To Remain in Contradiction

Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi attends an exhibition of Bruce Nauman’s early work, at Marian Goodman Gallery in Los Angeles.

By Ikechúkwú OnyewuenyiJune 11, 2025

• Art & Architecture

ON THE EVENING of March 25, 2025, the L.A. Dodgers opened their season with a drone show above Chavez Ravine. The night sky became an exhibition space. From the bleachers, fans likely saw Shohei Ohtani and his dog Dekopin floating across the sky—bright, bobbleheaded, a corporate spectacle engineered to charm and dissolve in the same breath. But up on a hill in Mount Washington, the display arrived warped—backward, cropped, and partially obscured by the craggy terrain. The movement, the angle, the inversion, the distance, the timing—everything conspired to produce what looked unmistakably like a crude, flickering sex act, or something edging toward one. It wasn’t a glitch, exactly. The image was there, intact. But the vantage point transformed this cute moment into a luminous, illicit silhouette, caught in a gesture of receiving something (phallic) that was never meant to be offered. It was funny and wildly inappropriate—a moment of erotic misrecognition, brought to you by aerospace choreography and the Los Angeles landscape.

Of course, I laughed—loud and unalone—beckoning my partner to look out yonder at the sexualized skyline. And then I thought of Bruce Nauman. Not because the luminous doodle looked like art, but because it didn’t mean to—and still produced a kind of contagion of affect. Something flickered across the civic unconscious, something uninvited and ambiguous, at once ridiculous and charged.

The next day, acting on that thought, I went to see Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years at the Marian Goodman Gallery. The exhibition was his first in Los Angeles in 30 years, an absence that is staggering but perhaps not surprising. Los Angeles has long preferred a more manageable image of itself—one shaped by language, screenwriting, and the culture industry’s perpetual construction of a sunlit utopia. Theodor Adorno spoke directly to this health-unto-death quality of the city’s glitz. Writing in the 1940s, he remarked that “the brightest rooms are the secret domain of faeces.” Two decades later, Nauman’s work, with its fixation on contradiction, ambiguity, and uneasy bodily proximity, arrived like a splinter in the eye, magnifying something the city hadn’t quite wanted to face: the invisible infrastructures of domination, the casual incursions on land, and the psychic toll of performative identity.

On view in Pasadena Years wasn’t the Nauman of signs and systems—the one caught in the strictures of semiotics. It wasn’t even Nauman the slick provocateur of neon who, beginning with Run from Fear, Fun from Rear (1972), experimented in luminous wordplay with erotic overtones, hints of the more explicit sexual imagery to come in the 1980s. I had that Nauman in mind after what I’d seen over Chavez Ravine. By contrast, the current exhibition presented a Nauman less concerned with what a thing means than with what it does, the gap between what’s said and what’s heard. It was the Nauman of awkward repetitions—the one who once said the studio was worth staying in because everything outside had stopped making sense, or maybe never had. Pasadena Years makes the case that it was during this time, from 1969 to 1979, in the suburbs of Pasadena and Altadena, that Nauman began rehearsing not just how to make art but also how to be inside time. Inside a room. Inside a joke that forgets its punch line and turns into something else entirely: a rhythm, a discomfort, a weird erotic loneliness. It’s where body, space, and language stopped behaving—where the work turned self-aware, where it began to think through both the conditions of art-making and the comic, erotic, and phenomenological strangeness of being a person in space.

Organizers Philipp Kaiser and Samantha Gregg opened the exhibition with instruction. When I walked into the gallery, I was met by a plinth holding a stack of pink paper. The ream was comprised of copies of Body Pressure (1974), a textual score that asks the viewer—gently, absurdly—to press their body against a wall. “Press very hard and concentrate,” the sheet reads. “Concentrate on tension in the muscles.” Nauman’s proposition is anatomical, phenomenological—maybe even sacred. But the blankness of the paper, its reproducibility, renders the act almost bureaucratic. Before you encountered anything sculptural in the exhibition, Body Pressure insisted that you locate yourself in relation to the architecture—your front or back, your limbs, your perspiration.

Turning around, visitors were met with two adjacent video works—Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up and Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up, and Face Down (both 1973). (It’s possible that you might’ve encountered these videos first, before finding Body Pressure—a reversal that would cast the stilled gestures of Elke and Tony in a different light.) Together, these videos extend the logic in Body Pressure with a kind of slow-motion absurdity. Shot in real time and intended to be viewed on a continuous loop, each video documents a performer lying supine or prone on a carpeted floor, submitting to an imagined process. Their movements are minimal, often barely perceptible—just the shifting of weight, the labor of staying still. The floor, of course, never rises. Tony never fully sinks. But the titles remain in the present progressive, as if the action is always just about to happen.

