In the environment of 1950's, 60's, and 70's from which Bruce Nauman emerged, art movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art often left the viewer with very little indication as to what the author intended as the meaning of a piece. Supposedly, the viewer was able to read myriad meanings onto a colorfield painting or a minimalist cube of steel. This change from the meaning as a product of the artist to meaning as a function of the viewer is connected to Barthes proposal of a change from the traditional concept of art as work to a new concept, that of art as Text. While the author of the work is thought to have relatively complete control over the meaning of his piece, the author of the Text is theorized to have little if any control over the meaning of his piece. However, not all artists were willing to resign all control over meaning to the viewer. Although Bruce Nauman's art conforms to Barthes description of the Text, Nauman does not relinquish control over the meaning of his art to the viewer.

The work is readily classifiable. However, Roland Barthes characterized the Text as being difficult to categorize because it cuts across genre boundaries. For example, the writer George Bataille is difficult to classify because he could be seen as "a novelist, a poet, an essayist, an economist, a philosopher, (and) a mystic."1 Similarly Nauman has worked with sculptures, films, videos, installations, performances, neons, holograms, words, and photography. He is suspicious of technical ability and works in varying media to "set up obstacles to block his own talents" so that his work becomes intellectual rather than technical.2 By varying genres to diminish the role of technical ability, he emphasizes the process of making art over the final product.

Process was also an important part of Barthes' elaboration on the Text. Whereas "the work can be seen ... , the text is a process of demonstrations... The Text is experienced only in an activity of production."3 Correspondingly, Nauman has said about his art: "Sometimes it works out that the activity involves making something, and sometimes that the activity is the piece."4 This emphasis of process and activity over tangible product explains why Nauman so frequently shifts between diverse media. The art is in the process not in the object. An example can be seen in his films, such as Bouncing Two Balls between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms and Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square. The artist's activities and experiences are the sole content of these films, which function more as documents of an activity than as films. Likewise, his early sculptural pieces are presented with imperfections, such as unfinished surfaces or evidence of a mold, in order to emphasize the process and indicate that it is the evidence of a process rather than a finished piece.5

The receiver of the work consumes the work for pleasure. As Barthes indicated, "(I)t is the 'quality' of the work ... and not the operation of reading itself which can differentiate between books."6 Alternately, Barthes characterized the Text as trying "to abolish the distance between writing and reading ... by joining them in a single signifying practice."7 For the receiver of the Text, playing and listening form "a scarcely differentiated activity."8 Nauman's art, especially his corridors, attempts "to abolish the distance between writing and reading."9 Installations such as Performance Corridor, a 20 inch wide corridor though which the viewer is invited to walk, place the viewer in "the position of the performer as soon as he or she enters."10 These pieces come out of Nauman's desire to produce art in which "somebody else would have the same experience instead of just having to watch me have that experience."11 The distance between author and viewer is reduced though the reproduction of an experience. It is not enough to visually consume the piece, one must walk through the corridor and experience its claustrophobic environment. Another example is Kassel Corridor: Elliptical Space, an enclosed space into which one can enter, with a 4 inch gap at either end through which people on the outside may observe the people inside of the space. However, the installation is designed so that there is an area which can not be seen by an observer on the outside, allowing someone on the inside to find privacy. The viewer outside the space is merely a voyeur, but as Coosje van Bruggen observes, the "visitor entering this space goes through the same experiences as the artist, who in his work publicly exposes his most profound feelings and at the same time offsets his disclosures by withholding one part, thus preserving his privacy."12 The incorporation of mirrors and closed circuit cameras into pieces such as Corridor Installation (Nick Wilder Installation) adds a new dimension to the work "allowing the visitor to shift from performer to observer."13 The observer who becomes the performer inside the space can now watch his or her own performance on a monitor as it happens, thus becoming an observer again.

This increasingly important relationship between Text and viewer leads Barthes to theorize a decreasingly important relationship between the Text and its author. While the intentions of the author of a work must be respected and accounted for, the Text "reads without the inscription of the Father."14 As Craig Owens stated, "(T)he author could not - or could no longer - claim to be the unique source of meaning and/or value of the work of art."15 Barthes alternately proposed that it is the reader and/or the system of codes and conventions of art that create the meaning of the piece.16 While traditional thinking held that the meaning of a piece of art came from the author and was expressed through the piece to the viewer, Barthes would seem to suggests that meaning occurs somewhere in the relationship between viewer and work. The author does not produce meaning, the viewer and the conditions in which the viewer receives the work produces the meaning. This caused many artists to explore the conditions in which art is received, the institutions of the art world.17

Instead of investigating the conditions (and therefore the institutions) under which the viewer normally encounters art, Nauman manipulates these conditions and experiments with the relationship between art and viewer. Nauman has said about Performance Corridor :

It's very easy to describe how the piece looks, but the experience of walking inside it is something else altogether which can't be described. And the pieces increasingly have to do with physical or physiological responses.18

In some of his works "perceptual and psychological suggestion and response constitute the sole content."19 Yellow Room (Triangular) is a triangular room filled with yellow fluorescent light. Nauman has described triangles as "really uncomfortable, disorienting kinds of spaces. There is no comfortable place to stay inside them or outside them."20 The yellow light serves to excite the viewer, further increasing the viewer's discomfort and agitation. As a result, it is difficult to stay in the room for very long. Yellow Room has very little in the way of traditional aesthetic value. Looking at a photograph of it is not very interesting. However, it succeeds in presenting a very intense and specific experience for the viewer.

