Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety

Parveen Adams
October, Vol. 83. (Winter, 1998), pp. 96-113.
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Bruce Nauman and the Object
of Anxiety
PARVEEN ADAMS
I know what it is to desire. I do not suffer anxiety because I am waiting for the
object of my desire. I face two alternatives, triumph and failure. Of course, neither
of these is actually true since the object of desire is a substitute for another object;
nonetheless, that is the phenomenological state desire finds me in.
What is true is that lack lies behind the metonymy of desire. So any analysis
of desire and the image must take into account the lack behind the plenitude and
pleasure of the image. But we must appreciate the complexities of the idea of lack.
For if desire results from the lack of an object we have two possibilities: first, that
the lacking object lies somewhere in front of us; second, that the lacking object
lies behind us. Lacan's objPt petit a lies behind desire; it is the cause of desire. And it
is this lacking object that we deal with in Nauman.
Now the idea of the object of desire does not help me to understand this
idea of cause. I come closer to the idea of 1,acan's object through the obect of anxiety.
The object of anxiety that is outside me nonetheless bears t he most intimate
relation to me. For through the process by which I become a subject I lose myself
as object. Something of the identity of my body prior to this separation from
myself, I transfer into t he place of t he Other. These objects that I displace in
becoming t he barred subject of language have never had any objective status;
these objects are not shareable or exchangeable. It is these displacements that at
one and the same time constitute the fundamental lack of the object as well as the
many forms of the object: breast, feces, phallus, gaze, voice.
But why do I speak of objects of anxiety? It is quite simple-when the object
approaches me (and that is what the uncanny is, the approach of the object), I am
threatened in my status as subject. Anxiety describes a relation of overpowering
proximity to the object, within which the object is still curiously ill-defined. It is
certain that it is too close to me, that it is sitting on my chest, that it is gripping
my insides. What is not certain is what it is-to the point that I can say that the
effect it is having on me is a function of not knowing what it is. In anxiety, I am
threatened with extinction; I do not have sufficient space to breathe.
In uncanny situations, then, the object devours my space as subject. But as a
subject surviving everyday life I do have sufficient space to breathe. It is, however,
0CTOBb;R 83, Wznkr 1998, ,bp 97-1 1 ? O 1998 October Magatznr, I,td and Massachwrtts Instztulp of Technology
Bruce Nauman. Failing to
Levitate in My Studio. 1966.
OCTOBER
a space shared with other subjects similar to myself. So it is a space that is not my
own and I am not particularly mobile. Do I have any other alternatives? Is there a
space where I can have some freedom of movement? A space where Ican be?
Let us allow Don Giovanni to help us here. Is the third act of Mozart's opera
not about anxiety and freedom? The heroism of opposing anxiety does not lie in
resolving it, but rather in contempt for it. The figure of Don Giovanni in the last act
of the opera is such, and well contrasted with Leperello who is ready to expire with
anxiety. Far from turning away from the object in anxiety or in heroism, the Don
directly confronts the figure of anxiety to secure his freedom. He refuses the
Commendatore's dread demand that he repent. The spatial freedom that the Don
gains in refusing the Commendatore's command condemns the opera to attempt to
represent a space of Hell. But in my mind is fixed another image of the space that
opens for the Don-it comes from a Covent Garden production of about fifteen
years ago-the image of Ruggiero Raimondi's descent down a long flight of stairs in
the best Douglas Fairbanks tradition. This is not flight in fear; this is flying.
If I have used this example to introduce Bruce Nauman it is because I think
that Nauman not only works around the object of anxiety, but that he allows us a
space and a time to be. While producing effects of unease through the approach of
the object, Nauman at the same time allows the object to shift from its place to
open up a space where Ican be. I will analyze how these effects come about in the
field of vision by distinguishing psychical space from perspectival space in
Nauman's installations.'
I went to the large Nauman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in
1. Perhaps 1 rleed to say soir~ething at a more general level about the way 1 approach art with
psychoanalytic throry. 1 do not clairri sorrie rpisteir~ological "privilrge." I ir~erely say it differs from an
art-tristorical approach, which seeks to interprrt the text within t hr oeuvre of t hr artist and to irlterpret
the oeuvl-e of the artist in its topographical or historical context-in other words, to build a knowlrdgr:
a historical labor conducted at thr Irvel of consciousness. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is concerned
with the urlcorlscious determinations of the object and its effects, and it accords no general privilege
to chronological sequence. Psychoanalysis is not primarily concerned with knowledge. It rrsponds to
the work of art through different means altogether. I would say that it produces something quite unlikr
art history, somethirlg niore akin to the work of art itself.
