Bruce Nauman: For Beginners

Early in his career, Bruce Nauman came to the conclusion that, “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”
 
For Beginners (all the combinations of the thumb and fingers) stacks two frames of video images of the artist’s hands with commentary on the different combinations he creates (like some sort of gestural painter, sans paint and canvas). His fingers shift as his voice delivers different commands.

Like his 1968 work Walk with Contrapposto, For Beginners… was created in the studio with a camera, the artist’s body and little else. Suggestive of a struggle between words and actions, the physical and the mental, Nauman forces us to look again at the simplest of our own gestures.
 
LACMA has collected works by Nauman representing each decade of the artist’s work since the late 1960s, not long after the artist graduated from the University of California, Davis.