Bruce Nauman

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #263)
Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles
Mr. and Mrs. Asher B. Edelman, New York
Sotheby's, New York, November 15, 1995, Lot 37 (consigned by the above)
Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1996

Los Angeles, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Bruce Nauman, March - April 1987
New York, Leo Castelli Gallery, Bruce Nauman/Richard Serra: Sculpture and Drawing, October - November 1988
Pully-Lausanne, Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne, Regard sur la Collection Asher B. Edelman, January - February 1990, p. 31, illustrated and p. 30 (text)
Pully-Lausanne, FAE Musée d’Art Contemporain, "Sélection": Oeuvres de la Collection, June - October 1991, p. 109, illustrated in color (as Suspended Chair III)
Stockholm, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Bruce Nauman, March - June 1996, n.p., illustrated in color
Ishøj, Denmark, ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall: Selections from the Collection, November 1997 - February 1998
Oslo, Galleri Riis, Bruce Nauman, October 1998 - January 1999
Stockholm, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Passage, October - December 2001
Stockholm, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Walking & Falling, February - May 2006
Turin, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Cascais, Ellipse Foundation; Paris, La maison rouge-Fondation Antoine de Galbert; Stockholm, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; Athens, DESTE Foundation, Investigations of a Dog: Works from Five European Art Foundations, October 2009 - October 2011, p. 74, illustrated
Gothenburg, Sweden, Gothenburg Museum of Art, Bruce Nauman, March - September 2013, p. 81, illustrated in color

Colin Gardner, "The Esthetics of Torture," Artweek 18, no. 13, April 1987, p. 7, illustrated (in installation at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, 1987)
Coosje van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman, New York, 1988, p. 89, illustrated (in installation at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, 1987) and illustrated (detail) (as Untitled)
Kathy Halbreich, et al., Bruce Nauman: Catalogue Raisonné, Minneapolis, 1994, cat. no. 374, p. 306, illustrated
Susan Brundage, ed., Bruce Nauman, 25 Years, Leo Castelli, New York, 1994, n. p., illustrated (in installation at Leo Castelli Gallery, 1988) (as Suspended Chair III)
"Bruce Nauman: Samtidskonst med doft av slakthus," Konstvärlden, no. 1, February - March 1996, illustrated
David Neuman, Spatiotemporal: Magasin 3 Konsthall 10 years 1988-1998, Stockholm, 1998, n.p., illustrated in color 

This work is in very good condition. There are four parallel horizontal abrasions to the reverse side of the chair back, located toward the bottom right tip as illustrated in the catalogue, and similar horizontal abrasions are located near the chair seat on the lateral side of the forward left leg as illustrated in the catalogue. There are a few short minor scratches scattered on the seat top and the lateral sides of the chair back. For installation, it is recommended that a wire cable of 4 mm. gauge is used, and images of the recommended clamps are available from the Contemporary department at 212-606-7254.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

As a feat of powerfully symbolic installation art, Bruce Nauman’s arresting Untitled (Suspended Chair, Vertical) stands as an eloquent and potent example of the artist’s most compelling and politically charged body of work. It is Nauman’s relentless and provocatively uncomfortable interrogation of the human condition that has made him one of the most influential and revered conceptual artists of our time. This work from 1987, however, moves away from the abstract mediations on humanity, taking deeper root in the specific historic moment from which it stems. Using the stilled gesture of a steel-gray chair, flipped vertically and suspended in mid–air, the artist enacts an immersive gesture that seeks to encompass the persistent injustices and violent breaches of human rights that marred global politics of the late 1980s. Modifying an often overlooked but nonetheless prevalent motif from art history, Nauman’s Untitled deftly awards symbolic form to the extremities of human cruelty that defy expression. Seemingly hung, drawn and quartered, the object's emotive weight gained through its perpetual state of unease forms a conduit for political gesture and a comment upon physical and psychological torture.

The device of the suspended chair first entered the artist’s oeuvre in 1981 with his South America and Africa series which built upon the subject of a political oppression first broached by Nauman in the 1970s. Diamond Africa with Chair Tuned D E A D 1981, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, shows the suspended chair surrounded by a steel frame. Referencing the swinging pendulum of French physicist Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, the chair’s legs were tuned to chime the musical notes ‘D E A D’ upon contact with the frame.  As Nauman noted “Africa/South America [artworks] deal with the specific violence and cultural present there.” (the artist cited in Bob Smith, ‘Bruce Nauman Interview, 1982’ in Janet Kraynak ed., Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words Writings and Interviews, Massachusetts and London 2003, p. 304) South America Triangle, 1981 in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden also uses the chair as a metaphor for torture and the isolated attack of an individual. With the present example, Nauman’s eradication of the surrounding frame leaves the central character all the more vulnerable. Strung up uncomfortably and flipped on its central axis, Nauman infers violence through the simple reconfiguration of objects instilling a captivating disjuncture in which, as noted by Peter Schjeldahl, “the idea will not mesh with the physical facts. The objects, allusions and real implied spaces cling to their separate orders of experience. One yearns to resolve them in vain.” (Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Profoundly Practical Jokes: The Art of Bruce Nauman’, Vanity Fair, 46, no.3, May 1983, p.93)

Considered a quotidian object in its ubiquity and utilitarian associations, the motif of the empty chair has held significant art historical precedents, having been used as a metaphor for existential crisis. The flattened perspective and sense of abandon in Van Gogh’s Chair of 1888 in London’s National Gallery of Art exudes a profound psychological precariousness. Pertinently the present work recalls the muted terror of Andy Warhol’s legendary Electric Chair series. Here the harrowing image of the famed execution tool, similarly left void of human presence, explicitly references society’s capacity to impose inhumane punishments and painful deaths upon its subjects.

Beyond its iconographic connotations and the influence of Warhol, Nauman’s Untitled (Suspended Chair, Vertical) self-consciously challenges traditional sculptural values in its expansive presentation. Clear links can be drawn to innovations made to contemporary dance by the distinguished nexus of contemporaries and collaborators that Nauman formed a central part of in the 1960s. In 1958, in a production that featured sets by Robert Rauschenberg and music by John Cage, Merce Cunningham performed choreography with a chair tied to his back. Nauman later recalled: “Those early Warhol films and what I’d  known and seen of Merce Cunningham’s dance were important considerations. Because his dance is built up of normal activities. But again, it’s how you structure the experience in order to communicate it.” (The artist cited in Michele De Angelus, ‘Interview with Bruce Nauman, May 27 and 30, 1980’ in Janet Kraynak ed., Op. Cit., p. 248) A later piece from the Trisha Brown Dance company titled Walking on the Wall from 1971 used suspension and the tense placement of bodies which clearly also resonates with the present work.

With performance having formed a significant part of Nauman’s own practice, the artist's consideration for site-specificity and spatial experience is paramount. As surmised by Ellen Joosten, Nauman “thinks in spaces: whatever material he works with, the surrounding space is always present. Space in its limitations, in its effect....” (Ellen Joosten, “Bruce Nauman” in Exh. Cat., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Bruce Nauman, 1972-1981, 1981, p. 84) This expansive yet modifiable installation creates an experiential provocation to the viewer through an embrace of paradox: tension and harmony, absence and presence, all enigmatically coalesce with minimalistic clarity to create a striking sense of emptied space.