In one serlse it is true that my arlalyses of art and film make the same point again and again.
They are concerned with the work of the rrnptying out of the iniagr (ser my Thr E.~rnptinrss of the Image
[London: Routledge, 39961). But the poirlt is that this repetition sets off the movement of changr
through which nrw mranings come to takr the placr of the old. This can happen in analysis, in art,
and in writing psychoanalytically about art. In other words, analyst, artist, and critic are all rngaged in
this emptying. Whrn writing about a work, you use everything you know about t hr artist's statrments,
the circumstances of production, the changes in the work, etc., but you go beyond that knowledge. 1n
relation to the work, you create a rlew orle that relates to the first but does not colonizr it. Through the
text which is writtrn so as to producr t hr samr rffect, t hr reading undrrlines the work of emptying.
You leave t hr trxt open, just as the original work is open. This is to inhabit what 1 would call the
discourse of the analyst of art arld it leaves the discourse of the irlaqter far behind.
This way of writing about art has consrquences for a politics of representation. 1t doesn't dictate
and it keeps work of art, text, and psyche open to change.
Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety 99
Nauman. Carousel. 1988.
New York in 1995. There was the early work of the '60s on the lower floor-the
surprise of From Hand to Mouth and of Henry Moore Bound to Fail (both from 1967);
the daring of Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals
(1966), and more. But it was not until I got to the top of the escalator and onto
the first floor that it hit me. It knocked me out. There was nothing to see as yet,
but I was assaulted by the blare of screaming, tortured sounds, the harsh recitations
of orders, the frenzied jangle of rock music, and, if I'm not mistaken, the grinding
and squeaking of a carousel as it rotated, dragging the feet of its taxidermic
passengers along the floor. I could not believe my ears.
The cacophony made me apprehensive about what I was to see. For nothing
had prepared me for Nauman's installations of the 1980s. I saw the neon Mean
Clown Welcome (1985), the stacked video monitors of Violent Incident (1986), the
separate scenes of Clown Torture (1987), the steel and aluminum animals of
Carousel (1988), and hanging just in front of my eyes, the foam and wax animal
forms of Untitled (Two Wolues and Two Deer) (1989). Then from the 1990s came the
decapitated wax head and shadow mime of Shit in Your Hat-Head on a Chair
(1990) and the Technicolor wax horror of the Ten Heads Circle/Up and Down
(1990), bobbing in midair. Now, I couldn't believe my eyes.
I returned to London and straightaway bought the Catalogue raisonnb
Working with it I began to appreciate Nauman's concern over three decades with
the effects of what he calls "activity." This activity is to be found in Nauman's own
performances, in actors like Tony and Elke who carried out his instructions to
OCTOBER
sink into the floor or rise above it, and in his corridor installations that turn the
viewer into performer. More importantly, this activity is also to be found within
some of the installations, the striking example of this being a piece from 1994
called Work. With two monitors one above the other, one showing an image right
side up, the other showing the same image upside down, this shares a familiar
feature of Nauman's work. In this case it involves a frantic image of Nauman
jumping up and down and rapidly repeating the word "work." The activity is
generated in the movement of the two images in relation to each other. Nauman's
own activity is quantitatively and qualitatively transformed as his image begins to
swing in a reverse direction. I will call this activity movement only when it issues
from the piece but note that this movement in the field of the installation over-
rides the habitual function of movement in the viewer's perception (I will say
more about this later).
