Reconstruction 9.3 (2009)
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Playgrounds of Disturbance: Bruce Nauman's "Existentialism" in a Modernist Gallery Space and the Problems of Analogue Video Art in the Gallery / Cyrus Manasseh
Abstract/Summary
From the 1960s, the American Conceptual artist Bruce Nauman would challenge Modernist gallery structures through his video art. This paper addresses the effect of Nauman's pioneering video art within White Cube gallery spaces particularly in relation to the High Modernist period (1968-90 app.) by examining its meaning from a particular standpoint. It does this by discussing Nauman's video artworks in relation to aspects of existentialist philosophy and theatre as Nauman's avant-garde works would cross into these territories. Nauman's work I argue, would manifest in such a way that would, in terms of his works being displayed, lead to the re-sculpting within the period of High Modernism of the Modernist gallery paradigm set by the Museum of Modern Art in 1929.
Introduction
<1> Throughout the mid-1970s until the 1990s, contemporary video art as a vehicle for social, cultural and political analysis had been a prominent element within global museum-based contemporary art exhibitions. Yet analogue video, as a form of technology and avant-garde art practice, was relatively short-lived in the twentieth century. Historically it was contained between film and digital art. Artists would work with the medium of film from the dawn of cinema through to the present day. Periods of dramatic experimentation would proliferate in Europe during the inter-war years (WWI-WWII) and across the globe in the post-war WWII period. Digital means of production would be produced in the latter period of the twentieth century - its accessibility as a creative platform for artists would largely occur in the post 1990s. The short period in which analogue video art would flourish would occur from the early 1960s to the middle of the 1990s (when its means of production would be subsumed into the digital era). Yet from the outset, its imbrication [1] by art museums engendered specific problems in relation to its exhibition.[2] This had presented problems which would be compounded through a basic and fundamental need for the total flow [3] of imagery emitted from the video text to be presented in contexts that were suitable and sympathetic to each piece.
<2> Within a period of High Modernism, the American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman would in a sense create pioneering existentialist video art installations that would be problematic for the fixed framework of the Modernist gallery space. In major Modernist gallery spaces such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou and the Tate Gallery for example, Nauman's 'phenomenological' and 'existentialist'[4] video art installations would be integrated to question the potentialities of these (specific) viewing environments in relation to viewer perception and spectatorship.[5] Nauman's interest in the separation between public and private would lead to unique video art installations which would investigate psychic and physical barriers and the psychological, philosophical and existential factors within the gallery's framework. Through this, Nauman's conceptual video work would challenge these museums and others.
<3> Much of Nauman's video art from early on would focus on the body being trapped by space and time. For his video installations (Performance) Corridor (1968-70), first exhibited in 1969 in the Modernist gallery spaces of the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles and Live Taped Corridor (1969-70) at the Whitney Museum, New York Nauman would develop a claustrophobic passageway or tunnel comprised out of two wooden 'floor-to-ceiling' parallel walls, which would be designed to confront the viewer-participant with their own filmed image from a surveillance camera in a gallery space. At one end of this theatrical apparatus, two monitors (showing the length of the corridor space) would be used to tempt the viewer-participant to traverse the space in between which would relate to Nauman's conceptual quest to question the process of art making and of modifying the gallery space into a performance space/workshop for seducing the visitor into the actors' role.
<4> Museum installation such as Nauman's (which would play upon the notion of public/private space) containing surveillance elements harks back to the origination of video installation as a security aid and can be linked to the employing of the camera akin to the Big Brother aspect of George Orwell's 1984. For Nauman's Going Around the Corner Piece (1970) Modernist gallery spaces would again develop into spaces for surveillance, as viewer-participants would be tempted into a game of hide and seek by using their bodily presence within Nauman's specially constructed space while being simultaneously filmed. With the stress placed upon anticipation (by leading the viewer around the corner of a white rectangular box repeatedly), a playground of sorts would be inserted directly into the gallery. Comprising this, surveillance cameras encouraging the viewer-participant's self-scrutiny were hung at the top of a closed rectangular box. Within this scenario, viewer-participants would be provoked into playing both interrogator and the one interrogated simultaneously. As Hartel would point out, in this work, '...hang four cameras, like vultures keeping an eye on their prey.'[6] By critically questioning or polemicising the individual's role and position in (and relationship to) society, Nauman's video performance installations would convert the museum into a space for intrigue, mystery, and threat.
