Beautiful Things: Bruce Nauman’s Carousel

July 16, 2020

Posted by Webmaster under Volume 26, Number 3, May 2016

Robert S. Lehman (bio)
Boston College

This essay examines the relationship between beauty and violence in the taxidermy sculptures of the contemporary American artist Bruce Nauman. It addresses how these sculptures, specifically Carousel (Stainless Steel Version) (1988), succeed in bringing together two incompatible models of the beautiful: the neo-classical beauty of well-ordered bodies, and the beauty of irreducibly particular things. The aim of this project is, first, to make sense of Nauman’s intervention by locating it in a longer history of reflections on the politics of aesthetics; and, second (and more speculatively), to suggest the continued relevance of “beauty” as a political-aesthetic category.

Bruce Nauman’s Carousel (Stainless Steel Version) (1988)¹ is made up of four large, stainless steel arms that extend out from a central motorized pillar to form a rotating cross (Fig. 1). Suspended from the arms by their necks are a taxidermist’s polyurethane molds of an assortment of animals: two small coyotes; a large lynx and a smaller version of the same; the front half of one deer and the head of another. All animals appear to have been skinned. As Carousel rotates and the molds drag along the floor (only the deer are fully suspended), the casts recall the bodies of animals hung awkwardly in a slaughterhouse, particularly if one focuses on the dismembered deer. But for all that, the continual circular movement and low scraping of Carousel‘s passengers is eerily peaceful. If the piece were dangled from the ceiling rather than set upon the floor, it might resemble an uncanny mobile, turning above some monstrous infant’s crib. Nauman has stated, not of the piece itself but of the molds from which it was made, that, “They are beautiful things. They are universally accepted, generic forms used by taxidermists yet they have an abstract quality that I really like” (374). So there lies in Nauman’s Carousel—at its origin if not necessarily at its end—an aesthetic pleasure, an old-fashioned pleasure in beautiful things.

In the essay that follows, I want to concentrate on the interaction—in Carousel as well as in some of Nauman’s related works—between beauty, on the one hand, and violence, on the other. Nauman’s artistic fascination with violence has already received a good deal of attention from critics. In a 1987 interview with Joan Simon, Nauman himself describes his aim to produce art that is “just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down. I like that idea very much: the kind of intensity that doesn’t give you any trace of whether you’re going to like it or not” (320). Like getting hit with a bat…. It is unusual to find a critical appraisal of Nauman’s work that does not quote (or at least paraphrase) this remark and spin an interpretation out of it. Jerry Saltz describes Nauman’s art as “a deliberate assault on the senses, aesthetic and otherwise” (198); Michael Kimmelman writes, “Mr. Nauman’s goal seems to be to knock you out rather than win you over” (207); and in a review titled, “Watch Out! It’s Here!,” Paul Richard warns potential spectators that “Nauman… distrusts the ‘lush solution.’ His sculptures… never let you bask in transcendental loveliness. He’d rather show up in your thinking space—and club you from behind” (217). These responses to Nauman’s art treat its status as art as more or less incidental to its intended (and achieved) effect. Nauman’s is not an art that one lingers over, in the canonical Kantian sense that we “linger [weilen] over the consideration of the beautiful” (107); it is, rather, an art of immediacy, an art that hits you all at once and that you hurry to escape. This assaultive immediacy, Nauman has suggested, is both antithetical to “beauty” and integral to his art’s “moral function”: “I know there are artists who function in relation to beauty […] I don’t work that way…” (332).

Despite the claims of Nauman’s critics, and despite some of Nauman’s own claims, I am interested in holding on to the notion that Carousel is not only an ugly, violent work that happens to be made up of “beautiful things,” but that it is also—in a sense on which I will elaborate—a beautiful thing. Now I recognize that “beauty,” beyond its being a questionable term for evaluating Nauman’s artistic project, seems an ill-suited word to describe most contemporary art, and that even those critics who admit the continued relevance of philosophical aesthetics have tended either to avoid making reference to beauty altogether or to replace it with other categories—whether drawn from tradition (as in the category of the sublime) or newly invented (as in the categories furnished in Sianne Ngai’s recent work).² Indeed, about a decade ago, Arthur Danto “attach[ed] to what has been epidemic in avant-garde circles since the early twentieth century [a] needed clinical term” (25): “Kalliphobia,” meaning literally, “fear of the beautiful” (from κάλλος, the Greek term for beauty).

I want to insist on beauty, though, not because it does the best job of explaining the affective response one is likely to have to Nauman’s works—Nauman’s works are unpleasant and assaultive—but because it helps us to appreciate in these works the struggle over a set of aesthetic questions that reaches back at least as far as the eighteenth century, a set of questions pertaining to the relationship between, on the one hand, this or that particular physical body, and on the other hand, the technological or political or conceptual structures in which this or that particular physical body finds itself enmeshed. Nauman’s Carousel is a beautiful thing—this will be my claim in what follows—and its beauty is indissociable not only (though somewhat paradoxically) from its ugliness and its expression of violence, but also from whatever critical potential it possesses—from its “moral function.”

