2002, "Bruce Nauman," Eye Level

Bruce Nauman's installation at Dia in New York, Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), involves seven DVD projections and a variety of audio tracks presented in the warehouse exhibition space across the main building.  The work bears similarity to Nauman's studio based performances of the 1960's.  The black and white video for this work has a green tint and pixilated look.  It appears that the videos were shot with stationary night vision surveillance cameras and enlarged by projection.  Sounds were recorded, edited and remixed so that the visual images and audio tracks are out of sync. The viewer can watch and wait and listen from a wheeled office chair in the middle of the gallery. Each video consists of a little over 5 uneventful hours of the artist's New Mexico studio.  Trash, abandoned art projects, a house cat, moths and wild mice fill the studio. The videos are still-lifes, with the few exceptional moments when a mouse runs across the floor or a moth hits the camera lens.  For those too impatient, Nauman created a textual map of the videos, presented in the lobby, which outline all of the occurrences in each video and their precise time.  Enduring the work for any length of time is Nauman's mousetrap of the viewer.  One begins to realize this is not a work about watching but about being watched.  The videos showcase the ominous, unknowable dark force of "night in the desert," where the primal reigns and one fears the predator.  Though the sounds are natural, they are manipulated just enough to imply the unseen hand of Nauman, the unseen hand of surveillance.  The auditory slaps and slams, one assumes from the screen door or cat and mouse chase, are just soft enough to listen to the real sounds in the gallery as well.  The visitors, who gawk and talk and try to explain the importance of Nauman's work, are the final auditory element in this elegy to sound.  Of course the title of this work is more likely about Nauman's cat, who fails to catch the mouse in the end and goes by "John Cage."