A fixed, angled camera shows Bruce Nauman repeating for about an hour a laborious series of exercises to move from one end of his studio to the other.

At the beginning of the action, Bruce Nauman is at the far end of the room, his hands tied behind his back. He throws one of his legs forward at right angles, then turns his body by 45° and suddenly falls back onto that leg, making a noise and lifting the other leg behind him, with his body leaning forwards like a pendulum. He then repeats the same sequence. three steps to the right and then three steps to the left, before finally moving only two steps forward. As he advances towards the camera, and therefore towards the spectator, it becomes increasingly difficult to see everything that he does. The fixed camera creates a frame which defines the scene shown. Thus, his body is shown in a fragmented, dissociated way. The head is often cut out, or we only see a foot or a leg. At certain moments, Bruce Nauman moves totally out of shot and only the noise of his footsteps indicate his presence. This way of treating his body with detachment through fragmentation and moving out of shot is reinforced by the perceptive confusion and the impression of weightlessness produced by the inverted space. In Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), the spectators are confronted by a feeling of alienation which they experience while watching the artist in the doubly enclosed space of the screen and his studio.

These actions were predetermined in an extremely rigorous and detailed way in two drawings from 1968-69 which served as studies. Bruce Nauman spent a long time rehearsing his exercises before doing them in front of the camera. The recording was made in one hour, without any interruption in the shot or the action. The rigour of the method does not exclude chance, however. Thus, there is a certain tension created when he loses his balance and particularly when he falls. Bruce Nauman executes his movements with such concentration and conviction that the result is as powerful as it is absurd.

Some of his intuitions were reinforced by reading Samuel Beckett. The behaviour of Beckett's characters is often highly obsessive. Bruce Nauman is particularly interested in the character Molloy, who moves pebbles from one pocket of his coat to the other without mixing them. For Bruce Nauman, this laborious, pointless and absurd exercise is nevertheless a human activity worthy of careful examination. Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) was inspired by a description by Samuel Beckett in which the character moves from one home to another. The movements of the body resemble exercises - bend, turn, lift one leg - repeated unendingly. Progress, even by a metre, involves a tiresome and complicated process.

Like Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman uses banal everyday movements in such a raw way that they regain the interest and power which they had lost through habit.

Cristina Ricupero