In this film, Nauman, bit by bit, pulls five or six yards of gauze from his mouth. Along with Black Balls and Pulling Mouth, it is one of the "Slo-Mo" films that he shot with an industrial high speed camera.
In this film, Nauman applies black makeup to his testicles. The action was recorded with an industrial high-speed camera capable of shooting between one thousand and four thousand frames per second.
For this videotape, Nauman turned the camera sideways and positioned it so that his head is cropped from the frame and his body is presented from neck to ankles. As he stands in the corner, his back to the wall, he appears to be lying down; falling backwards into the corner and then pushing himself...
A stationary camera set upside down and framing a long shot of the studio records Nauman, with his hands clasped behind his back, repeating a series of steps similar to those of Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk). The curious exercise combines pirouettes, goose steps, and crabbed, angled arabesques....
For Seven Easy Pieces Marina Abramovic reenacted five seminal performance works by her peers, dating from the 1960's and 70's, and two of her own, interpreting them as one would a musical score. The project confronted the fact that little documentation exists from this critical early period and one...
In the work two monitors are displayed at head height on pedestals. The head and shoulders of a young black man appear on one; on the other is an older white woman. They both speak the same sequence of a hundred phrases five times, beginning in a flat neutral tone, and becoming increasingly...
This video registration of a performance in his studio shows Bruce Nauman walking the perimeter of different shapes: circles, spirals and figure eights. Nauman recorded the performance on video because, unlike film, video was a medium that allowed him to make longer recordings. This videotape was...
In this work, shown on two stacked monitors, Bruce Nauman washes his hands with a thoroughness bordering on obsession. Each from a different vantage point, the two monitors present a simple everyday action, extended to fill almost an hour. The work is a self-portrait in which the hands serve as a...
Flour Arrangements, a photo series showing Bruce Nauman pushing some piles of flour around on the floor. He uses his body by treating it like material for his art. Nauman committed himself to making one ephemeral flour sculpture each day for over a month.
Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around in the Studio
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In this film record of a studio activity, Nauman set himself the task of walking while playing "two notes [on a violin] very close together so that you could hear the beats in the harmonics." The camera is set centrally in the studio in a stationary position so that when he walks outside of the...
Bruce Nauman - Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1968), 16mm black-and-white film For this film, Bruce Nauman made a square of masking tape on the studio floor, with each side marked at its halfway point. To the sound of a metronome and beginning at one corner, he...
This is one of the "Slo-Mo" series of films Nauman shot. Here he distorts his mouth with his fingers for the duration of the film in an inverted, close-up image.
"In this videotape Nauman attempted to maintain the contrapposto pose associated with classical and Renaissance sculpture while walking down a long, narrow corridor of his own design. In this position, one knee is bent, and weight is shifted to the opposing hip. Trying to walk while holding the...
From an inverted position, high above the floor, the camera records Nauman’s trek back and forth and across the studio; his stamping creates a generative rhythm reminiscent of native drum beats or primitive dance rituals. However, Nauman is not participating in a social rite or communal...
Images of sixteen men and women are shown, one by one, as they run on a conveyor belt against a black background. They appear to be in a complete void. The camera films the runners from all kinds of angles: sometimes from the front, from the knees up, then in profile or a focus on one of the limbs...
Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square
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In this silent film, Nauman walks around the perimeter of a large square marked off with masking tape. He shifts his hips exaggeratedly as he places one foot in front of the other, moving carefully around the square.
In an earlier film, Playing A Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (Violin #1), Nauman played a single note on the violin as he walked around his studio. In this video work, he remains in a stationary position while he plays four strings together. (These have been tuned to the notes of...
Seven screens show videos of as many places in Bruce Nauman's studio during the summer of 2000. He filmed these slices of night life with an infrared camera and processed them during editing. But one person is conspicuous by his absence: the artist. From time to time, only a cat wanders between the...
