Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience, and: Bruce Nauman--Raw Materials (review)

Published in conjunction with the exhibition at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (31 October 2003-18 January 2004), Theaters of Experience examines Nauman's theatrical impulse as evidenced in recent acquisitions by the Guggenheim from the Panza Collection. Tracing Nauman's intellectual and aesthetic influences, curator Susan Cross aligns his early sculptural pieces with Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd, who famously exemplified Michael Fried's condemnation of duration and presence.¹ Yet Nauman's interest in materiality quickly shifted into temporal explorations using the body of the artist as medium, inspired by the Judson Dance movement and the conceptual music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. In the video Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 (1968) Nauman falls into the studio corner again and again, his head beyond the frame. The forced perspective of this unrelenting repetition reveals the absurdity of the gesture undercut by its subtle violence against the body. Here the "lack of resolution in the scenario becomes [...] a poignant metaphor for the social condition" as the anonymous abstraction of the artist's body appears interchangeable with the body of the viewer (14). For Cross, the transposition of the role of artist as maker to medium to director establishes the political efficacy of Nauman's project as it destabilizes any conception of a single ontological self and forces an uncomfortable complicity onto the viewer. When Nauman's body disappears in the late '60s in the Corridor installations² it is replaced by the viewer, who becomes simultaneously subject, witness, and voyeur. Describing the psychological and phenomenological affect of these works, Cross evokes the "alienation effect" of Brecht and the sensate metaphysical theatre conceived by Antonin Artaud in Theater of Cruelty (17). While these associations potentially extend her critique of Nauman's conception of subjectivity, they seem too tentative or perhaps too literal in their application.

Nauman's relationship to theatre, specifically the work of Samuel Beckett has been extensively noted, most provocatively in Samuel Beckett Bruce Nauman at Kunsthalle Wien (2000) curated by Christine Hoffman. This "experiment with open exits" (2000:11, translation mine) is further developed in Hoffman's essay "Think-Thank" in Theaters of Experience. Here her poetic juxtaposition of the "floundering" methodologies of Beckett and Nauman creates a resonance between artistic processes such that the behaviors captured in Nauman's pieces become like the wandering characters of a Beckett novel (2003:53). Inside the "endless, temporal loops," words, statements, pleas, and commands compulsively collected, repeated, and inverted become unrecognizable and disorienting (58). This rupture in linguistic and associative logic alters the relationship of artist to audience, opening up Hoffman's question, "What is to be expected when it is the viewer who makes the art?" (59). If in Beckett we wait for the excessive, garbled monologues to cease, in Nauman we are called upon to act in response to the streaming cacophonous video, to walk contorted through the narrow corridors.

Nauman's reorientation of the experience of art and the conditions of communication is further extended in both the exhibition and catalogs for Raw Materials. Taking the title from a series of installations from 1990 to 1991 combining large-scale projection, double video monitors of the artist's head spinning, and the sound of his stuttering hum (MMMMM...), the exhibition at the Tate Modern (12 October 2004-28 March 2005) illuminates the paradoxical signification of raw and material.3 Commissioned for the Unilever Series and installed in Turbine Hall, the 22 "spoken and sung texts" are neither raw as they refer to previously performed and exhibited works, nor are they physically present (19). Represented in visual...