When I left school and got a job at the Art Institute in San Francisco, I rented some studio space. I didn’t know many people there, and being a beginning instructor I taught the early morning classes and consequently saw very little of my colleagues. I had no support structure for my art then; there was no contact or opportunity to tell people what I was doing every day; there was no chance to talk about my work. And a lot of things I was doing didn’t make sense so I quit doing them. That left me alone in the studio; this in turn raised the fundamental question of what an artist does when left alone in the studio. My conclusion was that I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever it was I was doing in the studio must be art. And what I was in fact doing was drinking coffee and pacing the floor. (…) At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product. The product is not important for your own self-awareness. I saw it in terms of what I was going to do each day, and how I was to get from one to another, and beyond that I was concerned with maintaining my interest level over a longer period of time, e.g., a part of a lifetime. It is easier to consider the possibility of not being an artist. The world doesn’t end when you dry up. What you are to do with the everyday is an art problem.
Bruce Nauman (Ian Wallace et Russell Keizere, « Bruce Nauman Interviewed »)