Because Barthes views the author as "no longer privileged, paternal," he believes that the author may only appear in the text as a "guest."21 "If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters."22 Nauman effectively assumes the role of a "character" in his own work when he talks about "using my body as a piece of material and manipulating it."23 In his video and accompanying diagrams for Slow Angle Walk, "Nauman was able to alienate himself in a Beckettian manner from his arms and legs, so they seemed to have lives of their own, detached and objectified."24 It is these "objectified" parts of the author which are presented in early works such as Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten-Inch Intervals and My Last Name Exaggerated Fourteen Times Vertically.

Nauman also appears in his works in a way that Barthes does not account for. Barthes assumes that because meaning occurs between the viewer and the piece of art, the author has no way to control the meaning of his art, or at best he has a very limited input into the meaning of his art. Nauman attempts to control the meaning of his art by controlling the relationship between the viewer and his art. Nauman explains: "I didn't want to present situations where people could have too much freedom to invent what they thought was going on. I wanted it to be my idea, and I did not want people to invent the art."25 From Gestalt psychology, Nauman learned that "many laboratory tests have shown that specific physiological changes occur in particular situations, and that we react in certain ways in certain situations."26 Thus, it is possible to create a piece in which the viewer would become the performer but at the same time the viewer as performer was restricted to a certain set of responses. In this way, Nauman creates what he describes as "a participation piece without the participants being able to alter the work."27 It is difficult, if not impossible, to walk through the narrow space of Performance Corridor without feeling "claustrophobic discomfort."28 The viewer/performer in Yellow Room (Triangular) can not escape feeling agitated and uncomfortable. Nauman leaves very little latitude for varying personal interpretations.

While Nauman's predilection for creating pieces that demand specific reactions from the viewer is most apparent in his installations, it influences all of his work. The video for Slow Angle Walk attempts to induce a controlled response from the viewer by involving the viewer in the action. According to Nauman:

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, and the viewer feels that foot and that tension.29

For the video Good Boy, Bad Boy two different actors on two different televisions simultaneously bombard the viewer with lines like "I am a good boy. You are a good boy. We are good boys. I am a bad boy. You are a bad boy. We are bad boys." Nauman designed the video so that "It involves you by talking to you ... It's not a conversation; you are not allowed to talk. But you are involved simply by virtue of the fact that someone uses that form of address."30 The continuous barrage of conflicting moral judgments directed at the viewer serves to create an unescapable, disconcerting atmosphere.

A similar strategy is employed in the eleven foot tall neon entitled One Hundred Live and Die. The sign alternately flashes messages such as "Sleep and Die / Sleep and Live / Laugh and Die / Laugh and Live / Stand and Die / Stand and Live." The powerful, yet contradictory messages directed at the viewer, combined with the enormous size of the piece, serve to overwhelm the viewer.

These works create "situations which define the possibilities of experience for the viewer in a relatively precise manner; they are capable of doing this because they operate with elementary physical reactions which cannot be eradicated by either knowledge or training and lie, therefore, beyond the power of adaptation."31 As Paul Schimmel has observed, "The meaning of the piece is what it does to us."32 Although Barthes theorized that the meaning of art could no longer be controlled by the author, Nauman regains the control over the meaning of his art by controlling the effect of the piece on the viewer.

Footnotes

1 Barthes, Roland, “From Work to Text,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, editor, (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984), p. 170.

2 Halbreich, Kathy, “Social Life,” in Bruce Nauman, Joan Simon, editor, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994) p. 89.

3 Barthes, Roland, “From Work to Text,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, editor, (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984), p. 170.

4 Schimmel, Paul, “Pay Attention,” in Bruce Nauman, Joan Simon, editor, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994) p. 71.

5 Ibid., p. 118.

6 Barthes, Roland, “From Work to Text,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, editor, (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984), p. 173.

7 Ibid., p. 173.

8 Ibid., p. 173.

9 Ibid., p. 173.

10 Bruggen, Coosje van, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 18.

11 Schimmel, Paul, “Pay Attention,” in Bruce Nauman, Joan Simon, editor, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994) p. 78.

12 Bruggen, Coosje van, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 117.

13 Ibid., p.117.

14 Barthes, Roland, “From Work to Text,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, editor, (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984), p. 172.

15 Owens, Craig, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life After ‘The Death Author?’” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 123.

16 Ibid., p. 125

17 Ibid., p. 126.

18 Bruggen, Coosje van, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 238.

19 Benezra, Neal, “Surveying Nauman,” in Bruce Nauman, Joan Simon, editor, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994) p. 15.

20 Ibid., p. 28.

21 Barthes, Roland, “From Work to Text,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, editor, (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1984), p. 173.

22 Ibid., p. 173.

23 Bruggen, Coosje van, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 10.

24 Ibid., p. 115.

25 Ibid., p. 19.

26 Ibid., p. 230.

27 Ibid., p. 238.

28 Schjeldahl, Peter in Neal Benezra, “Surveying Nauman,” in Bruce Nauman, Joan Simon, editor, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994) p. 26.

29 Bruggen, Coosje van, Bruce Nauman (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), pp. 115-6.

30 Ibid., p. 239.

31 Schmidt, Katharina, “Nothing Must of Necessity Be Concerned with Nothing. A Commentary on the Oeuvre of Bruce Nauman.” in Bruce Nauman, 1972-1981, (Otterlo, Netherlands: Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller, 1981) pp. 83-4.

32 Schimmel, Paul, “Pay Attention,” in Bruce Nauman, Joan Simon, editor, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1994) p. 69.