Art Museum brings home two Bruce Nauman gems

There can be little doubt that the Bruce Nauman show at the 53d Venice Biennale, closing today, will reverberate in significant ways for the artist, the Biennale, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which curated this selective career retrospective.

The museum lined the outside of the U.S. Pavilion with multicolor Nauman neon words, giving the small Neoclassical building a beckoning presence on the Biennale's leafy grounds. It also expanded the show beyond the famed art fair into two other Venice venues - a possibly unprecedented strategy that led to unusual chance encounters with the work.

All this captured large crowds for Nauman, yet did not diminish one of the central aspects of the Nauman experience: the remarkable immersion he achieves for viewers through economical, seemingly simple gestures.

At the Nauman-filled U.S. Pavilion, you found yourself in a sea of dancing hands, each one twisted to its own pose and possible purpose, in a room devoted to Fifteen Pairs of Hands (1996).

More than a few canal-crossings away, at the Universitá Ca'Foscari, concepts of confinement and freedom became personal in Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) to the point of inducing a panic attack; to fully engage, you had to squeeze through a foot-wide gap between a large cage and a slightly smaller one. (University guards started a score sheet to track how many people dared to walk the walk.)

At a third venue, the Università Iuav, a small room lighted by a 10-watt bulb drew you into a mood of reduced expectations - until you began to hear menacing whispers leaking from behind blank walls. The angry 1968 piece, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, gives Hitchcock a run for his money.

You won't get the full Nauman treatment of 33 works in Philadelphia. When the Art Museum's collaboration with the American artist-philosopher ends today after a nearly six-month run at the Biennale, the museum will not crate it up and import it to Philadelphia, as it did with its 1988 Jasper Johns show. Rather, it is bringing home only two souvenirs: Days and Giorni. But they are gems.

The two new sound sculptures - which made their U.S. debut at the Art Museum yesterday - are as highly immersive as any Nauman in Venice. Context is everything, and these pieces have enormous impact at the museum, which generally does not traffic in sound. Giorni is at the Perelman annex, in the large, light-filled gallery to the left after you enter; Days is in the main building, in the Alter Gallery in the modern and contemporary section.

To see such large spaces at the museum devoid of visual stimulation is a dramatic statement in itself. In both works, prerecorded voices recite the days of the week in loops (Days in English, Giorni in Italian), creating an unexpected music all their own.

If you leave Days yearning for visual grounding, you can cross the hall to meditate on the kinetic cunning of Nauman's spiral neon The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967). Nearby, you can watch three newly acquired early films and videos by the artist.

As prestigious as the Venice Biennale is, residual benefits usually are hard to quantify. Not this time. The Biennale's top prize, the Golden Lion for best national pavilion, went to "Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens," echoing Philadelphia's win of the same award in 1988 for Jasper Johns.

Attendance has been high. The 53d Biennale had clocked 360,000 visitors as of last week (with several days to go). Preliminarily, that's on the high end for the exhibition, which started in 1895.

It also means that by one measure, this rare Art Museum presence had much greater visibility than the Jasper Johns, drawing four times as many viewers as the Biennale of 1988. The U.S. Pavilion alone averaged 1,800 viewers daily, an impressive 227,448 as of the end of October.

"It is a big crowd compared to other years," said Chiara Barbieri, project manager for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, who serves as liaison for the U.S. Pavilion. "On many occasions there was a line."

"It was definitely one of the most popular pavilions," said Grazina Subelyte, manager of daily operations. "We had to limit it to . . . 30 or 40 people at a time, so people could have a good experience." She was especially impressed by the level of engagement with the art. "They were very interested in Nauman's questioning of what it means to be an artist."

Critical reaction generally took the position that Nauman had achieved primacy, at once renegade and elder statesman, and that the Art Museum's treatment of his work made its points elegantly.

The Washington Post's Blake Gopnik saw the kind of resonance between Nauman and the setting that was hoped for by Art Museum curators Michael R. Taylor and Carlos Basualdo, drawing relationships between the Venice exhibition copy of Nauman's 1967 The True Artist neon and the huge mosaic of Christ ascending in the dome of Venice's Basilica of Saint Mark.

"Most old masters worth their salt have practiced Naumanish disruption, even if that's gone unrecognized by us or even by most of their contemporaries," he wrote.

Nauman, in fact, assumed the mantle of old master; next to gimmicks like the figurative gigantism of the Japan pavilion, or the body-in-pool crime tableaux of the Nordic, Nauman made the U.S. Pavilion look like a shrine to substance.

Bloomberg critic Martin Gayford wrote: "Nauman emerges as the big art-historical figure in this Biennale. He's tremendously inventive, with a bleak Samuel Beckett-like vision of existence."

It seems no coincidence that as Nauman was going strong in Venice, ArtReview magazine placed him as the top artist in its Power 100, a list of the 100 most influential figures in the art world. The show was pulling into its last few weeks when a Nauman neon from the early 1980s, Violins Violence Silence, sold at Sotheby's for $4 million.

The Venice effort was an enormous strategic step for the Art Museum, perhaps more popularly known for Cézanne and armor than conceptual art. It showed edgy curatorial chops in contemporary art. It proved to funders that the museum could triumph in a big, expensive, artistically ambitious project.

Both sadly and boldly, it showed that the museum could do all this without the watchful eye of its late director Anne d'Harnoncourt, who died after the conception of the Nauman show, but before its opening.

The True Artist himself had no special connection to d'Harnoncourt, but he has one now with museum staff, which hopes to continue to expand its Nauman holdings.

Before it acquired The True Artist in 2007, the museum owned only a single Nauman work on paper. Days and Giorni are not owned by the museum, though it has recently acquired the three early films and videos. The museum is fast becoming an East Coast locus for Nauman.

Asked about this accumulation of his works, the selectively reclusive 67-year-old artist was typically sphinx-like.

"It didn't have anything to do with me," Nauman said with a smile last week after taking a break from tweaking the sound of Giorni.

"Watch this space," says curator Taylor. "To get that neon piece was to send a message to Bruce that we believe in his work, and the conversation continues on with what are the other major works we'd like to get."

"It's a beginning of something I am hoping will grow. I think he is an artist who makes a lot of sense in the collection," said Basualdo, who was the art museum curator often on the ground in Venice making things happen.

Such a direction strengthens the museum's hand in contemporary art as it contemplates an ambitious expansion. Anyone who thinks that a move into this progressive realm is out of step with the museum's history doesn't know the enigmatic depths of Duchamp, now the focus of attention not far from the Naumans in the north wing.

"It reaffirms the significance that contemporary art has played at this institution for a very long time," said director and CEO Timothy Rub, "and it reaffirms the way the museum has in the past identified what it considers very key figures."

And anyone who fears that Nauman won't speak trenchantly in a conservative city underestimates both his work and the public's capacity.

Visitors eavesdropping on Days - still behind the velvet ropes last week before its official opening - seemed entranced.

"One of the guards told me he thought if you listened to it enough, you could achieve enlightenment," said Erica Battle, the project curatorial assistant who helped reset Days and Giorni in Philadelphia. "He might be right."