustrated

The present work was the only one made in Europe, and it is larger in size than the other examples (2/3, 3/3 are 5 1/4 x 30 x 3 in.) which were executed later in the 1980s. In the two later works, the words flash on and off alternately. 

Language, including signs and symbols, is the active medium through which most of the world functions. Nauman’s neon signs address their audience in the most direct and unambiguous way possible – they speak our language.

Brenda Richardson, 1982

Suite Substitute is an early sculpture from Nauman’s body of ground-breaking work in neon, in which the artist confronts his own and art’s identity.  Nauman has worked with a multiplicity of media, from drawing to photography to film to sculpture in fiberglass, clay, cardboard, and metal.  Yet neon is acknowledged as one of Nauman’s most important and influential forms of expression, particularly when wedded to his interest in semiotics. A commercial craft of twentieth century signmaking, neon was first associated with low forms of popular culture in the 1950s and 1960s  – motels, Las Vegas, movie houses and bars. In the 1960s, the introduction of neon into contemporary art was therefore subversive in nature. Artists as varied as Dan Flavin and Chryssa worked with neon and fluorescent light at this time as a non-referential industrial material or as decorative abstraction. Nauman approached the medium with deeper intent, seeking a congruence of philosophical thought and concrete form in his object-making. As Nauman stated, ``I realized that much of my intellectual and emotional life was not being used or expressed in the work.  I wanted to get away from what appears to be abstract formal sculpture in order to make work charged with more personal meaning.‘’ (B. Richardson, Bruce Nauman: Neons, Baltimore Museum of Art, 1982, p. 17)  In the process of exploring new boundaries for three-dimensional art, Nauman employed neon to liberate his creative mind in the same way Eva Hesse used latex.  As a result, their utterly unconventional, organic manipulation of such commonplace material forever alters they way we perceive it. This manipulation of perception conforms to Nauman’s theme of semiotics, the philosophy of signs and symbols and the perception of meaning.

In Nauman’s earliest neon sculptures, executed in 1966-7, the artist’s frame of reference and subject matter pertained to artistic identity. The first neon, Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals (1966, Collection Philip Johnson) explicitly used the body as a map of self, with its fluid looping in space combining the artist’s ``mark-making’’ ability with a conceptual use of his own body as template.  The gestural composition and the exposure of the mechanical elements of the neon armature are more fully explored in the artist’s next neon work, My Last Name Exaggerated Fourteen Times Vertically (1967, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on extended loan from Collection of Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo).  In this work and the related My Name as Though it Were Written on the Surface of the Moon (1968, edition of 3), the artist’s name introduced words and language into his neon sculptures, and his willful distortion of the attenuated letters render these labels of identity nearly incomprehensible without reference to the title.  In thus divorcing his ``name’’ from its ``meaning’’, Nauman not only challenged his own sense of self and role as an artist, but challenged the viewer to investigate the complex relationship between ``thing’’, ``name’’ and ``meaning’’.

Suite Substitute is most closely related to Nauman’s other early neon from 1967, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign). Fabricated in an edition of three and all now in the collection of major museums in Australia and Europe, this blue and peach spiral is closely related to the use of neon in commercial signs.  Indeed the artist hung the original work in the plate glass window of his storefront studio. Yet its phrase, which can be interpreted as either facetious or romantic, is ultimately an investigation of the power of language and a treatise on the artist’s persistence to communicate through art. Followed in 1968 with Suite Substitute, these works are the physical culmination of Nauman’s explorations of wordplay that investigate multiple meanings in words and our perception of their ``message’’.

Nauman’s fascination with semiotics and wordplay began in his student days of the early 1960s, and was heightened by his readings in Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1966, Nauman was searching for ways to base his art more strongly within his intellectual thinking, and how to define an artist’s engagement with the world. ``In the end, I think most of my work is to some degree about how anybody continues to make art. It’s always interested me how one does any work in the studio at all, what it’s supposed to be about, how you get things started or make any sense of the process.’’ (Ibid. p. 22)  Turning to Wittgenstein’s 1953 Philosophical Investigations, Nauman adopted Wittgenstein’s model of investigating propositions by including contradictory and nonsensical arguments rather than sticking to purely logical ways of reasoning. Loading his work with meanings from many sources, especially in his drawings and notes, Nauman found freedom in the use of puns, jokes, and irony. He worked with anagrams (None Sing Neon Sign), palindromes (Raw War) and homonyms of which Suite Substitute was the first.  In this title, the ``substitution’’ of the homonym ``suite’’ for ``sweet’’ is as central and concrete a visualization of Nauman’s word play as possible.  The title is a pun on the Jelly Roll Morton song of 1940 titled Sweet Substitute, whose lyrics speak of transferring affections to ``my new recruit…I’m crazy `bout my sweet substitute’’.  The transference or substitution of ``suite’’ for ``sweet’’ in this neon and its related drawings introduces meanings associated with furniture.  The 1968 drawing (Drawing No. 67, formerly the collection of Konrad Fischer) for the fabrication of the neon Suite Substitute included the inscription, ``(Art to Replace your Favorite Furniture)’’, that in turn refers to another collage Nauman did of a cutout of a set of furniture from Sears, Roebuck and Co. in which he replaced the cushions with Hershey bars. In another drawing for the sculpture (Drawing No. 68, Private Collection), the artist continues his play of substitution by substituting asterisks or stars for each letter that appears simultaneously in both SUITE and SUbstItuTE, when they are overlaid one on top of the other as in the neon sculpture. This word play becomes more obvious with the next neon sculpture done in 1968, Sweet, Suite, Substitute (edition of three, 5 1/4 x 29 3/4 x 4 3/4 in.)

Suite Substitute demonstrates Nauman’s ability to show us something familiar in a new and surprising light.  By the act of substitution and the play of homonyms, sense becomes nonsense, the meaning of a ``sign’’ or word or phrase shifts, and our learned definitions and accepted perceptions are questioned. Art and the artist thus engage in the post-modern world by asking the viewer to explore, question and seek.