<5> For the viewer-participant, a work such as this would particularly reveal the restrictions of the fixed White Cube gallery space as initiated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as they, experiencing the work within the physical conditions of the gallery would be invited to actively critique the external framework of the cube. In order to install a work such as this, mainstream museums would need to contour their viewing environments and internal symmetries into spaces for play, which would contravene the exhibitory logic of pedagogy in more Modernist and traditional display environments. This contravention of the Modernist museum framework would also occur with the exhibiting of video art by another American artist Dan Graham who, like Nauman, would also incorporate into the gallery entire environments that would need to re-shape the sculptural realm of the museum.[7] As such, Nauman would install into the gallery whole environments for the audience/ spectator to participate. These works, which had focused on spatial disjunction, would be purposefully calculated and constructed to fashion surroundings that would make the viewer uncomfortable.
<6> Central to Nauman's exploration and positioning of the body within this period, would be his interest in the body trapped within the parameters of the video screen and this persistent motif in Nauman's work would often be rendered to the gallery audience/watcher-participant via the placement of his taped work on video monitors within the gallery. These works would often show Nauman performing in different ways - but usually in limited and confined spaces. Although not posing a direct physical challenge to the architectural parameters of the Modernist gallery paradigm (as defined by the Museum of Modern Art) in quite the same way as Performance Corridor and Going around the Corner Piece, Nauman's video artwork Stamping in the Studio (1970) would again employ the idea and practice of surveillance to articulate a critique of a fixed or hierarchical space.[8] The work, best shown in a darkened environment of a gallery space, questions the boundaries of normal behavior and scrutinizes the artist's agency within a closed room/gallery. In Nauman's video text, [9] the artist presents himself on the monitor as a medium of performance and documentation which shows as part of a habitual rhythmic act in an enclosed and fixed environment the artist's repetitive prowling the studio activity. Appearing as a caged animal trapped and isolated under the compulsive surveillance of the outside world the work reveals itself as empty and lacking the structure and formularized expectancy of a narrative that proceeds in time. This characteristic would make public Nauman's minimalist preoccupations with bare performance as a real life tape action showing the artist in a state of theatrical performance as the notion of the past is made visible as viewers in the gallery space watch it in their present tense. Through this, Nauman would metonymically reveal that he is (as we all are), in a sense, trapped by space and by time and he thus attempts to escape the present. By presenting this work in a gallery space, Nauman's inner vision and private world would be made public. Peripherally for the viewer of this work, this would simultaneously appear as a kind of staged realist theatre while also giving the impression of a man caged in the progressive temporal space of the present.
Nauman's 'Existentialism' in a Gallery Space Within the Period of High Modernism
<7> In fact, in conceptualist artworks such as these, Nauman, when viewed in a certain way, appears within the period of High Modernism to question what it is to be and to exist, and his prowling the studio action in Stamping in the Studio for example, can perhaps be better understood by examining it in relation to existentialism. Nauman's examination of the human body within a physical situation in Stamping in the Studio would raise ' ... questions of freedom, consciousness, moral value, action, and the significance of history' [10] within a gallery space. In choosing to expose himself in this way, Nauman appears to raise the existential question of Why should I be at all? which according to the 21st existentialist Richard Appignanesi is '... what philosophers call the basic ontological question of what being is.' [11] Nauman, in his video art, would often appear to be in a world or environment confined by the parameters of time and space. Although all of his videos would differ, others by Nauman that can be said to appear to fit into this category would include Floor Positions (1968) and later video works, such as Good Boy, Bad Boy (1985-86) and Clown Torture (1987). Like most of Nauman's video art within the High-to-late Modernist period, these video works appear to question the notion of being and of what it is to be in the world and in this way, reveal artworks that had been difficult to classify in a gallery within the High Modernist period.
