Sinking Colour/Colouring Skin: Thinking through Race in Bruce Nauman’s Body Painting

Abstract

This essay reframes two of Bruce Nauman's early moving-image exercises in which the artist applies paint and cosmetics to his own torso, arms and face – Art Make-Up (1967–1968) and Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968) – in terms of their racialised logics, which unfold in complicated and circuitous ways. In both works, racial complexes organise Nauman's exercise and animate the space of his studio, enabling an array of contradictory images, affects and meanings to accrue therein. By focusing on time and process in both works, in addition to issues of representation, Nauman's skin painting exercises help elaborate a lineage of racialism within American modernism that mobilises spectacles of racial identification to drive formal experimentation. This creative legacy, which seeks to marshal the multiple registers at which we encounter race's operations, provides a new lens from which to understand both Nauman's early work as well as his continuing relevance to contemporary art and art criticism.