My overarching aim and argument, however, is to introduce the idea of
equilibrium. This idea isn't just a concern with the range of suspended pieces-
from the chairs in their circular, diamond, or square frames to the two wolves and
two deer already mentioned. Rather, my corlcerrl with equilibriunl comes precisely
from those pieces that exhibit a frantic activity. It may sound paradoxical, but I
want to argue that in its different forms all the activity is in the service of a point
of equilibrium for the spectator.2
Equilibrium
There is an early example of Nauman's attempt at a new kind ofequili\>riurn,
though it fails. This doesn't stop the frequent reproduction of the famous photo-
graph Failing to Levitate i n My Studio (1966). So what is so important about
Nauman trying to levitate? It's like trying to float but the medium isn't right. And
when, even years later, Nauman encourages a horizontal Elke and Tony to try to
raise themselves above the floor or sink into it, he departs from the usual relation
to the support. In between, there is the hour-long performance at the Whitney
Museum with his wife and Meredith Monk-Bouncing i n the Corner (1969)-which
involved leaning back at nearly a 30-degree angle and breaking the fall by slapping
hands against the wall. Dan Graham called it "playing the architecture"; I would
call i t "playing space." Nauman seems to want to displace the body's relation to
2. At the time of the MOMA exhibition I was not familiar with the range of Nauman's work, and I
was struck by the diversity of the exhibition items and a little lost in the sumptuous variety of the
entries in the Catalogue rabonnr'. But it became clear after a while that the work was of a piece, that it
somehow constituted varying solutions to a set of underlying problems and goals. In this essay I have
set out the underlying structure as I see it.
I don't probe into the artist's unconscious motivations, and I don't interpret the meaning of the
work. I analyze the effects of the work on the viewer. In relation to Nauman's work these effects can be
summarized in an idea of equilihium, and this helps me avoid using theory as a grid with which to read
off an analysis of the work. The term "equilibrium" isn't a 1,acanian one and neither is it a term that
Nauman uses. But I relate the term both to the theory and to what Nauman does say about his work. The
theory, what the artist says about the work, the work itself, and what I say about it must meet convincingly.
Bruce iVnurnan and the Object of Anxiety
the vertical and the horizontal. Floating in water wouldn't achieve this; floating in
air would, if he could.
It reminds me of the infant described in Paul Schilder's article on clinging
and equilibrium.The infant car1 defy gravity by the strength of its grasp; the new-
born can suspend itself by its grasp. Schilder's point is that while it clings to the
mother, the infant sucks and this secures the infant's equilibrium. Sucking and
clinging-a masterful suspension, we might say-constitute an equilibrium in the
field of an infantile organizatiorl of space. I,ater, the infant's clinging works quite
differently; it helps to attain and preserve an upright posture. This is an adult
organization of space and mastery of gravity. The former is predominantly libidinal,
the latter has more to do with the evolutionary denlands of postural indepen-
dence. I am talking about establishing an equilibrium different both from that
which is a fusion with the mother's body and that which is a conquest of gravity.
There is activity and mastery in each of these two organizations of equilibrium in
space. Now, the necessity for independence from the mother is obvious. So why
would we have a further need: that of a respite from postural independence? It is
not so much that we want not to be upright. And certainly, we do not invite passivity.
What we need is respite from an entire system of seeing and space that is bound
up with mastery and identity. To see differently, albeit for a moment, allows us to
see anew.
Movement and Equilibrium
If levitation does not come to Nauman's aid, there are other powerful and
successful sources of equilibrium in his work, such as the stacked monitor screens.
In the 1994 Work there is Nauman's head on the upper screen moving up and
down, repeating the word "work" with dogged determination, and on the lower
screen is the same image upside down. The first impression on encountering the
piece is that of a circular force that comes out from the surface of the screen in a
powerful rotation and passes back through the surface of the screerl to a point
behind it, then repeating this cycle over and over. You stand there winded. You
are transfixed and disbelieving. The head starts to transform. What is happening
to this strange body part? Is it one or two? Is it being tortured in some unimaginable
way? Sometimes the top screerl is empty for a moment, as though the head had
drowned or beer1 swallowed up. Sometimes the head flips over and reappears
underneath and this happens in the other direction also. There are changes in
the rhythms both of images and of the spoken word-for any word repeated over
and over will be successively deformed and reformed in myriad ways.
Since the two images do not always line up, the joint images undergo a
succession of topological transformations. Imagine a neck joining the two heads
and being stretched and twisted. Imagine the two heads uncomfbrtably inhabiting
3. Paul Schilder, "The Relations between Clinging and Equilibrium,"International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, vol. 'LO (1939), pp. 58-63.
the same plane. Imagine the shrunken heads telescoped around the central
frame. And then it seems they have smashed their heads-into nothing. There is a
joining up, a disappearing, and a splitting. What perceptual calculations might we
be making? That when the head on the lower screen appears on the upper, either
we now see the face that must have been on the back of the head all along, or that
the upside-down head is annihilated by the upright head on the upper screen.
