"Life, Death, Love, Hate, Pleasure, Pain" 1983

In this piece of artwork, Bruce Nauman once again uses florescent lights as his medium. Also, Nauman sticks with a theme of geometry as this piece is a series of words in the shape of a circle. The words are arranged so that they are adjacent to their opposite word. For example, life is connected to death, love to hate, and pleasure to pain. The words "love" and "hate" are shown with colors in which they are mostly associated with, a warm, fierce red and pink. Once again this piece doesn't have reference to sexual content, as many of Nauman's works had. But of course you can link the words love and pleasure to a sexual idea.


I love this piece of artwork because it describes the most powerful abstract nouns in a human being's life. For instance, at one point in everyone's life, they are in love, loved by, or just loved. The two words that are easiest to read are "love" and "life". This caught my eye and I was fond of it because these are my two favorite words in this artwork. I think the circle framing is ironic because it is almost as if Nauman is displaying that this is the life cycle at its best. In broad terms, these words are what life is all about.

This work reminds me of nothing other than my own life. Each individual word takes me back to a place where I felt love, hate, pleasure, pain, and where I experienced life and death. More specifically the word life reminds me of the day my niece was born, the word death reminds me of the day my sister was taken away by cancer, the word love reminds me of how much I'm loved by my family and close friends, the word hate reminds me of the one and only person I hate, the word pleasure reminds me of what makes me happy, and the word pain reminds me of the time I got my wisdom teeth taken out.

Bibliography:
www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/ntm/ntm1-1-06.asp
http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/interviews/ldlhpp.html