
John Duff, Robert Mangold, Bruce Nauman
Although there is no perceptible link between the work of these three artists, each of them was formed in a climate more ostensibly attuned to conceptual concerns than is today’s, and their work shows it. Both Bruce Nauman and John Duff came to the forefront of their generation with the surge of so-called materials-and process-oriented artists, Nauman as a neo-Dadaist high-jinkser, Duff as a sculptor of nonrepresentational forms. Robert Mangold, somewhat the oldest of the three and a bona fide reductivist, stands apart from them in the “no-hands” look of all his paintings; whereas Nauman and