Nauman shot two films in 1965, and despite their rudimentary execution they make a compelling diptych. Manipulating the T-Bar (1965) shows the artist delineating what would become his basic studio practice, arranging and rearranging a sculptural form within the constrained architectural parameters...
In this video work Bruce Nauman explores violence, gender and behaviour. Set around a simple middle class dining table, the scene quickly escalates into a slapstick fight between a man and a woman. Their actions become increasingly more erratic and aggressive yet also ridiculous and cartoon-like as...
Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up, and Face Down
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In this videotape, a companion to Elke..., the actor's task was to imagine himself sinking into the floor. The resulting images portray him stretched out on the floor, sometimes face up, sometimes face down, in a series of dissolves. Although the mental component of the exercise is not captured,...
Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up Over Her, Face Up
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In 1969 Nauman had devised a set of mental exercises in which a live performer was to concentrate on sinking into the floor or allowing the floor to rise up over him or her. This videotape was based on these exercises and were the first videotapes Nauman made in a professional studio. They also...
On three projection surfaces and six monitors, one sees the head of a man shown in different takes. While continually revolving about his own axis, in a variety of tonalities he sings «FEED ME/ EAT ME/ ANTHROPOLOGY,» «HELP ME/ HURT ME/ SOCIOLOGY,» and «FEED ME, HELP ME, EAT ME, HURT ME». In...
“Two color monitors placed in the window played one of Nauman’s most recent videos, that of a clown jumping up and down shouting ‘No, No, No, No!’ endlessly. Nauman’s videos confront the viewer with behavior normally thought unacceptable. The clown’s simple declarative statement takes...
Nauman, his head cropped from the frame, is shown bouncing in the corner of his studio. Here, however, the images were recorded with a fixed camera that was inverted rather than turned on its side. -- EAI
The artist Bruce Nauman set the corner post of a fence on his ranch in Galisteo, New Mexico, one day and videotaped the process. As the title of Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) suggests, Nauman sees this simple, even mundane, activity as an allegory and metaphor for other areas of life....
In this film, Nauman bounces his testicles with one hand. Shot in extreme close-up, the work is perhaps an ironic reference to an earlier film Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, in which he bounced rubber balls. Along with Black Balls, Gauze, and Pulling Mouth,...
This stacked two-screen video installation shows the artist washing his hands with a vigour that goes beyond a daily cleaning ritual. The energy of the gesture and the distortive effect of the double screen evoke a sinister prior event and a sense panic or fear. Here Nauman continues his ongoing...
Art Make-Up is composed of four individual segments, each 10 minutes long. In them, Nauman appears tightly framed by the camera against a blank background, shirtless, and visible from the torso up. The action begins. Dipping his fingers into a small dish of makeup, he smears his face and body with...
A fixed camera turned on its side records Nauman repeating for nearly an hour a laborious sequence of body movements inspired by passages in works by Samuel Beckett that describe similarly repetitive and meaningless activities. Hands clasped behind his back, he kicks one leg up at a right angle to...
This film records the activities Nauman performed four years earlier in 1965. Both in this performance and in this work he strikes and holds a variety of poses on the floor in relation to a glowing fluorescent light fixture.
Violin Film #1 (Playing The Violin As Fast As I Can)
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Violin Film #1 (Playing the Violin as Fast as I Can), is one of several 1967-68 films featuring Nauman's violin-playing, in which the production of sound is subjected to procedural strategies that problematize its status as music and performance.
This exhibition presents a new work by Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, which continues the artist's exploration of video, sound, and performance. Characteristic of his work over the last five decades, Nauman transforms a simple and subtle gesture into a complex network of images...
An upside-down close-up of the artist’s mouth, Nauman repeats the words “lip sync” as the audio track shifts in and out of sync with the video. The disjunction between what is seen and heard keeps the viewer on edge, struggling to attach the sound of the words with the off-kilter movements of...
