Time & Perspective Quote by Bruce Nauman

Nauman’s studio isn’t a factory; it’s a pressure chamber. When he says he doesn’t do “repetitive activity,” he’s quietly rejecting the comforting myth of the artist as a tireless producer, grinding out craft until meaning appears. His emphasis on “looking and thinking” frames art-making as a sequence of decisions rather than a demonstration of virtuosity. The line lands with a characteristically Nauman-like bluntness: no romantic fog, no mystical “flow,” just attention, doubt, and a ruthless edit.

The key word is “efficient.” In most cultural contexts, efficiency reads as anti-art, a corporate value smuggled into a place supposedly ruled by intuition. Nauman repurposes it as a conceptual tool: efficiency becomes the shortest route to the problem. Not the prettiest solution, not the most labor-intensive one, but the one that pins down what he’s after. That tracks with an oeuvre built on constraints, systems, and the body as material - works where the idea isn’t illustrated so much as stress-tested.

The list of mediums - drawing, sculpture, “casting plaster or whatever” - is almost dismissive, signaling that format is secondary to inquiry. That casual “whatever” is doing real work: it demotes medium to a means, not an identity. Context matters here. Coming out of the post-Minimalist, post-1960s turn toward process and concept, Nauman helped normalize the notion that the studio is less a sacred space than an experimental setup. His intent isn’t to sound efficient; it’s to sound unsentimental. The subtext: if the work looks spare, it’s because he’s already done the exhausting part in his head.