<8> Another of Nauman's early video installation works that would appear to raise similar issues to Stamping in the Studio is Slow Angle Walk (1968). In this pioneering video, Nauman traps himself within the frame and in a sense metonymically traps himself within the Modernist gallery setting. Nauman, in this way, would use his video as '...a device of limited observation—a frame cropping off his head, his limbs, or showing his back only—in order to turn himself into an anonymous performer and to direct the attention of the audience to the activity itself.' [12] By positioning and employing the body as a material, these propositions in a gallery space would often scrutinize the body to create an ambiguous interplay between useful and futile individual action.[13] Within the White Cube, this work would reveal the dramatic vulnerability and individuality of an artist conceived through the three dimensional presence of the monitor as a prison of the technology and as a prisoner within the gallery space. Through the compositional imagery in video installations such as these (which often appear to be inspired by 'Becketian' existential angst, alienation and desolation) Nauman would highlight how certain kinds of urban space (including gallery space), would be capable of evoking claustrophobia, separation and alienation. [14] Nauman's conceptualist videotapes, frequently appear to relate to the idea of the individual questioning their identity and 'being' within a social situation, and Nauman's challenge to the gallery can be seen in his critique of the ground. In Nauman's works, the notion of time is often represented by the ground. Yet, while Nauman would seem attracted by the ground he cannot wholly trust it. For Nauman the ground is something threatening, yet also would provide security due to the familiarity that secures 'a sense of place.'[15]
<9> As such, the ground is made permanent only within the present until the passing of time eradicates its presence. To counter this, walking over the ground makes the body coexist with the duration of time. As part of this, the process of falling features prominently. Falling is attractive because it corresponds to the importance of the ground and what that represents.[16] (Think of Nauman's video work Floor Positions in relation to the idea of falling). This call to the ground would appear within Nauman's Stamping in the Studio, Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 (1968), Slow Angel Walk, Pacing Upside Down (1969), Revolving Upside Down (1969), and in Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube (1969)—in which Nauman sits on the floor and Tony Sinking in to the Floor, Face Up and Face Down (1973). In these video installations, Nauman, (or the models appearing within them), try to escape the ground which is temporal.[17] Video art such as these displayed in Modernist gallery settings would appear to ask the question for the viewer What does it signify in practice to be a lived body? In posing this question (or appearing to), within the period of High Modernism Nauman would critique the meaning of consciousness within restricted or fixed gallery space. By appearing to ask Why should I be at all? Nauman's video installation works as watched by the viewer-participant would reveal how they would relate to curiosity, bewilderment, exasperation and utter boredom with life within a Modern gallery space.
<10> Nauman's video installations Performance Corridor, Going around the Corner Piece and Corridor Installation (1970), Green-Light Corridor (1970-71) and others would propose the same or similar themes within the gallery. These video environments reminiscent of entertainment arcades which go back to Victorian times would mount a curious yet innovative interplay and challenge to the sculptural realm of the gallery. [18] By shifting an emphasis between object and idea Nauman would import into art galleries elements related to the happenings events which had also taken place in large halls, auditoriums and external environments during the 1960s. [19] Through this, Nauman would evoke a '... high involvement on the part of the watcher' and would incorporate and employ the immediacy of theatre with the intimacy of cinema spectatorship as a way to entice viewers to act as a collaborator or to form the subject of the work itself. [20] In the gallery, Nauman's video artworks within the period of High Modernism would entice/invite the visitor to identify with his actions.
<11> As a result of pioneering performance video installations such as these, Nauman would facilitate and bring the artist's need of the intimacy and immediacy of the human body to the forefront of experimentation within the High Modernist period. This escalation of the human/bodily element in Nauman's video art would reorder the logical and spatial realms of the gallery as the galleries would, in a sense, become re-sculpted so that they could incorporate his works. By developing video environments such as these within Modernist galleries Nauman would crucially blur the boundaries and architectural parameters related to the meaning of space in the gallery. His subverting of the normative spectatorial positions in a gallery space would force galleries to consider relationships of creating internal environments. [21] For Van Bruggen, Nauman:
... has always been curious about the effects of physical situations on human beings, such as the uncomfortable feeling of being in too compressed or too large a space. [22]
