Stamping in the studio, like a number of Bruce Nauman's works, makes a metaphorical and mathematical proposition which places the artist and the viewers at the center of concentric circles, spirals which project the conceptual space well beyond the room. These circular forms are represented by his stamping on the floor of the studio, filmed upside down. The body and the noise of his footsteps, increasingly desynchronized with the movement, cross the shot, filling and emptying it lick a vibrant, metallic trace of his passage in this hall of sound.
The fixed nature of the image focuses even more on this constant movement, concentrating the viewers' energy and attention on a stretched space and time, creating within this immobility a real sensation of vertigo. The tiniest changes in the rhythm create a strange musicality: accelerations, moments of breathlessness, pauses and descrescendo. These different tempos, played by the body like a primitive instrument, set whirling an imaginary trajectory of infinite variations.

Stéphanie Moisdon