Please Pay Attention Please

Since the 1960s, the artist Bruce Nauman has developed a highly complex andpluralistic oeuvre ranging from discrete sculpture, performance, film, video, and text-based worksto elaborate multipart installations incorporating sound, video recording and monitors, andarchitectural structures. Nauman's work is often interpreted in terms of movements and mediums,including performance, postminimalism, process, and conceptual art, thereby emphasizing its apparenteclecticism. But what is often overlooked is that underlying these seemingly disparate artistictendencies are conceptual continuities, one of which is an investigation of the nature oflanguage.Unlike many of his contemporaries, Nauman has refrained from participating in the criticaldiscourse surrounding his own work. He has given relatively few interviews over the course of hiscareer and has little to do with the art press or critical establishment. Indeed, he granted JanetKraynak and The MIT Press almost complete autonomy in the preparation of this volume. In contrast toNauman's reputation for silence, however, from the beginning of his career, the incorporation oflanguage has been a central feature of his art. This collection takes as its starting point theseeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words.Please PayAttention Please contains all of Nauman's major interviews from 1965 to 2001, as well as acomprehensive body of his writings, including instructions and proposal texts, dialogues transcribedfrom audio-video works, and prose texts written specifically for installation sculptures. Whererelevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were composed.In the critical essay that serves as the book's introduction, the editor investigates Nauman's artin relation to the linguistic turn in art practices of the 1960s?-understanding language through thespeech act--and its legacy in contemporary art.