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Blink: The Viewer as Blind Man in Installation Art

Jane Blocker
Published online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Jane Blocker (2007) Blink: The Viewer as Blind Man in Installation Art, Art Journal, 66:4, 6-21, DOI:
10.1080/00043249.2007.10791279
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2007.10791279

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Downloaded by [Courtauld Institute of Art] at 07:39 17 November 2014

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Bruce Nauman, Green Light Corridor,

1970, painted wallboard and fluorescent
light fixtures with green lamps, dimensions
variable, approx. 120 x 480 x 12 in. (304.8 x
1219.2 x 30.5 ern), The Panza Collection,
Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New
York (artwork 2007 Bruce Naumanl
Artists Rights Society [ARS], NewYork;
photograph by Erika Barahona Ede The
Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation,
NewYork)

I blink my eyes to keep the time.

-Bruce Nauman

"And what about the day," Jacques Derrida asks, "the rhythm of the days and
nights without day or light, the dates and calendars that scan memories and
memoirs? How would the memoirs of the blind be written?" I Derrida wonders
how there can be a journal of the blind, a daily accounting,
when to be blind is to live in darkness, never to see the sun,
that clock by which we measure the day.How, in other
words, can the blind man keep time? It is important to
understand that when Derrida writes of the blind man, he is not necessarily
talking about people who have lost their sight to disease or injury, but rather
about a dual figure: the philosopher and the artist. 2 Throughout his catalogue
essay for a 1993 exhibition of drawings at the Louvre, Derrida identifies himself
with the draftsman, repeatedly discussing the ways in which the
Jane Blocker
philosopher delineates, draws contours and limits. 3 Thought
begins, in Western metaphysics, where one draws a line, a conceptual boundary, such as that between day and night, without
which there would be no categories, no taxonomy, no epistemology, no time. But the drawing of that line, the making of
representation, is an act of the blind. He explains this principle
by commenting on the ways in which, in order to draw a portrait,
the portraitist must turn away from the sitter's face and see the
lines or traits on his paper. Similarly, in order to write the word "face," one must
turn away from the putative real and attend to the lines that form the word. In
both instances, this turning away-from the face to the portrait, from the thing
to its name-this trope, is the fundamental motion and concern of both art
and philosophy.
We might illustrate this concept with one of the famous paintings of
Butades's daughter, the young draftswoman who appears in Pliny's natural history in a story he tells about the origin of art. The maiden's lover was set to leave
for battle. Out of fear and longing, she inscribes her lover's shadow on the wall,
his silhouette becoming a remembrance of his having been with her. As can be
seen in Joseph-Benoit Suvee's The Origins ofPainting (1791), in order to draw his silI wish to dedicate this essay to my mother.
houette, she must turn away from him and toward the wall, from the light and
toward
the shadow, from the real to the representation. This parable is normally
The epigraph is from Bruce Nauman, Please Pay
Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words; Writings
understood to illustrate the rudiments of art: it begins with the pure desire to
and Interviews, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, MA:
make the absent present; it begins not with skillful or educated rendering but
MIT Press, 2003), 62.
the simple act of fixing the indexical shadow. In that sense, the maiden's drawing
I. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The
might seem the product of immediate experience more than of representation,
Portrait and OtherRuins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
but her act of tracing, because it involves a moving toward the image, inherently
and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 33.
marks, however nascent, the representational turn. To pursue the idea further,
2. Ibid., 2. 'The operation of drawing would have
the line which she draws, though it can be seen on the wall or the page, is not
something to do with blindness, would in some
way regard blindness."
a record of what she sees. Such lines are not mimetic, even in the most realistic
3. The 1993 exhibition comprised works Derrida
of drawings. They are rather what Derrida calls thresholds, representations of
chose from the Louvre's department of prints and
drawings. Representing a variety of historical perithe invisible, the boundaries we erect between the body and its surroundings,
ods, the works included self-portraits and images
between subject and object, between the thing-in-itself and what surrounds it.
of blindness, often blind men from Biblical or classical mythology.
To conceive of the real (to think about the real in philosophical terms), then, is

