Exhibitions of work by Bruce Nauman, Robert Mangold and Anthony Green.

BRUCE NAUMAN has said that he is not interested in 'adding to a collection of things that are art', but in 'investigating the possibilities of what art might be.' Several of his investigations have, nonetheless, found their way into Charles and Doris Saatchi's collection of things that are art, and most of them are currently on view in the collectors' paint-warehouse-turned-museum in St John's Wood, London.
 
Early Nauman, like any self-respecting American avant-gardist, took the anything-goes approach. Busily questioning what art might be, he produced a series of rough-hewn imponderables. Untitled of 1965 is a columnar mould of snot-coloured fibreglass that looks like a trickle of gunge crawling down the gallery wall; a pair of similar forms lie in congress on the floor, where they look like copulating worms. This is art as reversion, to slime or primal coupling; Nauman was doubtless responding to the tabula rasa of art proposed by the American Minimalists, finding his own, terse language of reduction.
 
It was at around this time that Nauman photographed himself spitting out a thin jet of water and exhib-ited the result (not in the Saatchi Collection) as Self-Portrait as a Fountain. Turning himself into a fountain and calling it art was one of the ways in which Nauman - taking his cue, presumably, from Duchamp - poked fun at the cult of the artist. Others, which the Saatchis do own, were his Collection of Various Flexible Mate-rials Separated by Layers of Grease with Holes the Size of my Waist and Wrists, which is fairly well de-scribed by its title, and Wax Impression of the Knees of Five Famous Artists, a wall-hung panel constructed on the same principle as that pavement in Hollywood imprinted with the body...

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