Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Nauman

Nauman smuggles a work ethic into what, in his hands, often looks like anti-work: repetition, deadpan tasks, studio actions stretched until they become sculpture by other means. The line reads like a quiet manifesto for process art, but it’s also a hedge against the lazy caricature that conceptual artists don’t “make” anything. Efficiency, here, isn’t capitalism’s stopwatch; it’s a formal problem. He enjoys the hunt for the cleanest procedure the way a minimalist enjoys the fewest marks. Yet he immediately undercuts the idea that efficiency equals shortcutting: “which doesn’t mean the corrections aren’t made.” The pleasure is in tightening the loop between intention and adjustment, not pretending mistakes don’t exist.

The subtext is control and its limits. “I like to have a feeling of the whole task before I start” sounds almost managerial, but it’s really about framing: establishing a container for uncertainty so the work can misbehave inside it. Nauman wants a total shape in mind not because he believes in perfect plans, but because he needs something for reality to push against. That last clause - “even if it changes” - is the give. The plan is a tool, not a promise.

Context matters: Nauman’s practice emerged in the late 1960s when the studio itself became a subject and “making” could be walking, pacing, mapping, filming a body in space. This quote positions him as neither romantic improviser nor cold system-builder. He’s the artist as debugger: committed to the correction, suspicious of the clean solution, addicted to the moment when the whole task clicks and then immediately refuses to stay whole.