‘Nauman, in fact, is a master of inversions and secrets.’ – Kathy Halbreich, Social Life

Bruce Nauman’s Microphone/Tree Piece originally began life as Amplified Tree Piece, the artist’s written contribution to an exhibition of proposals called ‘Art in the Mind’ in 1970. He subsequently added more details a year later, certifying it as Microphone/Tree Piece, yet the instructions essentially remained the same: drill a hole into a tree trunk, mic it up, and amplify the sound into an empty room. Nauman’s other submission to ‘Art in the Mind’, Untitled (1969) similarly involved making a hole in which to conceal a microphone, except this one would have been a mile-deep below the ground. During a rush of works in the late-1960s, the artist had poured water through holes in slabs of metal to make them rust (Water-Mirror Piece and Untitled, both 1968, and Dead Center, 1969), and then, years later, made another hole in neon: this one from thumb and forefinger to form an orifice (Human Sexual Experience, 1985).