In this video, Bruce Nauman walks slowly, swinging his body in an exaggerated manner with his hands tied behind his neck and his elbows pointing forward. He advances towards the camera and then moves awa y from it along a narrow corridor. His body is twisted so that his hips, his shoulders and his head turn in different directions. Every time he puts one foot in front of or behind the other, he throws all his weight onto one of his hips. His exaggerated swaying movements are limited by the narrowness of the corridor.

Bruce Nauman did the same walk in the video Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square and stipulated that it should be used in a performance in 1968. The artist explained his method to Willoughby Sharp: "The camera was placed so that the walls came in at either side of the screen. You coudn't see the rest of the studio, and my head was cut off most of the time/ The light was shining down the length of the corridor and made shadows on the walls at each side of me" [1].The architectural arrangement thus defines the limits of the scene shown and plays on the exclusion of the image from the field of view, its fragmentation and distancing in relation to the spectator.

Unlike in his previous films and videos, here the camera is placed high up, looking down into the long corridor. This arrangement suggests that its function is no longer limited to simple recording of banal activities in the studio, but represents a surveillance system. In the early 1970s, surveillance became a major theme in Bruce Nauman's work. His dance exercises were based on day-to-day activities such as walking, but he called into question their supposed normality by breaking them down into disturbed, isolated movements.

Walk with Contrapposto anticipated the constrictive nature of the spaces in the artist's new installations. These gestures evoke those of a prisoner with his hands behind his head while be moves around within the narrow, claustrophobic confinement of the corridor. Walk with Contrapposto also functions as a metaphorical proposal which places the artist at the centre of his creative process, a labyrinth where he struggles to gain control of a situation in which he nevertheless sometimes gets lost.

Bruce Nauman likes things which resist, which do not function properly or which are difficult to understand. He often puts himself into uncomfortable, unknown situations to understand what makes him resist. He has always been interested in the effects that physical situations can produce in human beings, such as the feeling of discomfort caused by a compressed space. The architecture is a source of resistance to the human body, imposing certain postures on it, indicating where it should go and constricting it through its rigidity.

The corridor, used in this tape as part of the decor, would become a central theme in a certain number of Bruce Nauman's installations in the 1970s and 1980s. This marked a real turning-point in his activities. The distinctions between performance, film or video and his sculptural installations disappeared as Bruce Nauman began to set up installations necessarily involving the spectator's participation to be activated. These installations have to be experienced in real life. This also marked a transition between isolated, solitary work in the private space of the studio, where the artist was simultaneously the subject and object of his investigations, and public situations which force the spectator to become involved and experience certain situations physically and psychologically.

Cristina Ricupero

[1] Bruce Nauman quoted by Willoughby Sharp in "Nauman Interview", Arts Magazine, New York, March 1970)