001 080 Live or Die. exhibition catalogue

Live or Die Philippe Vandenberg Bruce Nauman

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Contents

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Live or Die

5—8

Brigitte Kölle

Normal and Other Miseries

10 — 15

John C. Welchman

Sundry Sunderings

16 — 20

Anna Dezeuze

WORKS I

22 — 41

Philippe Vandenberg Bruce Nauman

Between Necessity and Despair

42 — 47

Philippe Vandenberg in conversation with Bernard Dewulf

You Never See it Coming

49 — 52

Bruce Nauman in conversation with Joan Simon

WORKS II

54 — 75

Philippe Vandenberg Bruce Nauman

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LIVE OR DIE Brigitte Kölle At first, it may seem startling to see the small but dense selection of works by the American artist Bruce Nauman (born 1941) alongside those by the Belgian Philippe ­Vandenberg (1952-2009). The artists never met one an­ other and they could not be more different in their choice of artistic media. Nauman’s oeuvre is extremely wide-ranging and includes sculptures, installations, performances, drawings, prints, videos, neon and soundscapes. In fact, the only thing that he has never done over the years is paint. And yet painting is what Philippe Vandenberg loved the most, although he also made a huge and impressive range of drawings, most of which can be found in his sketchbooks.

What is it, then, that links these apparently divergent artists and their respective oeuvres?

In the first instance, Nauman and Vandenberg share a common attitude towards their artistic practices. This involves a form of elaborating things, a process of exploration and investigation as an attempt to understand how we relate to the world and to each other. Neither artist is interested in promoting certainties or in creating a ‘nice’, cosy art. Their works are direct, raw, uncouth and finished just to the point where they enter the space as a kind of prelude or genesis to something. And this is when the real questions begin.

There is rarely a simple form or a straightforward answer, and therefore in both Nauman’s and Vandenberg’s oeuvres

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there are countless repetitions, inflections and variations on the same theme. These are indicative of a certain obsessiveness that occasionally borders on mania. We perceive the strain that both artists are under and their singlemindedness. They are men who take things seriously – existentially seriously. There is an intensity in Nauman’s and Vandenberg’s works, one that is both gripping and dis­ tressing, unsettling and haunting.

But what, then, propels these two artists? What motivates them? What is the secret that drives their art? I venture to claim that Nauman’s and Vandenberg’s work, no matter how different it may look at first sight, originates from the same source: frustration. It is not a matter of being upset about life in general, i.e. of suffering Weltschmerz, but a case of despairing about the dark side of people, about hatred and violence, coldness and vilification, and about the impossibility of communication between people and of engaging them.

In an interview with Bernard Dewulf in 2008, Philippe Vandenberg explained: ‘Despair has many guises. Despair guides me to my studio, where another despair is waiting for me. That’s how it is.’ Bruce Nauman said something similar in a conversation with Joan Simon in 1988: ‘Anger and frustration are two very strong feelings of motivation for me. They get me into the studio, get me to do the work. [...] My work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition. And about how people refuse to understand other people. And about how people can be cruel to each other.’ 1

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Human Companionship, Human Drain is the title of one of Nauman’s lithographs, dating from 1981 (see page 37).

Human coexistence, it seems, is bound ‘to go down the drain’, like water trickling away through the sewer. ‘Help me!

Hurt me!’ cries a male head that is spinning around in a large video installation by Nauman, giving rise to a profound tension between pain and salvation in this interpersonal relationship. In the colourful, three-part lithograph Untitled (Fingers and Holes), 1994 (see page 41), the apparently innocent touch of a handshake seems to turn into an aggressive sexual energy. Who is the perpetrator here, and who is the victim?

