Such references to the body can be already be surmised in his first Fiberglas sculptures. When he makes the viewer the center of his installations, he sets up a precise situation in which an experience of self becomes realizable. For the artist, this is not a self-referential, emancipative project, but rather an experiment with concrete activities, a systematic measuring of the space surrounding the body, a fathoming of the problematic antagonisms in our conceptions of body and spirit. All of Nauman's room-based works can be traced back to a play between an intensive reference to bodily perception and its mental and psychic counterpart, without allowing themselves to be reduced to this. The nervous system is thus a central player in the network Nauman's works place us in. It is the unavoidable connecting link that leads the viewer to the work. It only becomes clear and deliberate, however, when it winds up in a trap, in conflict with the respective content.

Nauman isn't interested in beauty; he only provides his public with it as a by-product. His work isn't born out of a subtle view of the world, but a vital frustration that has driven him to incessant production for the past forty years. In the process, he keeps the various temperaments of his international public going, from the choleric to the melancholic and phlegmatic. Yet all the stimulus, provocation, and emotional upset he loads on us never produces a weary, grey blur, but rather astonishing states covering a spectrum ranging from clarity to emotional response, states that ultimately linger in the soul and the brain as a joy won with considerable difficulty.

The fact that it is not only the making, but also the reception of art that entails a certain degree of structured activity - that is, labor - guarantees a productive relationship between the viewer and the work. For Nauman, the work itself has long since crossed the borders of one-sided reception. His art works with us, and this is why we have to ultimately deal with him, as well. For this reason, the concept of the viewer can no longer be upheld in the constellations the work creates.


Lighted Center Piece, 1967-1968
Photo: David Heald
©VG Bild - Kunst, Bonn 2003 / 2004

The Berlin exhibition shows some of the most crucial works for Nauman's redefinition of the viewer's role. These are the corridors, the first of which, the Performance Corridor of 1969, was made in the studio as a backdrop for the performance Walk with Contrapposto. The situation that Nauman originally built for himself now becomes accessible to the viewer as an experiential space. In additional corridors, Nauman varies his architecture, making it even more precise in order to hone in on the specific experience that can occur in it: for example, he adds mirrors, as in the Corridor Installation with Mirror from 1970. The two corridors, which become slightly narrower to one end, converge at a point covered by a mirror. Whoever enters the work undergoes the disturbing experience of a situation that is limited to his own body; at a certain point, he is surprised to discover his own reflection in the mirror. Using two video cameras and two monitors, the Videocorridor for San Francisco creates a corridor without walls: when the viewer recognizes himself from behind on the monitor, and attempts to proceed along what he assumes to be the path between the camera and the monitor, he exits the camera's visual field. And the closer he draws to the monitor, the smaller his image becomes, until it almost disappears.

Bruce Nauman
Untitled (Hands), 1991
Sammlung Deutsche Bank, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2003

The feeling of moving here becomes confused on several planes. The viewer, before he has a chance to think about it, involuntarily winds up in a dance for two with the camera as he steps forward, back, or sideways.

Every attempt to keep the viewing nonetheless "pure" fails, dissolves into boredom or rejection. The videos and films with repetitive sequences, such as Art Make-Up or Walk with Contrapposto change throughout the viewing; their extended duration is a prerequisite for taking part in the changes in perception they induce. In order to participate, one has to slip out of the distanced viewer attitude and into a pathos-ridden, passive, yet alert state in which thinking and feeling intertwine in a paradoxical way. The work is always surrounding us; we are standing in the midst of it at all times. The creation of a new concept of the viewer, for which there is still no appropriate term, because it entails a more long-term process of habituation, has become concrete in the spirit of this work. What remain evident, however, are the art historical synapses that connect it to the theater of antiquity and the tumultuous achievements of artists such as Beckett and Artaud.

Nauman's latest work, which could last be seen in Cologne, is about the studio. Nauman offers the pure fact of his working space, although, as usual, not in minimalist or spiritual emptiness, but rather packed full in an entirely pragmatic manner. He set up an infrared camera and filmed the night scenes inside the room over the course of several months, which remained unused by him during these hours. The work that arose in this way is called Mapping the Studio. Fat Chance John Cage.


Bruce Nauman´s Studio
Foto: Nauman Studio

For long periods of time, nothing actually happens. Then, a cat on a mouse hunt occasionally sweeps by between the boxes and piles, recorded together with the moths, insects, and coyote howling. There is both a long and a short version made from more or less reduced cuts. After forty years, the work, perhaps unintentionally, completes a kind of imaginary circuit and refers back to the studio of the sixties, more an empty room in those days, in which the artist first began his research.

In the night-time video records, the traces of time inscribe themselves into the space when no one is there. When we are outside of a room, we carry an image of other rooms within us. To be in a room is both the most intense form of presence and at the same time a transitory shell of experience. It is perhaps for this reason that the casts of negative spaces stick so well in the memory, these often irrelevant in-between spaces. "Touching" the random occurrences in an uninhabited room is like peering into outer space, like a premonition of the spaces in which we will have been. For outer space is uninhabited space per se. No less peculiar, ridiculous, or embarrassing collisions occur there, crashing garbage and other material, remote-control hunts, competitions on an abstract level.

In Nauman's work, the nighttime studio images surround the viewer, arranged in a wall panorama. This creates an in-between state reminiscent of an abyss. The projections are a skin film of the space on which the present forms, automatically recorded as though by a neutral camera obscura god. An internal wall for the projections of our seeing, yet at the same time a double-sided reproduction of nothingness. Is he immersing us in the darkness of the studio?

Christine Hoffmann is a curator. She worked on the exhibition Samuel Beckett - Bruce Nauman in the Vienna Kunsthalle and published the volume Bruce Nauman: Interviews 1967-1988 (1996). You can read an excerpt from an interview with Nauman here.

Bruce Nauman: Theatres of Experience can be seen from October 31, 2003 through January 18, 2004 in the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin. The exhibition will be accompanied by numerous special events.