<12> Hence, through such pioneering video installations as Performance Corridor, Going Around the Corner Piece, Stamping in the Studio, Floor Positions and Good Boy, Bad Boy as well as others, which Nauman installed in Modernist galleries many of the fundamental tenets and strategies associated with museum practice were challenged presenting problems which would be compounded through a fundamental need for the works to be presented in contexts that were suitable and sympathetic to each piece. Much of Nauman's work had defied classification in the gallery and specialized video installation such as Nauman's had needed to be built into an environment that had been organized for purposes of reflection. As a result, within art institutions these artworks had often had to compete with more traditional forms of art. In some cases, this resulted in these works being awkwardly positioned and presented within the museum such as behind stairs or near public conveniences. [23] Moreover, the durational form of these works had posed a pervasive dilemma for museums which found it necessary to consistently endeavor to re-establish and rearticulate the most effective mode of presentation. [24] The durational movement of a museum's patrons would rarely be considered. Through this, the temporal and spatial parameters of the gallery would be continually challenged. [25]
<13> For many artists during the High-to-late Modernist period such as Nauman, video art had stood for contemporary art. During the 1960s and 1970s Minimalism and Conceptualism were the dominant trends in art and Nauman had emerged from this framework. Within this, categories and boundaries employed to define art had been blurred as new art forms, practices and technology pluralized fields resulting in various hybridizations which were related to '... media, technologies and performance disciplines.' [26] For Elwes, during this time, 'Artists rejected the mediating role of what they regarded as an obsolete art object.' [27] As a result, the domination and dominion of the previously indefatigable aesthetic practices of both traditional painting and sculpture stagnated. (This had meant a decisive shift in focus from object to the idea). [28] With increasing interest and momentum, artists experimenting with progressive forms had defined themselves and their art by presenting a challenge to mainstream and traditional institutions of art. Established modern art galleries or museums such as the Museum of Modern Art which previously had been more interested in showing/ dealing with traditional historical works and contemporary static forms had faced the prospect of becoming disassociated from the progressive impetus of contemporary art.
<14> Nauman's interest in the live event and audience participation had been a central proponent in his video art. While the interdisciplinary nature and visible unification of making art during the High Modernist period had reflected video's ability to instantaneously capture much that was in the culture a new era of progressive art, much of which had been formed by an ideological fixity of the art that had a sense of community to it, had been shaped by the myriad of live happenings events, and performances which already taken place just prior to Nauman's first works being exhibited in the gallery. [29]
<15> For a sculptor/ filmmaker such as Nauman, video art's most attractive feature had been its instantaneous ability to capture the live event. Its simple configurations could result in unique reflexive questions that would have significant theoretical implications for Nauman who, employing video, reacted to a developing technology that would engender, control and determine his styles and concerns. As such, an artist like Nauman was compelled to express himself through this new art form due to the framework created by the technology itself which instantaneously, would transfer/transform information as 'art' on to video tape. Significantly, Nauman would employ new technology in order to explore psychoanalytical and political conceptions of the subject. Through this he would engage with and speak directly to the viewer in order to establish a more immediate, (or temporal-based) relationship and intimacy between the construction and the viewer. Utilizing a popular communicative form such as video installation art opened the door for new types of relationships to be formed with the viewer in the gallery since conventional work during this time had been criticized for being presented in a way that had blocked or opposed the original intents of artists who had calculated that their work be shown to '...a newly receptive audience.' [30]
<16> By challenging the fixed Modernist frameworks of art museums in this way, Nauman's interiors in the gallery took on characteristics of the cinema, as they became oneiric spaces and places to dream and contemplate. During the 1980s, Nauman would continue to confront gallery environments by creating imaginative spaces that would prefigure much of the video artwork he would do during the 1990s. By 2000/01, his video installations as a result of their sculptural properties would further modify and sculpt the gallery's space through his installing of ceiling-to-floor screens which would need to modify gallery/museum space into an intensive immersive darkened or black box theatrical experience, often with chairs positioned for viewers to sit and watch as though they were viewing an existentialist film in a cinema. [31] In a sense, Nauman's challenge to the fixed viewing conditions of the gallery would have much in common with Dan Graham's mirrored audience participation-based installations. [32] Both artists would examine the role of viewing and of being viewed within institutionalized space and both would form a kind of interactive cinematic (or theatricalized) psychodrama in Modernist and classical gallery structures that would challenge their spatial and logistic (temporal) realms. Yet through Nauman's video work, the fields of sculpture, performance, theatre, live poetry, and dance along with the exploration of the body in space would be situated within the art museum. In this way, his video artworks which would be hard to classify had posed a challenge to the fixed Modernist framework initiated by the Museum of Modern Art's White Cube, paradigm. By contrast to the lack of visible presence of technology in mainstream broadcasting, the video art image as a mechanism for unveiling the processes of performance art documentation would define the central and significant conceptions inherent in much of Bruce Nauman's linguistically and existentially complex art practice.
