Bruce Nauman is about to have a very busy few years. Not only has the multimedia artist just opened a show of his new works, the Contrapposto Studies, in both New York and Philadelphia, he has added a major retrospective at Tate Modern in London in 2019 to his packed schedule of exhibitions. The Tate survey, which has not yet been formally announced, will follow a separate retrospective co-organised by Schaulager in Basel and New York's Museum of Modern Art, which is due to open in Switzerland in 2018 before travelling to the US.
Meanwhile, Nauman’s early installation Natural Light, Blue Light Room (1971) goes on show this week for the first time since it was made, at the Blain Southern gallery in London (5 October-12 November).
Perhaps all this institutional focus on his earlier work is what prompted Nauman to look back as well. The new series now on display at the Sperone Westwater gallery in New York (until 29 October) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (until 8 January 2017) is a reworking of his 1968 video Walk with Contrapposto. In the original piece, the artist walks towards and away from the camera along a narrow corridor, shifting his hips from side to side in the style of the classical sculptural pose. In the new version, Nauman’s body always remains in frame, while the studio background seems to move like a cartoon screen behind him. Another difference: “My hips aren’t as flexible as they were,” the artist says.
The seven projections progress from a straightforward view to split screens in which the artist’s top and bottom halves move independently, building to an installation where seven disjointed figures appear in seven stacked layers. “I don’t remember just how the idea of revisiting the Walk video came up,” Nauman says, but although he figured out the initial concept “over a short period of time”, the final presentation took a couple of years to realise.
Is he nervous about the two forthcoming exhibitions surveying his career? “So far I have tried to avoid thinking about the retrospective projects,” he says.
