oh bruce, how i love thee.
there is a massive bruce nauman show at the hamburger bahnhof at the moment and i had the joy of going to see it with a new berlin buddy david bausola.
it was so lush that i’m going to go back and a) see it again on my own and b) do a listening project there.
dream passage was based on all the works he had done regarding corridors, journeys, passages and empty spaces. of course there were a bunch of his neon works there, which were great, but i honestly think that they could have been left out and it would have made no difference.
however, there were other older works from the collection that i loved seeing and felt absolutely relevant: his art make up works – i hadn’t seen them before (and they gave me an idea for future work), his text: flayed earth/flayed self (skin/sink), musical chair,
i pressed myself against the wall (except i did it backwards, for the hell of it) for body pressure and had to be told to do it on the wall, not on the paper (oops!), and then almost ruined the marquette of his room with my soul left out trying to check out the underside, so that was a bit embarrassing.
but apart from those two gaffes, i really enjoyed the show.
the space itself is MASSIVE so i just limited myself to seeing the nauman works, having to pass up works by lawrence weiner, robert morris, yves klein and richard serra. but i will go back for them.
experiencing the kassell corridor was so beautiful. visually, it’s striking, experientially, a wonderful reprieve-space, but acoustically it’s fascinating – a strange amplification that is almost binaural – the sounds are close and far away at the same time. i listened to other people in the space from the outside before i went in and listened to people outside the space from inside the green crescent-shaped crevice.
as i said, i’m going to go back and do a more formal ‘listen’ real soon.
david, the meanie, took me into the bookstore and i promptly spent €25 on two books. fuck! but they were SO cheap: a lawrence weiner for €10 and global feminisms for €15! i just had to. regardless of the repercussions.