By Jeffrey Weiss
The germ of Bruce Nauman's recent body of work is deceptively simple. According to the press release from Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, the TriBeCa gallery where some of these works were on view this past spring in a show called "No Mistakes," the project was motivated by a question posed to Nauman by artist and friend Eric Fischl: "How do you hold your pencil when you draw?" Disarmed, Nauman asked his daughter to make a video of him drawing, shot over his shoulder from behind. That video provoked a broader set of reflections: "How do I work? How do I draw?"
What came of this self-examination were over sixty videos made in high-definition 3D, produced in weekly sessions over the course of more than a year, beginning in February 2025. The project was a collaboration with Ellen Babcock, Nauman's longtime assistant and friend. The videos take place in the New Mexico studio of Nauman's late wife, painter Susan Rothenberg, who died in 2020. What we see is Nauman-and, in some cases, Babcock-making drawings, with the curious addition of several videos of thumb-wrestling between them. In the exhibition, twenty-seven of the videos were shown as individual works, with a different one projected on a continuous loop each day, although Nauman also made a single five-hour compendium of fifteen others, selected to play in a sequence the gallery described as largely random. Also on view was a group of the drawings, which the artist produced in order to record them being made.
The videos, which are projected to fill a single wall, were shot with two iPhone 15s mounted together in a handheld jig, producing two images, one for each eye. Viewed through glasses with electronic shutters that expose each eye to its respective image, the final picture optically intrudes into actual space. Far more sophisticated 3D technology is available; in fact, Nauman's previous work of this kind (such as Contrapposto Studies, i through vii, 2015/2016) took advantage of it. Importantly, however, the artist has come to prefer consumer-grade hardware and lower production values. The result can be something of a strain on the eyes. The glasses are awkward to use, compromising the sensation of 3D. If we cheat by watching without them, which Nauman surely anticipates, we sacrifice the deception: The two images fall out of register, producing a picture that is dichotomous and unclear, embodying a captivating kind of incoherence. The twoness of stereoscopy heightens one's awareness of the mechanics of binocular vision, which is intrinsic to both 3D technology and how we see. Stereoscopy is also a kind of prosthesis: It produces an illusion, yet stands in the way. I see this as a device of deliberate defamiliarization in the artist's recent work. The opticality of low-tech 3D is a meaningful condition of "No Mistakes." Intimacy and estrangement obtain in equal measure.
The videos range in duration from just under thirty minutes to well over one hour. They run in slow motion-very slow, roughly one-eighth normal speed. Each shoot lasted as long as it took to make the drawing, but slow motion greatly alters one's sensation of elapsing time. Throughout the videos we hear the sounds of drawing-movements of the stylus or pen landing on and scraping across the surface of the sheet. Slowing the playback speed deepens the pitch, an alien, ominous effect heightened by amplification.
The drawings are self-portraits and still lifes. The objects include a group of eight cups and glasses arranged in identical pairs, each vertically stacked end to end; in some videos, the four pairs are suspended from wires, making for an improbable, strangely entrancing display. Two other still-life objects are equally eccentric: the skull of a catfish, left over from the process of casting the fish for a previous installation, and a Klein bottle, a topological model of clear glass in which, according to the principle of the Möbius strip, interior and exterior form a single continuous surface. Some drawings were made with ink, for which Nauman used fountain pens. The rest were made with metalpoint, an archaic drafting technique closely associated with Renaissance drawing in Italy and Northern Europe. The point is a stylus of silver or gold-mostly yellow or white gold in Nauman's case. The line, an actual deposit of metal, is fine and consistent, uninflected by the changing pressure of the hand. Drawings in metalpoint must be made on paper coated with a slightly abrasive ground, which is often tinted. Nauman's grounds are white, pink, pale gray, pale green, or black.
In the videos, Nauman uses both hands to draw, one implement in each. His head is lowered and his eyes are shut. His hands work largely in unison. For drawings in ink the paper sits on a table; for metalpoint it is attached with pushpins to a stiff board, which rests on an easel. Nauman makes the drawings with line alone-with long sequences in which the stylus or pen moves across the paper continuously without being lifted away. It seems this choice of method was instigated by the recollection of a joking challenge on the part of Nauman's friend, the late curator Kasper König, to "draw a pig with your eyes closed without lifting the pencil from the paper."
Many of the videos begin by showing Nauman gazing for some seconds at what he is about to draw-including, for the self-portraits, his own image in a tabletop mirror. Seen in profile or three-quarters from behind, the artist is seated, leaning toward the sheet. At times he wears glasses, which, as the act of drawing is about to start, he removes and tosses onto the table-in slow motion the gesture is almost ceremonial. Nauman closes his eyes and begins drawing at the top of the image, making his way down, around, and across; his hands double back and change course, stopping and starting, moving close together and far apart. The metalpoint tool sometimes slips or skitters; the fountain pen sometimes stops working-though, deprived of vision, the artist is unaware, and keeps drawing the now-invisible line. Nauman makes multiple passes over each image of an object; in some cases he also draws the same thing twice on a single sheet. (When the artist draws the skull, the object itself sits on the paper.) On occasion, Nauman sets his two drafting tools on the table, switching them out for another pair; the two implements also change hands. The cameras often pan across the drawing up close, so much so that the work fills the frame. They sometimes linger on the objects, but, with Babcock shooting, they also stray, moving through the space of the studio and lurking there. In some instances, we stare through a window or out a door. In others, amid heaps of clutter (boxes, tools, buckets, rags, and the like), we glimpse numerous drawings from the current project pinned to the walls.
