Bruce Nauman's influential work explores the poetics of boredom, entrapment, and failure. Many of his important early works, such as Art Make-Up, grew out of his involvement with experimental film and video in the 1960s, in which the artist often used his own body as the vehicle for exploration. Here Nauman applied colored makeup—white, pink, green, and finally black—in successive layers to his face and torso. Art Make-Up introduces the themes of surveillance and masking that recur in the artist's later work. His entire oeuvre can be read as a self-conscious investigation into the conditions and possibilities of art making.