Vandenberg’s works are like an echo, born from a similar aggression, erotic vigour and animalistic instinct. Where does the fun end and the violence begin? ‘Kill them all and dance’ is a categorical order to ignore law and order and all the rules that govern human relationships, and to indulge in an ecstatic delusion, driven by the urge to destroy and murder, and by sadistic pleasures. Philippe Vandenberg found inspiration for countless drawings and paintings on this theme in Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa that called for the murder of author Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses (1988). And in the case of the two impressive watercolour portraits, where the heads seem to be composed of a multitude of eyes (or wounds?) and the unusually long tongues protrude from the mouths, it is disconcertingly ambiguous whether this is the sad result of a brutal attack or the distorted image of a many-eyed,

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potentially aggressive Cyclops. Lust and pain, violence and horror are all too close to each other. We humans are like those that feature in Vandenberg’s almost monochrome La misère du jour III, 1996-1999 (see page 10), in which four heads are engaged in a circular dance, the mouths inseparably connected with a sort of barbed wire. Death seems the only way out of this whirl.

What makes Bruce Nauman’s and Philippe Vandenberg’s art so great is that both artists succeed in creating images that capture the abyss within ourselves, our failings and our cruelty. Their images are direct, uncompromising and distressing. They are not moralising, yet they are moral in a very powerful and responsible manner. ‘It is said that art is about life and death. That may be melodramatic, but it’s also true,’ Nauman said as long ago as 1978. LIVE OR DIE! Nothing more, nothing less.

1 Joan Simon, ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman’, 1988 (January 1987), in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words.

Writings and Interviews, ed. by Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003), p. 332.

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Philippe Vandenberg, La misère du jour III, 1996-1999 Acrylic, blood and pencil on cotton, 135 x 174.5 cm

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NORMAL AND OTHER MISERIES John C. Welchman Four faces, two in profile, two almost frontal, all drawn in graphite after Philippe Vandenberg’s wife, are floating in the shape of a skewed square or diamond, linked together by lengths of pencilled thorny briar. Their ground is a loosely brushed, snowy white arena that extends, unevenly, to almost the very edge of the cotton support. Here, ribbons and swathes of darker underpainting are revealed, some mottled with blood. The mouths of the faces are agape, thereby exposing the barbed fronds that weave in and out of the orifices and, at times, appear to merge with teeth or tongue. How can we adjudicate between the broadside of messages that we confront in this work – questions that turn on intimacy, domestic relations, repetition, recurrence and circularity, dependency and enunciation – and which are conflated, quite literally, with an undertow of violence?

Vandenberg’s title cuts us no slack. ‘La misère du jour’ is a phrase that combines several nuances in English: ‘the misery of the day’, ‘daily misery’, ‘the miserableness of daytime’.

La misère du jour III, 1996-1999 (see page 10) also reveals that this is the sequel to a prior bout of diurnal misery, one of the artist’s many modes of doubling down, in lockstep with the inexorable. The emotional disposition at stake seems to be compounded from several European formations of misery, though reducible to none. These include the selfreflexive alienations of mid-twentieth-century Existentialism,

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such as Francis Ponge’s definition of ‘Man – and man alone’, offered in a 1951 essay on the sculptures and paintings of Alberto Giacometti, who, ‘reduced to a thread – in the dilapidation, and misery of the world [...] searches for himself – starting from nothing.’1 The trope of threads, rendered physically in the emaciation of Giacometti’s figures, carries over into Vandenberg’s briars, and for both artists the congregational clustering of persons amplifies that aspect of linearity given over to twisting, turning and clamping down in a disquisition on the hard embedding of relationality per se. Yet the younger artist’s commitments cannot be identified so readily with a questing selfhood activated by overcoming the void.

Georges Bataille’s more desolate formulations locate the domain of misery within the ‘passive expanses of nature’.

For him, it was ‘untouchable and unnameable [...] soiled and impure in the strong sense of the terms’.2 Vandenberg is clearly heir to the struggle with elemental modes of tactility and nomination, as attested by the confoundingly wretched entanglement of tongues, teeth, lips and throat in La misère du jour III. But he does not espouse the notion of a generalised ‘impurity’ that is predicated upon the deep passivity of abjection, or certainly not in the ‘strong sense’.