There is all the violence of movement. And if there is violence as Nauman is
hurled around, the violence is even more palpable as the movement that hurls the
spectator out of the picture. The movements on the screen have the effect of
blows on us. They fend us off again and again. That stops us from being part of
the picture (as Anthro/Socio [Rinde Spinning] will demonstrate in detail).
With all this commotion, where, you might ask, is the equilibrium? It has to
do, precisely, with the rotation around the join of the monitors. Rotation suggests
equilibrium. It is the action engendered by the installation that, itself, installs
(Rinde Facing Camera).
equilibrium. We are at the zero point between opposites: between arrest and
motion; between right side up and upside down; between back and front; between
appearing and disappearing; between violence and submission.4
Anthm/Socio (Rinde SpinningFa complex installation of three video projectors,
six color video monitors, six videodisc players and six videodiscs (color and
sound), first shown at the 1992 Documenta-is an example of movement that
must be discussed in more detail.5 Here Rinde Eckert, a performance artist and
trained singer, chants sets of three phrases continuously and hypnotically: "Feed
me/Eat me/AnthropologyW; "Help me/Hurt me/Sociology"; "Feed me/Help
4. In the unpublished Seminar X on anxiety, Lacan speaks of power in the field of the scopic.
What dents that power is a gap in the coherence of the picture. The Holbein example of The
Ambassadors is familiar to all. Here, the gap figures differently.
5. This installation is very similar to Anthm/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera) of 1991, but is not to be
confused with it.
104 OCTOBER
me/Eat me/Hurt me." There are floor-to-ceiling wall projections of Rinde's
revolving head-upside down and right side up-as he turns on an unseen swivel
chair. These images are also on the video monitors that are played nonsynchronously
and at high volume. So, as the Catalogue raisonni says, there is "a barrage of images
and sounds."
Even with just a photograph of the installation what is compelling is a sense
of decapitation. It isn't just that the heads are cut off at the top and around the
chin. There is a quality about them that suggests something of the statue that
moves, of the dead coming alive. It is interesting that the previous year Nauman
made Four Pairs of Heads in wax and that one of them is Rinde's. Nauman's wax
heads are quite uncanny (as in Ten Heads Circle/In and Out [1990]). But the
effects of this installation take us beyond the uncanny. So far I have described it
as a zero point between the inert and the mobile, the live and the dead-here is
a wheeling head, an acrobatic cripple, a spectral heavyweight. Now I must be
more precise about the nature and the effects of movement and equilibrium in
this work.
I indicated at the beginning that a distinction can be made between the
movement in the field of the installation and the habitual function of movement
in perception. It will help to use Fenichel's paper "The Scopophilic Instinct and
Identification."s Though it has much to say about the developmental aspect of
movement and perception, I want only to use one example from this paper to
6. International Journal ofPsychoanalysis, vol. 18 (1937), pp. 6-39.
Ten Heads Circle/In and Out. 1990.
Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety
contmst it with Rinde Sfinning. The example concerns a female patient who had
had a childhood fear of a picture cylinder or zootrope (Fenichel calls it a "'wheel
of life,' a sort of embryo cinema"):
It was in the form of a revolving cylinder, divided into sections, in
which one placed sheets of pictures. If one looked at these as they
revolved through the different sections, the successive positions
assumed by the pictures gave the appearance of being in continuous
motion, and also made them look like solid figures. .. . she had a feeling
that the pictures were.jumping into her head. (p. 22)
For the patient there is a pleasure and activity in looking, on the model of
oral introjection. But at the same time she experiences the threat that her eyes
will be pierced. We are dealing with a libidinous looking, and clearly it has its own
terrors. What happens to us as Rinde's wheeling head travels along the walls? We
could say that the movement of Rinde's image is like the picture cylinder: dead
things coming alive through movement. The wheeling head hurtles along its set
trajectory, the head turns on its axis and the turning heads are laid out in a giant
turn around the walls. Yet we are not in danger. Rinde's image will not descend
from the walls and cross the floor to get us. Rinde's swiveling chair takes him
round and round the room, but the focus is not on solidity and continuity as it is
with Fenichel's wheel; rather, it is on the spectral head and on the crippled
revolutions of a swiveling seat. As the images take up the relay one from the other,
the picture remains inviolate. There is, however, a sense of violence. The movement
of the image kicks us out of the picture. We disappear into the empty space of the
circular track without a finish line-Rinde's head rides its solitary circuit. Perhaps
this is not so much the violence of movement as the violence of the uncoupling of
the spectator from the scene.
