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where “[p]roperly administered rewards and punishments in a comparatively
controlled environment [...] could achieve the same results with men and
women.””?
Nauman executes his movements following the geometrical lines on the
floor of his studio, in a space that assumes an abstract appearance owing to
the camera being turned counter-clockwise at a 90° angle, partially voiding
the image of its referential capacity. Three-dimensional space is flattened
out: a black line around the base of the wall divides the image into roughly
1:3 proportions between wall and floor, with a white diagonal line across the
floor. Nauman’s movements are thus situated in relation to an abstract grid,
recalling Watt’s cardinal directions.
Nauman’s construction shows how such abstraction only exists as a
function of subjective and bodily reality. Indeed, Gérard Wajcman points out
that geometrical abstraction of the early 20" century was not only a means of
liberation from figurative painting, but that painters such as Kazimir Malevich
and Piet Mondrian sought out “the paths of an emancipation from pictorial
geometry with regards to geometry itself, either by tracing squares that were
not really square, or by breaking straight lines.”*° Malevich’s Black Square
(1915) is a prime example, “marred” by its uneven edges traced freehand, so
that it is only “grossly a square, a square from afar.”*!
Indeed, in Nauman’s video, pointedly obeying the dictates of an abstract
geometrical structure means producing a surplus: the part of human
existence that remains excluded from strict conformity to commands.
Wajcman notes that geometry “is not pure mathematics,”” “number devoid
of meaning”; rather, “it is numbers in image” referring, in the final analysis,
to the representation of the human body. Hubert Damisch states that
perspective painting cannot be reduced to geometry, since it is “given to be
seen, in the same way as any other object of the visible world.”# There is thus
a split between geometry as abstract, and its embodiment in the image or any
work of creation, so that subjectivity inevitably leaves a “blot”** on the object,
to use Beckett’s own words.
See Storr: An Incantation for Our Time, 71.
30 Gérard Wajcman: Fenétre: chroniques du regard et de l’intime, Lagrasse, Verdier, Philia,
2004, 129. Bruno Eble also notices Nauman leaving a margin between himself and the
square: Bruno Eble: Le Miroir sans reflet: considérations autour de l'œuvre de Bruce
Nauman, Ouverture philosophique, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2001, 50.
31 Gérard Wajcman: L'Objet du siècle, Lagrasse, Verdier, Philia, 1998, 47.
Wajcman: Fenêtre, 127.
% Hubert Damisch: L'Origine de la perspective, Paris, Flammarion, Champs arts, 1987, 67-68.
% Beckett in Jonathan Kalb: Beckett in Performance, Cambridge University, 1989, 233.
+ 106 +