Unlike many of his fellow artists who also began their careers in the 1960s, Bruce Nauman has refrained from participating in the critical discourse surrounding his work. He has written no reviews and given no public talks, so our perception of him is an image of silence. For this reason, Museo Picasso Málaga, the US publishing house MIT Press, and Spain’s Machado Libros have joined forces to translate in its entirety the legendary reference book Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, by Janet Kraynak. This collection of interviews and writings by Bruce Nauman was published by MIT Press in 2005 and is essential reading on the way that a creative artist like Nauman thinks.

Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words contains all the main Bauman interviews from 1965 to 2001, along with a comprehensive anthology of his writing, including instructions and texts on art proposals, transcriptions of dialogues from audio and video works, and prose pieces written specifically for installation sculptures. Where relevant, the texts are accompanied by illustrations of the artworks for which they were written. In contrast to Nauman’s reputation for silence since the beginning of his career, the use of language has been a fundamental feature of his art practice. On the back cover of the book, Janet Kraynak points out that this collection of writing “is based on the seeming paradox of an artist of so few words who produces an art of so many words.” The Spanish edition of Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words fills the existing void as regards books on this artist published in Spanish. There are very few of them, and therefore this presentation is major publishing event in the Hispanic art world.

Exhibition catalogue and videos by the artist

At the same event, Museo Picasso Málaga will be presenting the catalogue for the Bruce Nauman. Rooms, Bodies, Words exhibition, which can be seen in the capital of the Costa del Sol until 1st September. The catalogue is fully illustrated and contains texts by curators Eugen Blume and José Lebrero Stals, along with others that are considered references for understanding Nauman’s work, by authors such as Theodore Roosevelt, Gaston Bachelard, Elias Canetti, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault and Samuel Beckett; it also contains historiographic texts by Marcia Tucker, Kathryn Chiong and Rosalind Krauss.

There will also be a screening of excerpts from two of Bruce Nauman’s videos, which have been recognized as valuable works in terms of the history of performance and action art: Wall-floor Positions (1968), from the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and Walk with Contrapposto, from the same year, shown courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. The artistic director of Museo Picasso Málaga and curator of the Bruce Nauman. Rooms, Bodies, Words exhibition, José Lebrero Stals, and Manuel Asín, coordinator of Círculo de Bellas Artes’ film department, will be presenting the two books and discussing the videos at Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, on Thursday 11th July at 7.30pm. Admission is free until all seats are taken. Both publications, which are already on sale at the MPM bookshop, can be purchased at this event. They are distributed in Spain and internationally by Editorial Machado.