Lack and Distance
In kicking us out of the picture Nauman has unraveled perspectival space.
We are speaking of the creation of distance, of a rlorlcontirluous space between
the viewer and the scene. This is a distance that cannot be reduced; we cannot fill
in the gap that intervenes between us and spinning Rinde.
How is this done? I think the answer has to be-by movement that is not
directional. The ,move,ment balances itself. We have equilibrium because we can
assign no direction to what's happening; it doesn't take off in any direction. Arld
that is why there is an unbridgeable distance. It's happening out there and it can't
come toward you (unlike the figures of the "wheel of life" for Fenichel's patient).
This is true though the room is everywhere peopled with heads. There is Rinde's
head, the profile and the back of his head, all at times right way up and at times
upside down. And again, as a memory in the mind's eye, the video monitors
display the head upside down on top and right side up underneath. But the
OCTOBER
change in scale does not affect the lack of direction. Instead of direction there is
circularity and a separation of the viewer from the view.
I referred earlier to the equilibrium of the grasping child and of the upright
citizen. So where are we now? What does it mean to say that we are no longer
connected to the scene in front of us? Obviously, this seeing is not libidinal as it
was for Fenichel's patient; the taking in through the eyes has lost its incorporative
force. Distance is the opposite of incorporation. But neither is this seeing rooted
in perspectival space. For that you would need to be able to wind a thread
through the scene, through a contirluous space. A gap puts paid to that idea.
Everyday seeing, whether that of child or adult, whether desiring or detached,
usually covers the gap. With Rinde spinning in his orbit and the viewer knocked
out of his or hers, this changes.
It seems that the circularplane of movement is important; it is not a movement
that approaches and recedes from the viewer. The circularity car1 vary considerably
across Nauman's works: Work traces the profile of a circle; in Rinde Spinning the
circle traces an arc around the viewer; in Carousel the circle is traced out flat in
front of us.
Equilibrium in the sense I have been discussing it is tantamount to the
collapse of the viewer's shared subjectivity (I call it "shared" because what is usually
called subjectivity is forged in the social). My argument is that this happens
through a break i n perspectival seeing of which Rinde Spinning is a particular example.
There are other examples in Nauman: numerous corridor installatiorls and two
floating rooms; and a discussion of these should make clear the interrelation
between perspective and shared subjectivity.
Nauman himself often speaks of these corridor works in terms of the
distinction between the public and the private.7 I disagree with this description, a
disagreement I believe to be terminological and theoretical. The public/private
distinction is a public one. What is private is constructed firmly within the public
sphere. That very private thing, your subjectivity, is after all constructed socially.
We need another term to contrast with the private/public couple. My term is
equilibrium. And my account of equilibrium is informed by the way Lacanian
psychoanalysis thinks of space. Nauman talks of private space as the opposite pole
to public space, but my argument is that in his work, he takes us beyond this
opposition.
Corridor Installations
In the 1970 Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Instc~llation), there are six corridors
of unequal width but equal length (thirty-two feet each). Some are lit and some
are dark. The first corridor is too narrow to enter; it is eight inches wide and has
7. See the 1986 conversation with Chris Dercon, quoted in Coosje van Bruggen, Brure Nauman
(New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 117.
Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety
an oscillating camera in a partially concealed room off one end. This camera
feeds into some of the monitors on display in other corridors, which show the
room's upper walls and ceiling.
The second corridor is twenty-three inches wide and is lit by gallery ceiling
fixtures. There is a camera mounted high, just inside the entrance, and there are
two stacked monitors on the floor at the far end, one showing the back of the
viewer advancing down the corridor, the other showing the corridor empty.
The third corridor is twelve inches wide and is unlit.
