Bruce Nauman's Everyday

Abstract

This research analyses the work “Days” (2009) by the North-American artist Bruce Nauman, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from October 2018 to February 2019 in the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Disappearing Acts. We investigate “Days” about the erasure of the visual image in the establishment of a space suitable to the emergence of sound images, discussing the relation between silence and noise, voice and loop as a way to generate a listening of the work. For this purpose, we take the thoughts by authors such as John Cage, Brandon LaBelle and the Brazilian artist and theoretician Rodolfo Caesar, in a sort of writing that also occurs in a kind of loop that releases and resumes some aspects of “Days”. Considering the sound in the work of Bruce Nauman, we turn to authors that have been investigating the artist’s oeuvre, among them Constance M. Lewallen and Barbara Rose. Finally, the research is also concerned with the question of time from the ordering of the weekdays and how the artist deals with it. To such purpose, we turn to Jonathan Crary that has been dealing with questions of time in contemporary life.