Think: About It

two square video monitors in black cases are stacked on a thin black metal rolling cart. on the shelf below two black panasonic laserdisc players fresh from the box are stacked on each other, with four white vacuum molded plastic clamshell folders for holding laserdiscs are on top of the players. a single black remote control sits atop that. a tangle of black cables connects to a generic powerstrip on the maple strip floor of a soho loft, and a couple of cables snake off to the right edge of the image, perhaps to a transformer. on the monitors, the tightly shot head of a middle aged white guy, the artist bruce nauman is captured in a single frame. the head on the lower monitor is upside down. this 1993 work, think, by bruce nauman, entered moma's collection in 1996, but this image has to predate that.
Bruce Nauman, Think, 1993, a 1996 gift of the Dannheisers to MoMA [via @voorwerk]

I saw this two-channel Bruce Nauman piece, Think, on the tumblr and marveled briefly at how, when you were soaking in it, the 1990s aesthetic wasn’t an aesthetic; it was just the world around you.

And then I zoomed in to see what exhibition catalogues were stacked on top of the player, and that’s when it hit me: those are no catalogues. They’re the plastic storage cases for laserdiscs. Sitting on top of two new Panasonic LX-101 mini-players, so new they still have the showroom stickers on them.

This photo must have been provided by the dealer, or the artist, even, when Elaine Dannheiser bought this work. And somehow MoMA just kept using this as their reference image when they got the Dannheiser collection in 1996.

a black and white installation photo of a 1997 show at moma is mostly empty white cube gallery space and a gleaming hardwood floor. an illegible drawing hangs on the right wall, an illegible drawing in some kind of shadow box hangs on the wall in the middle background, and in the distance through a doorway, an illegible cindy sherman photo of herself as a nun or saint or whatever, so all that can really be made sense of here is the bruce nauman work at the center of the image: two video monitors stacked on top of a black rolling cart, and two laserdisc players stacked on the shelf beneath. the monitors are glowing, but the images are illegible. i swear, this show was more interesting in person.
1997 Dannheiser Collection installation view of Bruce Nauman’s Think, 1993, stickers intact, (alongside a Nauman drawing, an Artschwager, and a Sherman), image: Thomas Griesel via MoMA

And I realize I’ve seen this piece multiple times. I think it’s a loop of Nauman shouting “Think” over and over. There may be jumping involved, too, which makes the heads move apart from each other.

According to MoMA’s listing, the work consists of “Two color video monitors, two laser disc players, two laser discs (color, sound), and metal table.” So the cases and the remote(s) are not exhibited, or broken out.

a jeff koons sculpture of two wet/dry canister vacuum cleaners, white with red and yellow stripes around their middle, inside a two-level plexiglass case. a row of white fluorescent lights blazes beneath each vacuum cleaner. from moma's collection.
Jeff Koons, New Shelton Wet/Dry Doubledecker, 1981, vacuum cleaners, plexiglass & fluorescent lights, a gift from the Dannheisers to the Modern

And I realize this video is a sculpture, in the Painting & Sculpture department, and it feels like a darker version of a Koons vacuum cleaner [which the Dannheisers also donated]. And that its hardware, its technology, registers its historic moment even more than its aesthetic. And that this material nature is as precarious, if not as fugitive, as The Last Supper or a Hammons unfired mud cone.

Not that I’m worried—there’s no better place for it than MoMA, who will, when needed, figure it out. That said, it does seem like it has not been exhibited in more than 20 years.

There are many Nauman sculptures in MoMA’s Painting & Sculpture collection, and many Nauman videos in the Media & Performance collection. [A bunch came into the collection in 2008 when Klaus, in build mode, put out a big canonical video art wish list, which were acquired by our committee of young collector/supporters.]

Bruce Nauman, Dirty Story, A/B, 1987, as installed with video tape recorders at MoMA in 1997 [L] and in 2019 without [R], images: Thomas Giesel and Martin Seck, via MoMA

Including Think, there are four Naumans at MoMA which include media, yet which reside in the Painting & Sculpture collection, and three come from the Dannheisers. One, Dirty Story A/B, 1987, is similar to Think in that it’s two monitors, two video tapes, and two players. There is no cart, though, and the video monitors are suspended from the ceiling. When it was first shown at MoMA, the monitors hung above the giant Betamax players, which sat on the floor. When it was shown in 2018, though, the players were out of sight. So their physical presence is less central to the piece than their function—the opposite verdict for whatever playback mechanism replaced them.

in a dimly lit white cube gallery, two video monitors are set with their screens facing either end of an enclosed rat maze made of piss yellow plexiglass. video cameras and a spotlight on a tall stand are pointed down onto the empty maze. a 1980s video projector on a wooden pedestal projects interspersed images of a white teenage boy wailing at a drumset, making an incredible racket; closeup shots of a rat running through the maze; and live images of the now-empty maze, and sometimes viewers' feet as they enter the frame. by bruce nauman, in moma's collection since 1996.
Installation view of Bruce Nauman’s Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer), 1988, at MoMA PS1 in 2018, image by Martin Seck

The other Dannheiser work, Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer), 1988, is more complicated. Video monitors, projectors, cameras, speakers and lights are all integral parts of a room-filling installation, with both recorded and live imagery. And that’s exactly how it was shown again in 2018 at PS1.

The P&S department’s acquisition of Days, 2009, in 2009, probably says less about the nature of the work than the nature of the department. The sprawling sound installation, which won Nauman the Golden Lion at Venice, was acquired jointly by MoMA and trustee Maja Oeri’s Hoffman Foundation. It’s on permanent loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel [though it obviously came to visit MoMA in 2010, an PS1 in 2018]. Never mind that this was a unique installation, not an open edition. Or that Nauman’s 2009 prices had surely lapped the entire Media & Performance acquisition budget several times over. Sorting out a joint ownership deal among institutions with overlapping trustees—of a work commissioned for Venice by another major museum— is exactly what the Trustees’ Committee on Painting & Sculpture is for.