Recent Faculty Member Sowon Kwon | 4Columns Article

In 4Columns Sowon Kwon writes about Bruce Nauman’s exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum.

Here is an excerpt:

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In 1968, the artist Bruce Nauman constructed a long and narrow (twenty feet by twenty inch) corridor in a borrowed Long Island studio. He then videoed himself walking inside it, while approximating and animating the contrapposto pose. Developed in classical Greek sculpture, contrapposto describes a torqueing of the human figure such that the axis of the shoulders contrasts with those of the hips, depicting a naturalistic distribution of weight in an idealized body. In Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, a new suite of installations currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Nauman revisits this seminal performance and video, Walk with Contrapposto, in digital media.

Five HD video projections make up the installation in the main room. They show multiple moving images of the elder Nauman, his head cropped at the eyeline or jaw, and wearing a quotidian white T-shirt and blue jeans, repeatedly walking, pivoting, and turning as he did forty-eight years ago. The videos run concurrently on two facing walls—two on one, three on the other—in a continuous loop.

The framing of each repeating figure of the artist is stitched side to side and stacked in two rows to fill a long expanse, like a monumental processional frieze in video form. On the top row, a digital filter has inverted the footage to a different color palette, one resembling photographic negatives, and the motion is reversed so that the figures seem to walk backward. The camera also moves (unlike the fixed perspective in the original WWC), keeping pace with Nauman so that even as he walks, he remains central within the frame. The horizon line may shift, but the scale of the figure remains constant.

While Nauman’s figure is multiple and the walk repetitive, each frame is also discrete, with variations in movement. You might catch one figure take a longer pause than the others as if awaiting a cue; another drops his arms or momentarily disappears at a point of edit, or briefly walks off screen. Some frames are bisected, with one layer moving out of sync with the other, sometimes so much so that legs move disconcertingly in the opposite direction of the torso. In the two larger studies, the rows are further subdivided into fourteen strata. The fragmentation and disjunction this creates is jarring at first, then mesmerizing, as the fractured body mis-registers, lags, then catches up to itself briefly, abuts itself partially, then again falls in and out of alignment, again and again, from head to toe. The corresponding audio, an ambient rumbling with cavernous echoes, punctuated by tinny swishes and regular thuds, is made up of the shuffling of feet or incidental studio noise, which has undergone comparable digital manipulation in sound editing.”

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