A still from Bruce Nauman’s “Pencil Lift/Mr. Rogers”, one of the videos in his current solo at Sperone-Westwater gallery in New York. At its best, Nauman’s work is brilliantly, unutterably peculiar – and the new pieces qualify. Nothing he does is easily turned into a pat paraphrase, but the new series is all about fingers and the tricks they play: counting and touching and holding pencils aloft by their tips. The idea of the “digit-al” came into my mind, with the digit-y cat feet in the background representing the normal domestic space that Nauman’s work seems to take place in. It’s as though he’s telling us that his work isn’t so much about the world of art, as about the weirdness that’s there in all the places we know.
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