A Cowboy in Winter | Martin Filler

Among the many most memorable interactions I’ve ever had with artists occurred throughout a visit I made to New Mexico in August 1992 to interview Susan Rothenberg for a Vainness Truthful profile. It had been three years since she wed her fellow artist Bruce Nauman and moved from New York Metropolis to New Mexico, the place he’d resettled from Pasadena a decade earlier. Collectively they purchased a seven-hundred-acre unfold in Galisteo, a half-hour’s drive south of Santa Fe, and constructed a compound with a ranch home, corrals, stables, and separate studios. On the time they have been the modern artwork world’s golden couple, not least as a result of this surprising midlife second marriage for each of them was an attraction of opposites so excessive that those that knew them deemed it good. Much more remarkably, it lasted three a long time, till Rothenberg’s demise in 2020 at age seventy-five.

She was petite, Jewish, voluble, and a quintessential livewire New Yorker. Nauman is tall, Gentile, taciturn, and a traditional self-contained Midwesterner. He’s additionally a real cowboy, having raised cattle and skilled quarter horses for resale as a facet gig. His primary gig has been more durable to pin down. From the outset Nauman’s inventive output has been far and wide, embracing just about each medium within the fashionable repertory, from images, video, and efficiency artwork to neon mild sculpture, sound installations, and even such conventional pursuits as drawing and printmaking. He usually seems in his personal items, notably the breakthrough Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966–1967), an eleven-part photographic suite greatest recognized for its picture of the bare-chested younger artist, arms akimbo, spritzing an arc of water from his mouth. His work usually inclines towards the disquieting: within the notorious 1987 video Clown Torture, an actor named Walter Stevens seems in full costume and make-up as a writhing circus Bozo whose strangulated screams make viewers flee for the exits at any time when it’s screened. 

Nearly the one medium he’s steered away from is portray, which might be simply as nicely, contemplating his second spouse’s preeminence in that self-discipline. Rothenberg was among the many ten artists (together with Jennifer Bartlett, Neil Jenney, Lois Lane, and Robert Moskowitz) chosen for the Whitney Museum of American Artwork’s 1978 exhibition “New Image Painting.” The landmark present codified a decisive transfer towards figuration in a medium that some commentators had deemed lifeless after years of domination by Minimalist sculpture and photos that sought to resemble work as little as attainable. Rothenberg’s wealthy, sensuous dealing with of pigment was the antithesis each of Minimalism and of Pop artists’ earlier tendency to imitate printed business imagery. Her haunting, dreamlike visions of fragmented human and animal varieties suffused her canvases with a psychological depth that saved you fascinated by them lengthy after you stopped trying.

Nauman was extra famend than Rothenberg—in 2018 Peter Schjeldahl gauged him “the most influential (though for many people arcane) artist of the past half century”—however her important repute was additionally sky-high, so there was little hazard of profession envy. Their New Mexico idyll impressed comparisons to Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, an equally formidable energy pairing on the American scene two generations earlier. Rothenberg’s most acquainted figural motif, moreover, was a silhouetted horse—her 1976 equine portray Butterfly hung within the White Home in the course of the Obama administration. Her relocation to Nauman’s desert area appeared to augur a match made in artwork historic heaven.

Nauman—whose enigmatic output usually communicates his considerations on a purely unconscious degree, however does so extra successfully than simply about every other American artist of our time—is now the topic of a strikingly mounted and emotionally affecting exhibition on the New York gallery Sperone Westwater. Titled “Begin Again,” it options an elegiac array of labor accomplished over the previous two years in a number of mediums, however it emphasizes drawing, a talent Nauman discovered as an artwork scholar on the College of Wisconsin however allowed to lie fallow till he lately felt the time had come to renew it. And although this isn’t billed as a tribute to Rothenberg, her spirit permeates the presentation: the present suggests a subliminal affect on his artwork—as seen in his silhouetted drawings of animal elements, which recall to mind her early work—and the way profoundly her demise has hit him, evident within the exhibition’s most surprising photographs.

It opens with a bizarrely stunning set up that fills the Norman Foster–designed constructing’s double-height floor ground gallery. Descending from the ceiling are eighteen composite sculptures connected to gnarled wires distanced broadly sufficient so that you can stroll amongst them. This disconcerting downpour of fake fox and coyote carcasses created from plaster, burlap, and polyurethane foam—it’s raining canids, one would possibly say—continues a sculptural sequence Nauman has been growing since 1989. It’s primarily based on readymade taxidermy armatures that he first acquired by way of a mail-order catalog, then altered and conjoined into groupings that obtain a surprisingly wealthy number of formal and sensory results, from antic and swish to inert and grotesque. On this iteration, any misapprehension that you just’ve wandered right into a wild-game butcher’s refrigerated meat locker is undercut by the inconceivable lyricism of the airily organized, pale-colored ensemble. 