Some Notes on the problematics of Analogue Video Art in the Gallery
<17> Discussed as existing as the index to the zeitgeist for the High Modernist period- video art as an experimental avant-garde art form had often manifested in the gallery as an indistinct medium that had curiously fitted well as the dominant aesthetic paradigm of the period. [33] Its lack of distinctness had stemmed from the fact that the singular analogue video artwork as a conceptual operation and entity had negated the possibility of a fixed text existing or being fully developed from a set of impermanent and shifting values due to the ever changing system of elements (exemplified by the fleeting nature of elements often to be found in the bulk of the video artwork's compositional imagery) which was commensurable to a wider field of total flow of randomized images not within any definable social period. This indefinability and undetermined quality of the video text had occurred due to a seamless circulation—multitudinous and randomized plurality of fleeting images which would be manifest as a perpetual program within its content, which often appeared to disregard what constituted the real of any previous era. As a result, much of the imagery in the video text often did not appear to posses any fixed or specific meaning as all semblance of reality was effaced by an open-ended text.
<18> Yet as an (often indistinct) experimental avant-garde art form, analogue video art had replaced literature and film within an age in which they were no longer a reliable index to the zeitgeist. [34] During the High-to-late Modernist age, literary texts, were subsumed by the continuous information of new media. While linguistic and semiotic priorities may have paradoxically existed, the very conceptual instruments had been challenged within this new cultural paradigm. The way analogue video art had addressed a new field - a new critical discourse and new era—a new theory is that it would ceaselessly reshuffle:
the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts—such is the logic of postmodernism in general, which finds one of its strongest and most original, authentic forms in the new art of experimental video. [35]
<19> In contrast to most traditional modern aesthetic concepts designed for (analyzing) written texts, that had existed previously, video art had thus needed to be seen as consisting of '...multiple dimensions of the material, the social, and the aesthetic.' [36] Through this, it would have the capacity to represent the (new) zeitgeist from the 1960s, and possess an ability to depersonalize or distance both the subject and object, while drawing in the viewer's gaze towards its total flow of imagery. [37]
<20> As such, while the critical distance of Modernism which had characterized and formed a central part of the cinematic apparatus, and the process of film watching, had become (almost) obsolete in contrast to watching video in general, [38] the experience and presence of video art viewing within galleries by contrast, within the High-to-late Modernist period had extended to this whole or total flow experience. This experience reflected an age without the sacred and the spiritual whilst a materiality which had been made to relate to everything would continue to be ever present. For those viewing analogue video art within the gallery within a period of High Modernism, any connection to realism, and representation had been effaced by video art's impermanence. The reason for this was because video was often a non-fictive form of art, which had contrasted with previous forms of art such as literature or film. It would exist as non-fictive, that is, it would not project fictive time, but rather more often than not, would operate in real time unlike film or the cinema (excluding film in its documentary form).
<21> Significant to this defacing of reality from a past age was that in video viewing memory would often dissolve as few after-images would be left in contrast with fictive (or traditional) cinema. Since the mind would need a certain amount of critical distance to establish meaning it would often be difficult to remember the particularities of what had been seen in the work afterwards. This exclusion of memory is in a sense built into the structure of video art. Unlike in film, or in literature, it was often absent from the experience of watching video art in the gallery. Through this, video art, in a sense, had created its own theory by itself, that is, by being a subject of itself.
<22> Thus while video art's imagery would possess an almost limitless range of possibilities and potentialities, in terms of variety and variability, its length in terms of duration when presented in the gallery had needed to be short by contrast with earlier art forms due to its lack of a conventional structure in which the viewer would expect to structure the experience of viewing (due to it not being fictive, or presenting fictive time). Through this, video art's qualities would anticipate elements of postmodernism within the age of High Modernism. [39]
<23> As such, for viewers, as a result of the multiplicity of unquantifiable and randomized imagery within its compositional and constituent parts within the gallery it would often be hard to extract a singular or fixed interpretation from a video work. In particular, much of this had been due to its being made up of a variety of indexical signs, which are freely exchangeable for any other sign at random. In this process, no single sign had taken precedence over any other sign within the video text. [40] In this way, the imagery within the video text had often pointed to signs in a shifting temporary constellation (or system of ephemeral meaning) in a constant state of shifting. Within this, the video image would often merely present the spectator in the gallery with glimpses of messages. Hence, the problem had been that the compositional imagery of the video text in the video artworks shown in galleries would often appear to eradicate its own signals. This had been made evident by the fact that the signals embedded in the content of the video text had pointed to signs within past or present culture that were not separated from other signs within the text, nor within the wider cultural field for that matter.
