Bruce Nauman, Pay attention Motherfuckers, 1973 Lithograph
Pay attention Motherfuckers
I don’t remember what I was looking for online when I came across this work by Bruce Nauman. It struck me with its emergency and its relevance to what I see happening in the world around me lately. I immediately felt my voice shouting it out in my head. And that was not to remind people to wash their hands.
Because, it is not just the virus. It’s what happened in America, what’s happening everyday, all over the world. It is how I see (some) people treating one another. And I consider this to be a result of our lack of attention towards our environment, humanity and the concept of being human. But more of that later.
I want to investigate the power the work exerts over me. I start by looking at it closer. It is a black and white lithograph, one of the many works of Nauman that has to do with language. From what I see by looking at the google results, the work is very famous and other artists have appropriated the sentence or other aspects of the work for their own purposes.
It is of course an insult. An angry statement. As such, it is powerful. Why then do we bypass the insult and engage with it as a work of art? Is it because of our guilt syndrome?
Perhaps also to an extent, but the work functions in wittier ways. First, the text is in reverse. (although I did see somebody that put it on pinterest reversed once more lol). So we have to become especially attentive in order to read the sentence in the first place. While reading the sentence we become conscious of ourselves paying attention to the reading process. That is we, the motherfuckers.
It seems at first that Bruce Nauman, as the artist, is telling us what to do standing opposite to us, on the side of the artwork on the wall. While reading, we also become attentive to conceding to being called a motherfucker. We are in a closed circuit, we and the artwork, telling us what to do. It is not a liberal artwork. But being liberal is perhaps not what this artwork is about.
The letters are stacked close together and placed on thick straight lines as if they were products on market shelves. Especially the three letters on the top, PAY, have a cast shadow that makes a three dimensional effect, although inconsistent in terms of a definable light source. The word attention is rather hard to read so perhaps an initial rapid reading of the text could be PAY MOTHERFUCKERS which brings to mind capitalism and its demands from us. As I said, the shading is inconsistent, and I start to think that Nauman himself is not paying enough attention while writing the sentence but gets distracted on the way.
It does seem as if he is actually pressing himself into paying attention. He seems to be pressing the crayon on the stone, writing this word over and over, nearly concealing it as a result. Like the little child that is punished by being made to write repeatedly ‘I will pay attention in class’, his self-induced ‘punishment’ is to repeatedly attend to the (word) attention.
The work is in reverse, so subconsciously we feel as if we are looking at a mirror. This assumption also seems to make up for the inconsistency of the cast shadows. From this place we would perhaps also be seeing ourselves in front of the text, which is now perceived as being situated in the same space as we. And here comes the revelation! The artist is sharing the same place with ourselves, that is the other side of the mirror. Instead of being indicative of the artist’s separation from the audience the ‘s’ in motherfuckers is actually indicative of the artist merging with the audience. We are in this together.
The work strikes me because it flashes a light to something that seems very important at the moment. Being conscious. This is a work about mindfulness before mindfulness became hip. It reminds us that we have to pay attention, although frequently what we are asked to do is to pay, fullstop.
Are we really paying attention?
It seems that more and more we are conditioned to being distracted, overwhelmed by the incessant flow of information and connection, always checking our phones and social media, always being somewhere else than our bodies are at the moment. Sometimes I am struck by how people can have a ‘gone’ look in their eyes, how they seem to be talking to you but not really being there.
The man who murdered George Floyd, was he paying attention? Floyd was saying he can’t breathe still the officer was looking the other way, almost laughing. Isn’t this a complete lack of attention, a lack of attention to human life, to what being human actually is? Isn’t this complete inattention not only to the other man, but also to one’s own sensations and feelings? And isn’t this exactly the opposite to what he was supposedly there to do, as a policeman? Unfortunately, this lack of attention was shared by his colleagues on that day. Today I saw another video, one policeman pushed an elderly man to the ground. His gesture was so dismissive and, again, inattentive. I see this more and more everyday now, everywhere I look, in big issues and small details.
I say to myself: Practice paying attention. Without criticizing or attempting to correct. To what arises. To your first reactions to something. And your second. Pay attention to the people you come across everyday. To your loved ones but also to the ones you don’t know. Reveal deep rooted unconscious thoughts that seem to go beyond simple conditioning. Pay attention to your mind, when it sends an alert every time a somewhat ‘different’ person comes your way, your DNA is tainted with racism.
The last words I saw written in this file where I keep my notes for the blog when I opened it to write this post were these:
‘Is there a need for the art object?
With all these discussions about art during the current crisis, I am wondering if there is a need for the art object. Do people need art? And if they do, in what way? Are they satisfied in looking at a work of art on the internet, do they want to see it live, do they need to live with art? Why? Is art just a decorative object on the wall?’
It seems that the answer, at least to some parts of this question came, for me, with this work. Art is a way to make us pay attention, motherfuckers.