Features

Blink:
The Viewer as Blind Man
in Installation Art

art journal

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Joseph.Benoit Suvee, The Invention of the

Art of Drawing, large detail,1743,oil on
canvas, I05~ x 51~ in. (267 x 131.5 cm)
(artwork in public domain; photograph
Groenignemuseum, Bruges)

4. 'These blind men, notice, since the illustrious

blind of our culture are almost always men, the
'great blind men,' as if women perhaps saw to it
never to risk their sight. Indeed, the absence of
'great blind women' will not be without consequence for our hypotheses." Derrida, 5 and 5-6

n. I.

to draw a line, a contour which contains all those things that accord with the
concept of reality. Ironically, that line is always drawn by turning away from the
real and toward the line as representational convention, an abstraction or artistic
technique which we employ for expediency. We need the representation in order
to conceive of the real, the image of the cave to imagine the sun. This is why, for
Derrida, the lore of the blind man as seer has such a central place in Western
culture; it is commonly understood that to know the world, that is, to think the
world, is to be blind, where blindness is understood to provide ethical clarity.
This essay is an attempt to contemplate experiences of blindness in contemporary art and to suggest, based on that contemplation, that the viewer is
installed in these works as Derrida's blind man. I use "blind man" throughout
this essay as shorthand for viewers of whatever gender who are subjected to or
voluntarily engage in blindness, both physical and metaphoncal.t In the most
basic sense, Derrida's figure animates these works because we are quite literally,
if only momentarily, blinded by them. The installations I discuss here-by
Gonzalo Diaz, Terence Koh, Bruce Nauman, and Ifiigo Manglano-Ovalle-all
involve intense lights that disorient and blind rather than bring enlightenment
to their viewers. These are only the most vivid of recent examples. One could
consider at some length why the 2007 Documenta and Venice Biennale are filled
with works that produce blinding effects. In Kassel and Venice, in one dark room

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5. Derrida discusses the theme of hands throughout his book; see especially pages 3-9. "A hand of
the blind ventures forth alone or disconnected, in
a poorly delimited space; it feels its way, it gropes,
it caresses as much as it inscribes, trusting in the
memory of signs and supplementing sight," 3.
"The mise en scene of the blind is always inscribed
in a theater or theory of the hands," 26.
6. 5ee Derrida, 34-35 and 44-51.
7. Derrida remarks that "Every time a draftsman
lets himself be fascinated by the blind, every time
he makes the blind a theme of his drawing, he
projects, dreams, or hallucinates a figure of the
draftsman, or sometimes, more precisely some
draftswoman.... The subtitle of all these scenes
of the blind is thus: the origin of drawing. Or, if you
prefer, the thought of drawing, a certain pensive
pose, a memoryof the traitthat speculates, as in a
dream, about its own possibility." Ibid., 2-3.
8. "As I told you, this must not be read as the
journal of an exhibition ... what would a journal
of the blind be like?" Ibid., 33.

