It is pretty obvious, these days, for any museum visitor to be expected to actively approach the objects on view therein – to look at them, examine them, walk around them, and perhaps even touch them. In a word, the visitor usually masters the “art observation code”. However, there are artworks which capsize certainties and destabilize the spectator, but in a constructive way. Art must strike the visitor like a blow to the nape of the neck, Bruce Nauman declared one day, in such a way that there is an intensity which grabs the onlooker's whole being – body and mind alike. And the fact is that even those who are forever visiting museums are nowadays perplexed when they suddenly find themselves standing in front of a simple white room which they can absolutely not go into. What are they supposed to do with it? Going Around the Corner Piece is a closed rectangle, twice as long as it is high. At the very top of the four white walls hang four cameras, like vultures keeping an eye on their prey. And we, visitors, are precisely that fresh-fleshed prey. Once digested (our -and-white image seen from behind), the prey ends up in front of us on the floor, at the end of the wall; you can see it on four monitors. Beckett, whom Nauman held in high esteem, described the (camera's) eye with its aggressive stare as the “Eye of Prey”. In so doing, he wanted to express the not only unavoidable but also destructive character of (self-)observation. When visitors catch a fleeting glimpse of this experimental installation, they are seized by a slight but unmistakable sense of disquiet – a malaise which Beckett calls the “Agony of Perceivedness” in his film Film (1964). For even if the austere spatial constellation constructed by Nauman, with the help of cameras, monitors and white walls, were as passive as it were aggressive, it would still require the participation of the person viewing it. In spite of its slightly menacing look, the work is seductive and the visitor assumes his actor's role, drawn to it as if by magic. Defence may well be a powerful driving force in man, but curiosity is another such force and every bit as strong. And curiosity is as powerful as the need to cavort in front of a mirror or a camera – which, with Nauman, is readily put on the same level as in his closed-circuit works. The artist is interested in models of human behaviour and is well aware of the fascination that everyone feels in front of their reflected “self”. He accordingly draws the onlooker into his work like a painter, while at the same time hugely limiting his possibilities of action. By the very construction of the installation, the visitor-cum-investigator is guided by the artist who in fact leaves him no other choice than that of following the track he has traced for him along the walls. From then on, the camera – that “Eye of Prey”– pursues him, and he is forever seeing himself from behind going round the next corner. The visitor thus feels directly, in his own skin, what it is to be an artist: the disturbing feeling of being barred from his usual experience of self, and chasing after himself without any hope of being able to catch up with himself. This amazingly simple immediacy is an unpleasant experience, and it is definitely not coincidental if it recalls Beckett's 1964 Film. In it we see character O (Buster Keaton from the rear) being closely watched for 22 minutes by the eye of a camera (E), which Keaton eventually looks straight in the eye at the very last reverse shot, and, in that gesture, shows that he is exactly the same as that eye. Man is both hunter and hunted by his own self: a vicious circle. As in Nauman's work, what is involved here are themes such as the futile flight from self, and the quest for self – themes which were already sketched in 19th-century novels about the doppelgänger (the ghostly double or other self) as a loss of existential reference. In Going Around the Corner Piece, Bruce Nauman casts the viewer in a role which he himself played in his early pieces about body and movement (pieces like Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-68; Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), 1968). In these works, he put life into the sculptural space by means of original and almost ritual bodily motor functions. At the time, he no longer regarded art as a finished product but as a process of self-creation. Like a series of sequential movements which do indeed evaporate on the surface of the moment in which they are made, but which, by the continual repetition thereof, become part and parcel of the physical, bodily memory, as with dancers. Nauman was obviously making reference to those works as if to dance studies, which undoubtedly had something to do with his friendship with the choreographers Meredith Monk and Merce Cunningham. But his works are also studies of human empathy: Nauman observes how his own physical tension is transmitted to the viewer in the form of a muscular tension. Ideally, as he used to say in that period, he would like the endless sequence of those movements to be a continuous loop. Where content is concerned, the loop does indeed signify the freeze frame and time frozen, but this does not necessarily conjure up boredom: the body's monotonous and endless toing and froing in a limited range of movement also relaxes the mind and opens up the inner stage. Nauman has observed that, during their passage through the works belonging to the “corridors” series, to which this “corner piece” belongs, many things pass through people's minds. The outer space of the “corner piece”, which is strictly geometric, also leads into the visitor's labyrinthine self. And this is not something awful and hopeless because, as Jorge Luis Borges put it, “In a labyrinth, you don't get lost / In a labyrinth you find yourself.”

Gaby Hartel

Translated by Simon Pleasance