The fourth corridor is thirty-five inches wide and is unlit. It has a single
monitor on the floor at the far end showing images from the oscillating camera in
the first room. It also has a camera mounted high and on its side at the far end
that produces an image on a monitor in the next and fifth corridor. This is sixty
inches wide and has two stacked monitors. On turning the corner and entering
the fifth corridor, one can see a fleeting image of one's back presented sideways
on the upper monitor (the illusion is of a body falling down off the screen instead
of turning a corner). Then one sees other people in the previous corridor on this
upper monitor. On the lower monitor there is another live feed from the con-
cealed room.
The sixth corridor is four inches wide and is unlit.
Nauman has said that the corridor pieces are about the connection between
private and public and that "the video helps the private part, even though it is a
public situation. The way you watch television is a private kind of experience."s
But are things so straightforward? In what sense is the image on the monitor
screen private? Or for that matter public? How can we get a grasp on this?
Perhaps through pursuing something that the installation itself suggests and plays
with: acts of surveillance. Michel Foucault's Parlopticon model of modern sub-
jectivity relies not only on surveillance by the observer hidden in Bentham's
central tower, but on the internalization of that surveillance by the observed. It is
important that we note that this affects the way i n which we see. Nauman makes us see
differently by disrupting the visual organization of surveillance. He interferes in
the internalization of surveillance by interfering with our perceptual expectations.
He exploits the visual rift between watching oneself and oneself being watched.
He actualizes the impossible: I see myself from the point from which you see me. I
find that the space of internalization of surveillance does not neatly map onto the
dimensions of surveillance.
Nauman's video images have the function of intrusion, but it is not the
intrusion of the public into the retreat of the private. It is an intrusion into the
system of public and private. Something intrudes through the monitor screen
when you are in the second corridor. It is yourself but you are somewhat unfamiliar.
You might know that you are seeing yourself but you don't recognize the represen-
tation of the movements you made in space. Here you are, walking toward the
OCTOBER
screen. Instead of seeing yourself approaching, you see your back retreating and
instead of getting nearer, you seem to get further away. That's on one monitor. On
the other is only the empty corridor. So you're walking toward the screen but
you're not seeing yourself at all; you are there but the corridor is empty.
After all this you go down the fourth corridor in the dark, and on the monitor
at the other end are the upper walls and ceiling of the concealed room off the
first corridor. You haven't beer1 in it and you haven't seen it. It has little to do with
your presence in the fourth corridor. Is this a picture such as there might be on
any television screen? Some other place? And then you turn the corner into the
next corridor and the camera placed up high, now behind you, remains trained
on you; and at the far end of the fifth corridor, on a monitor, you see a body fall
off the screen. And on the second monitor the image of some other place again.
So the viewer in the installation sees him- or herself in unfamiliar ways-
through the eyes of another viewer. The viewer is in two places at once, which of
course is where one never is in everyday life. Thus the experience of watching the
monitors yields a sense of being split by the screen. It also yields a sense of falling
off the screen before the viewer is restored to more customary views of a body in
space. These experierlces change the viewer in the corridor; they momentarily
relieve the subject of its shared subjectivity by exposirlg the structure of the subject
of surveillance. They effect a fleeting disappearance of the viewing subject.
How can we understand the breaking down of the usual correlations of sight
and space in terms of their psychical effect? We need Lacan's idea of the gaze
here. The gaze is the object that pins our perceptions in place. When Nauman
tampers with the places involved in perception he dislocates the gaze; it leaves its
place and reveals its usual furlctiorl of dissembling.
Let me explain the Lacanian idea of the subject of perspective. It is a subject
of representation split off from its object. The operation of perspective produces
the object as a hidden object. Lacan, writing about perspective, has shown how
the visual structure of the world is organized, not arourld an object but arourld a
hole. Something remains impossible to represent. Lacan argues that in perspectival
representation the projections of the anterior and posterior horizorls onto a
picture plane don' t meet; in this way we have a hole whose edges have to be
stitched up to define the horizon point.9 When the whole of the visible world is
projected (that is, the space in front of and behind the subject) there is the gap
that you cannot see, between the anterior and posterior horizons. The complexities
of perspective are like the making of tucks and seams.
Lacan has argued that the modern subject is a subject of perspective and
perhaps we can connect this to the questiorl of the public and the private via the
idea of surveillance. You need clean, straight lines of sight for surveillance. Nothing
must block the view. In the Nick Wilder installatiorl it is the very viewer who blocks
9. See Lacan's unpublished Seminar XI11 on the object of psychoanalysis, and Gerard Wajeman,
"Tableau," La Part de L'Oezl2 (1986),pp. 147-67.