There’s something quietly mystical here, watching Elke and Tony—and it’s not in the sense of transcendence but in the contradiction between the proposition and its impossibility. The performers appear caught in a devotional loop, trying to figure something out, or maybe just demonstrating what it means to try. It’s hard not to think of Nauman’s neon spiral from the same era, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (1967), made just before his Pasadena years, whose claim hovers between tautology and prank. In the case of Elke and Tony, the mystic truth may simply be that the body, despite its best efforts, remains bound to the floor.

These instruction or proposal artworks for Elke and Tony were developed from a text Nauman originally wrote in 1969 and later published in 1974 as Instructions for a Mental Exercise (not included in the exhibition). The event score is divided into two parts. In section A, the performer lies face down with the directive to “SLOWLY ALLOW YOURSELF TO SINK DOWN INTO THE FLOOR. EYES OPEN.” In section B, the performer lies face up and follows another instruction: “ALLOW THE FLOOR TO RISE UP AROUND YOU. EYES OPEN.” The underlined text suggests Nauman’s interest in developing visual acuity and focus—an emphasis echoed in his 1973 collage Please/Pay/Attention/Please (not in the exhibition). Indeed, the aim with Instructions for a Mental Exercise is to sustain concentration for 30 continuous minutes. The language, while clinical, edges toward the metaphysical, an inversion of gravity that can only be enacted through imagination and self-discipline. Elke and Tony take this proposition literally. Their slow, minimal gestures don’t resolve the paradox—they inhabit it.

That tension—between somatic effort and architectural indifference—reappears in Body Pressure. Again, the instruction in the latter is deceptively simple: press as much of your body against a wall as possible, then imagine yourself on the other side of that same wall, pushing back. It’s a closed circuit of physical and psychic tension, one that recasts the gallery from container to collaborator. When Body Pressure was first shown, in 1974 at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf, Germany, Nauman built a false wall specifically for this act, while the pink poster with instructional text hung on an adjacent wall. In Pasadena Years, the score is only offered as a takeaway sheet, stacked neatly atop a plinth. There’s no wall to press against, no evidence of pressure. The gesture becomes theoretical—a spot of mental gymnastics, something to picture rather than do.

This absence seems not so much a curatorial oversight as a reflection of the now—an index of how we live, or fail to. To press your full body against a shared wall today—to leave your breath, your sweat, the trace of your skin—feels less like a gesture than a gamble. Nauman ends the score with a provocation: the act, he writes, “may become a very erotic exercise.” But in the long tail of the COVID-19 pandemic (not quite post-, not quite gone), the invitation to touch or be touched by space no longer thrills so easily.

But this unease is not new. A few years before Body Pressure was first shown, dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton formalized the technique of contact improvisation—a dance practice grounded in shared weight, continuous touch, sensory listening, and the inherent risk of falling. This was January 1972. AIDS had not yet entered public consciousness, but virological studies now trace the virus’s diversification to that period. In retrospect, both Body Pressure and contact improvisation emerge from a fragile window of tactile permission, when touch could still be framed as erotic, speculative, even utopian, rather than dangerous. To stage Body Pressure now is to confront a shifted terrain: physical contact is no longer a given but a calculation. Reckoning with this past and this present, I’m not sure I’d go through with Nauman’s directive to press my body against a random wall. Over lunch, I asked a friend if they would. The response was a resounding no. The erotic risk Nauman once gestured toward now arrives tangled with immunological risk, psychic residue, and institutional caution. Rather than an invitation, the score now reads like a relic.

But the show didn’t leave the body entirely unmoored. In a room that branched off from the central gallery, Performance Corridor (1969) reactivated Nauman’s interest in spatial instruction. It consists of two narrow board walls, propped by wooden supports, that form an elongated passage. There’s no wall text, no directive. You just walk in. Or try to. The corridor narrows your path, compresses your range, adjusts your posture. What Body Pressure asks you to conjure, Performance Corridor supplies. It is a structure (a prop for a 1968 videotaped performance, Walk with Contrapposto) that doesn’t demand imagination so much as provoke a reaction—one rooted in physical navigation, balance, friction. You feel your shoulders pull in. You recalibrate your breath. You become, briefly, the performer Nauman once was.

Beyond the room that houses Performance Corridor, the show began to scatter a smidge—at times generative, at others gently shrugging. As an example of the latter, I passed a dimly lit space where the video projection Walks In Walks Out (2015) looped almost apologetically: Nauman steps into frame, then out again, pausing in front of two rows of seven spectral doubles, each echoing his contrapposto pose and gait. Filmed on a cell phone, the work registers as a faint afterimage of Walk with Contrapposto—drained of tension, yet still humming with the muscle memory of earlier movements. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson once read that walk as Nauman “playing queer,” a coded “sashaying” structured by “a set of biopolitical habits, corporeal disciplines and physical codes.” Others have also located in Walk with Contrapposto, made while Nauman was living in San Francisco, a resonance with ballroom culture—though here, mediated through Walks In Walks Out, the invocation feels paltry, like someone mouthing lyrics to a song you can’t quite hear.

