Whose Expanded Field?

Abstract

This article examines a large-scale installation by multimedia artist Bruce Nauman, commissioned for the University of New Mexico campus during the mid-1980s. While his Center of the Universe (1988) is largely overlooked by critics and scholars, new archival research indicates that it was central to Nauman’s practice in the years after his relocation from Los Angeles to the environs of Santa Fe in 1979. The subsequent controversy surrounding the work and its ambivalent connection to the regional landscape also locates Nauman at the intersection of debates around public art, Postminimal earthworks, and a long history of incursion into the Southwest by artists from the East and West Coasts. Ultimately, this article contributes to a larger reappraisal of celebrated twentieth-century avant-gardists by highlighting the ways in which Nauman and his contemporaries relied on Indigenous cultural forms and settler-colonialist expropriations to advance an “expanding field” of late modernist art.