Vapid Wunderkind

By ROBERT HUGHES

With three months of the art season still to run, it may be early to guess which New York institution will have put up the most vapid show of 1972-73. But a retrospective of the works of Bruce Nauman (through May 13) makes the Whitney Museum a strong contender.

Nauman, a 32-year-old body-artist, video-taper and conceptualist who works in California, is the present Wunderkind of the official avantgarde. His show, booked on the circuit to Bern, Dusseldorf, Milan, Houston and San Francisco, was jointly organized by the Los Angeles County Museum and the Whitney. Its imprimaturs are heavy. There are two long and ingenious catalogue essays by Curators Jane Livingstone and Marcia Tucker, written, alas, in the impacted duckspeak of art magazines (sample: "There is a singular combining of the purely somatic and the archly conceptualized and verbal in his aesthetic cognitions"). Nauman's intellect and methods are favorably compared with those of Vladimir Nabokov, Jasper Johns and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even Leonardo da Vinci is hauled in to serve as an artistic ancestor. The aim of this coercive litany is to persuade doubters that Nauman is a home-grown successor to Marcel Duchamp, whose every pun and jeu d'esprit, no matter how limp, must be given the solemn study once reserved for Holy Writ. In short, Nauman has had the full treatment. Mount Culture labors, and out he pops.

It could hardly have happened to a thinner talent. One gets video tape after video tape of Nauman gravely smearing his body with black or green makeup; Nauman distending his mouth in froggy grimaces at the camera; Nauman Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square; and an effort named Bouncing Balls, 1969, a long closeup of Nauman's unremarkable testicles jiggling up and down. It makes the most tedious of Warhol's movies seem like the chase scene in Bullitt. Every so often, Nauman inflects the monotony a little by putting the camera on its side, or (daring innovation!) upside down. And occasionally he gives the tape some irritant value, as in an inverted closeup of his own face repeating over and over the words "lip sync." But that is all: not much. In any case it seems a trifle late to be disinterring, once again, the idea of boredom as an aesthetic principle. Nauman's cool is of the kind that precedes rigor mortis.

What remains startling is the urbane unoriginality of his work. Whenever an image or process appears in Nauman's show that looks vaguely interesting, one may be sure it was worked out years before by either Johns or Duchamp. So with Nauman's casts and templates of parts of his body, which are merely spin-offs and rip-offs from Johns in the late '50s and, more distantly, from Duchamp's own interest in molding. That some of these Naumans are made of neon tubing does not alter this, any more than the fact that some of his word-pieces (e.g., a sign that lights up "R A W" backward and "W A R" forward) are neon raises them above simplemindedness. A second-or third-hand existence is intrinsic to his work.

Wax Impressions of the Knees of Five Famous Artists, 1967, is as anemic a parody of the cement pavement outside Grauman's Chinese Theater as one could desire; therein, perhaps, lies a fatuous sort of originality. Its aim, as Nauman once expressed it, "has to do with making the thing itself less important to look at." In those terms, such works are a complete success. It is hard to think of anything that could be less visually important, unless it is the punning (Duchamp again, minus the flair) in thrusts of wit like Nauman's Waxing Hot -- a photograph of the young master's hands applying car polish to three red wooden letters, H, O and T.

Nauman's output lacks the sense of fantasy, myth and visual meaning that informs the work of his West Coast contemporaries, William Wiley, William Allen and Joseph Raffael. It is too heavyhanded to rival the wit of an Ed Ruscha or a Kenneth Price. Nauman's reputation is an example of terrorism-by-art-history. Nowhere does he address himself to life, prosaic or imaginative. Instead, he poses fidgety little conundrums about the limits of aesthetic activity. Art about art about art: an infinite regress, like a camera staring at the monitor. How anyone can still obtain a reputation by squatting in that overpopulated cul-de-sac is one of the enduring mysteries of the world art scene.

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