E D I T O R I A L . 1 4

12th November 2004

(BRUCE NAUMANN 'RAW MATERIALS' AT TATE MODERN, TURBINE HALL, 12 OCTOBER 2004 - 28 MARCH 2005)

Why is Bruce Naumann crap?

His influence on contemporary art is vast, and vastly damaging.

He makes for laziness.

Laziness of practice and of intellect.

He is what I call an ‘excuse artist’ – an artist particularly attractive to other, younger artists because he makes it all look so easy. Set up a video camera and shout some slogans into it.

I would argue that this gesture was never radical.Video art was always lazy. The moment of its inception was lethargic. Which is why so many artists, in their 1960s happenings, tried to compensate for this by making the videoed event particuarly tortuous. They were attempting to expiate the guilt they felt at the ease with which they could make video. It has almost no work-value.

From the beginning, video art attracted those looking for an excuse.

This isn’t simply a case of ‘Ah, I don’t have to learn to draw’, or even ‘Aha, I don’t have to think’. It’s ‘I don’t have to learn to think beyond a certain point’.

Any truly great artist would have become bored with the potentialities of video art within a couple of weeks.

The film Le Mystère Picasso come closer to exploiting the potentialities of video-art than Naumann ever will.

In it, Picasso was filmed drawing, painting, collaging. The focus was on the canvas, not the artist. In doing this, he created no masterpieces. But he did take the opportunity to push paintings well past their point of achievement. He demonstrated how even pictorial art has climaxes before it has conclusions. That it exists performatively, in time, for the artist if for no-one else. (Although Picasso had been aware of making records of work-in-progress since before ‘Guernica’.)

A work by Naumann exists on a plane which is entirely flat. It is blandly horizontal.

‘But Naumann is questioning the vertical element in art,’ comes the answer.

Well, the things being questioned by Naumann, intra-art, are not worth questioning. They are merely representational – they cease almost immediately, lacking momentum of intellect.

The questions took a few moments to ask, decades ago.

It is easy to question the worth of an art aspiring to depth. It is easy and lazy to make that your entire project.

No wonder thought is hobbled by such art.

How bad was Bill Viola's 'The Passions' at the National Gallery, earlier this year? How not worth seeing was the ICA's recent collection of video art from the beginning?

I'll forgive Gillian Wearing for 'Dancing in Peckham' and a few other things. They are amusing - like a postcard from a silly friend.

The purpose of art is to partially escape the purposes of art.

As a bad poem I wrote once said, Naumann is ‘About aboutness.’

Don’t waste your life on the super-ephemeral. Trouble yourself with the gradually fading essences.

If they aren’t essences, at least they try to raise their own ghosts.

We are returning to the idea that the discipline of the non-momentary was for a reason.

Naumann’s entire ouevre is graspable in under five seconds.

Art must achieve duration.