Phila. art museum announces Venice exhibition

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition at the 2009 Venice Biennale this summer will explore Bruce Nauman's work over four decades with about 30 pieces in neon, sculpture, performance and other media. The American artist will create a new sound installation. And the show now has a name, and a more refined theme.

"Bruce Nauman: Topological Gardens," which opens in Venice on June 7, invokes in its title the branch of mathematics in which geometric figures remain unchanged even when spaces are stretched (but not broken).

These details are the first to emerge since the announcement in January 2008 that Nauman and the Art Museum had been chosen by the U.S. State Department to curate the American Pavilion at the 53d edition of the Italian art exhibition.

As planners previously suggested, the exhibition will not be confined to the American Pavilion, but will spill over into other venues. Today the Art Museum said Nauman's work will be shown at the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and the Exhibition Spaces at Università Ca' Foscari with the aim of diversifying the viewing public.

There, the museum hopes, Nauman's work will be seen by younger viewers whose reactions might be quite different from those of the expected critics and cognoscenti attending the Biennale.

"The fact that the show will take place at universities and that a student population will be able to really live with the art is quite fantastic," said Carlos Basualdo, the Art Museum's curator of contemporary art who also teaches a history of exhibitions course at the Università Iuav di Venezia.

Students and professors at both schools have already assisted with aspects of the show.

Museum officials to said it still has not been decided whether the exhibition or some form of it would travel to Philadelphia – as did the Art Museum's Jasper Johns show after its 1988 Biennale appearance – when its run concludes in November. The museum, facing a contracting endowment and waning city support, recently cut its budget and eliminated 30 positions. Exporting the Nauman to the United States would require its own funding.

Nauman was recently in Philadelphia to explore the suitability of spaces for a potential show at the Art Museum (and to see the Cezanne and Beyond exhibition and visit the Barnes Foundation).

"It's not a question so much of the funding as, what would make sense?" said Basualdo. "The show in Venice is tailor-made to Venice. So what would make sense in Philadelphia?"

Interim museum CEO Gail M. Harrity said that once a Philadelphia iteration of the show has been envisioned, funding can be sought.

"I am quite confident and hopeful that we can bring it to Philadelphia," she said.

Nauman, 67, is bound to be a controversial presence regardless of the venue. He is a prime practitioner of conceptual art – that is, art more concerned with novel ideas and philosophical provocation than displays of technical accomplishment and more traditional purely aesthetic ideals. Though decades old, conceptual art still raises indignant cries of perfidy from some art lovers.

For the Philadelphia Museum of Art, acceptance of an expansive definition of art is a long settled matter. The museum is a noted repository for works of the pioneering high priest of the conceptual art movement, Marcel Duchamp.

The strength of the museum's collection in conceptual art was part of the reason the Art Museum pursued Nauman, said Art Museum interim head of curatorial affairs Alice Beamesderfer.

"In my mind all conceptual artists today can trace their roots back to Duchamp. He just opened up this entire new way of thinking about art and what it is," said Beamesderfer.

Nauman, born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has worked in an exceptionally large number of media, and spent some time studying physics and mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is out of this interest that his concept for the Venice exhibition grew.

"He studied topology in school," said Basualdo, "and basically it's looking at certain configurations or surfaces in a way so that what interests you is the qualitative value of the object. The typical example for a topologist is that a donut and teacup are the same because you can turn one into the other. He's always talking about experience in a phone booth - you are inside and protected and have your own space but are in fact completely exposed. Venice is a city in which you have that feeling all the time. What is private and what is public is constantly shifting."

The show of 30 works is not a comprehensive survey of Nauman's career, said Basualdo, but a series of organized threads.

"The beauty of looking at threads is that you find that chronology doesn't work so much. There is early work, a new sound installation, but also works recreated for the show. It's like the saying, 'something old, something new, something borrowed.'"

The works will be organized into three threads that speak to aspects of Nauman's work, he said: "heads to hands," "fountains to neons," and "sound to space."

"Because of the nature of the space the Pavilion deals more with the relationship of heads to hands and is more object-based. At the universities we worked with spaces that are not traditional – a lecture hall and a courtyard – and for those spaces we chose mostly sound and light installations," Basualdo said.

Nauman's work is represented by a major New York gallery, Sperone Westwater Gallery, which is a funder of his Biennale show. Substantial funding comes from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Henry Luce Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Dept. of State.