This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 25, 2009 - The Bruce Nauman and Gedi Sibony shows now at the Contemporary Art Museum-St. Louis are well suited to one another, though the works they include were produced decades apart.
Nauman, the perennial favorite among conceptual provacateurs, has a nice little selection of works made between 1966 and 1965 in “Dead Shot Dan.” The deadpan, one-line visual jokes of “Eleven Color Photographs” (1966/67-70) never get old; in fact, “Eating My Words,” “Waxing Hot” and “Self-Portrait as Fountain” have become cornerstones of any decent education in contemporary art.
“Failing to Levitate in the Studio” (1966) is another reminder of the degree to which the body informs Nauman’s practice — and, for that matter, so is the lightly sadistic “Double Poke in the Eye II” from 1985.
The rawness of Nauman’s litho “Pay Attention” (1973) and drawing “Love Me Tender, Move Te Lender” (1966) segue nicely into the newly fashioned gallery spaces where New York-based artist Gedi Sibony has his first museum show, “My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arms.” 1960s Minimalism and Process Art lurk underneath Sibony’s forms, which appear to be fashioned out of leftovers from a building remodel.
Sibony manages to slow down your visual rate of consumption, so even two-by-four wooden frames, plastic tarps and the backside of mass-market carpeting take on new fascination.
For my money, the finest work in the show is “Too Many H’s and Too Many A’s” (2009), consisting of an enormous square of unprimed canvas hung from the ceiling, marking out a small gallery as its own territory.
Within its space, countless tones of white light bounce around, off the walls, the floor and the canvas itself, like a white Robert Ryman painting on an environmental scale.
Ivy Cooper is an artist and professor of art history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.