"For Bruce Nauman, drawing is equivalent to thinking."
—Coosje van Bruggen

A monumental rendering of Bruce Nauman’s eponymous sculpture executed the same year, Musical Chair, 1983, presents one of the artist’s most well-known themes while manifesting the importance of drawing to the artist’s practice. Referring to the children’s game, the present work coalesces Nauman’s deliberations on subject matter, form, and technique. Here, Nauman employed charcoal and ink to render two chairs suspended in mid-air beside two crossing I-beams, while annotating his visualization of the sculpture’s X-configuration from a bird’s-eye view in pencil at the lower left of the composition. Hailing from an esteemed private collection, where it has resided for nearly forty years since its execution, Musical Chair featured in Nauman’s 1985 exhibition, New Works on Paper 3, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A masterpiece of Nauman’s draftsmanship, Musical Chair offers a unique glimpse into the mind of one of the most conceptually rigorous artists of the 21^st century. 

 

 "When I take the game, I take it out of context and apply it to moral or political situations. Or I load it emotionally in a way that it is not supposed to be loaded."
—Bruce NaumanA critical motif in the artist’s oeuvre, the chair, Nauman expressed, “becomes a symbol for a figure—a stand-in for the figure. A chair is used, it is functional; but it is also symbolic. Think of the electric chair, or that chair they put you in when the police shine the lights on you. Because your imagination is left to deal with that isolation, the image becomes more powerful...The symbol is more powerful.”ⁱ Nauman’s suspended chairs typically serve as a metaphor for victims of political violence, which he first explored in South American Triangle, 1981. While discussing his series on musical chairs, Nauman expressed of the game, “Somebody is always left out. The first one to be excluded always feels terrible. That kid doesn’t get to play anymore, has nothing to do, has to stand in the corner...”¹ Referencing and subverting a children’s game as he did in his notorious Hanged Man, 1985, Nauman invites viewers to contemplate the deeper moral questions that underlie such seemingly playful activities. At the same time, the present work ultimately reflects the act of making. In Musical Chair, “sculpture is presented as an object for meditation, and the drawing itself is presented as a spatial object.”ⁱⁱ

 

"I do drawings to work the pieces out, to figure out how to proceed."
—Bruce Nauman

Unlike his multi-media works that invite audience participation and self-reflection, Nauman’s drawings act as conceptual blueprints that serve as a window into the artist’s mind. In the sculptural version of Musical Chair, the chairs hang from steel cables to make contact with the beams, thus chiming the titular “music.” While privying viewers to delight in its elegant rendering, the present work reflects the mathematical rigor and engineering exactitude Nauman employed to realize the sculpture. While making mostly quick, spontaneous sketches as notes for his sculptures, Nauman also executed larger drawings to resolve the problem of a sculpture or to envision its realization. Musical Chair is one of Nauman’s most ambitious drawings, which “frequently have a raw and unfinished look; corrections, erasures, dense undecipherable areas that indicate struggle—all signs of the artist’s mental process—are still visible.”ⁱⁱⁱ In the present work, Nauman renders the chairs backless and one of the beams without its cables, contemplating the physics of their arrangement to make the music possible.

 

ⁱ Bruce Nauman, quoted in Joan Simon, “Breaking the Silence: An Interview with Bruce Nauman,” Art in America, September 18, 1987, online.

ⁱⁱ Bernice Rose, New Works on Paper 3, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 10.

ⁱⁱⁱ The New Museum of Contemporary Art Annual Report, The New Museum, New York, 1988.