A Cowboy in Winter

Among the most memorable interactions I’ve ever had with artists occurred during a trip I made to New Mexico in August 1992 to interview Susan Rothenberg for a Vanity Fair profile. It had been three years since she wed her fellow artist Bruce Nauman and moved from New York City to New Mexico, where he’d resettled from Pasadena a decade earlier. Together they bought a seven-hundred-acre spread in Galisteo, a half-hour’s drive south of Santa Fe, and built a compound with a ranch house, corrals, stables, and separate studios. At the time they were the contemporary art world’s golden couple, not least because this unexpected midlife second marriage for both of them was an attraction of opposites so extreme that those who knew them deemed it perfect. Even more remarkably, it lasted three decades, until Rothenberg’s death in 2020 at age seventy-five.

She was petite, Jewish, voluble, and a quintessential livewire New Yorker. Nauman is tall, Gentile, taciturn, and a classic self-contained Midwesterner. He’s also a genuine cowboy, having raised cattle and trained quarter horses for resale as a side gig. His main gig has been harder to pin down. From the outset Nauman’s artistic output has been all over the place, embracing virtually every medium in the modern repertory, from photography, video, and performance art to neon light sculpture, sound installations, and even such traditional pursuits as drawing and printmaking. He often appears in his own pieces, notably the breakthrough Self Portrait as a Fountain (1966–1967), an eleven-part photographic suite best known for its image of the bare-chested young artist, arms akimbo, spritzing an arc of water from his mouth. His work often inclines toward the disquieting: in the infamous 1987 video Clown Torture, an actor named Walter Stevens appears in full costume and makeup as a writhing circus Bozo whose strangulated screams make viewers flee for the exits whenever it’s screened. 

Just about the only medium he’s steered clear of is painting, which is probably just as well, considering his second wife’s preeminence in that discipline. Rothenberg was among the ten artists (including Jennifer Bartlett, Neil Jenney, Lois Lane, and Robert Moskowitz) chosen for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1978 exhibition “New Image Painting.” The landmark show codified a decisive move toward figuration in a medium that some commentators had deemed dead after years of domination by Minimalist sculpture and pictures that sought to resemble paintings as little as possible. Rothenberg’s rich, sensuous handling of pigment was the antithesis both of Minimalism and of Pop artists’ earlier tendency to mimic printed commercial imagery. Her haunting, dreamlike visions of fragmented human and animal forms suffused her canvases with a psychological depth that kept you thinking about them long after you stopped looking.

Nauman was more renowned than Rothenberg—in 2018 Peter Schjeldahl gauged him “the most influential (though for many people arcane) artist of the past half century”—but her critical reputation was also sky-high, so there was little danger of career envy. Their New Mexico idyll inspired comparisons to Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, an equally formidable power pairing on the American scene two generations earlier. Rothenberg’s most familiar figural motif, furthermore, was a silhouetted horse—her 1976 equine painting Butterfly hung in the White House during the Obama administration. Her relocation to Nauman’s desert domain seemed to augur a match made in art historical heaven.

Nauman—whose enigmatic output often communicates his concerns on a purely unconscious level, but does so more effectively than just about any other American artist of our time—is now the subject of a strikingly mounted and emotionally affecting exhibition at the New York gallery Sperone Westwater. Titled “Begin Again,” it features an elegiac array of work completed over the past two years in several mediums, but it emphasizes drawing, a skill Nauman learned as an art student at the University of Wisconsin but allowed to lie fallow until he recently felt the time had come to resume it. And though this is not billed as a tribute to Rothenberg, her spirit permeates the presentation: the show suggests a subliminal influence on his art—as seen in his silhouetted drawings of animal parts, which bring to mind her early paintings—and how profoundly her death has hit him, evident in the exhibition’s most unexpected images.

It opens with a bizarrely beautiful installation that fills the Norman Foster–designed building’s double-height ground floor gallery. Descending from the ceiling are eighteen composite sculptures attached to gnarled wires distanced widely enough for you to walk among them. This disconcerting downpour of faux fox and coyote carcasses made from plaster, burlap, and polyurethane foam—it’s raining canids, one might say—continues a sculptural series Nauman has been developing since 1989. It’s based on readymade taxidermy armatures that he first acquired through a mail-order catalog, then altered and conjoined into groupings that achieve a surprisingly rich variety of formal and sensory effects, from antic and graceful to inert and grotesque. In this iteration, any misapprehension that you’ve wandered into a wild-game butcher’s refrigerated meat locker is undercut by the improbable lyricism of the airily arranged, pale-colored ensemble. 