Before I go any further, I should note that the same thing that has made Nauman perhaps the most consistently exciting American artist of the last fifty years also makes it difficult to say much of anything about his work in general. Here I am referring to the diversity of his oeuvre, which spans drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and video. I have decided to focus on Carousel, then, as a way to tie to a specific work and its effects claims that might seem questionable if applied to Nauman’s project as a whole. Nonetheless, as will become clear, I believe that Carousel can also function as a kind of lodestone, drawing Nauman’s other works toward it and thus helping us to develop some coordinates for an idiosyncratic mapping of Nauman’s oeuvre.

1

Let us return to Carousel. Built in 1988, after more than a decade of work focused principally on time-based media, Carousel is part of Nauman’s return to casting (though here the molds are readymade, not Nauman’s own, purchased from a taxidermy supply store near the artist’s New Mexico residence) (Benezra 136). With its endless rotations, Carousel continues Nauman’s interest in the coupling of violence and repetition, an interest also on display across his video pieces—in the repeated bodily movements of Pulling Mouth (1969), the looped escalations of brutality of Violent Incident (1986), and the incantatory demands of “Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning)” (1992). With its taxidermist’s molds, however, Carousel is more obviously of a piece with the (roughly) contemporaneous works Hanging Carousel (George Skins a Fox) (1988), a suspended “carousel” featuring four hanging animal molds and a television playing a video of the artist’s friend, George, skinning a fox (Fig. 2); Two Wolves, Two Deer (1989), in which the eponymous molds have been cut up, reassembled, and suspended (Fig. 3); and Animal Pyramid (1990), a twelve-foot-high pyramid of seventeen taxidermy molds (Fig. 4). The last of these, Animal Pyramid, differs from Nauman’s other taxidermy sculptures insofar as its molds are neither suspended nor dismembered. In its difference from the slightly earlier works, however, Animal Pyramid sheds light on what these previous pieces accomplish.

Animal Pyramid diverges from Nauman’s other taxidermy sculptures by virtue of what it does not suggest. While the suspended and mutilated animals of the “Carousel” sculptures may at first seem to imply violence accomplished for practical reasons (for food, for example, insofar as it is hard not to see in these pieces animals hung in an abattoir) or for theoretical reasons (for the good of science, which, as we know, must murder to dissect), the stacked molds of Animal Pyramid bespeak neither use nor knowledge. What remains? Registering his dissatisfaction with the piece, John Miller sees in it “allusions to totemism and blood sacrifice,” a “nostalgia for primitive sacred art” (128). I disagree. I have tried to see the piece in this light, to find in it an updating of the sorts of myths that fascinated Bataille and Masson and Picasso in the 1930s,³ but I cannot. If one sees in Animal Pyramid a sacred quality, this vision is soon overwhelmed by the suspicion that one is viewing a performance, a kind of circus trick or a distant cousin of the Catalonian castell. I do not mean to say that there is no trace of violence. The animals’ positioning is unnatural; they still seem to have been flayed. I do, however, want to claim that the source of this violence is, here, merely aesthetic. The animals have been stacked into a pyramid for no other reason than that it is visually interesting to see animals stacked into a pyramid. The piece thus comments, aptly, on the taxidermist’s art, an art for which it is acceptable to kill not out of the desire for food or knowledge, or to honor the gods, but for the purpose of decoration. More obscurely, Animal Pyramid comments on the violent potential of any artistic depiction, present in the simple act of imposing a beautiful order on particular bodies. Finally, this piece helps us to see how Carousel might make the same gesture.

Carousel does not exactly share in the articulation of solidity and precarity exemplified in Animal Pyramid. But neither does it allow its passengers to achieve the weightlessness of the molds that make up, for example, Two Wolves, Two Deer. Thus while it antedates these two pieces, in another way Carousel might be said to occur between them, to present the viewer with a representation of a grounded sculpture’s becoming airborne—albeit without ever quite leaving the ground, such that its rotations would figure a kind of frustratingly endless taxiing on the runway—or maybe more accurately, becoming-mobile. The latter, the notion that what Nauman’s Carousel proffers is an instance of a sculpture’s becoming (or struggling to become, or perhaps failing to become) something like a hanging mobile, locates Carousel in a tradition that reaches back to the Quattrocento—for a hanging mobile is depicted already in da Vinci’s 1498 drawing Duodecedron Planus Vacuus)—but which is not codified until the early twentieth century, with the construction of hanging mobiles by Aleksandr Rodchenko, László Moholy-Nagy, and most importantly the American sculptor Alexander Calder (whose works Marcel Duchamp deemed “mobiles” in 1932; see, for example, Calder’s Antennae with Red and Blue Dots).⁴ A comparison of Nauman’s not-quite-mobile with Calder’s works is, therefore, instructive. Calder explains his artistic aims in constructing his mobiles as follows:

[T]he underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from. What I mean is the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, and perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form. (8)

Calder describes not only the feeling of lightness or delicacy that is the hallmark of his mobiles—what he goes on to characterize as his attempt to approximate “freedom from the earth” (8) and what Jean-Paul Sartre would, in a 1948 appreciation of Calder’s work, liken to “a little hot-jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning; if you miss it, you will have lost it forever” (79)—but also an enabling sense of the orderliness of things, a sort of cosmic balancing act that allows the movement of painted sheet metal hung carefully from wires to double the movement of heavenly bodies: “A very exciting moment for me was at the planetarium…” (Calder 8).