after another, the intense light of videos and films is projected onto dark walls,
and viewers stumble about in disorientation, bumping into or treading on others
who lean against the walls or sit on the floor. The sightless participants in all
these works take on the basic characteristics described by Derrida. They are both
bedazzled by light and subjected to darkness, and so become skeptics who doubt
vision and see with their bodies, groping with their hands.! In addition, particularly in the works of Diaz, Koh, Nauman, and Ovalle, stricken audience members become people of memories and afterimages; they dwell in representations
and reflections."
To the degree that these works produce blindness, they differ Significantly
from the artistic examples that captivate Derrida. Rather than artistic depictions
of blindness or drawings of the blind, these works produce Sightlessness.They
install our bodies as and at the center of works of art. My body is the wall on
which the text is written, the surface off which the light bounces. My retina is a
tiny canvas on which light and color are painted. Thus my body is the site where
the art takes place. As such, the body is a work, or rather a scene, of art. Such
works do not consist, as in Derrida's examples, of the representation of something exterior to art, but rather of an experience that is immanent within art. As
a result of that immanence, accepting the premise of the blind man means that
these installations and the philosopher-artists who inhabit them are engaged in
the task of contemplating the very conditions of art's possibility, particularly in a
theoretical moment that continues to debate the nature of representation and the
real and in a technological age in which such categories have been destabilized."
This is precisely where we must compensate for Derrida's rather narrow
focus, for although he examines some issues that are of central importance to
contemporary art (such as the contemplation of theoretical categories and the
conceptualization of vision), his work is silent about others. If we are to understand the specifically performative and temporal dimension,of the installations
we will examine, then we must attempt to answer the question that Derrida
abandons, "What about the day?"g We must, in other words, try to understand
the peculiar relation between the blind man and the sun, between the blind
man and time. When Derrida describes blindness, he tends to focus on either
pure darkness or bedazzlement. I prefer Nauman's idea of blinking, a reaction
to bright light that has a "pulse," so to speak, a rhythm, by which one can
keep time. In what follows, I hope to show, by discussing the specific strategies
employed by Nauman, an important forerunner of contemporary installation
practices (and particularly those discussed here), that the task of contemplating
the conditions of art's possibility today involves drawing and withdrawing a
line, not only between the real and representation, but between the body and
its environment, between one moment and another. These are lines drawn and
withdrawn by a strobing light, set to the beat of the human eye.
Let us begin then with the sun. Diaz's installation Eclipse, which he created
for this year's Documenta exhibition, installs the viewer in a scene of blindness
and the revelation of blindness. The installation consists of a small, rectangular
room, constructed within the Joseph Beuys Hall in the Neue Gallerie in Kassel.
One enters the narrow doorway to see a brilliant white light spread across the
opposite white wall. The other three walls of the room are painted charcoal gray,
making the room reminiscent of a camera obscura. The light is thrown across the

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Gonzalo Diu, Eclipsis, 2007, cuboid-shaped

installation, profile spotlight, text panel,
dimensions variable (artwork Gonzalo
Diu; photograph Uwe Zucchilepal
Corbis)

room by a theatrical spotlight mounted on the wall next to the entrance. As one
walks toward the blinding brightness, there is nothing whatsoever to see except
the black outline of a square and one's own shadow creeping up the wall as one
approaches it. The light does not illuminate anything, but only bounces off the
white wall at the viewer. Then a remarkable thing happens. If the viewer gets
close enough to the wall, her shadow is cast on it, and within this dark shape,
she sees white letters emerge on a square gray background, which the intensity
of the light had previously obscured. The letters read: "DU KOMMST ZUM
HERZEN/DEUTSCHLANDS/NUR UM DAS WORT/KUNST/uNTER DEINEM EIGE-

(You come to the heart of Germany only to read

the word "art" under your own shadow)." In this work, the viewer is blinded by
an artificial sun. It is only in turning away, like the daughter of Butades, from this
sun and its brilliant light and looking into the darkness of the shadow, the darkness of one's own silhouette, that representation, the word, reveals itself Put
simply, it is in a moment of blindness that we see "art."
At the same time, however, Diaz's invisible message seems to be an indictment
of our pursuit. It says, "You came all this way to see art, but what you found is
only the word 'art' written on a wall." In this context, the word Kunst is a line, a
trait drawn in blindness, which in Derrida's words, "both names and effaces.":"
A philosophical category, it is only a word, a depiction that names or represents
NEN/sCHATTEN/zu LESEN"

9. This text is very similar to the quote from

Novalis that Dfaz uses in his 1999 work AIcolor
del pensomiento. which was also displayed at
Documenta 12. "WIR SUCHEN OBERALL DAS
UNBEDINGTE UND FINDEN IMMER NUR DINGE"

0Ne seek everywhere the absolute and always

find only things).
10. Derrida, 88.

