Bruce Nauman on vinyl: like being hit in the neck with a baseball bat

Bruce Nauman is considered one of the most influential artists of the moment. He creates work that crosses genre boundaries - as well as breaking down with them - in an exploration of body, language and performance that has now spanned 50 years. Nauman expresses his often provocative and invariably innovative ideas in a multitude of media and materials. As a result, his work can hardly be captured within one style. For instance, in a shed-like space in Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof, you walk through an abandoned corridor criss-crossed with sodium light. In the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, his name - written in stretched letters - gleams out at you in neon. For the - seemingly empty - Turbine Hall in London's Tate Modern, he produced a chorus of sounds from his performances and films. And now Nauman makes himself heard on the LP Soundtrack from First Violin Film.

Early in his career, Bruce Nauman asked himself: 'What to make? What to do?' His answer is as simple as it is comprehensive: if I am an artist and I find myself in the studio, then everything I do in the studio must therefore be art. So Nauman promotes his artistic output and stretches it from product to activity. He captures action on 16mm film: a still camera, ten minutes of celluloid and you see the artist drop into a corner of space - over and over again. Or: how Nauman walks somewhat theatrically along the outer edges of a square marked out on the studio floor. A question of: so this is how art can (also) be made? Not for Nauman, according to him this is thus, per se, art.

Practical joke

In his work, Nauman explores the possibilities for artistic expression. Not infrequently, he actively involves the body in experiments with various psychological states and manners. Video works show the artist himself shaking his head manically or record a practical joke exposing cruelty. Their simplicity and power have been fixtures in Nauman's work for years. He summed them up early on in the text of a neon object: 'The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.' Nauman does this by emphasising not the creative process but the documentation - the frame, naming it, temporarily experiencing it and capturing it on video and film.

Nauman on LP is therefore above all the documentation of a trio of activities. The sound on the record is not music or improvisation and it is not composed. In almost no way is he concerned with musical notion or connotations. Nor is it a soundart, it ís obviously sound. It is by Nauman and therefore art, but it is not art that exists by the grace of sound. It is not dance, not performance, not video. And at the same time, all these elements fold in and out of each other topologically and everything takes place simultaneously, even on this album.

Untraceable

For decades Soundtrack from First Violin Film virtually untraceable. The record was issued by Tanglewood Press in an edition of 100 copies, as part of Objects/69, a box containing also multiples by Richard Serra, Eva Hesse and Keith Sonnier, among others. The Italian label Die Schachtel has now re-released the album in collaboration with Nauman himself. Again in a minimal edition and - literally - in a new overcoat. And so Nauman's only LP can be heard again, as the original copies are rarely, if ever, played in museum settings.

Action in the studio

We hear how Nauman does three 'things' in his studio in 1969. He scratches unskilled across the strings of a violin in 'Playing All Four Strings on the Violin'. Because the source is invisible, the sound - think nails across a blackboard - hits the listener rock hard and directly. Obsessively and crudely, the cat whine-like tones screech through the bare space. The body and its activities are clearly in the spotlights. What Nauman produces in terms of sound is of secondary importance. What matters on this album is THAT he produces sound.

Nauman further fragments bits of violin playing - which are only very sporadically not irritating - by tearing them apart from the film. At the same time, he actually binds the sound together into the sole focus, because apart from the sound, he presents nothing. Having to make do with this produces renewed wholeness; a forced emphasis on an element from the totality of the film that can, in itself, also be a complete work. Or according to Nauman: ís.

Quite clumsy

'Violin Problem 2 - Playing Two Notes Very Close to Each Other' features a Nauman who rather clumsily searches for harmonic beatings. Involuntarily, one wonders if he is consciously leaning here towards the musical experiments of Tony Conrad or Phill Niblock. Real musicians and real composers, who shared the same issues tackling, only in their case, the results are accepted as musical.

In other words, does it really matter who wields the violin - an artist who can do next to nothing with it or a trained musician - if the result sounds almost the same (at least, to Nauman's own ears)? Or is it not the violin that takes centre stage, but the body of an artist who cannot muster the necessary discipline, expertly raking over strings and falling prey to cramp and exhaustion, whereas musicians have learned to eliminate that physical impact?

On the second side, Nauman stamps around rhythmically in his studio. Exaggerated, manic, choreographed, but also mundane, ordinary, matter-of-factly. And though Nauman persists, you can hear fatigue set in, contributing to a poignant physical intimacy that echoes the hollow thud of crashing footsteps. Similarly, Nauman's marching works like being hit in the neck with a baseball bat, as you listen to something you didn't hear coming.