Category: Artist
Nationality: American
Last Year: 45

The most important artist in the world? Who’s arguing? Not, one would imagine, many people who saw Topological Gardens, Bruce Nauman’s stellar solo presentation in the American Pavilion and two off-site locations at Venice this year. Not the Biennale jury that consequently awarded him a Golden Lion to match the one he received in 1999. And, obviously, not us. You can take Nauman historically: he’s a pioneer of postmedium practice and expanded forms of sculpture; while exploring issues of communication and how meaning is conveyed, he’s displayed a haunting sensitivity to life’s dead ends, circularities and cruelties; he’s a longstanding ironist and wit whose classic 1967 neon text piece, The True Artist Helps the World By Revealing Mystic Truths, balances brilliantly on a knife-edge between sincerity and sarcasm. The list of people he’s influenced ranges from Mike Kelley to Rachel Whiteread to Tim Hawkinson. Yet his own art uncannily resists dating, and as he heads towards seventy, the man who lit out for the seclusion of a New Mexico ranch in the mid- 1980s is clearly not ready to be a historical figure. This year found Nauman marking the 40th anniversary of the moon landings by skywriting the phrase ‘Leave the earth alone’ above Pasadena: a statement that could refer to ecological concerns, the loneliness of an astronaut’s voyage into the ether or mortality, and whose ambiguity, subtlety and sadness are classic Nauman. ‘Check any of the top 100 or top 10 lists in the art glossies that track the ups and downs of artists’ popularity among collectors and institutions and you will find that name firmly positioned at or near the summit’, wrote Robert Storr this year. Well, this is the list, Mr Storr; but it’s wholly true about Nauman, and deservedly so.