Known mainly for his neon sculptures and his installations, Bruce Nauman has been working with a totally heterogeneous collection of forms, media and materials: film, video, sound, photography, neon, plaster, wax, etc. His art - and more particularly, his video performances in the workshop - covers the whole field of creation, the question of identity and the artist's body to entice the viewers to watch and to make them lose their spatial and temporal bearings. This direct, perceptible encounter with his private universe immediately evokes a "different viewing paradigm", public space and shifts from the interior to the exterior. If Bruce Nauman quickly opted for the light weight and easy handling of video equipment, it was to constantly reformulate the physical experience of perception of the individual captured in his intimate and ordinary universe.
Bouncing in the Corner 1 and 2 (Upside Down) gives form with simplicity to a concept, the idea of visual disorientation, and presents the viewer with the performer's physical reality at that specific moment, in a given position. Space here is shifted, disturbed, oblique. In two fixed shots, face-on and from below, the artist's body, as if riveted to the floor, swings in the angle of the two walls: putting the artist's balance in jeopardy while making the viewer dizzy with perspective. In this constant movement of the body, punctuated by jerks and collisions, it is not so much repetition that lies at the center of the work, but rather the center itself, the subject in revolution. The picture in a frame that remains fixed, unchanging, then contemplates its prey, exploring the body's variations and the limits of its range. Bruce Nauman literally puts his own image to the test, repeating simple gestures again and again, pursuing and unsettling the abstract reality of the form and content in space and time. This work provides an experience which is simultaneously mental and physical, in an enclosed space which hems in the faceless, mute, locked body 1.

Stéphanie Moisdon

1 Experience which is conceived in an extensible time: some of the works, which originally lasted the length of the tape (60'), were edited later with the artist's agreement.