53 Quotes by Bruce Nauman

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don't like.

When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.

What is it that an artist does when he is left alone in his studio? My conclusion was that if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then everything I was doing in the studio should be art . . . . From that point on, art became more of an activity and less of a product.

I want to be in the studio. I want to be doing something. You just do whatever is at hand, and you don't even worry about whether it's going to be interesting or not interesting to anybody else-or even yourself. You just have to make something.

A good teacher is like a good artist. They go right to the most difficult part of whatever's going on.

I gave a certain amount of thought to how I set up the shot and then after that. That's not an uncommon way for artists to proceed.

If you're an amateur artist, you can get it sometimes and not other times and you can't tell and you can't always do it over again.

The idea being there so that it became almost like an object that was there, that you could go back and visit whenever you wanted to.