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View at the museum ↗Second Poem Piece
Bruce Nauman1969
- Attribution
- Bruce Nauman American, born 1941
- Medium
- Steel
- Physical dimensions
- 152.4 × 152.4 cm (60 × 60 in.)
- Credit line
- Gift of Lannan Foundation
Museum metadata is available under CC0. Image availability and rights are separate; consult the source record.
Source rights statement: © 2018 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
View the museum record ↗From the museum
Bruce Nauman’s engagement with linguistic gamesmanship— wordplay, puns, and jokes—can be traced to two exceptional steel sculptures inscribed with text produced in the late 1960s. In one of these, Second Poem Piece , Nauman positioned the words YOU, MAY, NOT, WANT, TO, SCREW, and HERE (or HEAR) strategically across the sculpture’s flat surface, each word establishing its own vertical column. As the text is read horizontally, row by row, the progressive removal of one or more words from the topmost sentence produces an insistently non-narrative list of variations—even a kind of “poem.” The artist has said of this work, “What I was interested in was that art generally adds information to a situation, and it seems reasonable to also be able to remove information from a situation and get art from that.” Here, the permanence of inscribed steel is at odds with the shifting meanings of the sculpture's series of statements.
Description: Art Institute of Chicago · CC BY 4.0