Exhibition · Bangkok Kunsthalle · Bangkok
“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.” — Zenrin Kushū Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941, Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists of the postwar period. For more than six decades, his practice has persistently questioned what an artwork can be and, more fundamentally, what it means to be an artist. Moving between sculpture, performance, film, video, sound, neon, drawing and architecture, Nauman has never developed a recognizable style in the conventional sense. Instead, his work returns obsessively to a set of fundamental problems: the relationship between body and space, language and meaning, action and repetition, control and failure, presence and absence. More than thirty years after his earliest studio performances, Nauman returned to this fundamental territory with "Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)". During the summer of 2000, after noticing mice in his studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, Nauman installed an infrared-capable video camera, moving it among seven different positions in the studio to record the space at night. The resulting work, completed in 2001, consists of seven large-scale projections whose grey-greenish tonality derives from the infrared recording, accompanied by multiple channels of ambient sound. The infrared video cameras observe different areas of the studio: tables, chairs, equipment, moulds, abandoned materials and the residues of completed, unfinished or discarded works. Nauman used the nocturnal traffic through these spaces as a way of “mapping” the accumulated remains of years of artistic activity. The studio appears as a theatre of ruins: fragments of unrealised, abandoned, completed and still-unfolding artworks coexist within the same space. Yet almost nothing appears to happen: for long periods, the studio remains empty. The artist never arrives. Instead, tiny events gradually acquire enormous significance: a mouse crosses the floor; a moth passes close to a camera;…