Across the central gallery and past the front desk was Funnel Piece (Françoise Lambert Installation) (1971), comprising two tall white walls—one straight, the other angled—converging into a narrowing corridor, a partial triangle. It’s more diagram than drama. That is, unlike the raw, drywall construction of Performance Corridor, whose exposed framework dares the body to submit and negotiate its limits, Funnel Piece is austere, polished, and withholding. Its stark whiteness and formal precision don’t invite a haptic intimacy so much as reinstate the etiquette of the white cube: look, but don’t touch. These aren’t just surfaces—they’re behavioral cues. Indeed, there are no scuffs on Funnel Piece, which suggests that white walls project a logic of spectatorship, where architecture disciplines the body into distance.

Nauman has remarked that triangles are “really uncomfortable, disconcerting kinds of spaces”—forms you can’t quite find yourself in. The angled walls of Funnel Piece create a tepid claustrophobic taper that leads nowhere. But rather than inducing vertigo or disorientation, the installation seemed oddly prosaic. The effect wasn’t helped by how much the walls resemble standard gallery architecture—just slightly off, just enough to register as something, but not enough to compel engagement. This owed something to the way the work situated itself in relation to neighboring architecture. While Performance Corridor was installed flush against a wall, forcing confrontation, Funnel Piece stood adrift in the middle of the gallery, with open space on either side. I walked in. I walked out. My body barely brushed its edges. You weren’t blocked off, exactly, but you weren’t going anywhere either. The discomfort didn’t derive from the spatial qualities of the installation so much as its conceptual ambiguity: a work that closes in without climax, that resists participation not through force but through a kind of ambient vacancy. And maybe that’s why I didn’t quite feel the disconcerting discomfort Nauman attributes to triangles. Because Funnel Piece, for all its tapered geometry, isn’t a triangle. It gestures toward one, sure, but lands more as an approximation. Still, it’s the closest thing I encountered to the sensation Nauman describes—an almost-triangle, trying to pass.

Somewhat disappointed with Funnel Piece, I wandered over to Text for a Room (1973/2025), a nearby score printed on green paper, stacked quietly on a pedestal beside a narrowed passageway. I peeked in. The gallery was empty, cavernous. I read the text slowly, half outside the space: “[G]et to the center of some place,” find the “halfway” or the “center of gravity on this point” and “remain.” I circled back and stepped inside. I stood there for a while, letting the words blur a bit, trying not to try. The room was still. Maybe I was too. I didn’t enter to complete anything—or to solve or even to feel—but because something in the instructions gave me permission to stay in the in-between. It wasn’t a performance or a gesture. Just standing. Just waiting. Not even for something to happen, but for the act of noticing to settle in, to take hold.

What emerged, slowly, was a sound—low, ambient, almost rustling. Overhead, perched in the rafters, a small white speaker whirred faintly with white noise. Or what sounded like it. The thrum didn’t deliver content so much as presence. After some time, I exited the room. The sound followed me—fainter now, folded into the background hum of the gallery, the shuffle of bodies, footsteps, and keyboards.

Text for a Room engendered a kind of attunement, a slow synchronization with the unnoticed rhythms of the (built) environment. Critic Michael Kimmelman once described Nauman’s work as conjuring an “awareness of spaces we usually don’t notice […] and sounds we don’t listen for.” That take found its perfect form here: a score that asks not for action but for submission to duration. This is where Nauman is most precise—when his work steps back from expression and instead occupies a frequency just below perception, where architectural void becomes signal and residual energies begin to press on the body. Not the spectacular, but the infrastructural; not the visible, but the vibrational.

On my way out into the garden, Gregg mentioned that the dimensions of the room—roughly 45 by 45 feet—almost mirror the original Text for a Room Nauman created for his 1973 retrospective at the Whitney Museum. (At the Whitney, the piece was installed in a preexisting room measuring 35.5 by 40 feet.) Of course, for Pasadena Years, Nauman preferred square: rational, architectural, almost municipal. But once outside, that clarity—the sense of self-containment promised by geometry—began to dissolve. Text for a Room was never really about a room at all, or not only. Its incantatory text draws the viewer inward. And if the body is the site of inscription, the room is only a staging ground: a space where perception is subtly rearranged and interiority activated.

