Double Poke in the Eye II,

1985

Fingers belonging to two disembodied heads extend and then retract, generating a cycle of violence that neither escalates nor stops. Such is the spectacle created by <em>Double Poke in the Eye II</em>, one of Bruce Nauman’s last works to utilize ­commercial-grade neon. As early as 1965–66, ­Nauman began to experiment with neon. This new body of work consisted of neither objects nor paintings but what the artist called "signs." Often employing alliterations, anagrams, puns, palindromes, rebuses, inversions, and rhymes, Nauman’s early neons were among the first works of art to utilize light and language as materials. His neons from the early to mid-1980s, by contrast, include both linguistic and figurative elements. Almost without fail, they address the antinomies of the human condition — sex and death, love and cruelty, humor and tragedy — as well as politically inflected current events. <em>Double Poke in the Eye II</em> is a riff on the platitude "Better than a poke in the eye [with a sharp stick]." A switching mechanism regulates the tempo of illumination, while the combination of malicious behavior and bewitching color exemplifies the artist’s commitment to contradiction and incongruity.