Lot 46 AProperty from the Collection of Mary & John Pappajohn
BRUCE NAUMAN (B. 1941)
Hanged Man
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Estimate
USD 4,000,000–6,000,000
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Specialist note
The audacious body of work that Bruce Nauman has pursued over the past six decades continues to challenge and fascinate his viewers, making him one of the most admired and influential artists working today. Nauman’s pioneering use of neon in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s was revolutionary, effectively bridging the gap between Minimalist and Post-Minimalist sculpture. Using language and often striking imagery, Nauman’s works in neon touch upon the overarching themes of life, death, sex and love, often in witty and unusual new ways.
Executed in 1985, Hanged Man depicts a brightly-colored stick figure whose body falls from a noose and to his comic demise. This is the first of Nauman’s “figurative neons” and a rare, large-scale example from that important series (it is also one of the largest neons ever to appear at auction). Colorful and larger than life, the work is based on the children’s spelling game of the same name, in which the body of a stick figure is hanged in the gallows if the player doesn’t guess the word in time. In Nauman’s hands, the children's game comes off the page and into the corporeal world, where it’s electrified in bright neon lights and locked into a repeating loop.
Beginning with Hanged Man in 1985, Nauman created a series of neon sculptures depicting clowns and stick figures that are seen to undergo strange or even lewd scenarios. Whereas his earlier neon sculptures of the 1960s and ‘70s consisted primarily of words and phrases, such as Raw/War (1970; Baltimore Museum of Art) and Run from Fear/Fun from Rear (1972; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Nauman now turned briefly away from words to expand his visual repertoire to include the human figure. As in Hanged Man, Nauman lit upon the neon stick figure motif as a way to express a sort of universal “everyman,” which he portrayed in simple, bright neon colors. At Nauman’s command, the stick figures participate in ordinary human activities. They march in lines, shake hands, fight, make love, fall on their head and in the present work, are both hanged and electrified. At the time, Nauman was interested in the underlying current of violence that he found in children’s games like “hangman” and “musical chairs," and his stick-figure neons have a kind of slapstick humor that is electrified with a dangerous and deadly current.
Hanged Man operates in a closed loop of flashing neon lights, and shows a stick figure’s body being assembled limb-by-limb by means of a few colorful neon lines. In the first sequence, the viewer sees an empty gallows rendered in neon-blue tubes. Suddenly the figure’s head and arms appear suspended from the noose in bright yellow, pink and green lines. This is quickly followed by his torso, legs and genitalia. In the next sequence, the figure’s entire body has been electrified, turning him bright pink and causing splayed limbs, a protruding tongue, “x”s for eyes, and an erection. The imagery then quickly alternates between the hanged man and the electrified man, before ultimately going dark and finally ending the cycle. However, the entire sequence starts all over again almost immediately and continues to run through the sequences, thereby locking the figure into an endless loop.
Scholars have compared Hanged Man to the Existentialist dilemma presented by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. So, too, does Nauman seem to invoke the myth of Sisyphus, who was forever doomed to a life of ceaseless labor. In Hanged Man, the participant in Nauman’s melodrama lacks any agency of his own. He has no free will and must continuously face the noose as well as electrocution. “With my version of the hanged man,” Nauman explained, “I took away the part about being allowed to participate. [...] The neon 'lines' flash on and off in a programmed sequence. And then the game doesn’t end. Once the figure is complete, the whole picture starts to be recreated again” (B. Nauman, quoted in J. Simon, “Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman,” Art in America, September 1, 1988, online). Much like Vladimir and Estragon, Nauman’s Hanged Man exists within an absurdist scenario that parallels the very act of being human.
As the art historian Gregory Volk has so aptly summarized, “Bruce Nauman’s neons...constitute an exceptionally nuanced and multilayered body of work. Sharing the entertainment value and eye-popping power of a carnival aesthetic, these works deal in challenging themes, from mortality and violence to the slipperiness of language, the mystery and foibles of sex, fractious encounters between people, and the vexations of the self” (G. Volk, “Miles of Stare: The Bruce Nauman Carnival,” in Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, exh. cat., Milwaukee Art Museum, 2006 p. 77). Indeed, throughout his career, Nauman has investigated the dark side of pleasure. His large-scale installations have invoked carousel rides, clowns, and funhouse mirrors, often demonstrating the seedier side of the escapism embodied by these strange pieces of entertainment. In Hanged Man, Nauman points out the disturbing terror that lurks beneath the surface of an otherwise lighthearted game, and thereby invokes the fragility and precariousness of life itself.
