Week
3 – Learning to look at artworks
Article on reading artworks
My experience of
this from GOMA Trace and its performances
1)Bruce Nauman
Art Makeup 1967-68
Visual analysis –
signs – this is a video of a man painting himself white then makes a pink then
a green layer which causes the previous
layers to go grey then finishes with a black layer. The colours are dulled
however and the background is a non descript wall causing all the attention to
rest upon the mans torso, upper body and head which is the main subject and viewpoint. 40 minutes long. There is a whirring noise in
the background.
To me this
spoke of a time based visually obvious and observable transformation of the artist
himself as the didactic highlights thus his body is the subject and is also the
object. He is the sole protagonist involved in his own transformation - in fact
controlling it- and it is performed slowly and pensively yet determinedly. Due
to the fact that this is a video the audience receives the full impact of the
transformation if we are prepared to sit through it all. Further research shows
that Nauman initially wanted to run it as a clip of each individual colour mask
being painted on, therefore 4 clips, been shown simultaneously. Nauman’s use of
the body as video performance also came at a time Lilian Haberer states ‘when
art had to define anew its sum and substance, a phenomenon which was
articulated in 1969 by Theodor W Adorno.’ (Haberer, L ,n.d, Bruce Nauman Art Make-up viewed 24 March
2014 http://www.newmedia-art.org/cgi-bin/show-oeu.asp?ID=ML000024&lg=GBR).
The
fact that Nauman has used video as the medium engages with the ritualistic
repetitive actions as well as the thoughtful and perhaps uncomfortable feeling
this creates in the audience as we have time to reflect upon what this means to
us. For me it was an ambivalent sense of creating an identity – a mask – yet also covering up an identity of
vulnerability and nakedness. I thought perhaps there was a reference to colour
and skin colour due to my history of living in Africa and the tensions of race.
The use of video and the way it is deliberately set up with the paint
accessible before hand also makes me think of Shakespeare’s ‘the world is a
play and all men are actors’ from Hamlet – this sense of performing identity.
As an American artist living during the times of second wave feminism which
started in the 1960’s could Nauman have been influenced by Judith Butlers
writing on identity as performance and Helaine Posner’s article on masculinity
as a masquerade?
This fantastic
paragraph of an article succinctly explains the influence of the times Nauman
was living in :
“In the midst of
Northern California’s macho art culture,* at the height of the Vietnam War,
catching the drift of early feminist performance art, Bruce Nauman went into
the studio in 1967 and made Art Make-Up, a 16mm color film to be projected onto
four walls of a small room It is projected onto four walls simultaneously so
that, standing in the center of the room in the bright white light as though on
a stage, the viewer is surrounded by images of the artist actor. The sound of
four projectors whirs overhead. In this dense sensory environment, the viewer
becomes an actor in the artist’s performance.
Art Make-Up is
composed of four one-reel sections designed as a loop to play continuously. It
is Nauman’s first film environment. In the film, he uses his body as a
sculptural material.
In front of a
stationary camera, Nauman repeatedly paints his face and naked torso, first
white, then pink, green and finally black. He is an Abstract Expressionist
painting, a bronze sculpture, a performance artist taking poses from heroic
classical sculpture and then from female and drag fashion.
In his existential
performance, the artist-actor reveals himself naked before the camera as he
systematically “makes himself up,” covers himself and withdraws from public
view. In Art Make-Up, Nauman creates an end-game circumstance to reveal the
contradictory human needs for communication as well as for withdrawal and
disguise. The film addresses the mutability of the self, and the construction
of identity, race and gender.”
Tanchelev, G 2007,
Bruce Nauman the early films and videos,
viewed 24 March 2014, http://www.stretcher.org/features/bruce_nauman_the_early_films_and_videos/
Film still, my own
from visit, Bruce Nauman, Art Make-up 1967-68
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