My June presentation at the Pulitzer was constructed of two parts. I had seated myself, within our ring of chairs, facing the work in question from across the gallery: Bruce Nauman’s cast iron Henry Moore Bound to Fail (back view) of 1967–1970. The sculpture was ever so slightly smaller, in person, than I had expected, and beautifully hung against a subtly mottled concrete wall at eye level. I wanted first to address the piece through its title, putting pressure on it nearly word by word: Why Henry Moore? Why or how is Henry Moore Bound to Fail? Why choose to image the cliché “bound to fail” in the first place? And what might be the efficacy of emphasizing, however parenthetically, the back-ness of the view, when there is no “front” for us? This approach helped me to draw out, in some cases with a purposeful obtuseness, what it was we were looking at: Not at all a cast of Henry Moore’s back, his arms bound with rope; instead, the cast of a wax mold, modeled by Nauman based on a photograph of his own rope-bound back. But my approach, via title, was also prompted by the second half of my presentation, a brief consideration of the casting process—a process that involves doublings or redundancies of its own, and that is linguistically related to the French cliché, a word important here in two ways. First, because Nauman’s cast iron piece was derived from an earlier work, therefore not just a sculpture produced by the literal doubling of the casting process, but also a sculpture that serves as three-dimensional doubling or revisioning of the prior two-dimensional work. Second, because the photograph in question, of Nauman’s own bound back, is from an eleven-photograph portfolio of 1966–1967 that in large part deals with the imaging of verbal clichés, and thereby with the doubling (or recasting) of particular commonplaces, particular meanings: The title of that bound-back photograph is, of course, “Bound to Fail,” and other clichés taken up within the portfolio are “Feet of Clay” and “Waxing Hot,” to name a couple. I spoke for about ten minutes in order to fill in the above points, but it was the ultimate implication of these points that felt exciting to me, especially being at last in front of the work itself: This seems a curious object to call a sculpture at all, a bas relief that hugs the wall, with no real sense of bodily or dimensional presence aside from the person (Henry Moore) and the part (a back) that are named in the title. Indeed, casting as a process is often more about skin and surface than it is about body or embodiment, and the relationship between this particular piece and its predecessor, the photograph—that is, the relationship between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional—strikes me as paramount here. This may not be a piece “about” Henry Moore or his modernist bronzes, but it is a piece “about” what sculpture is (and is not).

Discussion after my presentation was focused in two ways that were of great use to me. My own chosen structure—around and according to Nauman’s title—was taken up as a kind of curatorial approach, which gave us a chance to consider my “intentions” alongside what Nauman’s may or may not have been in titling his object with such humor as well as with such downright obscurity of intention. (Not that Nauman’s intention is the important object here, but I had come into the presentation choosing to weigh words—the words of the title—as objects of a kind.) The second line of discussion pursued the terms front and back: This piece being a “back view” without a front, and a back view that is itself difficult to identify as a human back at all—more lumpen field than anything else, unless one knows what potentially figural details to pick out. One particular point that I found especially useful came from Professor Carol Armstrong, who suggested that the doubling of the word model is important here, among the doublings inherent to both casting and cliché. In the photograph, Nauman is his own model; for the cast, he modeled in wax with his unbound hands a piece for which he could not have served as model—one cannot make a cast of one’s own back, and a sculptor whose arms are bound (whether by rope or by casting materials) cannot do what a sculptor does: model, make. The mental image of Nauman modeling “his” and/or “Henry Moore’s” back in wax can now be slightly elaborated, too, for after discussion, a few of us gathered around the piece to take a closer look. It was hung diagonally across from a window in precisely the right way so that when standing to the left side and observing the cast surface in raking light, we could just barely make out in a casual cursive the full title of the piece scratched faintly—even elusively—along what would be the upper left shoulder of the “back.” Nauman had not just modeled his back, he had written into it—words inscribed on figure, figure thus made ground.