Good Boy Bad Boy
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Good Boy Bad Boy” now? Collection: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Chicago, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
Bruce Nauman is a wildly influential artist whose work has explored the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure since the 1960s. Nauman was a key figure in the experimental film and video movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s with such works as Dance or Exercise Around the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance). After 1973, film and video become conspicuously absent from his work, replaced largely by language-based neon sculptures. He returned to video more than a decade later, with Good Boy Bad Boy. Of this decision, the artist recalled, “I think it’s because I had this information that I didn’t want to put into a neon sign. . . . I had thought about presenting it as a performance, but I have never felt comfortable with performance.
Read on
And so video seemed to be a way to do it.” Conceived as a didactic moral statement, the installation employs two actors, Joan Lancaster and Tucker Smallwood, who are presented in close-up, like newscasters, on two separate monitors. Each recites a one-hundred-line commentary on the human condition that includes passages such as “I was a good boy/You were a good boy/We were good boys” and “I hate/You hate/We hate/This is hating.” Directly confronting the viewer, they deliver each repetition with increased emotional intensity, shifting in and out of sync with one another.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Details
- Accession number
- 1997.150
In the catalog
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Image: Art Institute of Chicago — © the artist or rights holder
