“Feed Me/Anthro-Socio”, 1993, Multi-screen Video Installation
This piece was shown on 3 projections and 6 monitors in the gallery space. The screens show an actor’s face spinning and saying different phrases: “FEED ME / EAT ME / ANTHROPOLOGY”, “HELP ME / HURT ME / SOCIOLOGY”, AND “FEED ME, HELP ME, EAT ME, HURT ME”. As with “Clown Torture”, this piece is not complete until the viewer enters the installation space. This piece is focused heavily on the viewer’s experience, and continues Nauman’s trend of creating immersive pieces. Furthermore, this installation of course continues Nauman’s theme of communication, and the artist’s role in that process.
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“Setting a Good Corner”, 1999, Video, approx. 60 minutes
As with many of Nauman’s video works, this piece is meant to be played on a loop in the gallery space. It explores ordinary experiences and how people perform routine tasks and interact with their environment. Nauman said about this piece, “This is a completely different situation where—again, even though this is a new work, or a newish work, it comes from some thoughts about earlier work—where you could control the length of the film or videotape or activity by having a specific job. You began when the job started; and when the job was over, the film was over. And that became a way of structuring it without having to think about it, other than deciding what the job was that you were going to call the work.” The subject matter determines the duration of the video, and not the other way around. Nauman, like other Contemporary artists, is exploring the artist’s role in the creation of art.
An interview with Nauman about this piece can be found here: Art21 interview
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“Raw Materials”, 2004, Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, sound collage
This was a sound installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. Sound is an important recurring element in Nauman’s work, but in this piece sound is the dominant element. In this sound collage, he has taken multiple recordings from decades of his own work and overlaid them to play simultaneously. The result is that the listener hears him saying many things at once, some addressing the listener and some addressing no one. Some recordings are narrative, and some he is just saying disconnected phrases. From the Tate Modern’s website: “There are statements that explore sentence construction, single words repeated over and over, stories that feed back into themselves and go nowhere. Throughout, the tone of voice, the inflection, and variations in rhythms dramatically shift meanings, from diplomatic to psychotic, pleading to bullying, anxiety to mockery” (Link).Once again, Nauman is engaging the “viewer” (listener) in the piece. He is also continuing to explore language and his role as a communicator.
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“For Beginners (all the combinations of the thumb and fingers)”, 2010, Video
This is a video, displayed in a gallery setting, of Nauman making “all the combinations of the thumb and fingers” with his hands.