It was only when I was out in the garden that the nature of the hum suffusing the gallery became clear. What once seemed ambient was now distinct. The source of the sound was Microphone/Tree Piece (1971), a score instructing that a microphone be embedded inside the trunk of a living tree, with the signal routed to a speaker indoors. The instructions are meticulous, vaguely medical: wrap the mic in foam rubber, drill a hole at a convenient height, insert the mic, seal it with cement, then feed the signal indoors. What if we thought of this white noise filling the Text for a Room installation as a kind of arboreal surveillance, or a vegetal stethoscope pressed to the pulse of photosynthesis. It belongs to those frequencies modernity made inaudible, which Nauman seeks to recover through his terms of withdrawal—withdrawal as practice, as ethics, as form.

It’s tempting to think of this ecological foray as a break from Nauman’s earlier phenomenological work, but the impulse is continuous. The question isn’t just how to register a body—animal, botanical, spatial—in its surroundings, but also how to stay with it. What does it mean to enter a space and not extract something? To press into it, to record its pulses, and not leave a bruise? For all its sensitivity, Microphone/Tree Piece once ended in death: the tree that Nauman used in the original iteration reportedly died soon after installation. That part can’t be bracketed; it hangs over the piece. It’s the cost of a form that insists on listening, even if it can’t hear what’s being harmed. Is Microphone/Tree Piece a gesture of cross-species communion or a quiet act of violence? The line is fine. And it rustles.

Nauman is self-aware enough to understand his failings—most plainly visible in the 1969 score Leave the Land Alone (not in the exhibition). Conceived as a tongue-in-cheek skywriting proposal for an earth art exhibition, the piece now reads as equal parts blustering commandment and weary confession. It’s the latter that looms large: of course we can’t leave the land alone. We orbit it, we interfere with it, we inscribe it with our jargon—the semiotics of capital. The grid, the freeway, the rezone—all methods of touching without tenderness. Perhaps this is our way of trying to listen, but listening is not the same as understanding: we keep digging through sediment, culling data, unsure whether we’re grazing memory or merely disturbing another layer of debris.

If Leave the Land Alone addresses the earth from the sky, LAAIR (1970) assumes the opposite perspective, like a shift in altitude. Included in Pasadena Years, this eight-page artist book features full-bleed color photographs of Los Angeles air—capturing visual pollution framed as either banal or perversely beautiful. The title collapses in on itself in the nearby 1970 drawing Untitled (Study for LAAIR), where those five letters—L A A I R—run together until they start to look like “LAIR.” In that semantic slide, the city shifts: atmosphere becomes a space of confinement, a lurking threat. Los Angeles, going back to the early 1900s, has borne the weight of a poisoned climate. The sunshine may be unrelenting, but the illusion of purity it casts is fragile, always contingent. Nauman’s wordplay doesn’t merely point to this—it stages it, performs it, renders the rot beneath the shine undeniable.

What happened at Chavez Ravine—the celebration, the misrecognition, the inadvertent libidinal image—doesn’t feel like a blip. In retrospect, it appears to mock the city’s narrative of progress, recalling the histories buried under Dodger Stadium: first a Jewish cemetery (the dead displaced), then a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood razed to make room for a baseball empire (the living displaced). Nauman’s contradictions—his willingness to inhabit gestures not his own, to press into identities without claiming them, to listen in on earth even as he harms it—resonate with how we relate (as Angelenos, fans, critics) to Chavez Ravine. The same stadium that beams out ass cheeks and bobblehead dogs, phallic misfires and family-friendly drone shows, is also ground zero for a civic wound. To love the Dodgers is to participate—however unconsciously, involuntarily—in that wound. The land beneath that stadium isn’t neutral, isn’t mythic. It bears the scar tissue of displacement, a trauma repaved and floodlit for television, for postwar progress. And yet, there’s affection and ambivalence: strange, residual, almost perverse how they sit side by side. I’ve been to Dodgers games, sat in box seats, cheered for home runs. And now I’m here, writing this. I’m implicated. I’m down here languishing in this lair, conflicted—recognizing that the damage to the land is already done, and there’s no ethical perch from which I can judge the scene with clarity.

The question, then, that Pasadena Years levels is not how to disentangle ourselves from what we love but how to remain inside contradiction, how to bear the discomfort of occupying spaces both cherished and compromised. In Nauman’s work—as in the city’s landscape—the erotic and the ethical rarely align cleanly. And in that mess, I’m left to radically accept that sometimes all we have is the distorted image, the warped silhouette in the sky, and the laugh we weren’t sure we should’ve let out.

¤

Featured image: Bruce Nauman. Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up, 1973. Video in Bruce Nauman: Pasadena Years, 2025 Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo courtesy of author.