Bruce Nauman’s Good Boy Bad Boy (1985) was my first love. It was that work, the one that still, however far and many times I turn, sits at the base of my vocabulary. I don’t know if I can say why, it is just that this work hit something. I’ve never analyzed it particularly, apart from to say that its effect had to do with the use of language, of reading, of acting. Always exact, concise, simultaneously expansive and devastating. I had always attributed this quality in Nauman’s work to the difference held in repetition, the abstraction of word to sound and back again, a certain undoing. The three lithographs PERFECT DOOR, PERFECT RODO, PERFECT ODOR (1973) that open “Bruce Nauman: Selected Works from 1967 to 1990” are not, though, deconstructive. The repetition of Perfect, Perfect, Perfect, the rearrangement of Door to Odor to Rodo, point less to the differential than the additional, not just space between but the surplus created in their phasing. What separates red MALICE and green ƎƆI⅃AM in the neon work Malice (1980) is, after all, not difference but use: the materiality of letters, the literal physicality of form remains. In this sense, it is not the …