Art: Nauman in the spotlight

Bruce Nauman is one of the most admired and influential artists in America, so it seems slightly incongruous that for three decades he has lived on a horse ranch in the middle of New Mexico.

He does get around, though. In 1999 he shared (with Louise Bourgeois) the Golden Lion Award for best artist at the Venice Biennale. He'll be a major presence in Venice again this year, thanks to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which is curating the American pavilion.

The Biennale, after more than a century still one of the most prestigious international art exhibitions, opens June 7 and runs through Nov. 22. Art Museum curators Carlos Basualdo and Michael R. Taylor, the U.S. commissioners, have prepared a thematic investigation of Nauman's career, which began in the mid-1960s.

Besides a more or less conventional display in the American pavilion in the Giardini della Biennale, the main exhibition site, Nauman is creating site-specific installations for two educational institutions in the city - one housed in a palazzo on the Grand Canal and the other in a former convent near the railroad station.

A tripartite presentation, especially taking his art into the city proper, should allow Nauman plenty of latitude to display his mastery of multiple media, from sculpture to video, and including photography, illuminated neon, installation, body art, conceptual art, and performance.

Nauman is the quintessential postmodern artist, interested more in investigating the nature of art and aesthetic experience through experimentation than in producing objects. Perhaps more than any other American, he represents the forceful reaction against, and rejection of, the seriousness and dogmatic ideology of modern art.

The 67-year-old artist has devoted more than 40 years to testing the boundaries of art, as Marcel Duchamp, retrospectively the first postmodernist, so famously did nearly a century ago. But where Duchamp challenged orthodoxy with objects such as his commercial "ready-mades," Nauman creates unusual and uncomfortable situations, environments, and sensations.

Most of all, he poses questions about where ordinary life ends and art begins. He proceeds from the proposition that anything an artist does, especially in his studio, is ipso facto art - a debatable proposition.