I am highly interested in Nauman’s work because it inspires my work for this project. Particularly looking at his videography and films, he has continued to work with perspectives. He explores perspectives and how the audience will respond to the perspective that we are presented with, challenging the viewer. For example, In Going Around the Corner Piece (1970) is an installation that challenged the viewer in motion.

Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. 

Nauman began working in film with Robert Nelson and William Allen while teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. He produced his first videotapes in 1968, describing the transition from film to video thus: “With the films I would work over an idea until there was something that I wanted to do, then I would rent the equipment for a day or two. So I was more likely to have a specific idea of what I wanted to do. With the videotapes, I had the equipment in the studio for almost a year; I could make test tapes and look at them, watch myself on the monitor or have somebody else there to help. Lots of times I would do a whole performance or tape a whole hour and then change it. I don’t think I would ever edit but I would redo the whole thing if I didn’t like it.” Using his body to explore the limits of everday situations, Nauman explored video as a theatrical stage and a surveillance device within an installation context, influenced by the experimental work of Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass. 

Throughout his career, Nauman has returned to the kind of performance art in which the performer suffers. The video installation Clown Torture (1987), one of his few truly emblematic works, gives us a costumed and face-painted figure being forced to repeat a series of phrases and actions to the point when physical pain sets in. Sometimes, we’re the ones made to suffer: Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) (1988), an installation featuring concurrently playing videos of a rat in a plexiglass maze and an amateur rock drummer joylessly hammering out a beat, is something of an endurance test. The crazed, repetitious drumming echoes through PS1’s galleries, inducing a pronounced sensation of anxiety. 

Employing a tremendous range of materials and working methods, he reveals how mutable experiences of time, space, movement, and language provide an unstable foundation for understanding our place in the world. For Nauman, both making and looking at art involve “doing things that you don’t particularly want to do, putting yourself in unfamiliar situations, following resistances to find out why you’re resisting.” At a time when the notion of truth feels increasingly under attack, his work compels viewers to relinquish the safety of the familiar, keeping us alert, ever vigilant, and wary of being seduced by easy answers.

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