# The Infinite Body: The Daily Performativity in Bruce Nauman ![[Pasted image 20231006182055.png]] After the major lockdown, the coalition of personal and public spaces rapidly entered our lives as a “New Normal”. In the middle of lockdown, personal spaces, such as a living room or bedroom, are intentionally divided into working or social spaces based on the schedule. The screen displays a place, but it is placed inside of personal surroundings. It is far different from how many sci-fi films and novels imagined it as an expanded human body or decentred space. Rather, this newly developing environment gently invades daily life in a fixed place and atomises the individual body with radical capitalism by doubling up individuality in space and on the screen. The infinite inversion between two spaces is discussed and explored by many moving image artists in relation to real-time televisual technology. They are concerned with the synchronisation of public and personal time and how it reconnects spaces as a new identity. When television spread to households, Bruce Nauman immediately saw the advantage of the “real-time” televisual technology to show how it doubles reference both in the filming place and on the television, which can invade individuals and expose new subjectivity in the postmodern era. In his early works, Audio-Video Underground Chamber (1972-74), he used an instant feedback device that allowed him to create an infinite loop video between the original reference and mediated image on the screen. He recorded real-time footage of a fully sealed concrete chamber buried eight feet underground and positioned it in the gallery. In this way, the viewer is aware of eight feet under, recreated space in the frame with a new environment, and invisible negative space between both spaces underneath and in the gallery. The general meaning of the negative space is a space between two figures that shows the distinct outline of two or multiple forms. However, for Nauman, it also has the role of a between that can open the depth and determine scale and location and be removed after it has done its job, which can be identified as the artist’s role in aesthetic practice. Nauman attempted further expansion in his later work by inverting three different spaces into a solid form: the artist’s studio, negative space, and architectural space. In this series of works, he sometimes creates his own architecture, as in Double Steel Cage Piece (1974), or integrates exhibition and video by making a portal to his studio or presenting his body as a measurement in WALKS IN WALKS OUT (2015). Especially MAPPING THE STUDIO II with colour shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001) displayed in the multiplied video screens with different colours and covered all four walls of the gallery to surround the viewer. This work not only physically violates the boundaries of the video frame but also generates an infinite expansion of the studio’s time and space in the gallery. In the repeating visually different videos, he became both an invisible reference for artwork (studio) and a behind displayed artwork (projection). His doubling figure pushes us to see negative space, a far richer and more nuanced gap between two identical spaces in his subjectivity hovers. Thereby, it generates new boundaries between two spaces where the artist’s invisible figure is approximated to the negative space in the infinite expansion of the loop.  MAPPING THE STUDIO II subverts the two spaces of studio and exhibition space in the cinematic sense. As Lumiére’s train trespassed the traditional frame into the theatre, his work also transformed the contacting borders of the filmed space and filming place.[1] For Nauman, artwork faces exhibition space either absorb the architecture into the piece or build his own architecture”[2] He explains in the interview with Michael Auping that his first idea was letting the animals create a space, the mice and the cat, make the map of his studio.[3] However, depicting the artist’s empty studio has been a long tradition in fine art as a self-portrait, with a number of varieties within this genre,[4] including occupied space, devoid of human presence, or depiction of personal possessions. The very absence of the artist in the studio painting posits different values on identity and autonomy than one in which the artist depicts himself directly. In this process, the artist’s body becomes an invisible negative structure that connects both studio spaces and the gallery, simultaneously emptying between the two. The artist is an intimate connection between two spaces, the studio and the displayed space; simultaneously, the studio in the displayed space is alive as replacing its own author.[5]  Although his work is a prerecorded video, the studio is alive in the gallery. With animals and artists’ traces, the studio on the screen becomes a living habitat for invisible subjects. At the same time, it transforms into space as “the locus of a series of performative or discursive events.”[6] Nauman was concerned with the role of the artist. In an interview, Nauman explains his moral or ethical position in the artwork as “How do you append your life being an artist?”[7] and how his artworks point to what an artist is in different directions. He placed the artist’s studio as a portrait of himself in the gallery and conjugated the framed artist’s studio into the gallery’s architectural space, and by presenting the empty studio as a form of self-portraiture, he questions identity and subjectivity. Nauman does not intend his architectural installations to be unique art objects, nor does he consider them bound to a particular site. Instead, they are approximations of a concept. His installations can’t be reinstalled for the simple reason that the first installation is not the original but only the first instantiation of the work.  In this sense, this studio is not only doubling the author in the traditional sense but alive creates, calling the artist into the virtual and potential place as a doubled present. He interrupts the expansion of the space and traps it within his own body by making himself a rule. This reflective video delivers not only the consideration of the performance and artist’s body but interrupts the continuous expansion of doubling through the sudden trespass of the artist’s body, which also creates a new measurement of imagery space. Nauman’s work cannot be understood only within one genre, as human subjectivity can be identified in various ways depending on the contexts, situations, and self-identification. His video works approach the installation of space as the relationship between the body and two different spaces, which creates a new relationship between the recorded space and the surroundings as if building the architecture. In the post-pandemic era, our bodies are omnivorous in the physical and virtual sense. The individual “home” does not belong behind the scenes but is placed in front to be connected to the outside, somewhere else. Nauman’s work shows a new possibility of networking visual and behavioural bodies and the role of the artist, further, humans as a connector between spaces. What are the particular connections we create in infinitely connecting screens and videos in real space? It is not only meant to explain a space to live and do activities but also a perceptual space that is gathered shattered visibilities in one space. [1]: Look further about the Lumiere’s cinematic transformation of the frame in자크 오몽 eyes [2]: 레퍼런스 필요“When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you want to have a show, you didn’t have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb the architecture into the piece or build you own architecture” [3]: Bruce Nauman and Michael Auping, ‘Bruce Nauman Interview, 2001’, in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews, ed. by Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2003), p. 398. [4]: Rachel Esner, ‘Presence in Absence: The Empty Studio as Self-Portrait’, Zeitschrift Für Ästhetik Und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 56.2 (2011), 241–62. [5]: Rachel Esner, ‘Forms and Functions of the Studio from the Twentieth Century to Today’, in Hiding Making, Showing Creation: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, ed. by Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), p. 132. [6]: Eric De Bruyn, ‘The Empty Studio: Bruce Nauman’s Studio Films’, in Hiding Making, Showing Creation: The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, ed. by Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, and Ann-Sophie Lehmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 194. [7]: Nauman, B. and Kraynak, J. (2003) Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words: Writings and Interviews. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, p. 376. ## Note ## Related Notes ```dataview LIST FROM [[202310061820]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## References