Peter Schjeldahl: Express Yourself

“I suppose Bruce Nauman is the odd one out in this collection of artists,” Hatoum remarked to Daftari. The white male heterosexual master of many mediums—inexhaustibly inventive, philosophically profound, harsh—was represented by “Think” (1993): two stacked video monitors broadcasting a tape (upside down on the bottom screen) in which the artist’s face bobs, at a steady rate, in and out of view of a camera that was pointed at a blank wall above his head. With each leap—sweat and labored breathing evince an extended ordeal—he shouts, “Think!” Hatoum observed that Nauman is “a significant artist.” Indeed, the artistic tactics of half the works in “Here Is Elsewhere” would not be conceivable apart from his influence. Hatoum also deemed the piece a salutary injunction to viewers. She says, “With the Nauman video, I hear, ‘Think for yourself!’” I hear something else: theatricalized frustration at the impossibility of thinking by willing oneself to do so. Nauman is a bard of mental predicaments: tautology, double bind, Beckettian futility.

“Think” struck me as a more trenchant, unfriendlier complement to the show than Hatoum imagined. The besetting weakness of politically motivated art is precisely its quotient of willed thought and feeling. One senses that a work’s meaning has been nailed down—is effectively over with—before one’s encounter with it begins. Hatoum spoke, in her interview, of her wish for “viewers to come up with their own interpretations.” But the kind of work that she makes and favors keeps response on a short leash, assuming agreement and complicitous sympathy with the artist’s point of view—which is not even his or her own, exactly, but a programmatic stance. Darkly comic, Nauman forbids sympathy, even with himself. Truth interests him. He demonstrates the autonomy of spirit which ideal democracy puts within the sufficiently determined reach of anyone.