Stranger visual art intern Rachael Pullin—a talented and observant writer and a recent art history grad from the University of Puget Sound—offered me her own look back on Seattle Art Museum's summer blockbuster show, Target Practice. Incredibly, what she wrote is her first piece of criticism. I think it's pretty great, so I'm printing it in its entirety here.

Watch for her voice in the future.

The viewer was surrounded. The artists of Seattle Art Museum's big summer group exhibition Target Practice demanded that audiences repent for their devotion to the conventional ideals of painting. Each piece screamed louder than the last, turning the medium inside out and stretching it to the breaking point. And then, the pace suddenly changed in the last gallery.

The room’s four massive walls displayed the four sections of the silent Bruce Nauman video, Art Make-Up (1967-68). Each section depicts the application of a different color (white, pink, green, and black). The 16mm lens frames Nauman’s slender figure in a bust-like stance. He covers his body with paint, using his hands, while gazing into a mirror placed next to the camera but beyond the periphery of the frame. The medium shot emphasizes the physicality of the artist.

He abandons the canvas by painting his body, the brush by using his hands, and ultimately, the paint itself through the use of film, in a final attempt to dismantle the gold standard of art. Nauman’s piece questions the practice of painting, but more overtly the artist and the role of spectators in the formation of artistic ideas.

Like Nauman, Nam June Paik uses his body to paint, in the performance Zen for Head (1962), which was also in Target Practice. But Paik remains rooted in the traditional conception of painting by becoming the paintbrush: his hairs are the bristles that apply the ink to the paper. In Nauman’s work, tradition is eliminated and painting becomes as elemental as possible—only artist and paint. What is left is the core of the medium: the act of applying paint to a surface.

The silent sequence of gesture mesmerizes. Like the silence that falls after a radio malfunction, the anticipation of sound amplifies the experience of the surroundings. The silence is jarring, lifting the viewer from the slumber of passive experience. Art Make-Up is distinct from the majority of Nauman’s videos from this period in its lack of sound. Nauman professed a debt to the ideas of John Cage; present here is the influence of Cage's infamous 4’33”, during which the audience is left to absorb the sounds around them, to consider their expectations, and to be forced into awareness of the present.

Art Make-Up functioned well in Target Practice. The viewer faintly heard the films in the next room, provoking reflection on the remnants of messages gathered throughout the exhibition—mostly cries against tradition that shake our faith in the medium, such as photographs of Lucio Fontana’s standoff with a blank canvas, the artist gripping a knife.

Nauman’s work shifts the subject from the medium onto the artist. He's posing for himself as well as the viewer. His eyes are always searching, using the paint to cover and enhance while thoughtfully pausing, statuesque. He looks perplexed with a kind of alienated pain, donning new facades and seeking satisfaction through mutation and annihilation.

He doesn't make eye contact with the viewer, indicating a stage-like self-consciousness that would be picked up by Cindy Sherman in the following decade. The viewer is the voyeur that drives his neurotic application. The artist is portrayed here as a slave to the demands of the medium’s trajectory and to his audiences’ expectations. His critique is invasive and lasting without the use of violence. He poses, tenderly, in a manner that defies traditional gendered performances. He rubs his hands together—those celebrated artist’s hands—leveling the cult of the macho male-genius. But by breaking down these norms he becomes an iconoclast of the artists’ legends. Further enforcing this, the frame obscures the top of his head, affecting the oldest iconoclastic gesture: desecration of the face.

Target Practice aestheticized the rebel—a classically oversized gambit in the history of art. Art Make-Up, however, brings the dialogue down to human scale. The work’s monumental size paradoxically enhances the humanity of the artist. Though Nauman’s work is not riddled with gunshots, numbers, nails, or words, it delivers more eloquently a total critique of art and artist than anything else in Target Practice. It functions as an existentialist chapel following the fiery sermon. We are left to our internal dialogue to decide what makes up art and artist.

—Rachael Pullin