That he demurs from the pure negation of absolute misery can be explained, in part at least, by his interest in other orders of miserable experience, including what in 1986 Gerhard Richter termed the ‘normal misery’3 of a painter’s technical choices; but, equally, Nietzsche’s contrarian

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suggestion that misery ‘preserves the happy man’.4 Articulated in arenas replete with signs and traces of communicative exchange, Vandenberg’s paintings can be deep and bleak, but they are remorselessly situational.

They offer a visual release for the conditions of exchange while simultaneously ruining its method. We are beset by incompletion and failure. Language falls, is stuttered, or cut.

Signs are found or announced, then morphed into a virtuoso assemblage of imagistic and conceptual metaphors. But where do they end up? Perhaps as swastika patterns, floral attributes or disembodied heads. One issuance of every avenue becomes a form of cul-de-sac. And yet the work is about avenues – as zones of consolidated flow, on the one hand, but also as cord, rope and line, on the other; all specific binding agents that come together – unwittingly or violently – with or without their objects. Vandenberg’s avenues are distribution systems for gross communication; and he an exile in the forms of a superconducting network concocted from the specificity, burden and weight of certain objects, first miniaturised as nodes, then finally eviscerated.

Language itself can figure as a prison-house in the rectilinear and cage-form declension of words inscribed like bars across the pictorial surface. These arrangements posit a sense of confinement: what lies within and beyond the barlike letters, to what conditions of interiority and exteriority do they refer? They also generate a sense of ‘to and from’, the rudiments of a transmissive scene configured in nodal points and the pulses (of information) that move between

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them. Other works in the exhibition also bear witness to the elasticity of the nodal forms envisaged by Vandenberg.

The diamond shape that defines the arrangement of the threaded heads in La misère du jour III is recast as a lattice of lozenge-like forms in No title, ca. 2007-2008 (see page 25) – a chain-link fence that stands behind a scaffolding of letters – ’Kill All of Them’ – themselves elongated, reiterative and recombinant. It recurs in the space created by the legs and genitals of the prone figures in La petite incestueuse, 2000-2002 (see page 27), where wavy lines of brambles issue from the sexual organs of a mother and daughter.

Wife, wife, wife, wife. Or wife, mother, lover, friend. Or a mother’s two legs and a daughter’s two legs. Head nodes, vaginal nodes, toe-to-toe nodes. Relational nests tinged by love, desire and conflict, birth and death, abandonment and responsibility. Perhaps Nietzsche put it best when he contemplated living in that space of ‘sinful happiness’ confirmed by misery: ‘To spend one’s life amid delicate and absurd things; a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician; with no care for reality, except now and then to acknowledge it in the manner of a good dancer with the tips of one’s toes.’5

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1 Francis Ponge, ‘Reflexions sur les statuettes, figures et peintures d’Alberto Giacometti’, Cahiers d’Art, Paris, 1951; trans. in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas [2nd Edition], ed. Charles Harrison and Paul J. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 615.

2 Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard), Vol. 2, Écrits posthumes, 1922–1940, pp. 224, 230; cited in Rodolphe Gasché, ‘The Heterological Almanac’, in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. and trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 166, 180.

3 See Gerhard Richter, ‘Interview with Benjamin Buchloh’, trans. Stephen Duffy, in Roald Nasgaard and I. Michael Danoff, Gerhard Richter: Paintings (exhibition catalogue), Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art and Toronto, Ontario: The Art Gallery, (London and New York, 1988), pp. 19-29; reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-2000, p. 1039.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman, ed. Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), Book Four: ‘Discipline and Breeding’, section 1039 (March-June 1888), p. 535.

