Sinking Colour/Colouring Skin: Thinking through Race in Bruce Nauman’s Body Painting

Abstract

This essay reframes two of Bruce Nauman's early moving-image exercises in which the artist applies paint and cosmetics to his own torso, arms and face – Art Make-Up (1967–1968) and Flesh to White to Black to Flesh (1968) – in terms of their racialised logics, which unfold in complicated and circuitous ways. In both works, racial complexes organise Nauman's exercise and animate the space of his studio, enabling an array of contradictory images, affects and meanings to accrue therein. By focusing on time and process in both works, in addition to issues of representation, Nauman's skin painting exercises help elaborate a lineage of racialism within American modernism that mobilises spectacles of racial identification to drive formal experimentation. This creative legacy, which seeks to marshal the multiple registers at which we encounter race's operations, provides a new lens from which to understand both Nauman's early work as well as his continuing relevance to contemporary art and art criticism.

Keywords::

• race
• Bruce Nauman
• contemporary art
• painting
• modernism

Notes

1 The only existing film that Nauman could have encountered would have been Henry Brandt’s 1954 ethnographic research, Nomades du Soleil, an admiring account of the daily lives of the nomadic, agrarian community that crescendos to the yaake ceremony, in which young men adorn themselves in black make-up. ‘Transformed,’ in Brandt’s words, ‘under the mid-day sun into silhouettes’, the men bare their teeth and circle their eyes as they march to attract potential partners (Brandt). Nomades was the first in what became an industry of depictions of the courtship ritual, which have been increasingly privy to Western misinterpretations of exoticism, vanity and gender transgression (Kratz 26–28).