Bruce Nauman: sensory place

photo courtesy of dia beacon

Excerpted from an essay by Lynne Cooke
It was in the late 1960s, when he was a recent graduate, that Nauman began his exploration of the practice of artmaking and of the role of the artist. Performances that put his own body under duress were matched by those that demanded as much of paid performers or of spectators: compare the physically exhausting Slow Angle Walk with Untitled or Body Pressure (1974), exacting mental exercises in which an actor and viewers respectively are required through intense concentration to try to suffuse themselves into the architecture of the room. Sometimes these works were orchestrated for the camera in the studio, to become single-monitor video pieces; sometimes they were choreographed for a gallery or museum situation.

With Performance Corridor (1969) Nauman transformed a prop that had initially been built for one such piece into an autonomous work. Moored to the wall of the gallery, the long, narrow, plywood structure teases the visitor to venture into its claustrophobic recesses. This seminal sculpture soon spawned numerous related progeny, some of which incorporate surveillance cameras and closed-circuit video systems that function as a kind of electronic mirror. Both these virtual mirrors and the real mirrors Nauman used elsewhere allowed spectators to see places that they did not imagine they would be able to see. Typical of these works is the way a frustrating denial of physical access to what can be seen engenders a strange sense of removal or dislocation. Yet other corridor pieces, notably Left or Standing, Standing or Left Standing (1971), saturate the space with a garish luminosity, tiring and taxing the viewer’s perception before producing disturbing purplish afterimages. The laconic text placed on monitors at each entrance to the structure reprises as it skews the disjunctive architectonic experience: paradoxically it is more concrete in defining the sources of the unsettling fear than its eerie physical counterpart.

“Perhaps the space was insufficient,” Nauman conceded. “In a way it’s a poem that stands by itself, next to the space, without describing it. The writing is about language; it includes a kind of anxiety that the space seemed to generate.”