5 Ibid.

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Bruce Nauman, Help Me Hurt Me, 1975 Lithograph, 91.4 x 129.6 cm

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SUNDRY SUNDERINGS Anna Dezeuze There are many Bruce Naumans. Until I started writing this essay, my Nauman had tended towards a whimsically powerless ‘good-for-nothing’, combining a radical de­skilling of sculpture and an exploration of failure with word play and spatial disorientation. I sensed in his brand of stumbling casualness a Cagean attraction to the Zen wu-shih, a term that can be translated as ‘no fuss’, ‘without artifice’, ‘nothing special’. 1 One day, however, a monumental lithograph unexpectedly called out to me – Help Me Hurt Me, 1975 (see page 16).

And it sucked me into a material turmoil that was, I had to recognise, far from casual. Layered with drawing and inks, through four runs involving two stones and two aluminium plates, the surface of this work brims with urgency. 2 The two block-lettered title phrases, though occupying the entire space of the page, are difficult to read. They are hidden behind a fifth word that brands the surface of the print: ‘DEAD’. Printed in an opaque, dark, red and blue, this word’s fatal addition breaks the binary movement of the ‘hurt me/help me’ refrain, bringing it to a sudden stop.

Faced with the ultimate dead-end, Nauman’s frustration with constraints and constrictions had turned to anger – and with a violence that I had not observed earlier. Yet Nauman himself had already tried to warn me: Pay Attention Motherfuckers, a 1973 lithograph had yelled out. Had I not

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noticed how difficult it is to communicate? How we are trapped in forms of ‘human companionship’ that drain all our energy (Human Companionship, Human Drain, 1981, see page 37)? Among the sleights of hand that characterise Nauman’s practice, an eager handshake can just as easily turn into a slap in the face…

Help Me Hurt Me belongs to a 1975 ensemble of nine prints collected under the title Sundry Obras Nuevas [Various New Works], in which Nauman relished the various repetitions and mirrorings inherent to the lithography and screen-printing techniques. For example, Proof of Pudding, 1975 (see page 70), comments on the inevitable imperfections of serial reproduction, while Ah Ha plays with a double symmetrical inversion of letters and colour. Though the tiny letters of No Sweat contrast with the two-metrelong text of Silver Grotto/Yellow Grotto, both screen-prints invoke in spatial and narrative terms a similarly vulnerable yet menacing body. Crucially, the same lithograph stone on which Nauman had inscribed the word ‘dead’ for Help Me Hurt Me was used multiple times in this series. It stands as a sombre statement of its own (Dead) and constitutes the lower half of an enigmatic screen-print/lithograph collage (Oiled Dead). In the two variations of Help Me Hurt Me the word functions more as a dramatic, impinging interruption, not unlike an unbearably loud noise.

According to the artist, ‘the point where language starts to break down as a useful tool for communication is the

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same edge where poetry or art occurs.’3 Help Me Hurt Me invites us to come close to the work, and to the artist, while simultaneously halting our gaze with a dead wall…

Such edges of language, poetry, and art, such obstacles to communication, could also be understood, as Amelia Jones suggests, as hinges: between self and other, as well as between life and death. 4 The cacophonic violence of Help Me Hurt Me returned in a new form in Nauman’s 1991 video installation Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera). The same phrase is multiplied and expanded here into a litany of words sung by classical musician Rinde Eckert: ‘Help me, Hurt me, Sociology’, ‘Feed me, Eat me, Anthropology’ and ‘Feed me, Help me, Eat me, Hurt Me’. The close-up videos of Eckert’s singing, sculptural head and face are simultaneously displayed, at times upside down, on three floor-to-ceiling video projections as well as on three pairs of video monitors. Eckert tries out different speeds, rhythms and intensities, but none of the nine sound tracks are synchronised. As we immerse ourselves in the space and sound of the installation, we hardly get any closer; yet its unintelligibility and aggression are deeply alienating.

