Bruce Nauman - Live-Taped Video Corridor

1970

Artists: Bruce Nauman · Year: 1970 · Medium: Closed-circuit video installation, narrow corridor with two monitors showing pre-recorded footage and delayed live feed · Substrate: Sheetrock corridor approximately 25 feet long and 20 inches wide; two TV monitors stacked at far end; one monitor plays pre-recorded footage of the empty corridor, the other plays live video with a time delay · Place: New York / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Leo Castelli Gallery (exhibition); Whitney Museum (acquisition) Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is a narrow sheetrock corridor, twenty-five feet long and twenty inches wide, with two stacked television monitors at its far end. The top monitor shows footage of the empty corridor pre-recorded before the exhibition. The bottom monitor shows live video from a camera behind the viewer, with a time delay. As the viewer walks down the corridor toward the monitors, they see themselves approaching from behind, with the delay producing the disorienting effect of watching oneself move seconds ago. The piece is one of the earliest major closed-circuit video installations by a conceptual artist. Nauman's argument, that video as a medium permits specific investigations of self-observation, time, and embodiment that are unavailable in other media, has been one of the structural claims of video art ever since. Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and other 1970s conceptualists produced adjacent closed-circuit pieces; Nauman's Corridor is the most widely-exhibited and most-often-cited example. Nauman is, in the broader conceptual-art canon, one of the major American artists of the late twentieth century; his Corridor sits within a much wider practice that includes neon text, cast-latex sculpture, performance, and photography. But the Corridor specifically exemplifies his engagement with video technology, and its inclusion in this archive is as a cybernetic-art moment that entered mainstream art-historical attention. Lore Nauman produced the first Live-Taped Video Corridor in his own studio in Pasadena before exhibiting variants at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1970. The piece has been restaged multiple times in different venues; each version requires a site-specific corridor construction. The Whitney Museum acquired an edition in the 1970s and has periodically re-exhibited it. Sources • Whitney Museum, Nauman collection • Bruggen, Coosje van, Bruce Nauman (Rizzoli, 1988) • Leo Castelli Gallery, exhibition records