Movies: Bruce Nauman

In an earlier film, Playing A Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio (Violin #1), Nauman played a single note on the violin as he walked around his studio. In this video work, he remains in a stationary position while he plays four strings...

Violin Film #1 (Playing the Violin as Fast as I Can), is one of several 1967-68 films featuring Nauman's violin-playing, in which the production of sound is subjected to procedural strategies that problematize its status as music and performance....

Art Make-Up is composed of four individual segments, each 10 minutes long. In them, Nauman appears tightly framed by the camera against a blank background, shirtless, and visible from the torso up. The action begins. Dipping his fingers into a small ...

An upside-down close-up of the artist’s mouth, Nauman repeats the words “lip sync” as the audio track shifts in and out of sync with the video. The disjunction between what is seen and heard keeps the viewer on edge, struggling to attach the sound of...

"In this videotape Nauman attempted to maintain the contrapposto pose associated with classical and Renaissance sculpture while walking down a long, narrow corridor of his own design. In this position, one knee is bent, and weight is shifted to the o...

Bruce Nauman - Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance) (1968), 16mm black-and-white film For this film, Bruce Nauman made a square of masking tape on the studio floor, with each side marked at its halfway point. To the sound of...

Bruce assumes a set of positions in relation to the wall and floor....

In this work, shown on two stacked monitors, Bruce Nauman washes his hands with a thoroughness bordering on obsession. Each from a different vantage point, the two monitors present a simple everyday action, extended to fill almost an hour. The work i...

This video registration of a performance in his studio shows Bruce Nauman walking the perimeter of different shapes: circles, spirals and figure eights. Nauman recorded the performance on video because, unlike film, video was a medium that allowed hi...

Nauman shot two films in 1965, and despite their rudimentary execution they make a compelling diptych. Manipulating the T-Bar (1965) shows the artist delineating what would become his basic studio practice, arranging and rearranging a sculptural form...

Flour Arrangements, a photo series showing Bruce Nauman pushing some piles of flour around on the floor. He uses his body by treating it like material for his art. Nauman committed himself to making one ephemeral flour sculpture each day for over a m...

This film records the activities Nauman performed four years earlier in 1965. Both in this performance and in this work he strikes and holds a variety of poses on the floor in relation to a glowing fluorescent light fixture....

This exhibition presents a new work by Bruce Nauman, Contrapposto Studies, I through VII, which continues the artist's exploration of video, sound, and performance. Characteristic of his work over the last five decades, Nauman transforms a simple and...

A stationary camera set upside down and framing a long shot of the studio records Nauman, with his hands clasped behind his back, repeating a series of steps similar to those of Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk). The curious exercise combines pirouettes...

HD video installation (color, stereo sound), continuous play, two HD video sources, two HD video projectors, four speakers...

This stacked two-screen video installation shows the artist washing his hands with a vigour that goes beyond a daily cleaning ritual. The energy of the gesture and the distortive effect of the double screen evoke a sinister prior event and a sense pa...

Images of sixteen men and women are shown, one by one, as they run on a conveyor belt against a black background. They appear to be in a complete void. The camera films the runners from all kinds of angles: sometimes from the front, from the knees up...

In 1969 Nauman had devised a set of mental exercises in which a live performer was to concentrate on sinking into the floor or allowing the floor to rise up over him or her. This videotape was based on these exercises and were the first videotapes Na...