Executed in 1985, Hanged Man depicts a brightly-colored stick figure whose body falls from a noose and to his comic demise. This is the first of Nauman’s “figurative neons” and a rare, large-scale example from that important series (it is also one of the largest neons ever to appear at auction). Colorful and larger than life, the work is based on the children’s spelling game of the same name, in which the body of a stick figure is hanged in the gallows if the player doesn’t guess the word in time. In Nauman’s hands, the children's game comes off the page and into the corporeal world, where it’s electrified in bright neon lights and locked into a repeating loop.
Beginning with Hanged Man in 1985, Nauman created a series of neon sculptures depicting clowns and stick figures that are seen to undergo strange or even lewd scenarios. Whereas his earlier neon sculptures of the 1960s and ‘70s consisted primarily of words and phrases, such as Raw/War (1970; Baltimore Museum of Art) and Run from Fear/Fun from Rear (1972; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Nauman now turned briefly away from words to expand his visual repertoire to include the human figure. As in Hanged Man, Nauman lit upon the neon stick figure motif as a way to express a sort of universal “everyman,” which he portrayed in simple, bright neon colors. At Nauman’s command, the stick figures participate in ordinary human activities. They march in lines, shake hands, fight, make love, fall on their head and in the present work, are both hanged and electrified. At the time, Nauman was interested in the underlying current of violence that he found in children’s games like “hangman” and “musical chairs," and his stick-figure neons have a kind of slapstick humor that is electrified with a dangerous and deadly current.
Hanged Man operates in a closed loop of flashing neon lights, and shows a stick figure’s body being assembled limb-by-limb by means of a few colorful neon lines. In the first sequence, the viewer sees an empty gallows rendered in neon-blue tubes. Suddenly the figure’s head and arms appear suspended from the noose in bright yellow, pink and green lines. This is quickly followed by his torso, legs and genitalia. In the next sequence, the figure’s entire body has been electrified, turning him bright pink and causing splayed limbs, a protruding tongue, “x”s for eyes, and an erection. The imagery then quickly alternates between the hanged man and the electrified man, before ultimately going dark and finally ending the cycle. However, the entire sequence starts all over again almost immediately and continues to run through the sequences, thereby locking the figure into an endless loop.
Scholars have compared Hanged Man to the Existentialist dilemma presented by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. So, too, does Nauman seem to invoke the myth of Sisyphus, who was forever doomed to a life of ceaseless labor. In Hanged Man, the participant in Nauman’s melodrama lacks any agency of his own. He has no free will and must continuously face the noose as well as electrocution. “With my version of the hanged man,” Nauman explained, “I took away the part about being allowed to participate. [...] The neon 'lines' flash on and off in a programmed sequence. And then the game doesn’t end. Once the figure is complete, the whole picture starts to be recreated again” (B. Nauman, quoted in J. Simon, “Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman,” Art in America, September 1, 1988, online). Much like Vladimir and Estragon, Nauman’s Hanged Man exists within an absurdist scenario that parallels the very act of being human.
As the art historian Gregory Volk has so aptly summarized, “Bruce Nauman’s neons...constitute an exceptionally nuanced and multilayered body of work. Sharing the entertainment value and eye-popping power of a carnival aesthetic, these works deal in challenging themes, from mortality and violence to the slipperiness of language, the mystery and foibles of sex, fractious encounters between people, and the vexations of the self” (G. Volk, “Miles of Stare: The Bruce Nauman Carnival,” in Elusive Signs: Bruce Nauman Works with Light, exh. cat., Milwaukee Art Museum, 2006 p. 77). Indeed, throughout his career, Nauman has investigated the dark side of pleasure. His large-scale installations have invoked carousel rides, clowns, and funhouse mirrors, often demonstrating the seedier side of the escapism embodied by these strange pieces of entertainment. In Hanged Man, Nauman points out the disturbing terror that lurks beneath the surface of an otherwise lighthearted game, and thereby invokes the fragility and precariousness of life itself.