Bruce Nauman Quotations

If you really want to do it, you do it. There are no excuses.

I think humor is used a lot of the time to keep people from getting too close. Humor side-steps and shifts the meaning.

In art, the only one who really knows whether what you've done is honest is the artist.

And I don't have any specific steps to take because I don't start the same way every time. But there is a knowing when it's enough and you can leave it alone.

I like to use my hands and make things... It might seem pretty stupid or pointless but that doesn't matter... some of the most interesting work is the stuff that starts like that - out of a raw need for activity.

The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.

And then what makes the work interesting is if you choose the right questions.

Generalised anger and frustration is something that gets you in the studio, and gets you to work - though it's not necessarily evident in anything that's finished.

I've always been interested in what happens in the studio.

If you choose the wrong questions and you proceed, you still get a result, but it's not interesting.

What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.

And so I put down some of the things that he said, about keeping your tools sharpened and not letting them lie on the ground where they get hurt or get abused and dirty and can't find them. And some thoughts about how his father used to do things.

But part of the enjoyment I take in it is finding the most efficient way to do it, which doesn't mean the corrections aren't made. I like to have a feeling of the whole task before I start, even if it changes.

But if you can find that spot - I suppose it's like running - I used to be a swimmer and swim laps, and you just have to be there with what you're doing.

In the studio, I don't do a lot of work that requires repetitive activity. I spend a lot of time looking and thinking and then try to find the most efficient way to get what I want, whether it's making a drawing or a sculpture, or casting plaster or whatever.

I don't like to think about being an influence. It's embarrassing.

In this case we're building a corner to stretch a fence and hang a gate. It had a real purpose in the ranch here. I needed to do this. But at the same time, it made a beautiful structure.

Pete and Repeat were sitting on a wall. Pete fell off. Who was left? Repeat.

I'm surprised when the work appears beautiful, and very pleased. And I think work can be very good and very successful without being able to call it beautiful, although I'm not clear about that. The work is good when it has a certain completeness, and when it's got a certain completeness, then it's beautiful.

One of the factors that still keeps me in the studio is that every so often I have to more or less start all over.

And the part about being a professional artist is that you can tell and you can do it over again, even if you can't say how you got there exactly.

Learn to recognise when you need to know something.

It's interesting when you make things or do things that open up the possibilities for making more things, or different kinds of things.

And sometimes the question that you pose or the project that you start yourself turns into something else, you know, but at least it gets you started.

I'll talk. You'll listen.

My videos always involve some idea of a human being in a unusual situation-and what happens.

Did you stop because it was good enough, or could have done more - but then maybe ruined it too? Sometimes you finish because you've gone too far.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

I want to be in the studio. I want to be doing something. You just do whatever is at hand, and you don't even worry about whether it's going to be interesting or not interesting to anybody else-or even yourself. You just have to make something.

A good teacher is like a good artist. They go right to the most difficult part of whatever's going on.

I gave a certain amount of thought to how I set up the shot and then after that. That's not an uncommon way for artists to proceed.

If you're an amateur artist, you can get it sometimes and not other times and you can't tell and you can't always do it over again.

The idea being there so that it became almost like an object that was there, that you could go back and visit whenever you wanted to.