This 1991 work reminds me of the jarring notes the artist played until exhaustion, in his studio, on A Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., back in 1969. I am left wondering, with Steven Connor, whether the dizzying variety and multiplicity of Nauman’s work could be traced back, from the very

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beginning, to an active resistance against the Freudian ­ death drive itself. ‘[C]omposed of sunderings and breakings off’, Nauman’s work refuses to ‘solidify into a whole’; it ‘does not anywhere and anyhow come to rest’. 5

1 See my ‘“Bound to Fail”: Constraints and Constrictions in Bruce Nauman’s Early Work’, in Bruce Nauman: Make Me Think Me, ed. Laurence Sillars (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2006), pp. 46-55; and my Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), chapter 3, passim.

2 See Bruce Nauman Prints, 1970-1989: a Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Christopher Cordes (New York: Castelli Graphics, 1989) entry 28, p. 120.

3 Christopher Cordes, ‘Talking with Bruce Nauman: an Interview’, in ibid.

4 Amelia Jones, ‘Space, Body and the Self in the Work of Bruce Nauman’, in The ‘Do-it-yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, ed.

Anna Dezeuze, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), chapter 8.

5 Steven Connor, ‘Shifting Ground’ (2000), http://stevenconnor.com/beckettnauman.html (accessed 27.02.2017).

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WORKS I

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PHILIPPE VANDENBERG

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No title, ca. 2007-2008 Oil on canvas, 128 x 7.5 cm

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No title, ca. 2007-2008 Oil on canvas, 130 x 62 cm

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La petite incestueuse, 2001-2002 Oil and charcoal on cotton, 84 x 110 cm

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No title, 2006 Watercolour on paper, 59.4 x 42 cm

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No title, 1997 Watercolour and pencil on paper, 42 x 29.7 cm

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No title, 1984 Watercolour and colour pencil on paper, 56 x 42 cm

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BRUCE NAUMAN

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Live or Die (State II), 1985 Lithograph, 38.1 x 27.9 cm

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Live or Die (State I), 1985 Lithograph, 38.1 x 27.9 cm

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Human Companionship, Human Drain, 1981 Lithograph, 76.2 x 55.9 cm

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Violent Incident – Man/Woman Segment, 1986 Video, monitor, colour and sound (mono), fragment of 28’’ Collection M HKA, Antwerp, BE

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Untitled (Fingers and Holes) A, 1994 Lithograph, 76.2 x 101.6 cm

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BETWEEN NECESSITY AND DESPAIR Philippe Vandenberg in conversation with Bernard Dewulf 1

Bernard Dewulf: Your approach to the artist and his calling is as deferential as it is serious. You’re also acutely aware of history. What, in your opinion, is the place of the artist in our present time?

Philippe Vandenberg: You can consider this from two points of view. Firstly, from that of the artist, who doesn’t really have a choice. Personally, I feel this very strongly.

When I was younger, I had two options: to either become a dog trainer or an artist. I grew up around dog-breeders and was fascinated by their world. Had I gone down this route, I would have come to a halt. Becoming an artist meant breaking away from my family, and resisting this path. It was a battle that needed to be fought. Afterwards, I realised how beneficial it had been: it was a first test.

As a child, I was strongly thwarted by the social, familial and religious system. My first act of resistance was my first drawing. And that opposition has remained with me ever since. My hope is that I can use it to touch somebody. When that happens, I feel as though the resistance has been fruitful.

As far as the system is concerned, it is harder to give a clear answer. Perhaps the artist is, above all, the creator of icons,

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a supplier of symbols that might be of use to people. As far as I’m concerned, art forces you to accept that life can be mysterious. However, we’ve been educated to believe that everything should be solvable and clear. It’s wrong, and I believe that many of our sorrows and problems, as well as suicides, are due to this belief.

Yet, I do feel that I must give something to society as an artist. I offer my work and what I want in return is, above all, communication. My wish and my hope is for people to look at my work. Unless it’s viewed, it doesn’t exist. That ‘third eye’ is very important to the creative process. I always try to involve it in my work.

