There should have been times when repeated washing of hands was considered an expression of an exaggerated madness of purity. The American Bruce Nauman, for example, called a video work “Washing Hands Abnormal” in 1996, which is now being given more attention in his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam than it would have been before the Corona crisis. You don't want to wait for an hour in front of the two stacked monitors to assist Nauman with the ritual kneading of soap. But as an entrance one could not have wished for any other work, fascinated by the change of perspective that a cultural technique that had long been suspected of being neurotic could experience.
The show, spanning fifty years of creativity, was created in cooperation with London's Tate Modern.
In the wintry lockdown, only a lucky few saw this celebration of over forty works of timeless conceptual art.
In Amsterdam it shines all the more, as it picks up on those sensitivities that one could not escape since what felt like a pandemic: isolation, frustration and boredom.
When the young Nauman ran up against walls in his black and white videos at the end of the sixties and felt his way across a square he had drawn on the floor, you know that he is certain to be one of the most innovative post-war artists, even if he retreats into Inner already shows strange peculiarities.
A circus arena of death
A claustrophobic déjà-vu can be felt when entering “Get Out of My Head, Get Out of This Room” from (1968). The artist keeps growling the sentence from the title. He wants to keep to himself. One would have liked to experience the post-pandemic uncertainty using the example of a less toxic isolator. Even a classic like the neon lettering “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths” from 1967 touches upon with its spiral-shaped promise of salvation, one no longer believes to hear the spirit of the drug-fogged sixties from it, but the offer for existential reflection - and this is only available at the price of the effort of a cervical spine that adapts to the circle of the scriptures, an exercise that is recommended to anyone who has been injured in the prescribed home office.
An advertising sign that calls for thought - just one of countless aperçus that the seventy-nine-year-old now likes to pour into unexpected media constellations, from performances to sculpture to sound works and text-based installations. The Stedelijk connects the pioneer in all of these disciplines, with the exception of painting, which he left behind, his participation in the legendary group exhibition “Op losse schroeven” from 1969.
“Bruce Nauman” has some overlaps with the considerably larger retrospective in Basel's Schaulager three years ago. And yet something is different this time. Not because there is no chronology here. It seems as if Nauman's relentless view of existence, under the impression of the global Covid19 disaster, found its way out of the art-historical canon loop, in which it gradually threatened to lose its sharpness.