Amid the paraphernalia of Bruce Nauman’s studio in his video Self-Portrait at 80, 2022, sutured images of the artist’s body play out unusual inversions, reversals, subdivisions, and re-adhesions as he traverses an intently circumscribed space. His physical acrobatics, a tightrope walk of sorts, suggest a metaphysical awareness of one’s deliberate and unconscious patterns of behavior. This space—in both the rarified quotidian arena of creative production and within the medium of video—gives new twists on Nauman’s familiar catalogue of gestures, which he self-reflexively calls out from the start.
In the single-channel projections Practice and Spider, both 2021, as well as the unsynchronized eight-channel His Mark, 2021, Nauman’s signature, pared-down aesthetic sidesteps the kind of spectacle typical of larger-than-life video. Shot in close-up, the artist records his hands repetitively tracing Xs over a scarred wooden tabletop. Is Nauman hard at work, with his movements as ministrations for creating something out of nothing, a kind of cultural prestidigitation? The figures sketched by Nauman’s fingers remain elusive while marking a particular spot 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 viewer as they enter the gallery, which can be used for some of the projections on display. The offering is almost like a ritualistic gesture, a gift in hope of transforming someone’s perceptions. The ceaseless repetitions of Nauman’s hands over the tabletop lend the work a meditative, even melancholic air. The movements can be read as reminder of a legal sleight of hand that the US government employed to appropriate Indigenous lands (as referenced in the show’s wall text) or as penance, an attempt at washing away such primal sins. And perhaps they’re also the gestures of a renowned performer nearing the end of life, reconjuring something crucial as his final act.
— Brian Karl
