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Bopy, THE GAZE, AND ABSTRACTION: FROM SAMUEL BECKETT TO BRUCE NAUMAN
FOOTSTEPS
Nauman’s pacing shows how the performer is not crushed by the abstract
commands but asserts his human status. The extreme and unbroken
duration (one hour) of the video is ceaselessly punctuated by his movements.
The apparent uniformity resounds with the firm tramping and the scraping
of his sole as he turns.» Nauman described this as “a tedious and complicated
process to gain even a yard." Connor points to the importance of physical
weight involved: “Both Beckett’s and Nauman’s work is held or called by the
ground. In both artists gravity exerts its pull everywhere, though not always
visibly.”*”
This suggests a reversal of perspective whereby it is the body that gives
grounding to visible space, “as though space would fade unless repeatedly
made to start forth by the tread of the foot.”** Nauman’s pacing results from
the imperious need to pound out space, in order to make it his, causing the
apparently abstract construction to prove extremely concrete. It can be
interpreted as a ritual® or "prayer": what Lacan calls invocation, defined
as the way that, by speaking, the subject imposes silence on the vociferation
of his original Other.“ Nauman creates his own habitable space by stamping
his feet.
Indeed, the “Beckett Walk” is a performance revealing force and determi¬
nation,” as a result of the constraints imposed on the body: the stiff legs,
exclusion of the arms, balancing systematically on one leg. The spectator
shares in this activity, which can be read in the light of Beckett’s remarks
concerning Not I, a play he wanted “to work on the nerves of the audience,”
so the latter would “share [Mouth’s] bewilderment.”“* Nauman explains:
35 Describing Wall-Floor Positions (1968), Kathryn Chiong speaks of the interval as
“unendurable pause” and cites Watt. Kathryn Chiong: Nauman’s Beckett Walk, October 86
(Autumn 1998), 64.
Quoted in Ruth Burgon: Pacing the Cell: Walking and Productivity in the Work of Bruce
Nauman, Tate Papers, no. 26, Autumn 2016. This echoes strangely Beckett’s determination
in creation, as if faced with a cliff, to “[g]ain a few miserable millimetres” (Beckett in Charles
Juliet: Rencontres avec Samuel Beckett, Paris, P.O.L, 2007, 21).
Connor: Shifting Ground.
38 Ibid.
Christina Grammatikopoulou: Repetitive actions, mumbled whispers: Some notes on Bruce
Nauman, http://interartive.org/2012/10/bruce-nauman-repetition (accessed 21 April 2020).
10 Beckett: Disjecta, 68.
* The Shofar sounded on Yom Kippur reminds the primordial father that he is dead. Jacques
Lacan: Le Séminaire, Livre X, L'Angoisse, Paris, Seuil, Champ freudien, 2004, 282.
Tiredness is explicitly a central element in this construction. Nauman in Kraynak: Please
pay attention please, 142.
Beckett in C. J. Ackerley — S. E. Gontarski (eds.): The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett,
New York, Grove, 2004, 411.
Beckett in Maurice Harmon (ed.): No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel
Beckett and Alan Schneider, Cambridge [Mass.], Harvard University, 1998, 283.
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