Bruce Nauman: Make-Work | "Exclusive" | Art21

[BRUCE NAUMAN: MAKE-WORK]

You're just going to go and do something every day.

Sometimes you have to do that--you just have to make work for yourself.

I tried to put some different stuff together, so I ended up...

This is stuff that's lying around here.

Andrew head on the bottom and a Juliet head on top.

All thumbs...

I had a lot of thumbs left over, so I put them together.

[LAUGHS]

These are taxidermy forms,

and this one...

made out of styrofoam--or urethane foam, I guess.

Yeah, this is where most of the animal figures came from,

this taxidermy supply company.

They come in all kinds of poses,

and then you can saw them up

and glue them together in different ways and make different poses.

Those are all head mounts.

White-tailed deer, in an amazing number of positions,

some of which I've never seen a deer in.

The fish, I find the oddest--

because they look more like fish fillets than fish.

[LAUGHS]

I've said this thing that I've always thought was a quote from Roy Lichtenstein

when he started the comic book paintings, and he said,

"There just wasn't anything else to do and I had to do something."

And I feel that sometimes.

I mean, I'm an artist, I want to be in the studio,

I want to be doing something, you just get desperate.

And so you just do whatever's at hand,

and you don't even worry about whether it's going to be interesting

or not interesting to anybody else, or even yourself--

you just have to make something.

I suspect I got that quote from Roy Lichtenstein completely wrong--

it was just a creative misquote.

But, it's really useful, so that's great, don't worry about it.

[LAUGHS]

I think they went together this way, actually.

I can't remember.

I'd have to go out and look at the fountain to remember how they went together.

[LAUGHS]

[SOUND OF WATER DRIPPING]