Bruce Nauman

No, No, New Museum

In a stark white room, an actor, clad as a jester, tensely grasps a jingling marotte and angrily jumps in place while shouting “No! No! No!”

Part of Bruce Nauman’s Clown Torture video series, No, No, New Museum takes its name from New York’s New Museum, where the recorded figure’s unnerving protestations first confronted viewers in 1987. Nauman shrewdly subverts the traditional associations of clown figures with jubilant innocence. By staging an erratic tantrum, he charges his jester as a mechanism to explore human neuroses.

The figure reveals that a jocular façade may mask the feelings of anxiety, embarrassment and irrationality that humans universally share and work to conceal.

Nauman is also interested in how repetition can strip language of its meaning, transforming it into an abstract auditory pattern.

“Where language starts to break down,” Nauman says, “is the same edge where poetry or art occurs.”