What a joy it is to find yourself in a pastiche of white on white—replete with the sweet musty smell of freshly cut drywall, old-timey CRT monitors, and a clattering symphony of long-ago bodies wresting tedious, long-ago sounds. What a joy to be back, back, back in time, floating through a light, bright, buzzy tunnel of anachronisms. “Pasadena Years” at Marian Goodman Gallery was less a survey of Nauman’s decade in Los Angeles, from 1969 to 1979, than an opportunity to absorb the poetry of the past. Overseen by Nauman himself, it was like entering the holy grail of his provocations—interventions into space, language, and the psyche that are so ingrained in contemporary art we forget how joyful they are to experience firsthand.
The show opened into a long view of Body Pressure,1974, the iconic stack of take-home pink papers whose text, printed in typewriter style and centered on the page, presents a series of instructions, opening with PRESS AS MUCH OF THE FRONT SURFACE OF YOUR BODY (PALMS IN OR OUT, LEFT OR RIGHT CHEEK) AGAINST THE WALL AS POSSIBLE. This poem turned sculpture turned performance still (after all these years!) directs you to humiliate yourself, love yourself, fuck yourself, dissolve yourself, embrace yourself. Bossy and beautiful, the ultimate in anti-digital, all raw experience and vulnerability.
Deeper within the exhibition space, visitors encountered Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., Revolving Upside Down, Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube, and Bouncing in the Corner No. 2: Upside Down, all 1969: four videos looping continuously on CRT monitors lined up along the wall. These sixty-minute videos feature noisy, repetitive, even annoying performances—a back smacking a wall causing a whack that echoed around the room, a shrill violin note, a series of odd, hunched-over movements. Across from the videos was Performance Corridor, 1969, a set of seemingly ad hoc, narrow wooden walls jutting into the center of the room. The sculpture’s simplicity felt somehow fresh: It was an object but also a question, a temptation. While some viewers may have recognized the work as a prop from Nauman’s 1968 video Walk with Contrapposto, and therefore may have felt obliged to enter, there were no clear instructions to the viewer. The tightness of the space was at once seductive, alluring, confusing—how we want to be beckoned, to be told what to do, and to do it!
Attention to sight line and scale was especially arrestingin the second gallery, with visitors sandwiched between Studies for Holograms, 1970—five screen prints of squished yellow lips and teeth—and Vision, 1973, a lithograph bearing an almost imperceptible rendering of the word VISION. This setup offered a delicious, embodied dichotomy between speaking and seeing—or between the perennial opposition of language and art. There was a touch of the abject in Studies for Holograms—a pinched neck, a close-up of cartilage on the gums—that reminded us of Nauman as an artist working in the fleshy, stubbly, wet-lipped world.
Funnel Piece (Françoise Lambert Installation), 1971, installed in the gallery’s gigantic main space, presented two white walls meeting at a sharp angle—making the whole room and all its other walls appear askew. Though you could enter Funnel Piece and experience some sort of claustrophobic narrowness, it’s best for its play at blankness, at nothingness. Text for a Room, 1973/2025, was also comprised of two temporary gallery walls; however, the two here were made to bisect the main gallery and form a narrow corridor between each half. This was truly a jewel of an artwork, with the little corridor opening onto another stack of poetry (this time on green paper), beginning WE ARE TRYING TO GET TO THE CENTER/OF SOME PLACE: THAT IS and leading you ever more into hissing, empty nothingness.
Outside, in the garden, among aggregated rocks crunching underfoot and everything mellowed by the smell of sage emanating from the gallery’s landscaping, Dark, 1968, seemed simple and yet blistering. The heft and immovability of the smooth, hard-edged tablet of oxidized steel lying on the ground was so unlike the landscape in which it sat that it somehow became psychologically imperceptible. Nearby, Microphone/Tree Piece, 1971, was a tree rigged up with microphones that captured ambient sounds and played them into the empty gallery adjacent to Untitled (Centering Piece). Microphone/Tree Piece drew you out of the whiteness of the gallery and into life, bringing all the elements in the garden that were not art into focus.
By current standards, there was nothing remotely digital, technological, flashy, entertaining, or, in that sense, contemporary about this show. The unique quality of Nauman’s output during these years is that its meaning stays fixed—not because it’s inflexible, but because it’s indelible. Bodies themselves no longer hold the key to subjectivity—after all, we are dematerialized beyond comprehension. And yet this work transports us away from the specificity of lived experience, and toward the embodied experience of trying to live. What remains and must still be experienced is Nauman’s work as a form of curiosity, expression, and autonomy. This is why it stays gold, and why “Pasadena Years” felt like standing in the warm Los Angeles sun.