Added to this bestiary is a pair of life-size bronze human heads laid sideways on the concrete gallery floor. The castings’ deluxe material brings to mind the dismembered statues of deposed dictators familiar from revolutionary uprisings, but these feel more specifically personal. In a darkened room beyond this space, a two-minute 3-D video by Nauman focuses on the heads filmed on the floor of his Galisteo studio. They’re shown lying next to the same wire-suspended ball-peen hammer adjacent to them in the gallery installation. In the video the hammer swings lazily against one of the craniums with an eerie metallic clangor—another of Nauman’s unnerving sound installations. (It’s dedicated to his friends Bruce Hamilton and Susanna Carlisle, Santa Fe artists who share his interest in new-media installations and assemblages of found objects.) 

I next took the elevator up to the second floor of the triple-decker presentation, where I was stopped dead in my tracks by the first of the large monochromatic works on paper I encountered. Here was suddenly Susan, in an untitled drawing that captures the flattened outlines of Rothenberg’s unmistakable features, gamine but lifeless, executed with the detachment of a forensic autopsy sketch. Her high-set eyes with lids closed, snub nose with flaring nostrils, and wide mouth with small, evenly spaced lower teeth are all immediately recognizable. This almost life-size memory portrait is accompanied by a nearly identical version rendered upside down, along with a half-dozen others that trace the arc of Rothenberg’s wispy hairline, again delineated with medical precision. I came away from them feeling shaken, as though I’d been asked to identify her body at the morgue.

To create these pictures and a slew of others that echo the animal forms in the ground floor installation, Nauman returned to the venerable Renaissance techniques of silverpoint and goldpoint. Those painstaking methods entail using a stylus made from one of those precious metals to incise lines into thick paper coated with a thin gesso-like liquid ground that dries into a smooth porcelain-like surface, which is then hand-engraved. Five of these sheets are the kaolin white of a ceramic glaze, the other three similar to the pink underlayer of Hans Holbein’s inimitable chalk portraits. Nauman first experimented with this medium decades ago after he saw Joseph Stella’s silverpoint profile of Marcel Duchamp (circa 1920) at MoMA, as he writes in his essay for Bruce Nauman: Learning to Draw Again, the well-illustrated exhibition catalog.

To be fully appreciated, however, these pieces must be viewed in person, since the delicate lines and tactile surfaces come fully to life only under strong artificial light. Nauman gives the material an uncannily corporeal quality, and it feels more convincingly evocative of the human body than Lucian Freud’s signature clotted impasto, about which he said, “I want paint to work as flesh.”

Nauman’s untitled posthumous portraits of Rothenberg add to a long tradition of artists who’ve made deathbed images of those close to them. Modern art’s ultimate master of mourning, Edvard Munch, turned out endless angst-ridden tableaux of bereaved families in spectral groupings around corpses. Entirely different in tone is Claude Monet’s painting of his thirty-two-year-old wife, Camille, soon after she died of cancer in 1879, which shows her stiffened visage incongruously swathed in chic Impressionist billows of mauve tulle. The urge to set down a final record of a beloved partner’s postmortem features has always struck me as a perfectly understandable, therapeutic way to process and internalize the finality of death.

That appears to have been Nauman’s motivation. In a Brooklyn Rail interview about the current exhibition with the curator Michael Auping, a longtime advocate of Rothenberg’s work, her widower admitted: 

I have a hard time talking about it, and I guess [not] titling those drawings is part of that. So, anyway, I made two drawings of her from a photograph I took of her just after she died here at the house. One of the drawings was upside down, and the other right side up. I did the upside down one because I thought it would be easier emotionally, thinking the process would be a little more abstract. I’d never done drawings like these…Figurative portraits of someone very important to me. Then I did some without her face. It was of just her hair moving around the space where her face would be…. I was very surprised at how they turned out. One of them is the best drawing I have ever done, at least I think so…. It affected me to the extent that I just stopped working for a bit. 

During my long-ago New Mexico trip, I spent most of my time with Rothenberg as I taped our lengthy, discursive conversations, which touched on everything from this relentlessly self-critical artist’s creative practices (she destroyed an unusually large proportion of her works-in-progress, much to the dismay of certain dealers) to her stint as a go-go dancer at Ithaca’s Alt Heidelberg bar while a Cornell undergraduate. My Vanity Fair assignment was occasioned by her midcareer retrospective, “Susan Rothenberg: Paintings and Drawings, 1974–1992,” which was curated by Auping and traveled to six American museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C. As would be expected from an artist so wracked by self-doubt that she was prone to retouch paintings even as viewers were about to arrive for a vernissage, Rothenberg worried endlessly about the forthcoming survey. She also fretted about how her move to New Mexico was influencing her work, having vowed that she would never paint landscapes, breaking from virtually every other artist who came under the spell of the region’s stupefying natural grandeur.