It is not only the lightness or delicacy or freedom from the earth that Nauman’s Carousel refuses but also the cosmic balance—the as-above-so-below-ness—that allows Calder’s mobiles to both reflect and participate in the movement of the spheres, to overcome their own secondariness as representations and attain the status of natural things. While Calder himself initially worked with small, usually hidden motors, his mobiles were eventually exhibited near a window or in the open air, where they could “vibrate in the wind like Aeolian harps” (Sartre 79). In Carousel the molds hang gracelessly, thanks to the wires looped around their necks; their movements appear coerced, thanks to the motor that makes the whole contraption turn; and while polyurethane is neither a particularly heavy nor a particularly sturdy building material, the molds’ being not quite suspended from reinforced steel posts makes the whole structure seem unusually substantial. We are far from “a little hot-jazz tune.”

Even so, there may still be a point of contact between Carousel and Calder’s fragile constructions. In the same piece of writing I cited above, after stressing the impossible delicacy of Calder’s mobiles—”fed on the air, they respire and draw their life from the tenuous life of the atmosphere” (79)—as well as their affinity to natural forms—”their marvelous swan-like nobility” (80)—Sartre concludes with a litany of associations. “Calder’s mobiles,” he writes, “are like aquatic plants bent low by a stream, the petals of the sensitive plant, the legs of a headless frog, or gossamer caught in an updraft” (81). So: aquatic plants, flower petals, and wind-blown gossamer…but also the still-twitching legs of a decapitated frog. What are we to make of this list? At the very moment that Sartre seems most intent on connecting Calder’s mobiles to the beauty of the natural world, he resorts to an image of the latter in pieces, to a mutilated animal body that recalls his reader to the dissecting room, or, ultimately, to the flayed or hacked-apart forms that make up Nauman’s Carousel. What explains this movement from the nobility of the swan to the (apparently still beautiful) death throes of the frog?

2

Here we need to step back for a moment, in order to give this relationship between aesthetic order and physical violence a slightly larger historical frame. Consider Johann Winckelmann’s famous 1759 description of the Belvedere Torso (Fig. 6), believed by Winckelmann to depict Heracles at rest:

I direct you now to the much praised, but never sufficiently glorified, mutilated statue of Heracles—to a work which is the most beautiful of its kind and is to be counted among the highest creations of art which have come into our time. How will I describe it to you, since it has been robbed of the most charming and significant parts of nature? Just as from a mighty oak, which has been felled and stripped of its twigs and branches, only the trunk remains, so sits the mutilated image of the hero; head, breast, arms, and legs are missing.(xiv)

Having set for himself this challenge—”How will I describe it to you…?”—Winckelmann goes on to reconstruct from the trunk and what is left of the legs not only the ideal form of the statue, which he likens to the motions of the sea and the rise of the mountains, but also the hero’s world and labors: “At this moment my mind travels through the most remote regions of the world through which Heracles passed, and I am led to the limits of his labors…by the sight of thighs of inexhaustible force (and of a length appropriate for one of the gods) which have carried the hero through hundreds of lands and peoples into immortality” (xvi). Winckelmann concludes by lamenting that this singular work, “which is perhaps the last one to which art applied its utmost powers” is now “half annihilated” (xviii). Nonetheless, one has the impression, reading his ekphrastic reconstruction, that the statue’s having suffered dismemberment is a condition of, not an obstacle to, its claim to transcendence—that “the strength of his arms” and the “head full of majesty and wisdom” can only appear before us in all their splendor because they are not weighed down by the heaviness of stone. This promotion of the partial or the broken is realized more explicitly in the later cult of the fragment, as we encounter it in the writings of the Jena romantics, the sculptures of Rodin (Fig. 7), and indeed, in some of Nauman’s own works. In each instance, the fact of fragmentation somehow points toward a more perfect whole—even in the case of a work like Nauman’s Five Pink Heads, which, from the right vantage, ends up evoking an abstract ideality akin to that attained by Brancusi’s Endless Column (Fig. 8 and 9).⁵

Fig. 6 Belvedere Torso, 1st century B.C.

Fig. 7 Auguste Rodin, Torso, ca. 1877 or 1878.

