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Infinite jest: Bruce Nauman & contemporary art as continuous process.

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With the false hope of a firm foundation gone, with the world displaced by worlds that are but versions, with substance dissolved into function, and with the given acknowledged as taken, we face the questions of how worlds are made, tested, and known.

--Nelson Goodman, "Ways of Worldmaking" (1978)

It has been said again and again, becoming more of a truism with each evocation, that Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential living American artists. The variations on this theme are numerous. On the occasion of his 1995 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curator Robert Storr deemed him "arguably the most internationally influential figure of his generation of Americans." (1) The importance of stating Nauman's nationality in relation to international influence is pivotal. As art historian Pam Lee has eloquently argued, Nauman's reception outside of the United States since the late 60s has historically been remarkably consistent. (2) Nauman's work has persistently played with melancholy mixed with humour, as well as with the trope of failure and of failed communication. While language often underpins the logic of his artwork, even when taking the form of sculpture, the possibility of being lost in translation, so to speak, is recurrent and deliberate. Combining philosophical questioning with a protean use of mediums, Nauman's gravitational pull in terms of contemporary art practice is difficult to deny. However, articulating that influence precisely poses a challenge. On the occasion of this year's 53rd Venice Biennale, Bruce Nauman has been selected as the representative of the US national pavilion, bringing his work compellingly into conversation with the international context of contemporary art while epitomizing an American legacy, marking how there is no time like the present to ask how it is that Bruce Nauman remains a contemporary artist. His presence evidences how the notion of being contemporary exceeds the limits of simply being "new" More profoundly, being contemporary is about relentless probing, facing "the questions of how worlds are made, tested, and known." (3) Imaginably, it is Nauman's repetitive insistence on disrupting conventions that continue to make him a model for artistic practice as an investigatory procedure.

La Biennale di Venezia perseveres as the art world's most recognized, best loved and longest running art exhibition. In a world where a proliferation of biennales across the globe has become the norm, Venice maintains its unique position in this complex constellation. At this event, Nauman's artwork will occupy three venues. Organized and commissioned by Carlos Basualdo and Michael R. Taylor, curators from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the show called Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens will survey four decades of Nauman's work, including video, installation, performance, sculpture and neon pieces. The gesture of such an extensive survey poses the question of Nauman's ongoing connection to the contemporary art scene. Beyond the scope of the US Pavilion and situated at the Giardini della Biennale, a neoclassical building from the 30s, this particular project will also use to its advantage the site of the Universita Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini, while, simultaneously, two floors of the 15th-century gothic palace that houses the Universita Ca' Foscari will show different versions of a new sound installation that did...

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