Bruce Naurnan and the Object of Anxiety
the view. The viewer might have expected a picture at the corridor's end or an
opening perhaps; instead of which there is his or her own impossibly shrinking
back in front of it. The object gaze shifts from its place. Nauman shatters the
internalization of surveillance by undermining the system of vision it relies on.
The success of surveillance depends on the idea of a public space that is a
deprivation of and incursion into a private space. In reality, the success of
surveillance depends on self-surveillance. And of course there is nothing "private"
about the latter. Public and private don't meet i n the viewer. Psychoanalytically
speaking, the public enters the subject in the internalized form of the superego.
Subjectivity is public.
What Nauman calls "private" I describe as the loss of shared subjectivity.
There are moments in the installatiorl where the appearance of the viewer's body
on the monitor precisely constitutes the viewer's disappearance as subject. With
the body split in two or falling off the screen, the body becomes the stain in the
picture which disrupts the completeness of the visual field. For a moment there is
no subject of vision.
Let me give another example of this moment of blindness. k'assel Corridor:
Elliptical Space (1971) is a curved corridor, only four inches at either end with an
entrance through a door on the concave side. The viewer is to be given the key for
an hour and is free to leave and return during that time but is not to share the
space with anyone else. People can look in through the four-inch ends but there is
a place near the door that can't be seen. Nauman supposes the viewer to be going
through the artist's experience of sharing yet withholding something.
This explanatiorl seems to me too metaphorical, whereas the work itself
suggests something rather odder. The viewer has made him- or herself invisible,
no longer to be watched by the multitude of visitors to the exhibition. The
situation reminds me of those games that set offa delicious excitement in children,
which precisely consist of you with your eyes closed awaiting exposure. It is you
who can't watch and therefore can't see. What lies behind the expectancy of that
childhood moment of hiding? You will shudder with pleasure when other eyes find
you out. But the moment before, unseen and unseeing, where were you?
I think there must be such a blind moment in the Kassel corridor at its center
near the door. But now it is the point of the experience that you stay hidden,
perhaps till your hour is up-till you know, to echo Nauman, that the public
doesn't care?-and then you return to the order of surveillance. What happens in
that space of time? The game could go horribly wrong. The deliciousness of the
moment of waiting could wear off. Anxiety could set in with the question: does
the Other want to lose me? The child is released (precisely, from an enjoyment
that could become unbearable) on being discovered and finding that it has a
place in the desire of the Other. Yet Naumarl does not expect the adult viewer to
be anxious. Perhaps because of the freedom to come in and out and because there
is an overall time limit to the solitary condition: the one hour after which you
relinquish the key and reenter the public domain.
OCTOBER
What, then, are the effects of being in a place not-to-be-seen or seeing, a
place where nobody cares? Reduced visual stimuli, silence, and reduced move-
ment. Do you get anxious like the child would? Or do you enjoy hiding in the
pouch of perspective, with no place in the visual and the social?
Floating Room
You might agree that I have made an argument about the breakdown of per-
spectival space in t he corridors. But what has happened to t he idea of
equilibrium? For Nauman, who has made explicit that the other (the public)
poses a threat, it is safety that is at stake in the public/private distinction.lo And if
it is safety that is at stake in Floating Room: Lit from Inside (1972)," it is also here
that equilibrium is connected to safety.
Floating Room is a brightly lit interior installed so that its center is above the
body's own, giving a sense of levitation (something that Nauman had tried
independently, as we know). And the room also appears to float. Safety is linked
to the contrast of light within and dark without:
The more time you spent in the room, the harder it was to think about
leaving. . . . It became much safer to stay in the center of the room,
because you became anxious about the dark space outside of it.12
So we have a link between levitation and safety. Perhaps Nauman would say
that both belong on the side of what he calls the private. At any rate, we learn
from van Bruggen that he compares the experience "to the dilemma of a child
who is lying in bed and drops an arm over the edge":
Withdrawing the arm may stir up something unknown under the bed
that can grab it. But it is too scary to jump and run out of the room
into the dark. The only way out is to slowly withdraw the arm and wait
comfortably within the safe middle of the bed until the sun rises.13
We have all had this experience. And if the child is comfortable it is because
it has fourld a new equilibrium whereby its body is out of reach. I myself don't
remember anything but an apprehensive tightening of muscles. I could not put
my body elsewhere. The viewer in the lit room can be comfortable: not because
there is light, but because there is a centering. Here are the instructions for the
installation:
We are trying to get to the center of some place: that is, exactly half
way between each pair of parts.
