The Art of Punishing

Although Bruce Nauman has been acknowledged as one of the most influential American artists of the second half of the twentieth century, he has received considerably less recognition and exposure that his contemporaries, due to a lack of understanding in his work, particularly the one element that is important to his oeuvre and that binds most of the disparate threads in his work - control. This examination uses the work of Michel Foucault as a means to understand the importance of control for Nauman and to suggest Foucault's influence on Nauman.