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BODY, THE GAZE, AND ABSTRACTION: FROM SAMUEL
BECKETT TO BRUCE NAUMAN
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LLEWELLYN BROWN
ABSTRACT
Artist Bruce Nauman’s video “Beckett Walk” is directly inspired by Samuel
Beckett’s works such as Watt and Molloy, showing shared preoccupations.
Watt’s walk follows abstract coordinates, testifying to the absence of a unified
bodily image. In Nauman’s walk, the body as subjectivity persists through
geometrical forms. The use of the video undercuts the impression of surveillance,
since the spectator is immobile, by contrast with the performer, whose
movements escape his limited gaze. The walk as performance subordinates
the specular image to the force that drives the pacing, and reveals the creation
to be addressed to the spectator as other.
Described as one of the greatest contemporary American artists,’ Bruce
Nauman (b. 1941) read Beckett in the sixties,” and took inspiration from him,
raising the question as to what may be involved in this creative encounter.
One creation is particularly worthy of attention in this respect: “Slow Angle
Walk (Beckett Walk)” (1968), a one-hour monochrome video that explicitly
pays tribute to Beckett’s writings. This work belongs to his “Studio Films, a
series of filmed performance pieces Nauman made in 1967-68, and which
have since attained the status of signature works."
A comparison will enable us to see the way the two artists are indeed
concerned by common preoccupations, particularly in their relation to
abstraction and the body. Steven Connor underscores that both “Beckett and
Nauman have found a compulsion in the act of walking.” Indeed, Beckett
1 Gérard Wajcman: Mother Fuckers, Elucidation 3 (2002), 13.
Coosje van Bruggen: Bruce Nauman, New York, Rizzoli, First Edition edition, 1988, 18.
3 https://vimeopro.com/user3539702/ubuweb/video/121813096, (accessed 22 October 2017).
Title henceforth abbreviated as Beckett Walk.
Janet Kraynak: Bruce Nauman’s Words, in Janet Kraynak (ed.): Please pay attention please:
Bruce Nauman’s Words, Cambridge [Mass.], MIT, 2003, 14.
Steven Connor: Shifting Ground, http://stevenconnor.com/beckettnauman.html, (accessed
22 October 2017). English version of an essay published in German as Auf schwankendem
Boden, in the catalogue of the exhibition Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman (Vienna, Kunsthalle
Wien, 2000), 80-87.
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