The Dialectics of my Dancewear
At the end of the 1960s, as part of a series of documented performances in which he investigated spatial patterns, Bruce Nauman created one of his better-known performance works, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square – a 10 and half minute-long silent film documenting the artist's uninterrupted movement around the perimeter of a square, marked with white masking tape on the floor of his studio.
Much has been said and written about the movement vocabulary of this work, designed with the help of choreographer Meredith Monk: incessant movement backwards and forward, as the artist's physical gestures – placing his legs on the square's lines with exaggerated slowness, while leaning his body weight on his waist, distorting his torso - stretch the boundaries of time and space and become a non-narrative narrative. Nauman moves as a wind-up toy programmed to perform the dance walk (or the walking dance) ad infinitum, an Object as Body mechanics, augmented through its reflection in a small vertical mirror which leans against the studio's exposed back wall: when captured by the camera in its distorted reflection, this apparently inhuman choreography acquires an apparently human form of a classical contrapposto.1
The immobility of the 16 mm camera makes this movement all the more pronounced. The camera only captures a small part of the square, remaining fixed even as Nauman disappears into areas outside the frame. Artist Coosje van Bruggen rightfully observed that these moments of "disappearance" paradoxically accentuate Nauman's isolation in his double prison, the frame and the studio. Yet this prison is2 not only spatial; it is a temporal prison as well, because this perpetuum mobile lacks a real beginning or end. It is a movement that challenges the limits allotted by our perception, through the arbitrarily selected moments of beginning and end of the taped documentation. It seems Nauman has always been and will always be there, as if independent from the audience, constructing a self-sustaining circle with his square movement, but also trapped inside it. This exaggerated walker is absolute freedom and absolute subjugation at the same time; both the creator and the chronotopic creation of his empty circular square (or square circle).3
This dance of the empty space is formed as an incessant dialectic tension between presence and absence, between Nauman's exaggerated movement, accentuated in space, and the void it delineates, while it is itself delineated by its present absence – a proof that art does not abide by Parmenides's well-known claim that whatever is is, and whatever isn't cannot be; rather, it is based on a faith in dynamic dualism in which what isn't is (as the absent shapes that which is present), and what is isn't (as the present is nothing but an illusion delineating the absent, while being absent itself). Heraclitus prevails over Parmenides; harmony – if it exists – grows out of the4 movement between opposites, which are interweaved in a manner beyond binary dichotomy. The empty space inside the square and the present movement which delineates it (inside the boundaries traced by masking tape) are being formed simultaneously, in an apparently paradoxical process: the void generates the movement that surrounds it (Nauman is careful not to invade the square's territory), and the movement constructs – or to be more precise, activates – the void.
It is interesting to compare Nauman's choreographic logic in this work, which can justly be defined as a film-dance, to "Dance Twenty One" by the late poet Hezi Leskali, a poem belonging to a cycle of thirty poems, "The Empty Dances", from his book Addition and Subtraction:
At the time of the great hunger I ate
The food
On the plate
And the plate
Under the food
And the table
Under the plate
And the floor
Under the table
And the foundations
Under the floor
And the earth under the foundations.
And I only left the void intact because
I am going to cut my dancing wear out of it.
(Hezi Leskali, "Dance Twenty-One", 1985-1987)
While Nauman uses an exaggerated mechanical accumulation of the "is" to accentuate the void – an artistic strategy prevalent in his work to this day – Leskali does the same in a seemingly opposite way: he eradicates the "is". This obsessive, methodical reduction, layer after layer, reveals an irreducible void, a void which keeps expanding as the "is" keeps shrinking, being swallowed by this man of great hunger, whose indestructible stomach is perhaps an echo of Chaplin's tramp in The Gold Rush.
Yet these works have more in common than differences. Leskali's surrealistic, supposedly inhuman eating – as mechanical and as exaggerated as Nauman's walking – copies a very human attempt to fill an inner void. The linear outlines of this action conceal a cyclical pattern of constant movement: the inner void generates the eating of the external reality, which in turns creates (or at least reveals) an uneatable external void, which is nothing but an externalization of the unsatisfiable inner void; which means the present-absent reality created out of the void, the dancewear of the dance of the empty space, is from its inception an object of swallowing which will generate a new reality out of the void, and this reality will once again turn into an object for swallowing, and so on.
Leskali's dancer is simultaneously eating and eaten. His movement is absolute freedom and absolute subjugation, a cyclical becoming which traps the void while being simultaneously trapped inside of it. To dance, he needs his costume, which, as we have argued, expresses the dialectic tension between the "is" born out of the "isn’t" and the "isn't" born out of the "is". And perhaps this costume is nothing but the white shirt and black pants of the exaggerated walker, as the dance acts of both artists are two that are one, a fictive reality and a real fiction. "In fiction time is subtracted," explains Yoel Hoffman, "one must put down in two or three lines what returns (and keeps returning) a thousand times."
Translated by Michal Shalev
1 Contrapposto is an artistic term used to describe the position of a human figure in a transition between resting and walking. It is considered the classical position of Ancient Greek art.
2 Coosje van Bruggen, "Sounddance", in: Robert C. Morgan [ed.], Bruce Nauman, [Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2002], pp. 47-48.
3 The chronotope is a term used by Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, a portmanteau of the Greek χρόνος ('time') and τόπος ('space').
4 Parmenides and Heraclitus were two major pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Parmenides argued that all reality was necessarily one, and negated any possibility of plurality [whatever is can only be one, or it is not]. Heraclitus, on the other hand, claimed that the world cannot be based on a single material cause, as such a claim will ignore its plurality, difference and movement [the principle of constant flowing: no man ever steps into the same river twice]. He believed true wisdom lies in recognizing the oneness of all contradicting phenomena.