It would appear that none of this fascination with the fragment is present in the writings of Friedrich Schiller, the modern figure who, more than any other, labored to align the notion of classical beauty adumbrated by Winckelmann with what is morally or politically desirable, and who, along with J. G. Herder, moved German thought in the direction of an aestheticized holism.⁶ In his theoretical writings on aesthetics from the last decade of the eighteenth century, Schiller decries a modern form of life in which, “[e]verlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment” [Ewig nur an ein einzelnes kleines Bruchstück des Ganzen gefesselt, bildet sich der Mensch selbst nur als Bruchstück aus] (Aesthetic Education 35). Man is fragmented insofar as he is given over one-sidedly to his sensual desires or to his calculating reason. With his notion of the “play-drive” [Spieltrieb], Schiller proposes a holistic alternative: “Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays” (Aesthetic Education 107). To be fully human, to play, is to find balanced in oneself sensuality and rationality, animal and god. The harmonization of these seemingly opposed tendencies, in the individual as well as in the collective, is an aesthetic task, but one that reaches far beyond the traditionally delimited domain of the aesthetic. Man in play is man in his “aesthetic state,” a term that has to be maintained in its rich ambiguity as both a state of consciousness—ästhetischer Zustand—and a political formation—ästhetischer Staat. Here are two passages in which Schiller helps us to understand what this means. The first is from the 1793 letters to Gottfried Körner, Kallias, or Concerning Beauty:

I know of no more fitting an image for the ideal of beautiful relations than the well danced and arabesquely composed English dance. The spectator in the gallery sees countless movements which cross each other colorfully and change their direction willfully but never collide. Everything has been arranged such that the first has already made room for the second before he arrives, everything comes together so skillfully and yet so artlessly that both seem merely to be following their own mind and still never get in the way of the other. (Schiller 174)

The second is from the better-known Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man of 1795:

Uncoordinated leaps of joy turn into dance, the unformed movements of the body into graceful and harmonious pantomime; the confused and indistinct cries of feeling become articulate, begin to obey the laws of rhythm, and to take on the contours of song. If the Trojan host storms on to the battlefield with piercing shrieks like a flock of cranes, the Greek army approaches it in silence, with noble and measured tread. In the former case we see only the exuberance of blind forces; in the latter, the triumph of form and the simple majesty of law [den Sieg der Form und die simple Majestät des Gesetzes].(136)

The aesthetic state is, ideally, like a dance, but a dance that models or is modeled on the behavior of an army on the battlefield, on the “noble and measured tread” of Homer’s advancing Greeks.

So, from the dance to the battlefield: with Schiller, we do not take as our starting point the violence of mutilated frogs or half annihilated torsos, but do we end up there? In 1939, reflecting on the same text in which Schiller had found “graceful and harmonious pantomime,” Simone Weil writes that “for those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as a historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today, as of yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors” (6). Weil refers here to the seductiveness, the aestheticization, of violent force. The latter, rather than any particular character, she treats as “the true hero, the true subject, the center” of Homer’s epic (Weil 6).

And for what in our modern history does Schiller’s depiction of the aesthetic state, modeled as it is on the “measured tread” of the Greek army or the “arabesquely composed English dance,” provide the purest and the loveliest of mirrors? The implications of this question may seem excessive. The legacy of Schiller’s idealized aesthetic state, principally its prefiguring of National Socialist ideology, has no doubt been overstated in the past.⁷ Returning to Schiller’s own writings, we find simplifications of Kant, anticipations of Hegel, ubiquitous Hellenophilia—but fascism? The relationship of Schiller’s Weimar classicism to what the next two centuries would bring is, in any case, a topic far too large for this essay. We can at least admit, though, that the aestheticization of the political, whether or not we follow it back to Schiller, has been one of the twentieth century’s controlling operations (a fact noted by critics from Benjamin and Brecht to Boris Groys and Eric Michaud). At stake is the conception of the state as somehow like a work of art (and consequently of the statesman as somehow like an artist), as well as the possibility of finding something beautiful in force.⁸

Back to Carousel. Viewed in light of Schiller’s conception of the aesthetic state, which, even at war, “obeys the laws of rhythm” as though it had adapted itself to song, Carousel can be read as figuring a violence that is learning to dance. The steps are heavy and dragging at first, but once the legs are removed (as they are in the molds of the two deer), transcendence should be easier. If the classical beauty of well ordered bodies is secured at the cost of dismemberment—the same fortuitous dismemberment that inspired Winckelmann and Rodin (and that is evoked by Sartre’s unexpected likening of the swaying of Calder’s mobiles to the twitching of decapitated frogs)—the critical power of Carousel is to let this violence, which aestheticization ought to conceal, shine forth. And so, against Winckelmann’s sublime torso or Schiller’s aesthetic state, we might position Carousel alongside Heinrich von Kleist’s marionette theater, where the very possibility of the most beautiful dance is revealed to depend on the replacement of all-too-human limbs with “what they should be—dead, pure pendulums following the simple law of gravity” (24).⁹ Whatever trace of beauty remains in Nauman’s sculpture—the beauty of the “beautiful things” of which it is made, or the eerie beauty of its passengers’ slow, dragging motions—is only there to remind us that beauty can and does disguise violence. Carousel is only as beautiful as it needs to be, no more.

