Bruce Nauman’s engagement with linguistic gamesmanship— wordplay, puns, and jokes—can be traced to
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two exceptional steel sculptures inscribed with text produced in the late 1960s. In one of these, Second Poem Piece, Nauman positioned the words YOU, MAY, NOT, WANT, TO, SCREW, and HERE (or HEAR) strategically across the sculpture’s flat surface, each word establishing its own vertical column. As the text is read horizontally, row by row, the progressive removal of one or more words from the topmost sentence produces an insistently non-narrative list of variations—even a kind of “poem.” The artist has said of this work, “What I was interested in was that art generally adds information to a situation, and it seems reasonable to also be able to remove information from a situation and get art from that.” Here, the permanence of inscribed steel is at odds with the shifting meanings of the sculpture's series of statements.