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I I. Gonzalo Diaz, "Exponer en el extranjero es

siempre un cacho," interview for the website
of the University of Chile, available online at
www.artes.uchile.c1/uchile.portall_nfpb+true&pa
geLabel= (consulted July 3, 2007; my translation).
12. Ibid.
13. A PAR light uses a parabolic aluminized reflector. HMI refers to "mercury medium-art iodide,"
a type of gas-discharge bulb, which is enormously
efficient, much more so than a tungsten bulb,
producing 90 lumens per watt. See Harry C. Box,
Set Lighting Technician's Handbook: Film Lighting
Equipment, Practice, and Electrical Distribution, 2nd
ed. (Boston: Focal Press, 1997), 54-56 and 410.
14. Shamim M. Momin, "The InfiniteTear,"
Terence Koh, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney
Museum of American Art; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), n. p.

art, but is not, in itself, art. What is more, it is not a depiction of the kind we
have come to expect from works of art, but a signifier of depiction's, that is, representation's, failure. It names something the experience of which is deferred.
Diaz has said of this work that it "formalize]s] a kind of suspicion or alienation about the effectiveness of the social function of contemporary postmodern
artistic production."11 Written in the second person-"you came to the heart
of Germany"-the message seems to be directed to the art-world audience that
attends the numerous international exhibitions that now dominate the globalized art market. "I suppose that the common spectators or those who might be
called 'specialists,''' Diaz remarks, "artists, curators, museum directors, galleries
and magazines, critics, theoreticians and art historians, intellectuals and collectors-go to Documenta with certain expectations.... That which will finally be
eclipsed will be precisely these expectations." 12 Given Diaz's own commitment to
social change and the political function of art, it seems clear that the expectations
to which he refers involve the experience of art as a slick commodity, the seeing
of art as a form of consuming within an international, postmodern art economy.
But his work hopes to eclipse that expectation, to throw it into shadow by highlighting something else. I argue that the experience of art in this work and in
others like it lies elsewhere; it is not in the reading of the word, the seeing of the
image or the experience of"art," but in the experience of blindness itself The
viewer is startled here by a trick of visual perception, a trick that takes place in her
eye: where she thought she saw nothing, there was something, and that something came into view, was perceived, only when darkness intervened. The viewer
thus becomes a skeptic, a philosopher who does not believe her eyes, who is
forced to consider whether and under what conditions art can exist any longer.
Terence Koh produced a comparable theater of sunlight using similar means
in 2007. His untitled work was installed in a small gallery just off the lobby of
the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art. The piece consists of a 4,ooo-watt HMI
PAR light, used in filmmaking to simulate sunlight, mounted about five feet
off the floor on a steel stand and pointed directly at the viewer. 13The light is
so intense that museum guards stationed near it wear sunglasses, and for the
unprotected viewer it has a painfully blinding effect. This blinding makes it all
the more difficult to see the other element of the work, a lead ball, one foot in
diameter, which lies on the floor and contains what the artist describes as a
secret. Though, like Diaz's piece, it employs a theatrical lighting instrument to
achieve its effect, Koh's installation produces a more direct visual assault. The
viewer blinks, squints, and turns her head to one side as she approaches the
source of the intense light that blinds her. Because this lighting instrument is
4,000 watts, unlike the spotlight used in Diaz's piece, which is perhaps only
1,000 or 1,500 watts, it creates a great deal of inviting warmth, and simultaneously, because it is pointed directly at the viewer instead of at a wall, it produces
an almost painful experience and a disorienting barrage of afterimages, what the
Whitney curator Shamim Momin describes as "explosions in your retina." 14, No
longer able to see the light to which I am subjected, I close my eyes and see an
image, a memory, a representation of that light, which is ultimately a representation of my own seeing. It is as though, rather than stare at the sun, one were to
turn to see the sun's reflection in water, except that in this instance the image
of the sun is reflected in the watery chamber of the eye itself Therefore, in an

II

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Terence Koh, Untitled, 2007, mixed media

sculpture,light on custom metal stand,
custom lead sphere with secret content,
string, dimensions variable, edition of 3
and 2 artist's proofs (artwork Terence
Koh;photograph provided by Peres
Projects, Los Angeles and Berlin)

