Taylor Walsh

For the American artist Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), medium is a problem. Since the mid- 1960s, Nauman has experimented with every conceivable technical support, alternating traditional forms like sculpture and etching with the emerging fields of performance and video. Such artistic promiscuity would seem to discredit medium altogether, reducing it to a vestige of a rigid and hopelessly dated modernism. Yet close attention to the objects themselves reveals a subtler stance: less a rejection of medium’s import than a recasting of its areas of competence, extending its explanatory power beyond the narrowly art historical.

Informed by the era’s unfolding debates over medium’s shifting definitions and continued purchase, the first decade of Nauman’s work tested the bounds of this governing episteme, stretching it to accommodate willfully eccentric formats. Through case studies of four such marginal practices—holography, neon, recorded sound, and artist’s books—my dissertation posits an expanded notion of artistic medium, locating specificity where one might least expect to find it.