Philadelphia Museum Exhibits Bruce Nauman

　　Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens—the official United States presentation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in collaboration with the Universita Iuav di Venezia, and the Universita Ca’ Foscari di Venezia— presents a thematic survey comprising four decades of Bruce Nauman’s innovative and provocative work.

　
　　Featured at three exhibition sites—the United States Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale, Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, and the Exhibition Spaces at Universita Ca’ Foscari—the exhibition presents more than 30 works lent from public and private collections in the United States and Europe, some of which the artist has adapted and redeveloped specifically for Venice, working in direct response to the spatial context of the sites. The exhibition also includes two new sound-based works, Days and Giorni, the latter created by Nauman working in collaboration with students at each university. The exhibition will be on view through NOVEMBER 22, 2009.

　　These two works will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to make their U.S. premiere from November 21, 2009 – April 4, 2010.

　　Since his first works in the 1960s until the present day, the American artist Bruce Nauman (b.1941) has continually forged new paths in which language and conceptual thinking figure prominently. From his early studio-based videos, films, and sound pieces to his neon signs, bronze, plaster, wax, and resin sculptures, and corridor installations, Nauman has pushed the boundaries among disciplines and media. “What I want to do is use the investigative polarity that exists in the tension between the public and the private space and to use it to create an edge,” the artist once commented.

　　The exhibition’s three-site structure builds upon Nauman’s spatial ideas, extending the geography of the American representation in the Venice Biennale beyond the U.S. Pavilion and into the city. The exhibition metaphorically embraces Nauman’s spatial considerations, such as those originating in the mathematical discipline of topology, which has informed the artist’s practice since his undergraduate years. The exhibition also explores the notion of continuity amid changing conditions and challenges any notion of discrete and isolated experiences. In the exhibition, topology offers a kind of framework in which the audience can relate the encounter with Nauman’s art to traversing the city of Venice. As such, the exhibition challenges the ideological foundation on which the national pavilions historically rest.

　　The exhibition sites suggest the continuity of change layered in the history of the city’s architectural spaces that were once private, regal, or religious, and are now public civic, and educational. Ca’ Foscari—a Gothic Palace on the Grand Canal—was once home to the prominent Foscari family, and now houses the administrative offices of the Ca’ Foscari University and the renovated interiors of its Exhibition Spaces.

　　The main lecture hall (the Aula Magna) of the Universita Iuav di Venezia is situated in what was the refectory of the former convent of the Tolentini. And the U.S. Pavilion is located in the Giardini, which were created during the Napoleonic regime in the XVII century. All three sites lay bare the mutability between the public and the private that characterizes the city of Venice.

　　Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens is organized according to three thematic “threads,” or recurring openended categories that are evident throughout the artist’s career: “Heads and Hands”, “Sound and Space”, “Fountains and Neons”. Each site will include a combination of threads, displaying works that resonate with one another, so that a visitor entering one of the three sites can experience the logic organizing the entire exhibition. Each site will include works from various moments in Nauman’s oeuvre, allowing visitors to discover each in relation to the others.
In the picture Image 01: Bruce Nauman discusses the production of Giorni with Daria Carmi, a student of Universita Iuav di Venezia, February 10, 2009. Photo courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art © Michele Lamanna 2008.
The exhibition also proposes that the city of Venice becomes an additional fourth thread, extending and dissolving national considerations and offering a wider spatial context in which to consider Nauman’s art. The accompanying catalogue and exhibition brochure have been coded with color and location icons noting the thread and the site of each exhibited work. -- www.philamuseum.org

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