Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)

Bruce Nauman's landmark video and sound installation examining the artist's studio at night through infrared recording, invoking John Cage's legacy of attending to silence and absence. About Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941, Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists of the postwar period. For more than six decades, his practice has persistently questioned what an artwork can be and, more fundamentally, what it means to be an artist. Moving between sculpture, performance, film, video, sound, neon, drawing and architecture, Nauman has never developed a recognizable style in the conventional sense. Instead, his work returns obsessively to a set of fundamental problems: the relationship between body and space, language and meaning, action and repetition, control and failure, presence and absence. More than thirty years after his earliest studio performances, Nauman returned to this fundamental territory with "Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)". During the summer of 2000, after noticing mice in his studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, Nauman installed an infrared-capable video camera, moving it among seven different positions in the studio to record the space at night. The resulting work, completed in 2001, consists of seven large-scale projections whose grey-greenish tonality derives from the infrared recording, accompanied by multiple channels of ambient sound. The infrared video cameras observe different areas of the studio: tables, chairs, equipment, moulds, abandoned materials and the residues of completed, unfinished or discarded works. Nauman used the nocturnal traffic through these spaces as a way of "mapping" the accumulated remains of years of artistic activity. The studio appears as a theatre of ruins: fragments of unrealised, abandoned, completed and still-unfolding artworks coexist within the same space. Yet almost nothing appears to happen: for long periods, the studio remains empty. The artist never arrives. Instead, tiny events gradually acquire enormous significance: a mouse crosses the floor; a moth passes close to a camera; the artist's cat prowls through the darkness; a screen door moves; an unidentified sound interrupts the silence. Infrared recording transforms these ordinary incidents into ghostly apparitions. The familiar environment of artistic production becomes strange, nocturnal and autonomous. The artwork emerges from events largely beyond the artist's direct control. The parenthetical title, Fat Chance John Cage, invokes the legacy of John Cage and his radical proposition that silence is never truly silent. As in Cage's "4′33″", what initially appears as silence becomes an invitation to attend to sounds and events that normally remain outside the frame of attention. Here, too, once attention is activated, apparently empty time reveals itself as an accumulation of events. Nauman applies a comparable proposition to space: an empty studio is never completely empty. What makes "Mapping the Studio" extraordinary is that Nauman reverses the premise of his earliest work. In the 1960s, the proposition was: the artist is in the studio; therefore, whatever happens there can become art. Here, the artist is absent. Yet things continue to happen. Cats, mice, moths, sounds, shadows and accidental movements populate the space in his absence. Agency appears to shift from the artist towards the environment itself. The artwork seems to emerge precisely through the artist's non-action: it is produced without his direct intervention or will. This inversion acquires a particular resonance when the work is encountered in Thailand. Within Thai Buddhist culture, non-action, stillness and withdrawal need not signify emptiness or passivity. They can instead constitute conditions of heightened awareness. Even in "Mapping the Studio", the withdrawal of the artist does not produce nothingness. On the contrary, it allows another world to become perceptible: the mice move, the cat waits, the moth crosses the camera, the building makes sounds. Time passes. Across the seven views, the five hours and forty-five minutes of the projections seem to expand into the apparent stillness of the studio. The less that happens, the more acutely we become aware of duration. Waiting becomes almost tangible. As attention intensifies, time ceases to be merely the measure within which events occur and becomes itself the substance of the experience. In "Mapping the Studio", this displacement of the human being from the centre becomes unexpectedly literal. The work proposes an ecology of attention in which human beings cease to occupy the privileged position within the image. The artist relinquishes the studio to other bodies and other temporalities. Animals become performers; abandoned objects become scenery; darkness becomes material; waiting becomes an artistic condition. When the artist leaves, nothing happens. And, slowly, everything begins to happen. The exhibition is supported by Elisa Yu Art Foundation. With special thanks to Dia Art Foundation. Read more Toggle Installation Performance / Live Art Film / Video