Wit & Attitude Quote by Bruce Nauman

Nauman’s sentence sounds like a humble studio note, but it’s really a blueprint for how tradition gets smuggled into art under the cover of practicality. The surface content is all shop-floor common sense: sharpen your tools, don’t leave them on the ground, keep them clean, keep them findable. Yet the phrasing keeps slipping from instruction into injury and misuse: tools “get hurt,” “get abused,” as if the real subject isn’t maintenance but care, discipline, and the quiet violence of neglect. That personification matters. In Nauman’s hands, the workbench becomes an ethics lesson.

The speaker is also a recorder, not a lecturer: “I put down some of the things that he said.” That distance - the mediated voice, the secondhand authority - hints at how craft knowledge travels: through overheard maxims, through fathers and fathers’ fathers, through the folklore of making. The last clause, “some thoughts about how his father used to do things,” flips the scene from an individual habit to a generational chain. Tools aren’t just implements; they’re heirlooms of behavior.

Contextually, Nauman emerges from a post-Minimalist moment suspicious of heroic gestures and monumental statements. He gravitates toward process, repetition, instruction, the almost-boring language that actually governs bodies in space. Here, “tools” can read as literal studio gear and as metaphors for the artist’s own means: language, attention, the body. The intent is sly: to show how the most banal directives encode power, lineage, and a philosophy of work - and to suggest that what we call “craft” is often a form of inherited obedience.