10. From an interview in Vanguard (1979), quoted in van Bruggen, Bruce Nauman, p. 117
11. The exterior version of this is Center of the Unzuerse.
12. Brure Nauman, p. 194.
13. Ibid.
Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety 111
Floating Room. 1972.
We want to move our center (some measurable center) to coincide
with such a point.
We want to superimpose our center of gravity on this point.
Save enough energy and concentration to reverse.
(The center of most places is above eye level.)l4
There is an initial anxiety produced by the room where, Nauman claims,
"The space inside the lit room floats to the outside, where it is dark." The attempt
to find a center takes you out of the space of anxiety. The centering is a new
equilibrium. This is the opposite of the frightened child who shrinks into itself.
To be safe from public others, one needs a different sense of one's center, a
different relation to gravity. Levitation is not really the answer. Nauman faikd to
14. Bruce Nauman (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994), p. 256.
OCTOBER
levitate in his studio. But Nauman does effect a different relation to gravity, space,
and the public through an activity (on the spectator's part) that leads to a new
equilibrium. Perhaps we can take "the center of ourselves," and "levitation," and
the private, and the unseen space in the bend in the corridor as Nauman's ways of
talking about the space he opens in his installations: moments of freedom from
our public and private selves.
If I opened with comments about anxiety and freedom, I want to close with
remarks on their relation in the context of Rinde Spinning. It seems to me that
while the movement internal to Rinde Spinning is crucial in the production of the
uncanny effect, at the same time the organization of that movement explains the
resistance that the installation itself mobilizes against the uncanny.
How does one identify the uncanny? While there is more to it than a check-
list of items, certain features outlined by Freud often help in the identification.
Both in Rinde and in Work there is a dismemberment and a doubling. There is
also a repetition that carries all the force of the compulsion to repeat. You may rec-
ognize this phrase and its relation to the Freudian death drive, the beyond of the
pleasure principle. There is something that doesn't satisfy the pleasure principle,
both insisting and disrupting it. But how is the analogue of such an insistence in
the field of the image produced? I don' t think that repetition in and of itself,
something happening again and again, suffices to produce the uncanny. The
repetition has to have the force of a powerful and independent activity. I tried to
show how the movement in Rinde Spinning was self-contained and quite outside
the spectator. I think we can now take this to be a description of a case of the
compulsion to repeat. Of course, it is in the repetition that the object approaches
and that the uncanny effect is obtained.
But this particular mechanism of repetition also produces a distance from
the scene. It seems then that the compulsion to repeat operates in the same
moment as that of the "kicking of the spectator out of the picture." If this is so I
seem to be saying something inconsistent. For on the one hand I am arguing that
the installation provokes all the disquieting insistence of the uncanny, and on the
other that the -aery same mechanism produces the uiewer's equilibrium. We are talking
about the difference between the uncanny presence of the object and the empty
place it vacates. So here is an uncanny that doesn't threaten in the last instance! I
suggest that Nauman works in different ways in different installations to similar
effect and that the very work that t he artist puts into the production of the
uncanny effect enables not only the approach of the object that occupies your
space but the opening out of space. In his paper on the uncanny Freud insisted
on its relevance to the field of aesthetics, finding himself barely able to conjure up
examples of uncanny experiences from life. And it remains unclear from the
welter of arguments that arise from Freud's attempt to track down the uncanny,
Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety
what exactly it is. Where better than in Nauman's work to study the artistic
conditions of production of the uncanny and its related effects?
The compulsion to repeat equals the collapse of space, whereas phenomeno-
logically we equate freedom and space. My capacity to originate, to be, requires a
spatial freedom. It therefore follows that my incapacity to be free, the condemnation
of me that I will not and cannot change, is equivalent to a spatial deprivation. The
uncanny describes this state of affairs. And while Nauman plays with the presence
of the uncanny object, he frees me from the prison where there is less space than
I need-in order that Ican be.