NEW YORK, NY.- The single-work, sound
installation Bruce Nauman: Days will fill The Museum of Modern Art’s Special Exhibition
Gallery, from June 2 to August 23, 2010. Days (2009), by Bruce Nauman
(American, born 1941), was created for the artist’s solo exhibition at
the 2009 Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States. The
work, a recent addition to the Museum’s collection, consists of a
continuous stream of seven voices—men and women, old and young—emanating
from fourteen speakers, reciting the days of the week in an order
devised by the artist. The speakers are directional, transmitting each
voice, marked by its own tempo, pitch, tonality, and cadence, to visitors close by and
a cacophonous yet resonant chorus to visitors between the speakers or
farther away.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, Nauman has developed a provocative body
of work that covers a wide range of mediums and disciplines, including
performance, video, photography, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. As
a sculptor he has employed materials as diverse as bronze, fiberglass,
concrete, and neon light. Language and sound have played important roles
in his work throughout his career, and in Days these immaterial
elements become mediums of sculpture. The content of the work—the names
of the days of the week—may reflect the artist’s oft-stated belief that
the best solution to a problem is usually the simplest, yet these banal
words order our lives and govern our behavior. In Days they are a
profound expression of the passing of time. A 1967 neon-light piece by
Nauman spells out the sentence "The True Artist Helps the World by
Revealing Mystic Truths.”
Nauman’s most recent attempt to adhere to this maxim, Days invites
visitors to reflect on how we measure, differentiate, and commemorate
time.
Tomado de: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=38416
