What is wrong with offering an experience that enfolds in real space, in real time? This was the question Bruce Nauman asked in the 2003 publication, ‘Theatres of Experience’. A document is just that... evidence. Performances, on the contrary, can heighten awareness of our often contradictory physical, psychological, social, emotional and perceptual states.
What is the problem with having to move physically round something?
Bruce Nauman’s Performance Corridor of 1969 did just that. It was about control. Passive spectators morph into active participants manipulated, never the less, in their movement by Nauman’s controlled space. He said, “I want to be a director of viewing experience.”
Nauman’s corridor lies somewhere between action and non-action, the viewer can only ever see part of the image and thus moves this way or that trying (futilely) to find a complete view. In the book Nauman is described as, “a controller of marionettes via cameras.” Rather like Brecht’s alienation effect, Nauman says, “a moment when one is shocked bodily into an awareness of... the uncanny... suddenly in the minds of reassuringly familiar forms a space opens up, lit by a strange light.”
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