3

The preceding sketch serves as a first approach to the place of beauty in Carousel. The sculpture, revealing and reveling in ugliness and violence, presents an artistic challenge to beauty qua aestheticization, to the same sort of aestheticization that gives rise to what we can call, after Schiller, the aesthetic state. To affirm this approach, wherein the challenge to a certain aesthetic-political formation is of key importance, is also to associate Carousel with some of Nauman’s earlier and more openly political work from the 1980s, such as South America Triangle (1981), an inverted cast iron chair suspended inside a large, steel triangle (Fig. 10). Nauman has described South America Triangle as his attempt to address political torture. Having recently read works dealing with the repression of political dissent in South America—”I was reading V. S. Naipaul’s stories about South America and Central America, including ‘The Return of Eva Peron’ and especially ‘The Killings in Trinidad.’ Reading Naipaul clarified things for me and helped me to continue. It helped me to name names, to name things”—he decided to create a piece depicting the “torturing of a chair…hanging it up or strapping it down” (299). As in Carousel and related works, suspension is here associated with violence¹⁰—sadistic violence, I would argue (against Deleuze, who associates both literal and figurative suspension with masochism).¹¹ In South America Triangle, the suspended chair is itself the victim of this violence but, empty, it is also an indication that something more terrible has already occurred. As surely as ships go missing in the Bermuda Triangle, someone has (been) disappeared. Such is the force of Nauman’s sculpture.

And yet, there is something dissatisfying about aligning the “moral function” of Carousel with that of South America Triangle, such that each work suffers from the comparison. First, in light of the rich suggestiveness of the later sculpture, South America Triangle starts to appear frustratingly didactic, a testament to the artist’s justifiable horror concerning events in Latin America (though not U.S. policies, interestingly, which Nauman would not have been aware of), but limited as art. Carousel also suffers; along with Nauman’s other taxidermy sculptures, the piece was constructed and first exhibited concurrent with the slow collapse of what was then the world’s most high profile totalitarian regime, the Soviet Union, which was, if Boris Groys is to be believed, intended to be built as a kind of aesthetic state, “as a total work of art that would organize life itself according to a unitary plan” (23). At the time of Nauman’s creation of Carousel, it had already become clear that this plan had failed, that the Cold War was all but over, and that some version of Western liberal democracy had, for the time being, won. Moreover, Germany’s Nazi parenthesis had already been closed for nearly fifty years. What could it mean, then, to produce in 1988, 1989, or 1990 a work critical of the dangers of an aestheticized totalitarianism? If, looking back to Schiller and forward to the events of 1991, Carousel presents an oblique commentary on the aesthetic state, it does so at the risk of tying itself to some version of American triumphalism (or to a version of the sort of anti-totalitarian leftism that would come to be associated with the writings of André Glucksmann or Christopher Hitchens). Set alongside South America Triangle as a more or less straightforward challenge to an aestheticized totalitarian politics, Carousel seems rather dated.

I do not want to reject this reading of Carousel—the reading of it as a challenge, by way of its own ugliness or violence, to the beauty of the aesthetic state—but I do not want to rest with it either. For I am not so sure that beauty, as it operates in Carousel, is finally identical to whatever historical role it has played in the aestheticization of the political. In a handful of recent essays (and taking his cue from the later writings of Theodor Adorno), Robert Kaufman has argued that it may be useful to distinguish aestheticization, on the one hand, from the aesthetic, on the other, and to recognize, moreover, that “pace today’s critique of aesthetic ideology…the aesthetic is anti-aestheticist” (684). While in Kaufman’s argument, aestheticization describes something like the beautification of the status quo, or the means by which a brute physical violence (and paradigmatically, the violence of the statu itself) comes to appear well-ordered or natural, the aesthetic resists this ordering by insisting on the irreducibility of the concrete, sensual particular in the face of any conceptual articulation or practical recruitment. Beauty, in this formulation—”the aesthetic is anti-aestheticist“—would, then, be an especially fraught term; indeed, it would be divided between two incompatible roles. It would be, first and still, the tool or the telos of aestheticization, but it would also be another name for a (still aesthetic) resistance to aestheticization’s deleterious effects. Unlike the sublime—the experience of which, at least in its Kantian form, should raise the subject above the limits of his own sensual existence¹²—the anti-aestheticist beautiful would maintain itself as well as the subject who experiences it on the ground. To understand how the doubleness of beauty is mobilized in Nauman’s work, we need to follow Carousel on another rotation.

4

Above, I cited Nauman’s remark concerning the molds from which Carousel is made. Here it is again: “They are beautiful things. They are universally accepted, generic forms used by taxidermists yet they have an abstract quality that I really like” (374). Now, for reasons that I will explain in a moment, I do not think that Nauman can mean quite what he says here. He certainly may be serious when he states that he finds the molds of whole or broken forms of coyotes, lynx, and deer beautiful. This would be bizarre, but I cannot deny him his taste. I doubt, however, that it is really possible that he finds these forms beautiful for exactly those reasons that he provides—that they are “abstract,” “generic,” and so on.

