Folding Spaces and Porous Bodies: Sound and Sight in Bruce Nauman's Oeuvre

This dissertation is tuned to the sonic procedures, sculptures, installations and drawings created by American artist Bruce Nauman (b.1941) from 1965 to the present. Probing the move from making sense to making sensual-sense in the interstice between sight and audition, my study traces and contextualizes Nauman's works in relation to the modernist hegemony of the visual and its contemporary interruption by sound. From sculpting ears or making his body a sonoric instrument producing soundscapes in the gallery space, to composing theatrical cacophonies for the visitor to occupy, Nauman's oeuvre marks a history of sound art cultivated within the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s. This historical unfolding links new relations between music and the plastic arts and is induced by experimental and electroacoustic music, such as the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and the innovations of such Minimalist composers as Steve Reich, La Monte Yonge, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. My study contends that Nauman's use of sound challenges both the production of art and its reception profoundly. By importing sound into the realm of vision, Nauman questions the praxis of making sense under the assumed superiority of sight. No longer mute, sonic objects abrogate the hierarchy of the senses and mark the move from the spatio-temporal settings of passive spectatorship to the medial topologies of the sensuous perceiving body. Reckoned as "arguably the most internationally influential figure of his generation of Americans" by MoMA curator Robert Storr in 1995, Nauman's work anticipates the move to the multisensual practices of Augmented Reality and New Media. By contrasting the tight, almost synonymous relations between knowing, thinking, seeing and appearing with the turn to the sonorous and the tactile, my study places Nauman's sonic objects within the tense relation between philosophical ideas of perception entrenched in systems of signification and logic and those that pertain to the superiority of the senses.