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 had 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 excellent. Much more remarkably, it lasted three many years, till Rothenberg’s dying in 2020 at age seventy-five.

She was petite, Jewish, voluble, and a quintessential livewire New Yorker. Nauman is tall, Gentile, taciturn, and a basic self-contained Midwesterner. He’s additionally a real cowboy, having raised cattle and skilled quarter horses for resale as a aspect gig. His fundamental gig has been tougher 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 pictures, video, and efficiency artwork to neon gentle sculpture, sound installations, and even such conventional pursuits as drawing and printmaking. He typically seems in his personal items, notably the breakthrough Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966–1967), an eleven-part photographic suite finest identified for its picture of the bare-chested younger artist, arms akimbo, spritzing an arc of water from his mouth. His work typically 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 every time it’s screened. 

Nearly the one medium he’s steered away from is portray, which might be simply as effectively, 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 useless after years of domination by Minimalist sculpture and photos that sought to resemble work as little as potential. 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 kinds suffused her canvases with a psychological depth that saved you eager about them lengthy after you stopped wanting.

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 vital status 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 through the Obama administration. Her relocation to Nauman’s desert area appeared to augur a match made in artwork historic heaven.

Nauman—whose enigmatic output typically communicates his issues 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, nevertheless it emphasizes drawing, a talent Nauman discovered as an artwork pupil on the College of Wisconsin however allowed to lie fallow till he just 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 call to mind her early work—and the way profoundly her dying has hit him, evident within the exhibition’s most surprising pictures.

It opens with a bizarrely lovely 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 made out of plaster, burlap, and polyurethane foam—it’s raining canids, one would possibly say—continues a sculptural collection Nauman has been creating since 1989. It’s based mostly on readymade taxidermy armatures that he first acquired via a mail-order catalog, then altered and conjoined into groupings that obtain a surprisingly wealthy number of formal and sensory results, from antic and sleek 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 unbelievable 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 house, 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 pals 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 useless in my tracks by the primary of the massive monochromatic works on paper I encountered. Right here was all of the sudden 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 broad mouth with small, evenly spaced decrease tooth are all instantly recognizable. This nearly life-size reminiscence portrait is accompanied by an almost similar model rendered the wrong 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 kinds within the floor ground set up, Nauman returned to the venerable Renaissance strategies of silverpoint and goldpoint. These painstaking strategies entail utilizing a stylus made out of a type of valuable metals to incise strains into thick paper coated with a skinny gesso-like liquid floor that dries right into a clean porcelain-like floor, which is then hand-engraved. 5 of those sheets are the kaolin white of a ceramic glaze, the opposite three much like the pink underlayer of Hans Holbein’s inimitable chalk portraits. Nauman first experimented with this medium many years 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 absolutely appreciated, nonetheless, these items should be seen in individual, for the reason that delicate strains and tactile surfaces come absolutely to life solely beneath sturdy synthetic gentle. 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 mentioned, “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 pictures 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. Totally completely 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 closing file of a beloved companion’s postmortem options has all the time struck me as a wonderfully comprehensible, therapeutic approach to course of and internalize the finality of dying.

That seems to have been Nauman’s motivation. In a Brooklyn Rail interview in regards to 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 wrong way up, and the opposite proper aspect up. I did the the wrong way up one as a result of I assumed it could be simpler emotionally, pondering the method can be a little bit extra summary. I’d by no means accomplished drawings like these…Figurative portraits of somebody crucial to me. Then I did some with out her face. It was of simply her hair shifting across the house the place her face can be…. I used to be very stunned at how they turned out. Considered one of them is the very best drawing I’ve ever accomplished, at the very least I believe 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 the whole lot from this relentlessly self-critical artist’s inventive practices (she destroyed an unusually massive 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 Up to date Artwork Chicago and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. As can be anticipated from an artist so wracked by self-doubt that she was vulnerable to retouch work whilst viewers had been about to reach for a vernissage, Rothenberg apprehensive endlessly in regards to 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 had 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 web site of an historic 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 prefer to take a nap of their visitor room. I gratefully agreed, and after I wakened I discovered her and Nauman soaking within the tall barrel-like scorching tub simply outdoors their easy adobe home. Though they had been within the effervescent water as much as their necks, I might see that they’d disbursed with swimsuits. With room sufficient for a 3rd, Rothenberg urged me to affix 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 palms (dangerous 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 evening, 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 mentioned “listen to this” and turned up the amount, 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 operating commentary on the conference strengthened my certitude that this isn’t a person given to circumlocution, in both his speak or his artwork. I used to be extra conscious than ever of how important artists are to society as hypersensitive, early-warning displays of developments that the very best amongst them choose up on effectively earlier than skilled pundits attain such a state of heightened notion. This made me understand that he’s a basically political artist, although his work has seldom been overtly partisan (with a couple of main exceptions, comparable to his celebrated 1971 anti-Vietnam lithograph Uncooked Warfare, which spells out that palindrome in a lot the identical approach because the lettered neon wall sculptures he started producing across the identical 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 fear many individuals have felt since childhood in regards to 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 house).

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 aspect up, after which the wrong way up because the picture is flipped, with a horizontal slice at midpoint, at waist degree. Though it appears to be like very similar to the drunk take a look at that cops make DUI suspects take, he’s truly 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 to be like far completely different from how I keep in mind him as a lean and rangy buckaroo, although the disparity isn’t any much less stunning to me than once 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.