This first video installation produced by Bruce Nauman is a sequel to the mono tapes which Nauman made in the 1960s and 1970s. To start with, he directed himself, before making us actors. The idea he was pursuing was to carry out, in front of the camera, a series of simple actions connecting the body, space and video camera dynamics. These simple actions, like bumping his body against the corner of a room, walking round the studio and playing one and the same chord on a violin, all gestures repeated loop-like in real time, were aimed at bringing out the slight variations occurring during repeats of the action, and its growing complexity in time. At that time, Nauman was interested in John Cage's ideas about music and Merce Cunningham's about body movement, the tendency being to think about art in terms of its specific materiality. As such, this line of thinking stood apart from the Expressionism that was common currency in the earlier generations of artists, in which Martha Graham, for example, proved herself to be the exegete. Composers of his day (Philip Glass, Steve Reich) worked like he did on repetitive structures, relations between time and space imagined in a very concrete way, and the relationship to the spectator, likewise seen in very concrete terms in an inter-relation associated with issues of structure and spatialization. In the pieces made with neons which also came before Good Boy, Bad Boy, Nauman had explored the interplay of language in the manner of Marcel Duchamp, and had even explored the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories on the same subject. Armed with all these concepts, and a desire to further explore the television medium, Nauman duly broached the creation of this video installation in 1985. It would be created for the Krefeld Museum, which is in two houses built by that leading modernist architect, Mies Van der Rohe, whose work gravitates around concerns between the appropriateness of form and function. The work devised by Nauman gets to grips with similar issues, invariably related to Wittgensteinian preoccupations. Nauman is interested in the unidirectional relation of the television message. He fi lms two actors who are presented side by side on two monitors. One is a black man, a theatre actor, wearing a white shirt, the other a white woman wearing a dark green dress, who he has chosen from the world of television commercials and soap operas. The man repeats the hundred sentences written by Nauman, as does the woman, too, but the woman takes more time over her recitation, so the screen on which the man appears is black while she finishes. The man seems more at ease with reading the lines than the woman. The actor gesticulates more and the framing changes slightly to show the gestures of his arms. The first sequence is performed in a very neutral way, without any particular inflexion of tone or voice, and without any facial expression. For the other sequences, a different tone is adopted for each sentence. This tone becomes more and more aggressive and even violent as the tape progresses. The same words thus take on a more complex dimension, where affect is increasingly in evidence. The differences in pronunciation and in the intensity of the acting come increasingly to the fore from one take to the next. The black man's acting juxtaposed with that of the white woman echoes issues to do with differences in gender and race. The formal exercise serves as an exploration of matters of identity as well. The statements are simple assertions, such as, “I am a good boy, I am a bad boy.” They segue into other seemingly contradictory terms, like pleasure and boredom, love and hate, eating and drinking, defecating and urinating, working and having fun, virtue and evil, and so on. Pronouns vary from one sentence to the next, making each sentence gravitate from a subjective assertion (I) to an altercation of the other (you), from the collective assertion (we) to the altercation of a group (you). The closeness of the shots depends on the sentences and the type of address in question. The spectator faces an interlocutor speaking in the first person, as much as he is speaking directly to him (the spectator), describing him as this or that depending on the sentences, or alternatively he calls him to bear witness as part of a group where the narrator is by turns included and excluded. The statements made combine with a quality of pronunciation which lends too much meaning to the language used. In them, “television” sheds its one-dimensional image, and the authority of message and medium is challenged. The ambiguity and multiple meanings of the language are highlighted in the tension that is generated by the installation.

Chantal Pontbriand

Translated by Simon Pleasance