Bruce Nauman
'Pay Attention Motherfucker!' the barker sneered as I strolled through the muddy carnival streets of the historical side-shows and critical freak-shows that rolled into town and set up shop just outside the Modern. These sagging tents will be there, along 53rd street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, for the duration of the Nauman retrospective. Before the tents were pitched, I began thinking about Bruce Nauman in ways I've always reserved for Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and more recently, young Quentin Tarantino. Fassbinder too. Perhaps you see what I'm getting at. Nauman constructs scenes out of time and violence, especially in his later work. I'm thinking of his scenes of violence, domination and death (psychological, physical, and otherwise). Nauman, like these directors, stages vignettes launched by a fierce personal obsession that heaves furious manias into a timeless, weightless ether.
Carousel (1988), endlessly drags itself around and around, whining away time and endlessly going nowhere. Violent Incident (1986), continuously rehearses the theme of rising passion and its variations. The decorum of a polite, but banal dinner is suddenly escalated from a gag to rupturing violence in only a glint of time. She, kicking him in the balls, he slapping her in the face. But Nauman retools that sudden flare of unbridled fury into something perpetual. This collapse of flashing violence and endless time, this deathless-savagery is in part why Nauman's art is as frustrating to summarise as his commentators have noted. It defers epilogues on contact. And while I too believe Nauman's creative ether lies beyond our powers of description, comparisons with a few film directors on the subject of time and violence shed some light. White Anger, Red Danger, Yellow Peril, Black Death (1984) scrolls me to the scene in Taxi Driver where Scorsese, playing de Niro's fare, sits in the taxi with the meter running, spying on the silhouettes of his wife and her black lover. Even though Scorsese lets the meter run on, he has composed the scene in order to suspend time, leaving the audience with no other choice but to witness his racist and sexist rants about what a large handgun might do to the female body.
Comparisons of this ilk reveal something of consequence about the way Nauman links time with violence. One Hundred Live and Die (1984) is redolent of the sequence of blinking lights that aggressively crawled toward Armageddon across the Big Board in Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. More literally, Untitled (Suspended Chair, Vertical) (1983) shadows the toggle switch Tarantino slowly fingers in Reservoir Dogs, flipping reality upside-down. Bound to a chair in an airless space, remote in time and place, the rookie policeman is tortured gradually but deliberately - his ear cut off to the sliding dance rhythms of Stealer's Wheel. Learned Helplessness in Rats (1988) indexes the point-blank re-education scene in Clockwork Orange. and so on. As useful as it is to consider Nauman in this company of directors, I am not driving us toward an equation between his sculpture and filmic technique. Instead, I have in mind the crafting of fierce scenes of physical and psychological fury, but in such a way that time seems lazy, and torturously so.
I want to consider Nauman's Clown Torture (1987), with these directors and their construction of unhurried delirium in mind. Clown Torture consists of four separate video tapes concurrently appearing on monitors, and projected on the wall. On the left wall Clown Taking a Shit shows a circus clown sitting on a toilet in a public bathroom, waiting for the obvious to occur. With magazine in hand, he fiddles with the toilet paper. He hangs there in the kind of pedestrian time in which we all waste. He is a fellow witness to the silly madness that fills the rest of the room. The monitors show the clown in two other predicaments: in the first, he is precariously stranded, pressing a goldfish bowl to the ceiling with a broom, and in the second he repeatedly walks through a door on which a bucket of water has been balanced - that old gag. In another video, the clown incessantly rehearses the childhood riddle: 'Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off. Who was left? Repeat. Pete and Repeat were sitting on...' And in one final sequence the clown rants and pleads 'No No No No No No No No...' Nauman weaves his scenes in such a way that while there is an abundance of action, an overload of fussy anxiety, and plenty of clown-manufactured violence, time never moves along. Rather, he ushers us into the condition of the clown; swamping us with dread and suspending us there.
'My definition of anxiety', Nauman once said, 'is the gap between the now and the later...We have no future if we fill this void, we only have sameness.' There is a psychological savagery that accompanies this kind of sameness. In Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, and not surprisingly in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, this sense of being suspended in the fluid of marbled violence has been used with great, and remarkably similar effects. Fretting over (which is stark raving terror if you are a clown) the inevitable fatigue that spells death for the fish, the clown is chained to a level of anxiety and dread he is helpless to overcome. As we gaze into the monitors seeing the clown succumbing to his ridiculous plight, Nauman situates us in between the now and the later. My thoughts float to the level of absurdity that defines the clown's predicament; I reason with myself that for this mean-spirited foolishness to end, he and his fish must be resigned to their fate, to the fact that they cannot turn the tide of events. Inevitably a pale boredom sets in and my attention drifts until it is called back by the clown's scream, and the watery crash. My eyes bolt back to the screen but never to see more than a drenched clown and the shards of glass.
Like the clown, I begin the vigil from the top, stranded once more between now and later. Similarly, Pete and Repeat, the moronic riddle whose only answer condemns the clown to an endless loop, is itself a life sentence. He is just as helpless to effect his own escape from the awful logic of the conundrum. Occasionally the final video breaches the ongoing sequences, in effect extracting the clown from all this ceaseless folly. From another place that affords him a certain detachment, he looks back on himself and on the rest of us, suspended in Nauman's unforgiving sameness. Compassion unexpectedly grips the clown as he witnesses our awful plight, and he denies what he sees: 'No No No No No No No No...'