IS. Ibid.
16. Derrida, 13, IS.

extremely clever way, Koh's conceptual installation, though it does not engage in
traditional forms of depiction, returns us, just as Diaz's work did, to the image,
to representation.
In that regard, it also returns us to philosophy, to Plato's cave and the traditional philosophical belief that light represents the authentic, the good, and
the true. But Koh's installation seems to view the light of the sun not only as
beautiful, infinite, and cosmic, but as potentially threatening. "Using light as
his primary material," Momin explains, "Koh transforms the gallery space into
a seductive yet inaccessible diorama, creating a psychological interaction that
evokes desire and loss, pain and hope.... As we enter the Museum lobby, we
are immediately aware of the flood of light emanating from the gallery; it is so
powerful that its presence in the space is almost physical. When we turn toward
it, however, it is nearly impossible to look at directly. It is a harsh, painful,
extremely white void closing onto a single center, like the exploded point of a
star.?" Momin's warning reminds us of Derrida's discussion of what he calls
the "Platonic speleology."The inmates of Plato's cave, he remarks, "suffer from
sight," both when they are imprisoned, transferred from light into darkness,
and when they are freed, transferred from darkness into light. 16 On this point,
Derrida quotes Socrates, who of course challenged Plato's disdain for the image
that dances about in firelight, who entertained the possibility of the representation or the sign to enlighten when he said: "I decided that I must be careful not

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17. Quoted in Derrida, 15 n. 7.

18. Ibid. 53.
19. Momin.
20. Quoted in Momin.

to suffer the misfortune that happens to people who look at the sun and watch it
during an eclipse. For some of them ruin their eyes unless they look at its image
in water or something of the sort. I thought of that danger, and I was afraid my
soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them
with any of my senses. So I thought I must have recourse to logoi and examine in
them the truth of things that are." '7
I wish to suggest that we are like philosopher-artists installed in these
works, engaged in inscribing and contemplating the line between the real and
representation, the trait, which continually both "draws a boundary and withdraws from it." 18To be this blind man means, for Derrida, to see with one's
hands, and indeed when one interacts with these installations one finds oneself
touching-walls, elevator doors, a door jamb or stair railing-whatever is near
to hand that will steady one's balance. The blind man of necessity must also rely
on memory, both the memory of objects and spaces (the configuration of the
room, one's location relative to furniture) and, more important, the memory of
sight itself Deceived by shadows, blinded by sunlight, we are like Plato's cave
dwellers, for,like them, the viewer of contemporary art "suffers from sight:'
Accustomed to a world of simulation, a world where image is reality, we are fulltime skeptics for whom light and darkness, truth and falsehood, reality and representation hold equal dangers. We are left to draw blindly, again and again, the
line between them.
While I have focused thus far on these artificial suns, I want now to consider
their relation to time. Obviously, given the attempts of these artists to depict
sunlight and the solar eclipse, they make reference to cosmic temporalities and
their measurement, not only the daily circuit of the earth around its star, but the
months, years, or centuries marked by lunar and solar eclipses, the eons that it
takes for a planet to go dead like Koh's lead sphere fallen to the floor. The brilliant light suggests, as Momin puts it, "a byproduct of cosmic creation-like the
creation of dark matter, the dying explosion of a supernova, or the collapsing
center of a black hole that theoretically produces a new universe." 19 In contemplating his work's relation to these galactic forces, Koh describes his efforts as an
attempt at "crossing time with light:'20 In addition to their external references
to time, to the "rhythm of the days and nights:' these installations are fundamentally constituted by a more human form of temporality. Not only are the
works time-based, not only do they invite participants to perform within their
confines (to play the part of the moon, for example), they also make specific
reference to and may be said to be about performance-the theatrical spotlight,
the cameraman's lighting equipment, the stage, and the set. To the degree that
they employ these two categories of time-the cosmic and the performativeand to the extent that they install their viewers, it might be said that they owe a
debt to the work of Nauman.
In 1968 Nauman built the first of what was to become a series of corridor
installations. Made of wallboard affixed to freestanding two-by-four studs, the
corridors varied in dimension (width, height, and length), in their use of lighting (some later versions included green or yellow fluorescent lights), and in
some instances the use of closed-circuit video. The first corridor was made as a
prop and theatrical setting for his videotaped performance Walk with Contrapposto.
The videotape shows Nauman walking down the narrow corridor, away from the

