Not too long ago, when I was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, I was introduced to the work of Bruce Nauman by a professor who also informed me that he was now a “rugged, toothless cowboy living somewhere near Pecos, New Mexico... sitting on barstools and hanging out with other such individuals.” This information only served to add a whole new romance to this grand figure of contemporary art for me. “Why would he choose this lifestyle?” I wondered. Since my family had lived in El Paso, Texas for many years, I couldn’t see the draw of this existence. Although El Paso was nowhere near as under-populated as Pecos, I was always distraught at the lack of contemporary art and music in El Paso. Sure, there are people there who appreciate such things, but they are few. I just assumed that such a figure in art would want to be in a city teeming with art and other artists.

I had once previously thought of looking around for Bruce Nauman when I first found out that he lived within such a close proximity to my parents in El Paso (or relatively close considering the size of Texas), but I only decided to actually go hunting for him after my parents moved to Elephant Butte, New Mexico (which is even closer to Mr. Nauman). I realized before the hunt that there was a very thin chance that I would actually be able to find or even talk to the notoriously elusive king of psychological/conceptual art, but I figured the impromptu trip, being four hours long, would be a good way to try to explain to my parents what I had spent four years in art school doing and why I was now in so much debt.

My mother still has a hard time pronouncing the term “new genres” (which is what I got my degree in.) She attributes it to “never having an ear for foreign languages.” And my father seems perplexed every time I drag him through the SFMOMA or Yerba Buena Center for the Arts when he visits. So I figured what better person to help me explain conceptual and contemporary art to my parents than Bruce Nauman? And if we couldn’t find him to do it, then he was at least a good subject to use for the explanation.

Despite all of my plans and schemes involved in the hunt, I found that it actually wasn’t very hard to find Mr. Nauman at all. My first search yielded the information that he lived near Pecos and not actually in the city. Digging deeper I then resorted to a very embarrassing “people-finder site” for which I paid ten dollars to tell me basically what I already knew—that he lived somewhere near Pecos. It did however give me a P.O. Box number. So I decided we would just drive up to the area and look around the cowboy bars. Then maybe we would leave a nice postcard behind for him somewhere. I then called information to find that low and behold, his number was listed. I decided not to call because I figured our entire trip could be shot if he rejected the possibility of meeting us before we even got there. I would then have no excuse of making myself miserable and vulnerable to my parents for four hours. Having already discovered how easy it was to find his information, I thought we might end up finding a neon sign above his house stating: “Come all who dare to enter – Here lives a master of contemporary art.”

To prepare for the journey I decided to make a sort-of crash course pamphlet for my parents about conceptual and contemporary art. I included some basic information on Bruce Nauman, Sol Lewitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” and images from a website called justinspace.com which hosts a shits-and-giggles version of conceptual art photographs (The photos on this site consist of E-Bay photos that appear very much like conceptual and minimal art but which are indeed just amateur photos intended to sell an item. For example, one photo displays a bottle of Windex next to a vase on some sort of white pedestal.)

And so begins the search…

My father appears at the car with his Dewalt Tool brand coffee cozy, carrying all of my junk like a gentleman. Mom decides to take the first round of driving. I begin by convincing my parents to play a mixed CD that I made so that I could avoid the hours of Christmas music that they are still keen on listening to even though Christmas has very much passed. I might also mention that for the obvious reason, I absolutely loathe their Christmas compilation CDs with such artists as Sting, Bruce Springstein, and others singing the classics with a twist. We probably drove for about an hour in mutual silence before I tried breaking the ice by bringing up the “art pamphlet” that I had left them. Despite having a hard time with pronunciation, my mother, having read my pamphlet and talked to me about the topics before, had a grasp of what I was trying to explain to her immediately. She went right into talking about having had a better understanding of previous art that I had shown her (she described Yves Klein’s “Blue Painting” and Duchamp’s “Urinal”). My dad on the other hand seemed somewhat confused and disinterested. Despite his initial apathy, I figured maybe since he was the same age as Bruce Nauman he might end up discovering that they share some common interests (cars? meat? Dewalt tools? Coors Light? Republican-ism?)

