Now Man's Bound to Fail, More

Abstract

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths . Produced at a moment when the “put-on” (occupying “a fuzzy territory between simple leg-pulling and elaborate practical joke”) was a fashionable mode of expression, it isn’t hard to imagine why Bruce Nauman’s neon sign, combining beer-light connotations of commercialism with earnest sentiment, might have engendered a skeptical—if not outright cynical—response. 1 As with many of Nauman’s works from the 1960s, The True Artist relies on a semantic confusion produced by the artist’s apparently ironi cal intent, with the statement being both “true and not true at the same time.” 2 (This can be seen even more clearly in a related work that states that “the true artist is an amazing luminous fountain.”) Just as the textual message invites both an embarrassingly romantic and a coolly ironic reading, the sign’s potential mounting on a window offers two modes of viewing the work: one in which the spiraling script is seen frontally, and thus legibly, and one in which the text is viewed from behind, reversed and illegible, thereby suggesting a corresponding visual tension between figuration and abstraction in the work. Nauman’s extensive engagement with the issue of figuration—both in its rhetorical and its morphological manifesta tions—was not simply an exercise in semiotic analysis or postmodern indeterminacy. Acknowledging that the statement conveyed in The True Artist is “a