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Bruce Nauman, Performance Corridor,

1969, wallboard, wood, 96 x 240 x 20 in.
(243.8 x 609.6 x 50.8 cm), The Panza
Collection, Solomon R.Guggenheim
Museum, NewYork (artwork 2007 Bruce
Nauman/Artists Rights Society [ARS],
NewYork; photograph provided by
Sperone Westwater, NewYork)

21. Bruce Nauman in an interview with Michele

De Angelus, in Nauman, 258.

camera, in an exaggerated manner, swinging his hips in a series of contrapposto

poses. Rather than taking down the set, as Nauman explains it, he left the corridor up in his studio for a year before deciding that it could stand on its own
as a work of art, which he then included in a show at the Whitney Museum of
American Art in 1969.21 Walk with Contrapposto is just one of several video performances Nauman made in this period, performances that involved simple repeated
movements he did alone in his studio in front of a black-and-white video camera often set at odd angles relative to the action.
As might be said of all of these works, this piece involved the examination
of the boundary between sculpture and theater, art and time. As though engaged
in one of Eadweard Muybridge's time-motion studies or in a philosophical
dialogue with Gotthold Lessing, Nauman imitates the iconic pose of classical
sculpture, but sets it in motion down a narrow hallway, the very form of which
suggests a linear and temporal progression from one end to the other. Once
this stage set was displayed as a sculpture itself, however, seemingly affirming
the more static features of that medium, it had the ironic effect of installing the
viewer as a surrogate performer. Instead of Nauman entering the narrow open-

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Bruce Nauman, still from Walk with

Contrapposto, 1968, videotape, black-andwhite with sound,60 min., to be repeated
continuously (artwork 2007 Bruce
Nauman/Artists Rights Society [ARS],
New York;photograph provided by
Sperone Westwater, New York)

ing and traversing the cramped hallway, the viewer found himself squeezed
between its featureless walls. What is interesting about this transition from
prop to sculpture and from Nauman to the viewer is the artist's specific understanding of the viewer's role and his careful attempts to constrain that role.
His comments about these early forays into installation remind us that he was
working in a historical moment in which the rules and conventions of the
medium were still being worked out. "It was just two parallel walls," Nauman
remarks,
that stuck straight out from the studio wall about twenty feet and about
twenty inches apart. I remember it wasn't very big-I can remember some
bigger ones. I finally just decided it was fine the way it was, it didn't need
the performance. I think it was very hard for me to present it without any
particular instructions, because I felt I didn't want people to make their own
performance. I wanted to control the situation, and I felt that by giving
something as simple and uninflected as that corridor, that I was allowing
people a lot more latitude than I was used to."

22. Ibid.

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Bruce Nauman, Live- TopedVideo Corridor,

1970, wallboard, video camera, two video
monitors, videotape player,videotape,
dimensions variable, approx. 144 x 384 x
20 in. (365.8 x 975.4 x 50.8 cm), The Panza
Collection, Solomon R.Guggenheim
Museum, NewYork (artwork 2007 Bruce
Nauman/Artists Rights Society [ARS],
NewYork; photograph provided by
Sperone Westwater, NewYork)

