Bruce Nauman's Skywriting

Connecting with his 1970s artist's book LAAIR that included a series of alarming photographs of the air quality in Los Angeles, Bruce Nauman's latest work, Untitled "Leave the Land Alone," is yet another work that calls our attention to the LA skyline.  For this work, Nauman hired a team of five synchronized jets to write "Leave the Land Alone" over the Arroyo in Pasadena from 11am-12pm on Saturday, September 12.  After I decided to skip Nauman's much lauded exhibition at the Venice Biennial (a decision based on the fact that I was totally unwilling to wait in line to enter the American Pavilion because, unlike every other country's exhibition hall, only so many people were allowed inside the at once) I was glad to hear that his next installation was going to take place over the Arroyo, which is practically my backyard.  Yet, perhaps as a result still being mildly agitated by the long line outside his exhibition at the Biennial, I had a few initial objections to Nauman's latest installation.  When I was informed by Professor Heffernan that Nauman would NOT be present when the skywriting was to be taking place, I was pretty disappointed.  You see, my initial reaction to hearing about this project was very enthusiastic.  In my utter and oftentimes oblivious naivete, I assumed that Nauman, as America's darling conceptual artist, creator, author, innovator, would surely be nestled in the cockpit, sitting alongside the pilot as his words, his art, was being written across the sky.  Not only was Nauman going to be absent from the cockpit, he was also going to to be absent from Pasadena, which, for me, called into question the connections between artistic production, authenticity, and authorship.  My other reservation about this installation was related to Nauman's as-to-be-expected Duchampian themes of irreverence and double-meaning.  As I mentioned above, Nauman 1970s artist book LAAIR was comprised of a series of photographs that documented the horrific and filthy air quality in Los Angeles, a problem that the artist is now directly contributing to.  How clever!   

Ignoring the "prime viewing positions" that were suggested by Pasadena's Armory Center for the Arts, on the day of the installation I headed instead to a vantage point of my own selection: the campus of Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy, an all girls private high school that sits atop a hill overlooking the Arroyo, and coincidentally, my not-so-beloved alma mater.  When I arrived on campus, the skywriting had already begun so I just started snapping photos of the remnants of what had just been written.  As the puffy white words created by a skywriting plane are not known for their permanence, each phrase was only legible for a few brief moments before the letter-shaped clouds began to dissipate into thin air.  Every ten minutes or so, the jets would re-write Nauman's declaration "Leave the Land Alone" over a different area, and luckily, I happened to be standing directly beneath this on one occasion and shot some prime video footage (see below).  

As a spectator, I felt Nauman's installation offered a somewhat puzzling view.  By having chosen to repeatedly skywrite a phrase such as "Leave the Land Alone," Nauman, ironically or not, is refusing to follow his own instructions.  While I don't think its necessary for me to delve into the multitude of reasons why Nauman's choice to hire five airplanes to create an art installation is environmentally irresponsible, I would however like to point out that although his choice to employ what might be the LEAST environmentally sound medium to write the phrase "Leave the Land Alone" is somewhat bothersome, it reveals Nauman's thematic coherency as an artist that embraces contradiction and paradox.  

Here's a photo I took outside Bruce Nauman's exhibition at the American Pavilion at this year's Venice Biennial:

Below are some photos and video I shot for Bruce Nauman's skywriting installation over the Arroyo in Pasadena on September 12.

  

Postscript:
Just thought I'd throw this in here, it's an email I received on 10/01/09, several days after I uploaded the above video on YouTube:

Dear Megandonovan,

My name is Michael Short and I work at Sperone Westwater, an art gallery in NYC which represents Bruce Nauman, and we wanted to ask you for permission to present you video in a lecture that Joan Simon will be giving in Chicago later this year about Bruce's work. Joan thought that you had the best version of this skywriting work on YouTube and wanted to include it in her presentation of images.

Please let us know if you can grant permission for this and if so, how you would want to be credited.

Kind regards,

Michael Short

please reply to:

michaelshort@speronewestwater.com