Accepting Alchemy through Bruce Nauman and the global pandemic

William Pym, Standards & Practices, Volume 9

Comedian Dave Chappelle has a bit in his last standup special where he talks about being called to the Standards and Practices department of his cable network and being told to do things differently. He’s not too bothered about what the network thinks. There’s a vulgar, uproarious punchline. I like the idea of standards and practices. It makes for a good joke. The enforcer of arbitrary rules and norms, a person whose job it is to frame what’s right, right now. For how can you tame a moment? In the international art world, where I have worked since 2002, I grew to become very familiar with a world of amorality, grandiosity and arrogance. I watched pre-2008 hypercapitalism change everyone’s style, and watched money get darker. Now the art world is being rebuilt, like everything else, in the image of a new generation. And one thing is true now as it was then — the art world is a place of porous standards, and practice takes many forms. I am still here, somehow, and I am the Standards and Practices department.

Bruce Nauman’s Natural Light, Blue Light was exhibited in January 1971 at ACE Gallery in Vancouver, when the American artist was 29 years old. Like much of Nauman’s one-off gallery works, it has a mythic quality. I’ve never seen a photograph of it. Nauman describes it as a row of fluorescent lights underneath and covering a skylight along one edge of a gallery. He describes the chaos of trying to look at and reconcile these two types of lights, and the inability for the viewer’s perception to settle down and focus. He describes afterimages and things getting ‘jumpy’ — the sort of nauseous jitter, perhaps, that you might see in the artist’s animated neon works of flailing, profane limbs. That’s all we had to go on.

Natural Light, Blue Light became Nauman canon in 2016, when it was shown at Blain Southern, a brightly burning big-money gallery on London’s Hanover Square that closed in February after ten years and too much money spent. In the 2016 version of the work, the long upper edge of an empty rectangular room had a line of fluorescent light in a glacial bluebird hue. Along the long bottom edge of the opposite wall there was a maybe six-inch slit, allowing daylight into the space. Experiencing this artwork involved total resignation to constant perceptual shifts as two competing phenomena rewired vision and the brain, live. It was not a celestial experience, not the bliss and meditation of Doug Wheeler, Yayoi Kusama or James Turrell’s room environments. You’d be challenged to meditate in such a space.

In his installations — architectural sculpture and environments as well as sound and video works — Bruce Nauman is an artist in the business of proofs. His sculptural installations can tune the viewer, can tame and refine their reactions. Corridor with Mirror and White Light, made the same year as Natural Light, Blue Light, is a relatively traditional sculptural object, comprising two nine-foot-tall, forty-foot-long walls standing about five inches apart. Strips of white fluorescent light run along the top of the gap between the walls, and a tilted mirror at the end of the corridor makes it seem as if it goes forever. It is a tangible, inspectable structure. Looking down that corridor, however, warps everything, and unsettles totally. The space reads as a corridor, we know this place, yet it feels wrong, jumbled in perception, uneasy, a too-vivid dream, impossible to touch. This feeling hits every time you look down this work, even if you know what is coming, even if you’ve seen it a hundred times. Nauman’s ability to engineer such consistency is a proof. It is a proof of how humans work, how our faculties work. It is a deconstruction of fear that is also very scary.