Medium at the Margins: Bruce Nauman at the End of the Sixties

Abstract

For the American artist Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), medium is a problem. Nauman graduated from art school in 1966, entering the profession at a moment of seismic change. The very notion of a specific medium—an artwork’s material properties and their conventions of use—risked becoming obsolete, as clear lines that once distinguished the individual arts blurred into what one critic called “an indefinite, intermediary zone where inherited categories no longer apply.” This lifting of barriers furnished sixties artists with a staggering range of options, and Nauman tried them all, alternating traditional genres like sculpture and etching with emerging fields like performance or video. Such promiscuity would seem to discredit medium altogether, dismissing it as a relic of a rigid and hopelessly dated modernism. Yet close attention to the objects themselves reveals a subtler stance: I read Nauman’s versatility not as a rejection of medium, but a strategic attempt to extend its reach. Informed by unfolding debates in philosophy and criticism over medium’s shifting definitions and continued purchase, the first decade of Nauman’s career tested its newly elastic bounds, stretching it to accommodate willfully eccentric formats. Through case studies of three such marginal practices—holography, artists’ books, and even painting—this dissertation traces his persistent commitment to medium at the moment of its presumed collapse, locating specificity where one might least expect to find it.