BD: How large should that eye be?

PV: The moment that the ‘third eye’ comes into being, however modest, marks the start of a long road paved with pitfalls. For that’s the moment when the ‘career’ begins.

Which raises an interesting question: as an artist, how many ‘third eyes’ do you actually want? How many is enough?

Just like anyone else, the artist is a bottomless pit. With the following consequence: the more we get, the more we want.

In this respect, I’ve travelled a varied road. Between repulsion and attraction. I have a love-hate relationship with the art world. But I’ve always been fortunate enough to have had people around me acting as that ‘third eye’, also in difficult times.

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As to your question of how large that eye should be: in principle, anybody qualifies; but in practice, not so many. […]

BD: Speaking of difficult times… in your texts on art and being an artist, the concept of ‘despair’ is a recurrent theme.

PV: I believe it’s very hard to be a thinking human being without regularly facing up to despair. Despair is part of thinking. I associate it with a lucid state of mind. When you’re acutely aware of the situation we’re in, it’s ridiculous to ignore despair.

You can cope with it in two ways. Either you let it destroy you, as happened to some of my friends and acquaintances, or you use it as a kind of fuel. Despair feeds resistance. As it does in politics, or religion. Political parties and religions all find their origins in despair.

I know that despair is an unreliable companion, in the sense that it’s always looking for your weakest spot. But, so long as I’m able, in a manner of speaking, to humour it, and to express it, I can live with it.

Just look at art history in general: there is no happy art. Art is always about the blues and life’s cruelty. All great art is tragic, from Rembrandt’s brushwork to the subjects chosen

by Goya and Velasquez.

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As I see it, man has used his despair to create something akin to a state of grace. And however tragic the themes may be, the creator always experiences some degree of joy as well. I’m almost certain that when Bosch intensified the cruelty in his painting, he did so with his tongue hanging out. For me, the state of grace is an awareness of having seen something that transcends us, no matter what the horror. For me, the search for that state of grace is the driving force behind what I do. […]

BD: Despair is omnipresent.

PV: Despair has many guises. Despair guides me to my studio, where another despair is waiting for me. That’s how it is.

This is linked to the idea that nothing is definitive. I don’t think that we appreciate this enough. We are fascinated and obsessed by the definitive. But it doesn’t exist, despite what all those well-intentioned institutions and people – parents, teachers – would have us believe. We are nomads, we are drifters. We must learn to accept this. I believe in the nomadic, and in nomadic thinking.

The artist’s despair also resides in his inexorable attempt to create the definitive image. But he never makes it, fortunately. And those who assume they’ve made it – what happens to them? Think […] of Francis Bacon. At a certain

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moment, he touched the tip of God’s toe. But what did he do? He kept on repeating himself. My belief is that the artist should be lucid enough to avoid this trap. But it’s easier said than done. I just hope it doesn’t happen to me, or at least, it hasn’t happened yet.

I believe in continuing the attempt. Picasso said: ‘Je ne cherche pas, je trouve’. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s the other way around: I don’t find, I search.

1 This text is an edited excerpt of a conversation that took place between the artist Philippe Vandenberg and the writer and poet Bernard Dewulf in February 2008. The occasion was the exhibition Artist in Residence.

Philippe Vandenberg: Visite, in which the artist’s work forged a dialogue with the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts (MSK) in Ghent (12 April – 17 August 2008). The full text is published in the exhibition catalogue Philippe Vandenberg: Visite, (Ghent: Museum of Fine Arts, 2008), pp. 37-48.

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YOU NEVER SEE IT COMING Bruce Nauman in conversation with Joan Simon 1 Bruce Nauman: There is a tendency to clutter things up, to try to make sure people know something is art, when all that’s necessary is to present it, to leave it alone. I think the hardest thing to do is to present an idea in the most straightforward way.

