One Hundred Live and Die, Neon and glass tubing, 1984 by Bruce Nauman
If you haven’t guessed from recent posts, language and text-based art have been on my mind lately. This also means I’m looking at words and reading a bit more attentively than usual. Bruce Nauman’s piece, One Hundred Live and Die, displays a wide array of short sentences with words ‘live’ or ‘die’. His simple use of nouns and verbs in neon lettering bring much more complexity to one’s understanding of life and death. Calling attention to their depth through simplified visual representation. With so many different ways to display and showcase typography and text of any type, the audience grapples with meaning and semantics. Wishing I could see this piece in person…one day I will.
Published by
Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, computational media, critical medical anthropology, technology, race, and ethics. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. She received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts and holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco. Her work as been exhibited at Ars Electronica, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society.
Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She is a co-founder of REFRESH, a politically-engaged art and curatorial collective and serves as the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation. She is an advisor for Brooklyn-based arts and tech organization POWRPLNT and Bay Area-based arts organization slash arts.
Leave a Reply