<24> In fact, within galleries with the object as subject, video had existed as both object and subject due to its machinery which had depersonalized subject and object alike. As a non-text it would be comprised by a total flow of imagery spewed forth and emitted (from the monitor screen) and attempts in the gallery to analyze any of its single or fragmentary elements in motion would be difficult since much of its imagery would too closely reference elements of other video texts in other video artworks. As a result, the viewer of video time in works such as Nauman's would often be helpless, neutered—mechanically integrated in the gallery. [41] Thus existing not as a traditional text, but as an ephemeral text, viewing video by itself in the way one would view a painted masterpiece from an earlier period had been difficult since video texts would be linked by their commonality of total flow.
<25> Hence, the single analogue video work's imagery embedded in, and extracted from the total flow would homogenize with others in a way which had too much relation with other video and the imagery in previous art. This was because video art had contained traces of elements and ideas/imagery from other works/texts from before its time in addition to images taken from the evolving present. In this way, within the period of High Modernism, the analogue video artwork within the gallery had not referenced the substantiated but rather, randomized moments, which had already existed in some form within a culture that was inherited from the past. The imagery in video art had no longer features ' ... or elements of a form but signs and traces of older forms.' [42] Hence, video art within a period of High Modernism had contained signs, ideas and fragments related to those of past/earlier art and society. As a result, understanding these single-monitor video works in a gallery, had often been tricky because frequently, when one would view a video work by Nauman, Bill Viola, or certain works by Dan Graham for example, one had needed to participate and involve and immerse oneself '...in the total flow of the thing itself.' [43] For viewers in Modernist galleries, such as the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, for example, this would engender a need to watch other video works as well and to make relations between unique artworks contained within specific/solitary discursive paradigms. Through this, the video text had seen the critical distance of Modernism extirpated. As a result, it would be difficult for a singular video artwork to be recognized or thought of as existing as an entirely separate text, that is, as an individual work (or masterpiece) instead of sequential elements within a progressive development in conjunction with other video works and hence, within the High-to-late Modernist age, they were usually viewed with other video artworks in mind.
<26> Yet regardless of being a problematic form of visual art (in terms of its imagery and commodified presence) the gallery's perpetual program of incorporating video art formally during the High Modernist age would legitimize the medium as way of legitimating itself by displaying video art as a form of amusement goods. The governing impetus behind this had stemmed from a need to employ video art as a way of maintaining their status quo— that is, via material media commodification. The pattern of mass reproduction of imagery had been central to the system of the culture industry - within this, pseudo innovation had formed part of a system. Mass reproduction of images/signals had been employed for advertising in the case of exhibitions of video art during the period 1968-1990. A great deal of this had relied upon the art gallery's support and competition with other art galleries in relation to video art. Within the culture industry represented by the art galleries, video would be linked to part of a system of non-culture, to which one might even concede a certain unity of style. [44] Due to its lack of a fixed style the imbrication of video art was sometimes uncomfortable but nevertheless welcomed as a suitable vehicle by art galleries to order and manipulate the cultural and societal paradigms of society. Within the age, galleries legitimized themselves through distraction and desensitization through which business and amusement would be interwoven and intertwined.
<27> Yet in the case of video exhibitions of works such as Nauman's, the artist and viewer would be confused as the exhibition of video within the gallery '… also affords the viewer access to a two-way machine confusing the relationship between the maker and the consumer of at.' [45] The culture industry's apparent innovations would only reflect their methods to reinforce their system of mass reproduction. [46] Through this, audience and society were directed towards the novelty of type (for example, by a label or well-packaged cultural commodity) rather than the contents of the individual work.
<28> In this way, the galleries would jostle for position within the system - spectacular exhibitions of video art containing works such as Nauman's would focus attention on one institution or the other as each attempted to claim primacy. Through this, the culture industry set its own standard via the assigning of values, by which all levels of culture and art would be made into one.