Consider a similar remark that Nauman makes about his interest in clowns, and his use of them in what is by now probably his best-known work—his “masterpiece,” according to The New Yorker‘s Peter Schjeldahl, a longtime supporter of Nauman’s art (qtd. in Perl 56)—the 1987 installation Clown Torture (Fig. 11). The latter presents the viewer with four distinct video feeds: one featuring a clown lying on the ground, kicking his feet, and shouting “no” over and over again; another featuring a clown becoming agitated as he repeats the same joke; a third featuring clowns trying unsuccessfully to balance a goldfish bowl and a bucket of water; and finally, a fourth video featuring what seems to be security footage of a clown sitting on a toilet in a public restroom. Reflecting on the clown’s allure, Nauman states that he “got interested in the idea of the clown first of all because there is a mask, and it becomes an abstracted idea of a person. It’s not anyone in particular, see, it’s just an idea of a person. And for this reason, because clowns are abstract in some sense, they become very disconcerting. You, I, one, we can’t make contact with them. It’s hard to make any contact with an idea or an abstraction” (335).

Nauman could not be clearer. Clowns are “ideas,” “abstractions.” So why torture one? Or is the point that the clowns who make up the cacophonous installation are supposed to be torturing us with their pained demands? As one critic has characterized the piece, “With both clown and viewer locked in an endless loop of failure and degradation, the humor soon turns to horror” (Rondeau 82). Rather than choose who is most tortured in this dynamic—us or the clowns—we might suggest a third option: “clown torture” describes a relationship of identity. That is, to be a clown, to be an abstraction or an idea, is to be “tortured” by having one’s particular personhood effaced, having one’s self replaced by a mask or a more or less familiar set of features: white greasepaint, red nose, oversized shoes, squirting flower, and so on. Again, clowns are abstractions. Consequently, we can no more torture one than we can “grow grapes by the luminosity of the word ‘day.'”¹³ If we take pity on Nauman’s clowns, if their “failure and degradation” provokes horror rather than humor, it is because they are not quite yet clowns, because the elimination of their particular personhood is still a work in progress. They are still sufficiently individualized—sitting on the toilet or begging for it all to stop—and only individual things can suffer; ideas, abstractions cannot. In the not-yet-clowns’ suffering, the humanity that has not yet been entirely abstracted, erased by the mask or the greasepaint, is recalled. You, I, one, we make contact, and this contact, which persists in the face of an incomplete but perhaps still ongoing abstraction, is what is so disconcerting.

Something comparable is going on in Carousel. Now admittedly, despite its evocations of violence, the piece itself is bloodless; the molds seem generic, abstract. One would never mistake them for the real creatures whose stretched skins they are supposed to occupy. They are, again, “universally accepted…forms.” But somehow their suffering still comes through. It comes through in the mold of the small coyote, which was probably designed to appear as though it were howling at the moon, but which now seems to be straining painfully against its leash, tipping back on its haunches as it is pulled along (Fig. 12). It comes through in the molds of the two lynx, where the smaller appears to be holding on to the larger for dear life, or perhaps trying to prevent its friend or parent from being lifted away (Fig. 13). There is of course not much hope for the dismembered deer, but what remains serves as a presentiment of what is sure to befall the other animals. When we view Carousel, we still encounter some trace of the suffering animal body. This encounter, like our encounter with Nauman’s clowns, is disconcerting.

Here the fact that Carousel is made up of molds of animal forms—putting contemporary art in dialogue with the para-aesthetic practice of taxidermy—takes on a wider art historical significance. For what is the place of the animal in the history of art? In a section of his Lectures on Fine Art, written very much in the spirit of Winckelmann and Schiller and dedicated to the “ideal of sculpture,” Hegel—whom E. H. Gombrich deemed “the father of art history” (51)—notes of the head of the animal, and of the animal’s body more generally, that it “serves purely natural purposes and acquires by this dependence on the merely material aspect of nourishment an expression of spiritual absence” (2:728). This characterization of the animal’s head he opposes to the human’s face,

in which the soulful and spiritual relation to things is manifested. This is in the upper part of the face, in the intellectual brow and, lying under it, the eye, expressive of the soul, and what surrounds it. That is to say that with the brow there are connected meditation, reflection, the spirit’s reversion into itself while its inner life peeps out from the eye and is clearly concentrated there. (2:729)

We glimpse in the face of the human—and Hegel is thinking particularly of its appearance in Greek sculpture—the passage that the human is destined to make from the lower to the higher, from the sensuous to the spiritual. And we glimpse as well the passage that art itself must make—it must “[transcend] itself, [forsake] the element of a reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and [pass] over from the poetry of imagination to the prose of thought” (1:89).¹⁴ The animal, condemned to sensuous nature, cannot make this passage. It is, not only as itself, but also as a figure for that aspect of man that is merely sensuous—which Hegel, in the above passage, localizes in the lower part of man’s face, where the denigrated, animal senses of smell and taste can be found—precisely what is carved away, left behind, and finally forgotten in the movement of spirit, which lifts itself out of nature and then beyond even the sensuousness preserved in beautiful art.¹⁵

In its slow rotations, in its failure to lift itself out of nature and become something spiritual, in its partial preservation of its passengers’ suffering bodies, Carousel allegorizes the incompleteness of the process that Hegel describes. The animals remain animals. And so, to Nauman’s remark about the beautiful things from which Carousel is made, we might offer a small but important corrective: the animals, like the clowns of Clown Torture, are almost, but not quite, generic; almost, but not quite, abstract. As animals, they remain particular, and they suffer because of it. They pull against the leash or fight to keep (at least) one foot on the ground. They resist becoming something other than what they are: recalcitrant bodies, sensuous-particular things.