But throughout my visit Nauman was a hovering, watchful presence. When he wasn’t tending to his horses or the family dogs that had the run of the property, he kept one ear cocked to what his wife and I were talking about while busying himself unobtrusively within earshot. At one point, as Rothenberg reminisced about her youthful affair with the poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen on the Aegean island of Hydra, Nauman moseyed over to the table where we sat sipping Jack Daniels and slammed his broad-brimmed ten-gallon hat over my recorder without uttering a word. Rothenberg and I laughed—I a bit nervously—but his point was taken. She then suggested that the two of us instead go for a walk to the nearby site of an ancient pueblo to search for arrowheads and pottery shards (several of which I still keep on my desk in a box of personal treasures).

Later that afternoon, when jet lag caught up with me and I visibly began to fade, Rothenberg asked if I’d like to take a nap in their guest room. I gratefully agreed, and after I woke up I found her and Nauman soaking in the tall barrel-like hot tub just outside their simple adobe house. Although they were in the bubbling water up to their necks, I could see that they’d dispensed with swimsuits. With room enough for a third, Rothenberg urged me to join them. Even back in the Sixties, skinny-dipping hadn’t been my thing, but the more I demurred the more she insisted. Finally I blurted out, “I’m sorry, but Condé Nast has a very strict policy against its writers getting naked with their subjects”—a spontaneous fabrication that she accepted, much to my relief.

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: 2 coyotes and 2 hammers, 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: Mary Woronov shirt in plastic bag, 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: Standing in the crossroads heart in my hands (bad week), 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: 2 coyotes, ax handles and 2 hammers, 2024

Sperone Westwater

Bruce Nauman: Hammers and person, 2024

As day slowly blended into night, my hosts began to make dinner: Rothenberg assembled the salad while Nauman took charge of grilling the meat. All the while a small portable TV on a kitchen counter was tuned to the 1992 Republican National Convention, then underway in Houston. The video reception was terrible, and the striated, garishly colored talking heads of bloviating politicians reminded me of the paintings of Ed Paschke, a Chicago artist of the period. I paid scant attention to the proceedings until Nauman quietly said “listen to this” and turned up the volume, whereupon we heard Pat Buchanan’s now infamous “culture wars” speech, which ended with his exhortation, “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.”

Nauman’s terse, incisive running commentary on the convention reinforced my certitude that this is not a man given to circumlocution, in either his talk or his art. I was more aware than ever of how essential artists are to society as hypersensitive, early-warning monitors of developments that the best among them pick up on well before professional pundits reach such a state of heightened perception. This made me realize that he is a fundamentally political artist, even though his work has seldom been overtly partisan (with a few major exceptions, such as his celebrated 1971 anti-Vietnam lithograph Raw War, which spells out that palindrome in much the same way as the lettered neon wall sculptures he began producing around the same time).

Nauman’s great theme has been power in its broadest, deepest sense, whether in the public realm, as the subliminal political aspect of his work implies, or in the exertion of power over oneself, as seen especially in the pioneering videos he began to make in 1968. Whether tapping into the terror many people have felt since childhood about the aggressive jollity of clowns, or the parallels between hunting and warfare implicit in his animal sculptures, Nauman doesn’t believe in letting his viewers off easy. Often exploring his own physicality, his work now addresses the body as it ages and decays. The latter manifests itself with particular poignancy in a late-life counterpart to Self Portrait as a Fountain: a fifteen-minute-long video, Walk With Tyger (2024), screened in Sperone Westwater’s Moving Room (an ingenious twenty-foot-wide elevator-cum-display space).

In it the artist recites the familiar first stanza of the Blake poem—“Tyger, tyger, burning bright…”—while doing a heel-to-toe line walk. He moves unsteadily toward the camera and then turns backward, his arms outstretched sideways in a cruciform pose, first right side up, and then upside down as the image is flipped, with a horizontal slice at midpoint, at waist level. Although it looks much like the drunk test that cops make DUI suspects take, he’s actually doing a recuperative mobility exercise he learned in physical therapy after an operation for rectal cancer in 2018. This is yet another example of the multilayered ambiguity that gives so much of his work its sharp and subversive edge.

Nauman, who turns eighty-three in December, now looks far different from how I remember him as a lean and rangy buckaroo, though the disparity is no less shocking to me than when I nowadays catch an unexpected glimpse of myself, seven years his junior, in a mirror. What remains intact as time goes by is the sheer force of his artistic insight, undiminished in this heroic display of late-career vigor that reconfirms his stature as a towering figure of discomfort among his more complacent peers.