23. See, for example, Lorraine Sciarra, interview

manuscript, Pomona College, Claremont,
California, 1972, first pub. in Nauman, 167;
Willoughby Sharp, "Nauman Interview," Arts
Magazine 44 (March 1970): 22-27; Willoughby
Sharp, "Interview with Bruce Nauman," Avalanche
2 (Winter 1971): 22-31; Jan Butterfield, "Bruce
Nauman: The Center of Yourself," Arts Magazine
49 (February 197S): S3-55; Michele De Angelus,
"Interview with Bruce Nauman" (1980), unpublished manuscript from the California Oral History
Project, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of
American Art, Washington, DC. For more on
the viewer's role in Nauman's installations, see
Janet Kraynak, "Dependent Participation: Bruce
Nauman's Environments," Grey Raam 10 (Winter
2003): 22--45.
24. Bruce Nauman in Willoughby Sharp, "Nauman
Interview," in Nauman, 112.
25. Joseph Roach, Cities af the Dead: CircumAtlantic Perfarmance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996), 2-3.

The corridor-as-installation seemed to invite the viewer's direct participation, indeed to be meaningful only with that participation, so it was troubling
to an artist famously involved in solitary, conceptual experimentation. To say
that the viewer's body was installed in this work is to recognize that while that
body became an unpredictable element in the piece, it was at the same time disciplined by the limits and rectitude of the walls by which it was surrounded.
Nauman has stressed in several interviews, both from the early 1970S and more
recently, that he wanted to control the behavior of his audience." In a sense,
what he describes is a desire to install an ideal participant in the work, to set the
participant up as one would a work of art and manage its parameters. The corridors thus become metaphors for the exhibition space itself, the white unadorned
walls of a gallery. Just as installation art is by definition produced in response
to and is contained within the site where it is erected, so the audience member
responds to, plays within, and is enclosed by Nauman's claustrophobic space.
In later works, such as Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970)' he made this correlation
even more evident. He installed a closed-circuit camera at the top of the wall at
one end and two video monitors on the floor at the opposite end. This produces
a very odd experience in which the viewer, as she enters the corridor, sees the
back of her own head and torso displayed on one of the monitors in front of
her, while an image of the empty corridor remains unchanged on the other. If
she turns to look at the camera, her face will appear on one of the monitors, but
her back will be turned away from it so she cannot see it. Though she may act
in this space, she cannot show her face to herself, cannot really see herself, and in
this way is held suspended somewhere in the middle of the corridor between
camera and monitor. In an interview with Willoughby Sharp, Nauman explains
that the purpose for this configuration is "to make the situation sufficiently limiting, so that spectators can't display themselves very easily."When Sharp asks if
the work is not "rather perverse," Nauman replies: "Well, it has more to do with
my not allowing people to make their own performance out of my art." 24
Not quite performance and not quite sculpture, Nauman's corridor pieces
provoke a series of questions: What is the role of the, for lack of a better word,
"viewer's" body and the effect of the constraints placed on that body? What is
the place of vision in works in which there is nothing in particular to see (the
blank walls), or in which seeing is frustrated (the image of the back of one's
head), or in which one is blinded (the bright lights)? And what is the function
of representation in works in which nothing much seems to be represented?
While it seems clear that Nauman's works are performative--they involve a setting, an actor, a simple narrative arc, a temporal framework, and what Joseph
Roach has called surrogation (the viewer stands in for the artist )-they also
resist the category of performance. 25 They are, at the same time, involved with
seemingly more conventional artistic concerns such as vision (we are forced
to contemplate our own seeing), subject-object relations (the corridor is both
sculpture and stage), and representation (the viewer represents the artist).
Performance and sculpture, the real and representation, vision and blindnessthe corridor is an apt figure through which to contemplate the passage between
conceptual categories. It functions both as a long line (Derrida's trait) that
divides, and as a liminal space that connects-here and there, now and then.
Nauman's work Green Light Corridor (1970) features a narrow hallway, nearly