What I tend to do is see something, then remake it, and remake it, and remake it, and try every possible way of remaking it. If I’m persistent enough, I get back to where I started. I think it was Jasper Johns who said, ‘Sometimes it’s necessary to state the obvious.’

Still, how to proceed is always the mystery. I remember at one point thinking that, some day, I would figure out how you do this, how you do art – like, ‘What’s the procedure here, folks?’ – and then it wouldn’t be such a struggle anymore. Later, I realised it was never going to be like that, it was always going to be a struggle. I realised I would never have a specific process; I would have to reinvent it, over and over again. That was really depressing.

After all, it was hard work; it was a painful struggle and tough. I didn’t want to have to go through all that every time.

But of course, you do have to continually rediscover and redecide, and it’s awful. It’s just an awful thing to have to do.

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On the other hand, that’s what’s interesting about making art, and why it’s worth doing: it’s never going to be the same, there is no method. If I stop and try to look at how I got the last piece done, it doesn’t help me with the next one.

Joan Simon: What do you think about when you’re working on a piece?

BN: I think about Lenny Tristano a lot. Do you know who he was? Lenny Tristano was a blind pianist, one of the original – or maybe second generation – bebop guys. He’s on a lot of the best early bebop records. When Lenny played well, he hit you hard and he kept going until he finished. Then he just quit. You didn’t get any introduction, you didn’t get any tail – you just got full intensity for two minutes or twenty minutes or whatever. It would be like taking the middle out of [John] Coltrane – just the hardest, toughest part of it.

That was all you got.

From the beginning, I was trying to see if I could make art that did that. Art that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn’t give you any trace of whether you’re going to like it or not.

JS: In trying to capture that sort of intensity over the past twenty or so years you’ve worked in just about every medium: film, video, sound, neon, installation, performance,

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photography, holography, sculpture, drawing – but not painting. You gave that up very early on. Why? BN: When I was in school I was a painter. And I went back and forth a couple of times. But basically I couldn’t function as a painter. Painting is one of those things I never quite made sense of. I just couldn’t see how to proceed as a painter. It seemed that if I didn’t think of myself as a painter, then it would be possible to continue.

It still puzzles me how I made decisions in those days about what was possible and what wasn’t. I ended up drawing on music and dance and literature, using thoughts and ideas from other fields to help me continue to work. In that sense, the early work, which seems to have all kinds of materials and ideas in it, seemed very simple to make because it wasn’t coming from looking at sculpture or painting.

JS: That doesn’t sound simple.

BN: No, I don’t mean that it was simple to do the work. But it was simple in that in the ’60s you didn’t have to pick just one medium. There didn’t seem to be any problem with using different kinds of materials – shifting from photographs to dance to performance to videotapes. It seemed very straightforward to use all those different ways of expressing ideas or presenting material. You could make neon signs, you could make written pieces, you could make jokes about parts of the body or casting things, or whatever. […]

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JS: No matter how jokey or stylistically diverse or visually dazzling your works are, they always have an ethical side, a moral force.

BN: I do see art that way. Art ought to have a moral value, a moral stance, a position. […]

1 This text is an excerpt from an interview with the artist Bruce Nauman by writer and curator Joan Simon, dated January 1987. It took place on the occasion of a 1987 retrospective of Nauman’s work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, and was first published as ‘Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman’, in Art in America 76 (September 1988), pp. 140-149, 203; reprinted in: Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words. Writings and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003), pp. 317-338.