And their resistance is beautiful. At stake here is not the beauty of Schiller’s aesthetic state, with its well-ordered bodies abstracted from their particular needs or desires; it is, rather, the beauty of this or that finite, particular thing as it appears to this or that finite, particular observer—as it resists, by its very particularity, its own becoming exemplary, ideal, conceptual, generic, abstract. Unlike his epigones, Kant, at least, saw this clearly, observing that judgments of taste, judgments of the sort, “this or that is beautiful (or not),” are singular judgments. “This flower is beautiful” is a judgement of taste; “flowers (in general) are beautiful” is not.¹⁶ And Kant concluded from this singularity the impossibility of a “science of the beautiful” [Wissenschaft des Schönen] (184), the impossibility of ever compiling a list of principles that could tell us, in the absence of any encounter with a particular thing, whether or not that thing is an instance of beautiful nature or successful art.

We encounter in Carousel an instance of beauty no more compatible with the aestheticization of the political than with the ultimately “prosaic” goal of Hegel’s history of art, an instance of beauty as the persisting as nothing else than what they are of these particular things. And we encounter here as well the continued relevance of the supposedly outmoded concept of beauty to Nauman’s project and perhaps to contemporary art more generally. This is beauty neither in its synonymy with the superannuated ideals of unity, harmony, and proportion, nor as a hazard with regard to which the really modern artist must remain vigilant, but as a (catachrestic) name for the non-conceptualizability of the irreducibly particular. It is this notion of beauty that is too often missed by contemporary critical discourses on “art after the beautiful” (a designation that Nauman’s works should help us to see beyond), and it is, moreover, what makes the term beautiful preferable to “sublime,” “grotesque,” “monstrous,” or any of a number of aesthetic or para-aesthetic designations for Nauman’s project.

Two coyotes, two lynx, parts of two deer. They have suffered on the slaughter-bench of (art) history, where bodily particulars are hacked away and the poetry of imagination is transformed into the prose of thought. But if Carousel seems to us ugly, violent—if encountering it is like stumbling into an abattoir or getting blindsided with a bat—the reason is not that it lacks beauty. Just the opposite. Carousel is too beautiful altogether; more exactly, it mobilizes within itself what I have been describing as two incompatible models of the beautiful. On the one hand, there is the neoclassical beauty of well-ordered bodies. This is the beauty of Schiller’s English dance and aesthetic state—what Paul de Man and so many others alongside him have condemned as a component of “aesthetic ideology.” And on the other hand, there is the beauty of irreducibly particular things, things that maintain their beauty only so long as they resist the dance. Sometimes these two models of beauty can be hard to tell apart, but they are different. Their disharmony, their tense coexistence, is what makes Carousel move.

Footnotes

1. Throughout this essay, all references to Nauman’s Carousel refer to this version of the sculpture.

2. The attempt to replace the beautiful with the sublime as a category of aesthetic analysis was central to the writings of Jean-François Lyotard in the 1980s. See especially the essays “Newman: The Instant” and “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,” both included in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Sianne Ngai imagines new aesthetic categories in Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. In his recent essay, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” Fredric Jameson rejects not only the category of the beautiful but of philosophical aesthetics tout court: “There are two ways of grasping the meaning of aesthetics as a disciplinary term: either as the science of the beautiful, or as the system of the fine arts. The beautiful, which was able to be a subversive category in the late nineteenth century—the age of the industrial slum, in the hands of Ruskin and Morris, Oscar Wilde, the symbolists and the decadents, the fin de siècle—has in my opinion, in the age of images, lost all power either as an effect or an ideal. As for the system of fine arts, it has in postmodernity imploded, the arts folding back on each other in new symbioses, a whole new de-differentiation of culture which renders the very concept of art as a universal activity problematic, as we shall see; my title is therefore pointedly ironic” (107).

3. For a good treatment of the role of the sacrificial in modernist art, with which Nauman’s project in the taxidermy sculptures is usefully contrasted, see Lisa Florman’s Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso’s Classical Prints of the 1930s.

4. For a brief discussion of the development of the hanging mobile, see Henri Gabriel’s “The Hanging Mobile: A Historical Review.”

5. Jorg Zütter observes that, “Nauman’s dismemberment and reconstruction of the human and animal body, in defiance of the laws of anatomy, also cast a contemporary light on the sculptures of Auguste Rodin” (87).

6. For a survey of these matters, see Daniel Dahlstrom’s “The Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller.”

7. I am thinking here of Paul de Man’s reading of Schiller’s (mis)reading of Kant, and the reception of de Man’s reading by his own readers. Quoting a passage from Joseph Goebbels’s Michael, Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattem, in which Goebbels writes that, “the statesman is an artist, too. The people are for him what stone is for the sculptor. Leader and masses are as little of a problem to each other as color is a problem for the painter. Politics are the plastic arts of the state as painting is the plastic art of color,” de Man admits that Goebbels’s “is a grievous misreading of Schiller’s aesthetic state.” “But,” de Man continues, “the principle of this misreading does not essentially differ from the misreading which Schiller inflicted on his own predecessor—namely, Kant” (155). Some essays that think through the implications of this claim can be found in Barbara Cohen, Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski’s Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory. For evidence that de Man overstates the case and for a more balanced reading of Schiller’s project, see Josef Chytry’s The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought.

