Bruce Nauman

Sperone Westwater Fischer, Inc., New York (Leo Castelli Gallery number LC# 213)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in September 1983

Baltimore, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Bruce Nauman: Neons, December 1982 - February 1983, cat. no. 21, p. 93, illustrated in color
New York, Sperone Westwater, Merz, Nauman, Singer, Venezia, May - June 1983
Basel, Kunsthalle; Paris, ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Bruce Nauman, July 1986 -March 1987, p. 26, illustrated and n.p., illustrated in color 
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art; Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Bruce Nauman, November 1993 - May 1995, cat. no. 48, p. 126, illustrated in color (Madrid) and p. 155, illustrated in color (American venues)
Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art; North Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art; Seattle, Henry Art Gallery; Montreal, Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; Victoria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; South Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery, Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, May 2006 - April 2008, fig. 20, p. 26, illustrated in color

Rein Wolfs, "Bruce Nauman: Director of Violent Incidents", Parkett, no. 10, September 1986, p. 49, illustrated
Joan Simon, "Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman", Art in America 76, no. 9, September 1988, pp. 140-141, illustrated in color
Exh. Cat., New York, Castelli Graphics and Lorence-Monk and Chicago, Donald Young Gallery, Bruce Nauman Prints 1970 - 1989, 1989, p. 33
Brooks Adams, "The Nauman Phenomenon", Art and Auction 13, no. 5, December 1990, p. 121
Neal Benezra et. al., Bruce Nauman: Catalogue Raisonné, Minneapolis, 1994, cat. no. 300, p. 284, illustrated
Exh. Cat., Venice, U.S. Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens (53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia), 2009, fig. 58, p. 92, illustrated in color

This sculpture is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Wilson Conservation.
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Bruce Nauman's neon installation Violins Violence Silence from 1981-1982 twists and turns the English language with a sense of humor and aggression that forces the viewer to contemplate the visual possibilities of words.  This optically engaging and intellectually provocative work is confrontational with its illuminating radiance and at the same time contemplative and seductive.  Nauman's eager commitment to incorporate language into his work serves to address the nature of perception and the possibilities for paradox.  The inclusion of words would imply a degree of clarity; however, Nauman manipulates the words and sentences in his neon pieces to create tension and to challenge our understanding of the message.   Characteristically these pieces can read forward or backwards, include inverted or mirrored words or illuminate words within words.  Clearly influenced by his conceptual and minimalist predecessors, Bruce Nauman's neon signs by their very nature are meant to draw in our attention; however once they have it, his neon signs undermine it with great genius.  Neon is the perfect medium to serve as a platform for Nauman's formal, linguistic and humorous investigations.

Nauman, and other artists working with language, borrowed the format and type face of commercial signs from streets and advertising venues and brought them into galleries and museum spaces.  People tend to ignore or pass by signs on the street, yet in an art space, they are elevated to high art.  The significance of the present work and others from the artist's neon series is conceptual, dependent more on the message than on the craftsmanship or fabrication of the work itself.  Text art proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s particularly with pop artists such as Ed Ruscha, who like Nauman, focused on the meaning in combinations of words and their effect on the viewer.  Nauman's first explorations in this genre were word games in which he rearranged words and letters to create new expressions – blurring the lines between language and meaning.  His first word game was produced in 1968 and was titled Sweet Suite Substitute.  Here the viewer is forced to not only read but to vocalize the work.  In 1970, Nauman created a series of anagrams, palindromes and pithy puns, also in neon, that advanced his endeavors with language.

After a six year break from working in neon, during which Nauman focused on drawing, printmaking and sculpture, he returned to neon with an enormous outburst of production.  He created nearly 50 works in 5 years and in this time period had six solo shows in the United States and Europe.  The present work, along with the piece American Violence, is among his first works from this stage in his career and both utilize provocative language and patterns in a blinding array of color, buzzing and hissing.  Violins Violence Silence is a truly lyrical example of the beauty of three rhyming words.  The violin conveys a pure musical sound, quickly interrupted by violence and then further cut off by silence.  Nauman here creates a visual sound poem that has a formal simplicity and a linguistic eloquence and elegance.  Each word is an echo or memory of the preceding and in that sense is a mnemonic device – perhaps recalling an earlier performance during which Nauman played the notes on a violin D-E-A-D.

Another neon, also titled Violins Violence Silence was a large-scale outdoor commission for the music department building at California State University Long Beach.  The university declined the work and it was later installed on the exterior of the Baltimore Museum of Art.  The present example, intended as the indoor component of the Long Beach commission, superimposes words and forms a triangle from the three words.  The words flash at different times and the alternating sequences further complicate the implied meaning.  This complex structure conveys Nauman's increased interest in demanding a deeper engagement from the viewer of his work.  The final product is the elaboration of the underlying mechanism and structure, "the similarly sounding words of the title appear in both forwards and backwards lettering forming a triangular shape; when superimposed on one another the words and their meanings blur together." (Exh. Cat., Milwaukee Art Museum, Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, 2006, p. 71)

Violins Violence Silence is truly about Nauman's disdain for the violence humans are capable of inflicting on one another.  The neon is arranged on two planes with reflected inversion because the piece was originally meant to be shown in the window of the concert hall lobby and therefore read from two directions.  The word `violence' forms two sides of the triangle with the word `silence' as the base.  The `violins' open upward from the triangle.  Nauman's choice of the triangle as a shape for this composition harkens to the Italian Renaissance definition of beauty as a proportional harmony of ideal measurements and specifically references Leonardo da Vinci's drawing, the Vitruvian Man.  Science and art are at once intertwined in Nauman's shaped compositions and he also utilized the circle and the square for other complex organizations of words. As Nauman stated, "the implied violence and anger is what the newest work, the triangles and squares, is trying to show and for the first time it is really much more obvious." (the artist in Bob Smith, "Bruce Nauman Interview", 1982, reprinted in Janet Kraynak, Please Pay Attention Please, p. 299)

Bruce Nauman asks diverse questions of himself and the world through a number of different approaches in medium.  Violence is a constantly recurring motif and the present work is a seminal example from the artist's oeuvre that gives the viewer a confrontational experience with violence and our own flawed humanity through the assonance of these three words – violence, violins, silence.