Added to this bestiary is a pair of life-size bronze human heads laid sideways on the concrete gallery ground. The castings’ deluxe materials brings to thoughts the dismembered statues of deposed dictators acquainted from revolutionary uprisings, however these really feel extra particularly private. In a darkened room past this area, a two-minute 3-D video by Nauman focuses on the heads filmed on the ground of his Galisteo studio. They’re proven mendacity subsequent to the identical wire-suspended ball-peen hammer adjoining to them within the gallery set up. Within the video the hammer swings lazily towards one of many craniums with an eerie metallic clangor—one other of Nauman’s unnerving sound installations. (It’s devoted to his associates Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle, Santa Fe artists who share his curiosity in new-media installations and assemblages of discovered objects.) 

I subsequent took the elevator as much as the second ground of the triple-decker presentation, the place I used to be stopped lifeless in my tracks by the primary of the massive monochromatic works on paper I encountered. Right here was instantly Susan, in an untitled drawing that captures the flattened outlines of Rothenberg’s unmistakable options, gamine however lifeless, executed with the detachment of a forensic post-mortem sketch. Her high-set eyes with lids closed, snub nostril with flaring nostrils, and huge mouth with small, evenly spaced decrease enamel are all instantly recognizable. This virtually life-size reminiscence portrait is accompanied by a virtually equivalent model rendered the other way up, together with a half-dozen others that hint the arc of Rothenberg’s wispy hairline, once more delineated with medical precision. I got here away from them feeling shaken, as if I’d been requested to establish her physique on the morgue.

To create these photos and a slew of others that echo the animal varieties within the floor ground set up, Nauman returned to the venerable Renaissance methods of silverpoint and goldpoint. These painstaking strategies entail utilizing a stylus created from a type of valuable metals to incise traces into thick paper coated with a skinny gesso-like liquid floor that dries right into a easy porcelain-like floor, which is then hand-engraved. 5 of those sheets are the kaolin white of a ceramic glaze, the opposite three just like the pink underlayer of Hans Holbein’s inimitable chalk portraits. Nauman first experimented with this medium a long time in the past after he noticed Joseph Stella’s silverpoint profile of Marcel Duchamp (circa 1920) at MoMA, as he writes in his essay for Bruce Nauman: Studying to Draw Once more, the well-illustrated exhibition catalog.

To be totally appreciated, nonetheless, these items should be considered in individual, for the reason that delicate traces and tactile surfaces come totally to life solely beneath sturdy synthetic mild. Nauman offers the fabric an uncannily corporeal high quality, and it feels extra convincingly evocative of the human physique than Lucian Freud’s signature clotted impasto, about which he stated, “I want paint to work as flesh.”

Nauman’s untitled posthumous portraits of Rothenberg add to an extended custom of artists who’ve made deathbed photographs of these near them. Trendy artwork’s final grasp of mourning, Edvard Munch, turned out limitless angst-ridden tableaux of bereaved households in spectral groupings round corpses. Completely totally different in tone is Claude Monet’s portray of his thirty-two-year-old spouse, Camille, quickly after she died of most cancers in 1879, which exhibits her stiffened visage incongruously swathed in stylish Impressionist billows of mauve tulle. The urge to set down a last report of a beloved accomplice’s postmortem options has at all times struck me as a superbly comprehensible, therapeutic solution to course of and internalize the finality of demise.

That seems to have been Nauman’s motivation. In a Brooklyn Rail interview concerning the present exhibition with the curator Michael Auping, a longtime advocate of Rothenberg’s work, her widower admitted: 

I’ve a tough time speaking about it, and I assume [not] titling these drawings is a part of that. So, anyway, I made two drawings of her from {a photograph} I took of her simply after she died right here on the home. One of many drawings was the other way up, and the opposite proper facet up. I did the the other way up one as a result of I believed it could be simpler emotionally, pondering the method can be somewhat extra summary. I’d by no means finished drawings like these…Figurative portraits of somebody essential to me. Then I did some with out her face. It was of simply her hair shifting across the area the place her face can be…. I used to be very stunned at how they turned out. Certainly one of them is the very best drawing I’ve ever finished, at the very least I feel so…. It affected me to the extent that I simply stopped working for a bit. 

Throughout my long-ago New Mexico journey, I spent most of my time with Rothenberg as I taped our prolonged, discursive conversations, which touched on every little thing from this relentlessly self-critical artist’s inventive practices (she destroyed an unusually giant proportion of her works-in-progress, a lot to the dismay of sure sellers) to her stint as a go-go dancer at Ithaca’s Alt Heidelberg bar whereas a Cornell undergraduate. My Vainness Truthful project was occasioned by her midcareer retrospective, “Susan Rothenberg: Paintings and Drawings, 1974–1992,” which was curated by Auping and traveled to 6 American museums, together with the Museum of Modern Artwork Chicago and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. As can be anticipated from an artist so wracked by self-doubt that she was liable to retouch work at the same time as viewers have been about to reach for a vernissage, Rothenberg nervous endlessly concerning the forthcoming survey. She additionally fretted about how her transfer to New Mexico was influencing her work, having vowed that she would by no means paint landscapes, breaking from just about each different artist who got here beneath the spell of the area’s stupefying pure grandeur.