Two subjects-Nauman and Babcock-and, therefore, two separate states of attention are implicated by each video, with varying levels of concentration and distraction in play. In a recent interview with the New York Times about "No Mistakes," Nauman said the decision to move through the studio emerged as the project progressed: During the weekly sessions, boredom motivated Babcock to be a more active observer. Thanks in part to the slowed frame rate, which stabilizes what would otherwise be a shaky image, the cameras drift like floating eyes, watchful but disembodied.
The drawings in "No Mistakes" feature a pliable, wiry line that is familiar from the ones Nauman has been making for several years, but they resemble little else. Metalpoint is delicate by comparison with ink, almost weblike; but in both cases, the drawings are unraveling clusters and skeins, with passages both tight and loose. As images they resist the work of depiction in conventional terms. Physical volume is conjured, but a mesmerizing autonomy of line prevails.
The object being depicted becomes a vehicle less for the task of representation than for activity. The activity is that of absorption.
The bilaterality of drawing with two hands is undeniably analogous to the doubling of stereoscopy. In turn, the optical and the physical are twin modalities of the entire project: of drawing as seeing and drawing as touch, and of the two together as forms of orientation-of finding one's balance or one's way. The two-handed technique makes drawing a kind of reaching, even leaning. We refer to the sheet on which an artist draws as a support, and there is some sense here of "support" as a working pun, as if the sheet is a surface against which to lean, to keep steady. Double meaning can also be assigned to "orientation" as a term of physical bearing, which is analogized by the artist's decision to shoot some of the videos in the present exhibition with the cameras-hence the image-rotated ninety degrees or inverted.
With age, Nauman has endured a number of hits to his physical condition. He has been candid in his work about experiences of debility and fatigue. This is especially true of various large-format videos, the most recent being Beckett's Chair Portrait Rotated, 2025, shown at Konrad Fischer Galerie in Berlin last year, in which Nauman uses a chair to support himself while he moves through a variety of rotations, or turns. Throughout the videos in "No Mistakes," one frequently sees the artist resting his right arm while drawing on the "offset" handle of a cane. Physical limitations are a recurring factor, even as their appearance is an honest extension of the uses to which Nauman has put his body, in often deliberately perverse ways, since the works of the mid-1960s.
It would be wrong to say that drawing is the central concern of "No Mistakes," but a function for drawing is crucial to this body of work. To begin with, the seventeenth-century French academic opposition of painting to sculpture assigns painting to sight and sculpture to touch-to sensation achieved through physical contact. Blindness is a common motif in the literature on this topic. Broadly speaking, the argument is that, with respect to representation and, by extension, knowledge of the world, the blind cannot paint but they can sculpt. They can also draw: Line is a representational convention, which-unlike color-does not perceptually exist in the world. Like the creation of sculpture, making a line is understood to be tactile, a tangible act.
"You can't make a mistake if your eyes are closed." Nauman's remark, made to Fischl in a 2025 interview, reveals the logic of the project: To retain representation as a premise while depriving it of the hand-eye coordination on which it depends is to dispense with the factor that makes drawing a question of true or false. Self-imposed limitations defamiliarize the act of drawing, now an exercise, one movingly detached by the slowness of the feed: drawing as a process less of beholding than of orientation plus touch.
Put differently, blindness, two-handedness, and the continuous line are restraints that freed Nauman from the habits of description. Insofar as these drawings depart from previous works, they were clearly made for a new reason. Depicting becomes a vehicle less for the task of representation than for activity, and matching drawings to videos, while irresistible, is beside the point. The activity is that of absorption.
Further cues are useful. In the Times interview, Nauman explains that Rothenberg's studio is filled with natural light, and is thus an ideal setting for the videos. But he also says-without dwelling on it-that for some time after his wife's death it was difficult for him to enter the space. Finally, Nauman speaks of daily practice, briefly invoking Shunryu Suzuki's 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Recall Babcock's boredom and the camera's wandering eye. To produce a record of the process of making once or five times or even ten is to pursue an idea. To do it within a set of contained circumstances once a week over sixty times is, sublimely, to transform an event into a nonevent.
Nauman has often portrayed the studio as a charged space, even if-as with Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001, stitched together from footage shot intermittently over the course of several months-it is a space of waiting. Can it be said that with "No Mistakes" his challenge was to occupy yet not violate the studio as a site of deep personal loss?
Regarding the task of "seeing and copying," Paul Valéry wrote, in an essay about his contemporary Edgar Degas, of "willed seeing": Life drawing requires denying the hand-the body-its physical freedom. "To free the hand in the visual sense is to take away its liberty in the muscular sense." Line signifies motility: "The shapes our sight reveals to us as contours are produced by our consciousness of the concerted movement of our eyes as they register precise vision. This registering movement constitutes line." Even so, Valéry continues, "many 'relays' come in between; notably that of memory." The copy is a "recorded memory, and it is from this record that the hand will have to derive its law of movement on the paper. This amounts to a transformation of visual into manual copying."1
What if one stages and restages the circumstances of drawing from life to test memory and precise vision against the liberty of the hand? And what if, in replaying the image of the artist at work, the act is slowed to a crawl? That would mean that repetition, rather than representation, is chiefly at stake-a hypnotic ritual. Willed seeing would be replaced by a mechanics of absorption, the artist-subject at once unguarded and self-aware.