<29> Analogue video art was unique as it had been contained by technology determined within a very specific period in time 1968-90. As a result, the form itself had retained the imprint of this technology and specific mode of production which is inextricably linked to the specific time in which it was produced. Its mechanics which could be seen on monitors or screens in gallery spaces roughly within the 1968-90 period had the capacity to spatially displace present representations of time and structures of exhibition practice which summarized cultural values. Through this, it would create its own specific and unique discourse that would secure it to a particular period of time.
Notes
[1] My use of the term imbrication refers to the museum's gradual incorporation of video art into their institutional paradigms via the acquisition and exhibition of this experimental art form. [^]
[2] While the term video is applied to digital media in this essay video art as an art practice relates specifically to the formative practice of experimental avant-garde artists such as Bruce Nauman who used analogue video to critique institutional structures in the late 1960s and 1970s. Video art thus relates to a specific period within the period of High Modernism (1968-90app.). [^]
[3] My referring to the phrase total flow relates to the continuous open-ended imagery that had been contained within many video artworks which will be examined later in the essay. [^]
[4] My use of these terms reflects my belief that certain video artworks and installations by Nauman often addresses when analysed in a certain way some of the issues and themes discussed within existentialism and in phenomenology. [^]
[5] These would also include the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Nicolas Wilder Gallery, the Musee d' Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and many other galleries within Europe. For a longer list see Coosje Van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman (New York, Rizzoli, 1988), pp. 285-98. [^]
[6] Gaby Hartel, in Christine Van Assche (ed.) Collection New Media Installations (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou), 2006, 210. [^][7] For an example, see Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past(S) (1974) and Two Viewing Rooms (1981). Birgit Pelzer, Mark Francis and Beatriz Colomina, Dan Graham (London and New York: Phaidon, 2001). [^]
[8] The concept of hierarchy as a dogmatic curatorial practice and ideological idée fixe within museums goes back to the first real public art institution the Louvre, and Winckelmann. For further discussion on this refer to Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre, Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth Century Paris (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). [^]
[9] As a form of installation art the video text or composition on the video monitor in gallery spaces would be particularly problematic since the imagery that comprises a single video text: '...is a ceaseless rotation of elements such that they change place at every moment, with the result that no single element can occupy the position of interpretant (or that of primary sign) for any length of time ...' For an in depth explanation of the problematics of the video text see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London, Verso, 1991), pp. 74-94. [^]
[10] Richard Appignanesi, What Do Existentialists Believe? (London: Granta Books, 2006), p. 9. [^]
[11] Refer to Appignanesi in Ibid., p. 8. [^][12] Van Bruggen, p. 116. [^]
[13] For further discussion on this see Michael Rush, Video Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003). [^]
[14] This suggestion or reflection of existential angst is relatable to the emotional and psychological states often portrayed by characters within plays by Samuel Beckett. [^]
[15] Steven Connor, Shifting Ground (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 2000), http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/beckettnauman/ (accessed June 15, 2008), p. 1. [^]
[16] Ibid. [^][17] Ibid., p. 2. [^]
[18] As Rush points out, 'For Nauman, video installation was an extension of his sculpture.' Rush, p. 72. [^]
[19] The 'happenings' events in the 1960s and 1970s would follow much of the immediacy of intuitive performance/activity that would surround video art. Reflected in Allan Kaprow's Assemblages, Environments and Happenings - (largely written in 1959, finished in 1960, and revised in 1961) Kaprow's 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (presented at the Reuben Gallery in New York) had established a schedule for art to spontaneously happen in a gallery in a way that had been analogous to the historical avant-garde Dada acts that previously occurred during the early twentieth century at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Kaprow's event constructed an abstract theatre that had, as its main target and field of enunciation, the art institution and gallery. Like abstract theatre, this scheme had openly encouraged spontaneous audience participation as 'professional actors performed or improvised simple, elementary actions, declaiming sentences or just words as sounds and noises interacted without any pre-arrangement.' See Loredana Parmesani, Art of the Twentieth Century (Milan: Skira editore, 2000), 58-9. [^]
[20] See Charlotte Day, "Absorbing Summer Blend: David Rosetzky," Like, Winter (2000): 37. [^]
