The Instrumentality of Sense in Bruce Nauman’s Audio Video Piece for London, Ontario (1969–1970)

Bruce Nauman’s installations have long served a literary and linguistic critique emphasizing the role of the body in relation to space and time. However, focusing on vision, phenomenology and semiotics, scholars of Nauman have paid little attention to the sounding body. The author weaves the political basis of audition into the making of sense while morphing the historical and philosophical roots through a close examination of Bruce Nauman’s Audio Video Piece for London, Ontario, a work executed soon after unrest on the American West Coast and in the streets of Paris. Unhinging the unity of sensus communis, Nauman’s work proposes new political trajectories for dispersed sounding bodies.