However all through my go to Nauman was a hovering, watchful presence. When he wasn’t tending to his horses or the household canines that had the run of the property, he saved one ear cocked to what his spouse and I have been speaking about whereas busying himself unobtrusively inside earshot. At one level, as Rothenberg reminisced about her youthful affair with the poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen on the Aegean island of Hydra, Nauman moseyed over to the desk the place we sat sipping Jack Daniels and slammed his broad-brimmed ten-gallon hat over my recorder with out uttering a phrase. Rothenberg and I laughed—I a bit nervously—however his level was taken. She then recommended that the 2 of us as a substitute go for a stroll to the close by website of an historical pueblo to seek for arrowheads and pottery shards (a number of of which I nonetheless carry on my desk in a field of non-public treasures).

Later that afternoon, when jet lag caught up with me and I visibly started to fade, Rothenberg requested if I’d wish to take a nap of their visitor room. I gratefully agreed, and after I awakened I discovered her and Nauman soaking within the tall barrel-like scorching tub simply exterior their easy adobe home. Though they have been within the effervescent water as much as their necks, I may see that they’d distributed with swimsuits. With room sufficient for a 3rd, Rothenberg urged me to hitch them. Even again within the Sixties, skinny-dipping hadn’t been my factor, however the extra I demurred the extra she insisted. Lastly I blurted out, “I’m sorry, but Condé Nast has a very strict policy against its writers getting naked with their subjects”—a spontaneous fabrication that she accepted, a lot to my reduction.

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: 2 coyotes and a couple of hammers, 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: Mary Woronov shirt in plastic bag, 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: Standing within the crossroads coronary heart in my arms (unhealthy week), 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: 2 coyotes, ax handles and a couple of hammers, 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: Hammers and individual, 2024

As day slowly blended into night time, my hosts started to make dinner: Rothenberg assembled the salad whereas Nauman took cost of grilling the meat. All of the whereas a small transportable TV on a kitchen counter was tuned to the 1992 Republican Nationwide Conference, then underway in Houston. The video reception was horrible, and the striated, garishly coloured speaking heads of bloviating politicians jogged my memory of the work of Ed Paschke, a Chicago artist of the interval. I paid scant consideration to the proceedings till Nauman quietly stated “listen to this” and turned up the quantity, whereupon we heard Pat Buchanan’s now notorious “culture wars” speech, which ended along with his exhortation, “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”

Nauman’s terse, incisive working commentary on the conference strengthened my certitude that this isn’t a person given to circumlocution, in both his discuss or his artwork. I used to be extra conscious than ever of how important artists are to society as hypersensitive, early-warning screens of developments that the very best amongst them decide up on nicely earlier than skilled pundits attain such a state of heightened notion. This made me notice that he’s a basically political artist, regardless that his work has seldom been overtly partisan (with a couple of main exceptions, reminiscent of his celebrated 1971 anti-Vietnam lithograph Uncooked Conflict, which spells out that palindrome in a lot the identical means because the lettered neon wall sculptures he started producing across the similar time).

Nauman’s nice theme has been energy in its broadest, deepest sense, whether or not within the public realm, because the subliminal political side of his work implies, or within the exertion of energy over oneself, as seen particularly within the pioneering movies he started to make in 1968. Whether or not tapping into the phobia many individuals have felt since childhood concerning the aggressive jollity of clowns, or the parallels between looking and warfare implicit in his animal sculptures, Nauman doesn’t imagine in letting his viewers off simple. Typically exploring his personal physicality, his work now addresses the physique because it ages and decays. The latter manifests itself with specific poignancy in a late-life counterpart to Self Portrait as a Fountain: a fifteen-minute-long video, Stroll With Tyger (2024), screened in Sperone Westwater’s Transferring Room (an ingenious twenty-foot-wide elevator-cum-display area).

In it the artist recites the acquainted first stanza of the Blake poem—“Tyger, tyger, burning bright…”—whereas doing a heel-to-toe line stroll. He strikes unsteadily towards the digicam after which turns backward, his arms outstretched sideways in a cruciform pose, first proper facet up, after which the other way up because the picture is flipped, with a horizontal slice at midpoint, at waist degree. Though it appears very like the drunk take a look at that cops make DUI suspects take, he’s really doing a recuperative mobility train he discovered in bodily remedy after an operation for rectal most cancers in 2018. That is yet one more instance of the multilayered ambiguity that offers a lot of his work its sharp and subversive edge.

Nauman, who turns eighty-three in December, now appears far totally different from how I bear in mind him as a lean and rangy buckaroo, although the disparity is not any much less surprising to me than after I these days catch an surprising glimpse of myself, seven years his junior, in a mirror. What stays intact as time goes by is the sheer power of his inventive perception, undiminished on this heroic show of late-career vigor that reconfirms his stature as a towering determine of discomfort amongst his extra complacent friends.