After Nauman, the process that is the art

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise
Auden

Consider the case of Bruce Nauman. Along with David Hammons, Nauman is point person for the late 20th Century, early 21st Century divide. He’s the Samuel Beckett of the visual realm, documenting his body in space, from its most routine motions to its grunts and sighs, its failed dime-store dreams and dashed desires. Because his work has been absorbed into the body of contemporary art, it
mutates every day into other people’s uses of it.

In his studio on his ranch in New Mexico, however, the world that considers him a currency is far away. His ratty table before him, he sits on one of those expensive chairs favored by those with bad backs, his one concession to his status. Maybe he hears a horse whinny or a dog bark. He’s alone but not as alone as he imagined. Flipping through a manuscript, he finds mice turds and nibbled pages.

Enter rodents, stage left.

Office Edit 11, a video loop from 2001, presents what a surveillance camera discovered when left on in his studio overnight, sped up for the video. Furry interlopers the size of a toddler’s fist streak through space, stop dead and streak again, like paint brushes trailing invisible ink. Just as the human body is an instrument of its consciousness, Nauman’s mice play themselves like violins.

His studio becomes a stage, and all the mice are actors on it. It’s a tale told by a mechanical  idiot, otherwise known as a camera. The image shifts in tone, from porous and flat to an old-world shine. At one point, tired of verisimilitude, the image stands on its head.

Office Edit II is in Box with the Sound of Its Own Making at Western Bridge. The title comes from Robert Morris, whose 1961 sculpture of that title is owned by the Seattle Art Museum. The title is Morris’, but the artists in it (who are not Nauman) have hitched their wagons to his star.

The brothers Elias Hansen and Oscar Tuazon are in the parking lot with Use It For What It’s Used For, a piece that first appeared in New York in 2009 thanks to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. With poured concrete floor, skewered metal beams and solar-powered lights, it’s best seen at night. Like Nauman pacing off the steps he takes to walk circles in his studio, Use It For What It’s Used For  goes nowhere. Completing it would be a stain on its silence.

(Image via)

Jonathan Monk‘s Nauman tribute is direct, transforming Nauman’s deadpan absurdity into visual vaudeville. Monk’s white neon sculpture from 2007 is titled, The Space Between My Index Finger and My Middle Finger Enlarged to the Size of the Space Between My Legs, riffing on Nauman’s A Cast of the Space under My Chair, from1965-68. (Nauman made that piece and moved on. Decades later, Rachel Whiteread picked up the theme and made a career of it. She is her own Nauman cover band.)

Three or four years ago, when Western Bridge exhibited Jason Dodge’s Into Black from 2006, I thought the project came perilously close to nothing at all. Today the economy of its means strikes me as oddly moving. It consists of undeveloped photo paper exposed for the first time at sunrise on the vernal equinox 2006 in eight different places in the world. The sheets are blanks aspiring to color, darks groping toward light.

Maybe it’s the company Into Black is currently keeping, not just the other artists in the show, but other work by Dodge, including your death (copper pipe) and a current (electric). Both are a lovely kind of pared down poetry.

That leaves Ryan Gander and his process wallpaper. (Image of detail from Felix provides a stage, from A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, from 2008.

He failed to achieve a likeness, but his documentation of that failure is robust.

Through July 31. Open Thursdays-Saturdays, noon-6 p.m. Free admission.