Despite my father’s dislike of or misunderstanding of what I was trying to do, he was excited about the trip. When we arrived in Gallisteo, New Mexico, which is within a few minutes of Pecos, we began immediately inquiring as to the whereabouts of Bruce Nauman’s home. It was actually my father who told my mother to pull over so we could ask every random person “Hey, do you know where Bruce Nauman lives?” Pretty soon, my father’s blunt inquiries paid off. Every person that we asked—from a woman carrying wood on the side of the road to a few fellows in a pick up truck—seemed more than happy to point us to Nauman’s nearby ranch.

At this point, we began to realize that Gallisteo was no ordinary podunk town. It was a lot like Santa Fe, only smaller. The homes were all very “artsy” and there was an Inn that looked suspiciously like some sort of big-city dweller hide out.

We drove up to what was pointed out to us as being Mr. Nauman’s hideaway and found it to be very secluded and hidden from the road which led us to believe that he did not like intruders. So, in our best judgment, and in fear of possible shotgun repercussions, we decided to go back to the Inn we had spotted and regroup. In the meantime I wondered where all the cowboy bars were that I was expecting.

We found the Inn to be just as we expected, a hideaway for city folk. We went in to eat dinner and found very smartly-dressed men and women busy typing away on their laptops by the fireplace. Was this supposed to be some sort of pretend-rugged atmosphere? Upon more sleuthing, I found in the directory for Gallisteo, which was nicely displayed on the front counter, that we had indeed been to Nauman’s house earlier. I attempted to call him at this number in the directory, but to no avail. Sounding assuredly nervous on his answering machine, and having to call back twice after leaving the wrong contact number, I am sure he found me to be a certified freak.

So we sat as a family to eat dinner and I wrote a note to him on a postcard with an image of some donkeys on the front that read “Board of Directors” stating my intentions of “art- bonding” with my parents over a trip to “hunt” for him. I decided I would ask one question only to Bruce, and since I was searching for answers I asked him “Are you a mystic?” I wondered if he, the elusive New Mexican, fit the real m.o. of a secluded southwestern idol and whether he was to tell me my art future or change the course of my life. All romantic notions aside, I was directly questioning his famous neon sculpture that states: “The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.” However, I was really picturing him dressed in some kind of shaman outfit, offering my parents peyote, and whipping out a crystal ball to suddenly reveal my art future, while simultaneously curing my mother of her foreign language problem and also clearing the fog of conceptual confusion that surrounded my father.

After we ate our overpriced dinner at the Inn we drove back to Nauman’s house to drop off the postcard which explained who we were and what we were doing hunting for him. At this time in our excursion we had given up hope of actually meeting “the man,” but had in the meantime spent some good, quality time as a family together.

It has been some time since our trip and Mr. Nauman has not yet replied to our postcard. But regardless of that I feel secure in the fact that my parents have some clue now as to what I had been doing in art school. (My father now refers to me as a “conceptual artist” even though I’m not sure if he knows—or even if I know—exactly what that is). I also came to the realization that my father, who is an amateur racecar driver, is also an artist in his own right. After we returned home, he described to me the car he is building from scratch to race. He showed me the engine as well as what looked like a front end, saying he was “paving the way for a new and final creation” with this car—an Opel G.T.—(what other semi-professional racers call “the poor man’s sports car” and which makes him somewhat of an underdog). For this he basically takes the entire inside out and rebuilds, according to some complicated engineering process which even figures in his own body weight, this car which he continues to race, beating other drivers in his class (who have full teams and several back up cars.) He was even featured in a car magazine as being one of the underdogs of racing in a spread about the Opel. The name for his current car, his first masterpiece, is S.C.R.O.T.U.M.—an acronym for “Stan Czacki’s Racing Opel The Ultimate Machine.”

Even though my father still seems mildly confused about the term “conceptual art” and my mother has yet to pronounce “new genres” correctly I believe our unsuccessful hunt turned out to be a successful introduction for my parents into the world of contemporary art. Having gone through the experience, I would highly recommend to any artist to attempt to accomplish such a hair-brained idea as to search for their art guru with their parents. Even though I did not find the elusive Mr. Nauman, it really just verified my fantasy that he is a mystic flying around the New Mexico desert, spreading little art seedlings that look like glitter. And following Sol Lewitt’s statement that: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.”— I would like to keep Mr. Nauman’s whereabouts and true actions a mystery so that I can begin my own path down the yellow brick mystic road, leaping to conclusions all the way.