François Le Diascorn: © François Le Diascorn
Bruce Nauman, New Mexico, June 1983. Portrait by François Le Diascorn.
Bruce Nauman likes his personal space undisturbed. An artist who works in a broad range of media, he lives with his wife, painter Susan Rothenberg, far away from it all on seven hundred acres in a town near Galisteo, New Mexico, where designer Tom Ford built a huge ranch. It’s a world away from the dinner Missoni gave in his honor on the super-deluxe yacht Timoteo during the 2009 Venice Biennale, where fashion industry leaders such as Carine Roitfeld and Renzo Rosso partied the night away. They were celebrating Nauman’s Golden Lion win for best national pavilion of the Biennale: his Topological Gardens assembled a retrospective of the artist’s work including the neon sign Vices and Virtues (1983) as well as two sound installations, Days and Giorni. The new and different is Nauman’s terrain; his art challenges stylistically. His hats, though, are a constant. He wears an unfussy Stetson bought from Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors—outfitters to the stars, including John Wayne and Elvis Presley. In 1990, he made a disquieting video installation called Shit in Your Hat—Head on a Chair, in which an androgynous mime calmly repeats a series of orders: “Sit on your hat, your hands on your head. Shit in your hat.”