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WORKS II

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PHILIPPE VANDENBERG

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No title, ca. 2009 Chalk on paper, 110 x 75 cm

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No title, 2006 Watercolour and pencil on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm

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No title, ca. 2008 Oil and charcoal on plywood, 23 x 33 cm

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Peinture contre l’ennemi intérieur, 2000-2001 Oil on canvas, 83 x 113 cm

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No title, ca. 2007 Oil on wood, 67 x 53 cm Private Collection

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63

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No title, 2009 Watercolour and ballpoint on paper, 42 x 59.4 cm

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No title, ca. 1998-1999 Charcoal and chalk on wood, 23.5 x 25 cm

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BRUCE NAUMAN

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Large Carousel, 1988 Drypoint, 86.4 x 101.6 cm

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The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 1967 Neon tubing, 149.9 x 139.7 x 51 cm Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, NL

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Proof of Pudding, 1975 Lithograph, 91,4 x 108 cm

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Shit and Die, 1985 Drypoint, 40 x 57.2 cm

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Vices and Virtues, 1988 Neon tubing and clear glass tubing, mounted on aluminium support grid, height 213.4 cm The Stuart Collection, University of San Diego, California, USA

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73

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Malice, 1980 Lithograph, 74.9 x 105.4 cm

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Untitled (Fingers and Holes), 1994 Monoprint, with varying colour application produced from screen matrix, 90 x 90 cm

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The Authors

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Dr Brigitte Kölle is Head of Contemporary Art Collection, Hamburger Kunsthalle. Prior to this, she was the curator of Portikus, Frankfurt am Main; inova, Milwaukee (USA), and the Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf. She has written extensively on contemporary art and edited numerous publications.

John C. Welchman is Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, chair of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts (Los Angeles) and Advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam. His most recent books are the monograph Guillaume Bijl (JRP|Ringier, 2016) and Past Realization: Essays on Contemporary European Art (Sternberg, 2016), the first volume of his collected writings.

Anna Dezeuze lectures art history at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Marseille-Méditerranée in Marseilles.

Her publications include a study of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument (Afterall, 2014) and Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2017).

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Acknowledgments

Concept Wouter Davidts Dr Brigitte Kölle Sofie Van de Velde Editor Wouter Davidts Texts Bernard Dewulf Anna Dezeuze Dr Brigitte Kölle Bruce Nauman Joan Simon Philippe Vandenberg John C. Welchman Translation (German-English) Dirk Verbist Copy-editing Helen Simpson Photography (Philippe Vandenberg) Joke Floreal

All artworks Philippe Vandenberg © Estate Philippe Vandenberg, 2017; Courtesy Hauser & Wirth All artworks Bruce Nauman © Bruce Nauman, 2017 All texts © the authors Photo credits All images Philippe Vandenberg: Courtesy Estate Philippe Vandenberg All images Bruce Nauman: Courtesy Galerie Ronny Van de Velde and the artist, except for p. 69: Courtesy Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, NL; pp. 38-39: Courtesy M HKA, Antwerp, BE; p. 72: Courtesy Stuart Collection, UC San Diego, USA, photo: Philipp Scholz Rittermann Cover: Bruce Nauman, Live or Die (State I) (detail), 1985, lithograph, 38.1 x 27.9 cm; Philippe Vandenberg, No title (detail), 2006, watercolour on paper, 59.4 x 42 cm

Project coordination Jenke Van den Akkerveken Graphic design Mirror Mirror Printing die Keure, Bruges, BE Binding Van Mierlo, Nijmegen, NL

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This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Live or Die at Gallery Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, 2017. The exhibition was curated by Dr Brigitte Kölle (Head of Contemporary Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle). The works in this exhibition feature on pp. 22-39 (Works I) and on p. 10 and 16.

© Hannibal Publishing, 2017 Hannibal Publishing is part of Cannibal Publishing www.hannibalpublishing.com ISBN 978 94 9267 700 6 D/2017/11922/17 NUR 642 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Every effort has been made to comply with the statutory copyright requirements for all photographs and images. Anyone who believes they have a copyright claim that has not been acknowledged is requested to contact the publisher.

Special thanks to Sylvia Bandi (Hauser & Wirth), Tom Hunt (Hauser & Wirth), Estate Phillipe Vandenberg (Hélène, Guillaume and Mo Vandenberghe), Galerie Ronny Van de Velde and Ronny and Jessy Van de Velde.

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