Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around Bruce Nauman

Link to video: Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman’s work has been some of the most influential in my development as an artist. As a conceptual artist, he has no specific style, and works in any medium. In the 60s he worked primarily in performance and video, combining the two through documentation of his performances, while working with attributes specific to the medium of film or video. His video explorations of three-dimensional space are exemplified in Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, in which he walks extremely slowly, with exaggerated hip motions, heel-to-toe around a square taped onto his studio floor. For long periods of time he is outside of the frame, forcing the viewer to think about video as a frame, and the world outside of that. He has placed a mirror against the wall at the back of his studio, so that you can see some of his motions when he is not in the shot himself. However, the mirror is very small, and you can only see a small portion of the performance in it.

For one of my classes this quarter we were required to re perform a piece. In addition to the performance, I decided to replicate Nauman’s video. As mentioned before, Nauman has created a great variety of work, and WWU’s campus happens to have one of his sculptures, Stadium Piece. I felt it would be appropriate to incorporate this piece in my tribute to his work. The piece also interacts with space in a similar way to his video. It takes something we see in daily life (stairs/walking) and distorts it, exaggerating the line and angles usually associated with it. By walking up and down the stairs, your view of the staircase is obscured, and in forcing the visitor to go up, then down, then up and down again to reach the other side, he forces an exaggerated walk and an extended length of time to experience the piece.

My performance was in combination with two other people, so we decided to walk on and around the piece. By walking on it, as already mentioned, the performer was obscured from the camera’s view, and their travel pointless. As for myself, I walked around the base, and through the larger of the openings in its side. I was only visible to the camera for half the time, because the rest I was either behind the sculpture, or underneath it. The camera was also set up at a slight angle, to obscure even more of our movements. The building in the background works similarly to Nauman’s mirror, in that, it allows the viewer to see glimpses of our movements that would otherwise be hidden from the camera.