[21] See for example, Nauman's video tape Walk with Contrapposto (1969). [^][22] Van Bruggen, p. 18. [^]
[23] At the Tate Modern's Uniliver Exhibition Series (which I attended in June 2000) Bruce Nauman's Good Boy, Bad Boy (1985) and other major video works were positioned in the corridor where visitors often walked straight past. [^]
[24] For instance, the Tate Gallery's Video Show which opened in May of 1976 provides an example of the compromises often adopted by public art institutions. See Julia Knight (ed.) Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art (University of Luton, 1996). [^]
[25] Works such as these in gallery settings, which would be inspired by the Museum of Modern Art's White Cube, would see video's real time presence be manifested as an anachronistic object whose disassociative positioning and dislocation for the spectator would often challenge and even contravene the visitor's preconceived attitudes or perceptions of the art viewing process. The phenomenological circumstance of positioning a temporal-spatial form of art within the White Cube of a mainstream traditional gallery framework can be more fully understood through the operational codes of the art institution. As such, through this, video art's dislocation of time and simultaneous projection in a gallery space would, bring about the need for a new temporality or temporal agenda within the static architectural confines of traditional museum space. For more on this see Margaret Morse, in Doug Hall, and Sally Jo Fifer (eds.), Illuminating Video an Essential Guide to Video Art (New York, Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1990), p. 154. [^]
[26] Catherine Elwes, Video Art, A Guided Tour (London: I.B. Taurus and Co. Ltd., 2005), p. 7. [^][27See Elwes, p. 6. [^]
[28] See Rush, p. 61. [^]
[29] See Johannes Birringer, Media and Performance: Along the Border (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press), 1998, pp. 152-3. [^]
[30] Ibid., p. 6. [^]
[31] See for example, Mapping the Studio II with Color Shift (2001), Flip, Flop, and Flip/Flop (Fat Chance John Cage) 2001. [^][32] Such as his Time Delay Room series of video installations which, beginning from the 1970s would analyse and sculpt time-space relationships within a fixed gallery environment. Refer to B. Pelzer, M. Francis and B. Colomina. [^]
[33] See Jameson, pp. 67-69. Critically many commentators such as Jameson within the approximate period of 1968-1990 had regarded the proliferation of imagery/video art negatively. With so many video artworks displayed in, and propagated by the institutions, new questions had been raised by theoreticians regarding the moral, political and economic effects of technology in culture/society questioning the culture industry's raison d'etre. While the preponderance of video art (which continued to increase from the 1960s) would challenge the institutional structure of the art institutions (and in turn be shaped by them), the overabundance of imagery being projected upon society within the period would assume a primary position of focus. The exploitative nature of the culture industry would embody the corporate greed of a commodity-based culture. Hence, the public's gadget fetish of technology would spark institutional interest in alternative forms of media-based art. [^]
[34] Ibid. [^]
[35] Ibid., p. 96. [^]
[36] Ibid., p. 67. [^][37] Ibid., p. 70. In fact, elements in the video text were often (though not always) almost incomprehensible due to an abandonment of narrative structure and disassociative imagery which had made it vague and difficult to comprehend as a traditional text. For those that would follow this view the creation and display of video art in museums within the period would contribute to the loss of fixed constructs of meaning and singular renderings of culture. [^]
[38] This would extend to commercial video (that is, domestic VHS copies) watched in homes. [^]
[39] As Jameson points out 'Everything can now be a text ... (daily life, the body, political representations), while objects that were formerly works can now be reread as immense ensembles or systems of texts of various kinds, superimposed on each other by way of the various intertextualities, successions of fragments, or, yet again, sheer process (henceforth called textual production or textualization).' Jameson, ibid., p.77. [^]
[40] In relation to these signs, Jameson states that, '... as a topic of the operation ... it is subject to change without notice ... our two signs occupy each other's positions in a bewildering and well-nigh permanent exchange.' Ibid., p. 87. [^]
[41] Jameson quoted in Ibid., p. 74. [^][42] Jameson, Ibid., p. 83. [^]
[43] Jameson, Ibid. [^]
[44] Refer Jameson, Ibid., p. 76. [^]
[45] D. Hall and S. J. Fifer (eds.), p. 15. [^]
[46] As the central or dominant aesthetic paradigm of the High Modernist age, video art's global indexical presence and significance had been the result of the culture industry's marketing of video art as a commodity, which would be harnessed and assimilated into its narrow paradigm to maintain its status quo. This would include receiving revenue for its overall promotion and was due to its 'material' nature which was harnessed as a form of material media commodity. See T. Adorno, The Culture Industry (London, Routledge, 1991), pp. 61-9 [^]
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