Bruce Nauman

Experimental short by Bruce Nauman.

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, Bouncing Balls is one of Nauman's "Slo-Mo" films which are shot with an industrial high speed camera.

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 order to grasp the full effect of the installation «Anthro/Socio,» the space has to be entered. The calls heard from different directions irritate as much as the contradictory demands, aimed at the simplest of bodily needs and questioning them at the same time. The repetition of the alarming singsong, and multiple video shots of the singer, also create a disturbing moment. In «Anthro/ Socio,» not only because of the all-encompassing sensual experience does the viewer become part of the artwork; the installation also encourages viewers to give thought to the inherent qualities of subjects and objects, and to human beings in society.

“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 on new meaning and creates tension and anxiety for the viewer.” The New Museum Annual Report, 1988

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.

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.

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.

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 Nauman’s mouth.

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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.

4 Artists: Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenberg acts as a collective portrait of creators linked only by their stated intention of expressing ideas through art. Unconnected to traditional concepts of beauty, storytelling or pictorial representation, the artists discuss the context of their art and how their work and the public's perception of it have changed over time. This film offers the rare opportunity to see a large body of work in their studios.—Michael Blackwood Productions

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 in close up. The heavy breathing of their exertions is audible. The tight close-ups of the limbs lend the moving body parts an almost abstract, mechanical character.

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 often has to rely upon testimony from witnesses or photographs that show only portions of any given performance. The seven works were performed for seven hours each, over the course of seven consecutive days, November 9 –15, 2005 at the Guggenheim Museum, in New York City. Seven Easy Pieces examines the possibilities of representing and preserving an art form that is, by nature, ephemeral.

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. Maybe we are to see the work as a metaphor for making a work of art, since Nauman has chosen to film it for display in a museum. One of the key elements of the video is Nauman’s decision to show us the entire process. He does not leave out the long digging scenes or edit the piece down to its most essential components.

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 the video progresses. Nauman explores the ways in which anger can be provoked by others and questions the way we can react to them. Much like many of his other artworks, he employs the use of humour and exaggeration to explore serious and even dangerous topics - he produced this work as a result of his frustration with futile acts of violence in ordinary life. He explains, “The viewer is presented with a hypnotic repetition of pointlessly cruel and destructive violence which is both seductive and alienating.”

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 camera's view at times, only the sounds of the notes and footsteps are heard. Sound and image are out of sync, a situation noticeable only at the end of the film when the sound stops but Nauman continues to pace and play. [Overview Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix]

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 were the first to use performers other than himself and to utilize an optical effect. (His earlier videos all employ a fixed camera and a single long take.) "We used two cameras and changed locations from time to time," recalled Nauman in a 1979 interview. "What I was investigating at that time was how to examine a purely mental activity as opposed to a purely physical situation which might incur some mental activity." -- EAI

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, Nauman has recounted the highly charged atmosphere of the shooting session: "He was lying on his back and after about fifteen minutes he started choking and coughing. He sat up and said, 'I did it too fast and scared myself.' He didn't want to do it again, but did it anyway. At another time we were watching his hand through the camera and it was behaving very strangely. We asked him about it later and he said that he was afraid to move his hand because he thought he might lose his molecules." -- EAI

HD video installation (color, stereo sound), continuous play, two HD video sources, two HD video projectors, four speakers

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.