8. Walter Benjamin, to whom we owe the phrase “the aestheticization of the political,” has described this state of affairs in the most striking terms: “Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (42).

9. I am indebted here to Paul de Man’s reading of Kleist’s “aesthetic formalization” alongside Schiller’s aesthetic state in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.

10. Charles W. Haxthausen notes the relationship of suspension to torture in Nauman’s art in his review of a 1994 exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art, “Bruce Nauman. Los Angeles.” This relationship is still present in Nauman’s most recent art. At a 2015 exhibition of Nauman’s work at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, Carousel was exhibited in the basement (along with “Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning)“). Upstairs was Nauman’s 2013 video piece Pencil Lift/Mr. Rogers. In the latter, Nauman recreates a version of the “floating finger” optical illusion by using two sharpened pencils to lift a third that has been sharpened at both ends while his cat, Mr. Rogers, paces around on his desk. A long way from the more explicit violence of his earlier work, Pencil Lift nonetheless seems ominous and even a little painful once one has returned from a viewing of Carousel—the awkwardly suspended pencil recalling the suspended molds—and one cannot help but fear for Mr. Rogers’s safety.

11. Deleuze associates suspension with masochism in Coldness and Cruelty, insofar as “the masochistic rites of torture and suffering imply actual physical suspension (the hero is hung up, crucified or suspended), but also because the woman torturer freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting or a photograph. She suspends her gestures in the act of bringing down the whip or removing her furs” (33). The question of Nauman’s own relationship to either sadism or masochism is difficult to answer. A number of his works find him “torturing” others (or other things) and a few find him torturing himself—this would, I suppose, be one way to read Pulling Mouth. In distinguishing sadism from masochism, Deleuze positively cites Georges Bataille’s reading of Sade’s own complicated relationship to sadism: “the language of Sade is paradoxical,” he notes, because it is essentially that of a victim. Only the victim can describe torture; the torturer necessarily uses the hypocritical language of established order and power” (17). These remarks might provide us with a point of entry into Nauman’s own treatment of sadistic violence. Again, as Nauman states of Naipaul’s stories, they helped him to “to name names, to name things,” and thus to contravene what Deleuze following Bataille calls the “hypocritical language of established order and power.” The specific focus of my argument prevents me from pursuing these matters in detail here. I am grateful to Eyal Amiran for suggesting to me a possible connection between Nauman’s art and Deleuze’s comments on sadism and masochism.

12. See, for example, Kant’s remark in the “Analytic of the Sublime” in the third Critique that, “it is a law (of reason) for us, and part of our vocation, to estimate any sense object in nature that is large for us as being small when compared with ideas of reason; and whatever arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible vocation [übersinnlichen Bestimmung] is in harmony with that law” (115).

13. I borrow this phrase from Paul de Man, who uses it in The Resistance to Theory to call attention to the problem of confusing linguistic idealities with the real-world situations that they are supposed to describe (11).

14. Compare to Hegel’s discussion of the relationship between the heads of humans and those of animals the following observations by Schopenhauer, which in their own way suggest a link between abstraction and violence (here the violence of decapitation): “This distinction between humans and animals is expressed outwardly by the differing relationships between the head and the trunk. In the lower animals, the two are still completely united: in all of them, the head faces the ground where the objects of the will can be found: even in the higher animals the head and trunk are still much more unified than in humans, whose head seems to be placed freely on the body, borne by it without serving it. This prerogative of humans is displayed by the Apollo Belvedere to the highest degree: the far-seeing head of the god of the Muses sits so freely on its shoulders that it seems entirely wrenched away from the body and no longer subject to its cares” (200; my emphasis).

15. See also Hegel’s well-known characterization of art as, for the modern world, “a thing of the past” [ein Vergangenes] (1); see as well his remark from the conclusion of his lectures that “in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful child’s play, but with the liberation of the spirit from the content and forms of finitude, with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in what is apparent and visible, with an unfolding of the truth which is not exhausted in natural history but revealed in world-history” (2).

16. Kant discusses the “singularity” of judgments of taste in Critique of the Power of Judgment (100). For a discussion of the history of the notion of the singularity of judgments of taste, and of what this means for some recent developments in criticism and the arts, see Robert S. Lehman’s “The Persistence of the Aesthetic.”

Works Cited

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POSTMODERN CULTURE

Beautiful Things: Bruce Nauman’s Carousel

Robert S. Lehman (bio)
Boston College

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Footnotes

Works Cited

Issues

Mail

POSTMODERN CULTURE

Beautiful Things: Bruce Nauman’s Carousel

Robert S. Lehman (bio)Boston College

1

2

3

4

Footnotes

Works Cited

Issues

Mail

Robert S. Lehman (bio)
Boston College