Monday, March 8, 2010

Bruce Nauman

Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001)
"The piece consists of seven large-scale DVD projections of footage shot at night in the artist’s studio in Galisteo, New Mexico. The piece is accompanied by multiple audio tracks. Seven wheeled chairs that can be pulled up in front of individual projections heighten the installation’s immediacy. Nauman recorded the tapes, which are five hours and 45 minutes long, in segments of about an hour over the summer of 2000, when his studio was temporarily infested with mice.

The results are mesmerizing. The infra-red photography is a murky grey-green, but its painterly surface pulses and shimmers. In stationary, low-angle shots moths skid through the air, tracing ethereal trajectories; a lizard hangs on the screen door; a black cat without a tail wanders through, peers out into the night-time landscape, and then attempts to stalk the mice. At certain thrilling moments glowing feline or rodent eyes pierce the pea-soup gloom like car headlights. Nauman himself makes brief, somewhat smeary appearances.

Of the installation’s myriad and mysterious effects one of the strangest is that it makes the viewer - who is dwarfed by the projected images - feel like a stand-in for the artist and for the other creatures that make use of the space. This underlines the fertile uncertainty of Nauman’s investigative brand of art-making; it also highlights the palpable sense of exhilaration and unease in which cat, mice, objects and artist all seem to share."


image and text from http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/bruce_nauman/


This work has inspired me for this SYSTEMS10 project, looking at a space through another device, watching 'something'.

The viewer somehow becomes part of my project, using the devices that are in use to 'make' the work work. ...

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