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PARTISAN REVIEW
formal self-absorption dear to modernism: the pleasure it takes in the act of
self-definition. To shape material not by or for the performance of a func–
tion but rather for the display of its internal properties, as this sculpture
does , is to do a very particular thing to physical substances .
It
is to project
onto them the illusion that the objects they form can qualify and define
their own physicality, and in that peculiar form of sentience can mirror the
human consciousness that regards them. At the same time, those mirrors of
the viewer's own being are inescapably alien to him . They possess the
btutish unresponsiveness of inert matter. To see oneself in them is to see
oneself in a medium that enforces utter remoteness from the object of one's
contemplation: oneself.
There is in video the possibility of taking this paradox of "looking in by
looking out" and connecting it more explicitly with its psychic energies .
The video that simply packages narcissistic display fails to do this in any way
that goes beyond a kind of aesthetic freak show. But certain video promises
the organization and analysis of this material. The long , narrow video corri–
dors that Bruce Nauman built in 1969 lead their viewer through a space that
imitates the forward trajectory of vision . As one advances along the corridor,
one moves progressively farther away from a video camera mounted at the
back of the corridor, and closer to a TV monitor placed at its front . The
image one walks toward, as if to meet it , is one 's own . But it is oneself, seen
from behind and growing smaller with every step taken .
It
is an image of
photography capturing and exploring a circuit of space from which we as
subjects are naturally excluded .
