In the middle of Bruce Nauman’s studio paraphernalia in his video Self-portrait at 80, 2022, sutured images of the artist’s body play with unusual inversions, reversals, subdivisions and re-adhesions as he traverses a carefully circumscribed space. His physical acrobatics, a sort of tightrope walk, suggest a metaphysical awareness of his deliberate and unconscious behavior patterns. This space – both in the rarefied everyday arena of creative production and in the medium of video – gives new twists to Nauman’s familiar catalog of gestures, which he self-reflectively calls upon from the outset.
In single-channel projections Convenient And Spiderboth 2021, as well as the eight unsynchronized channels Her brand, 2021, Nauman’s signature, clean aesthetic eschews the kind of spectacle typical of larger-than-life video. Shot in close-up, the artist records his hands repetitively tracing X’s on a scarred wooden table. Is Nauman at work, with his movements like ministrations to create something out of nothing, a kind of cultural prestidigitation? The figures sketched by Nauman’s fingers remain elusive while marking a particular place and lamenting a specific moment – a summoning of past, present and future or an understanding that some things may still happen, while others never will.
3D glasses are given to each spectator upon entering the gallery, which can be used for some of the screenings presented. The offering is almost like a ritual gesture, a gift in the hope of transforming someone’s perceptions. The incessant repetitions of Nauman’s hands on the table give the work a meditative, even melancholic air. The moves can be interpreted as a reminder of a legal sleight of hand the US government used to appropriate Indigenous lands (as shown in the show’s wall text) or as penance, an attempt to erase those primal sins. And perhaps they are also the gestures of a renowned artist approaching the end of his life, reconjuring something crucial as his last act.
