The cover of this issue of Artkrush is a detail of a photograph of Bruce Nauman's Square Depression, featured in Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 in Münster, Germany, which is on view through September 30. Conceived for the 1977 Skulptur Projekte but only realized this year, the large concrete sculpture sinks into its center, submerging pedestrians. Like much of Nauman's work, the monument disorients the viewer, tackling the interplay between art and the body.

For the last 40 years, Nauman has presaged and transcended trends in conceptual, performance, and video art. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941, Nauman received his MFA from the University of California, Davis, in 1966. Early on in his career, he began creating cryptic works about the role of the artist; in a neon spiral from 1967, Nauman declares: "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." With a modus operandi both sincere and ridiculous, Nauman has turned his own body into artwork, such as his fiberglass casts of heads, hands, and knees and photographs like Self-Portrait as a Fountain, now ubiquitous in art-history textbooks. Mischievous wordplay also made Nauman famous — for instance, the neon scrawl Eat/Death from 1972 and the 1996 video installation World Peace, wherein five figures, each on a separate television monitor, argue in an absurd babble of contending harangues.

Nauman's myriad artistic experiments have been celebrated as pivotal works of the 20th century. He has participated numerous times in the Venice Biennale and the Lyon Biennale and five times in Kassel's documenta. In 2004, he created a commission for the Tate Modern's Unilever Series, and he has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and other museums and galleries worldwide. (LM)