There are landmark exhibitions. Sometimes it’s because the curator pulls together a group of artists, slaps a name on what he thinks of as their commonality, and that is how their work and they are forever thought of afterward. (Peter Selz did this 35 years ago in his Funk show at Berkeley). The other kind of landmark exhibition marks a psychological or historical turning point for an institution or a region (think Helter Skelter by Paul Schimmel at LA MOCA in 1992 that galvanized an LA aesthetic). Bruce Nauman’s show at Berkeley, organized by Constance Lewallen, is the latter kind of event. It is the culmination, professionally, of at least a decade’s worth of projects by Lewallen that resuscitated the work of conceptual artists of the Bay Area who had been in danger of being overlooked by art history: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Paul Kos, Ant Farm, and now Bruce Nauman. Of course Nauman doesn’t belong on that list, his work having been internationally acclaimed practically since the day he left school, but there is a profound way that he does belong on that list as well. That is that it is little known or understood that Nauman produced an enormous volume of work in his years in Northern California, both in graduate school at UC Davis (disclosure: where I work) and afterward living in the Bay Area, from 1964 to 1969.

I’ve often felt, especially after visiting the Philadelphia Museum where so much of his most important work is held, that Duchamp laid out in essence a century of research and practice goals in the arts, and the art world spent a hundred years filling in the blanks that he left. In a similar vein, seeing Nauman’s show, it felt as though he had laid out his whole career in those five years in Northern California, and has been filling in his own blanks ever since. The body-centeredness, the embrace of new materials and forms, the performative essence, the neon, the video, the humor, the creepiness, the utter originality: it’s all there. So it’s a landmark in thinking about Nauman. But even that is not exactly or completely what struck me at the exhibition.

I felt that it was a turning point in the Bay Area’s understanding of its place in contemporary art. This region has nurtured so many artists whose work is of the utmost value and importance, yet for the usual litany of reasons, it is rarely acknowledged as an important art center in this country, let alone internationally. So what is landmark about this exhibition is an assertive celebration of what we have accomplished and contributed organized by one of our most important curators, and that will go on to demonstrate that contribution in stops in both Europe and America. Furthermore, there is a bit of a culmination of something as well, as Nauman and his teachers are now in their 60s and 70s, (I saw both Jim Melchert and William T. Wiley at the opening for example) and are our old masters, beloved and esteemed.

Let me conclude by actually talking a bit about the work. There is very little so sad as revisiting an esteemed film, or book, or art work, after a long absence, and finding it dated, its spell broken. There is little as amazing as the opposite, discovering that such material is as fresh, profound and meaningful as it was the first time it was encountered. The latter is the case at A Rose Has No Teeth. In fact, seen as a body of work (in a very sensitive installation), the coherence is overwhelming, the logic of the work, if more familiar, perhaps more clearly impeccable.