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LLEWELLYN BROWN
If you really believe in what youre doing and do it as well as you can, then there
will be a certain amount of tension — if you are honestly getting tired, or if
you are honestly trying to balance on one foot for a long time, there has to be a
certain sympathetic response in someone who is watching you. It is a kind of body
response, they feel that foot and that tension.‘
OBSERVING
Nauman’s “Beckett Walk” puts to use the “savage eye” of the camera,
echoing Beckett’s own practice with television. For Beckett, the film and
television camera represented intense violence, as he expressed it speaking
of the camera “eye” in Film, whose gaze is “so acute and penetrating that it
can’t be endured.”*” Nauman’s video is composed of one single long take, and
the camera is devoid of any subjectivity that might be revealed by moving in
relation to the performer.
Moreover, the video was not accomplished by a camera crew, but the artist
by himself, in the same way as Beckett’s characters are obliged to act as their
“own other.”® The camera enables Nauman, like Molloy, to “strut before [his
own] eyes, like a stranger”: to observe himself with the eyes of an anonymous
spectator. Thus, as in Beckett’s films for the television, the enunciative set-up is
crucial: the artist places himself under the gaze of the camera, to be observed as
an object from the point of view of the Other, a place occupied by the spectator.
The impassive gaze involved inspires Ruth Burgon to evoke the notion of
surveillance: indeed, Nauman started filming at the same time as CCTV was
being installed in public spaces." In this context, the object is a potential
criminal, and “Nauman’s studio videos are watched in a manner that attends
only to occurrences outside the norm, that registers minute differences within
the endless cycles of sameness.”*! The observing eye aims to catch a glimpse of
a fleeting manifestation that, structurally, never ceases to escape.
Indeed, any idea of domination associated with surveillance is forcibly
undercut. The spectator is subjected to a permanently distorted perception
of space and context, because of the camera being tipped over at a 90° angle.
15 Nauman in Kraynak: Please pay attention please, 148.
Samuel Beckett: Suggestions for TV Krapp in Clas Zilliacus, Suggestions for TV Krapp by
Samuel Beckett, in James Knowlson (ed.): Theatre Workbook 1: Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last
Tape, London, Brutus Books, 1980, 72.
7 Beckett in S. E. Gontarski: The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts,
Bloomington, Indiana University, 1985, 188.
18 Beckett: Rockaby, 441.
® Beckett: Molloy, 37.
Burgon: Pacing the Cell, 5 and 8.
51 Ibid., 8.
46
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