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forty feet in length, with walls that are ten feet high but only about one foot
apart. So constricted is the space that the viewer may pass through it only by
turning sideways and shuffiing awkwardly ankle to ankle from left to right or
right to left. This configuration sets up an odd scenario in which the viewer who
faces forward (that is, in the direction his feet are pointed) sees only a blank
wall that is so close to his face that it is difficult to focus his gaze. In order to see
anything, he must turn his head at a ninety degree angle, left or right, perpendicular to his feet. In addition, the corridor is lit from above with intensely green
fluorescent lights, which cause the participant to experience a magenta afterimage once he emerges from the piece into natural light. According to the artist's
catalogue raisonne, when the work was first exhibited at the LaJolla Museum
of Contemporary Art, "the corridor was set perpendicular to a window, which
allowed viewers, on exiting the piece, to see a spectacular view of ocean and sky
as if through proverbial rose-colored glasses."26
I think of Green Light Corridor as a space of doubt, a space through which
we pass by feeling rather than seeing our way. In that sense the work, like the
others discussed here, is the site of philosophy, a place in which the blind man
contemplates the nature of the real and the trauma of representation, the conditions of art's possibility Though there is virtually nothing in the way of imagery
in this work, representations abound: the corridor represents the featureless
interior space, the gallery itself, perhaps, or the drab and confining office cubicle; the lights represent artificiality, the dolorous workplace, the psychological
mood experiment; 27 the magenta afterimage represents a rosy view of the
world. In addition to these things, the work is suffused with a concern for the
representation of time. Time is of course a primary concern of all "time-based"
media such as this, works that have a temporal and performative component.
That Nauman is concerned with time is something which many critics and historians have commented on. But the argument I'm making here is somewhat
different from that usually made about Nauman's work. Paul Schimmel asserts,
for example:
Throughout his oeuvre, Nauman demonstrates an interest in using time
to structure the way the viewer sees.We must take the time to see the film,
video, and performance: we must spend the time to read the programmed
sequence of words or images in the neons: we must give the time to enter
and interact with the corridors, tunnels, and room constructions. The temporal and experiential engagement of the viewer has been the real armature
on which Nauman's sculptural aspirations are realized. The works are often
open-ended in terms of duration, but they are authoritarian in terms of the
artist's expectations of the rules of the viewer's participation, if not the parameters of the viewer's experience. 28

26. Bruce Nauman, ed. Joan Simon (Minneapolis:

Walker Art Center; New York: Distributed Art
Publishers, 1994), 245.
27. Michele De Angelus suggests this last interpretation in his interview with Nauman, in Nauman,
258-59.
28. Paul Schimmel, "Pay Attention," in Bruce
Nauman, 70.

Here Schimmel considers time to be a structure into which the viewerparticipant enters and by which he is controlled. In this sense, time exists prior
to and exclusive of the viewer. But I am suggesting that while Nauman's work
is authoritarian in some ways, strictly controlling what the participant may do
within the works, time does not exist in advance of the participant but is rather
represented by him, within his own body. Blinded by an intense green light, he
blinks his eyes, as Nauman says, to keep the time.

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29. Bruce Nauman, interview with Michele De

Angelus, in Nauman, 258-59.

30. Derrida, 4.

In describing Green Light Corridor, Nauman remarks: "The Green was a very
strong piece, but I had some people go in and find it very relaxing and other
people find it very intense. I found it fairly tense myself And then the yellow
rooms that I made--I could never stay in them." 19 To the extent that it offers
its participants a "fairly tense" experience of blinding color, Ifiigo ManglanoOvalle's work Radio (2007) seems to be the direct inheritor of Nauman's
efforts. Manglano-Ovalle's work, displayed at the Documenta-Halle in Kassel,
is installed in a room with a high ceiling and a bank of windows on one wall,
which face the wooded area behind the building. The glass curtain wall is covered with red anodized aluminum foil, which casts everything and everyone in
the space in an intense red-orange glow. On the floor lies a life-sized sculpture
of a radio in cast aluminum that is painted black, and speakers mounted on the
walls occasionally broadcast the sound of radio static. In the context of Ovalle's
body of work and his interest in exploring our relation to technology, the radio
reads as outmoded and forlorn, a once-revolutionary device now frozen into an
image. Like the word "art" in Diaz's installation, neither the sculpted radio (the
representation of a radio) nor the sounds broadcast in the room (the imitation
of radio sounds) are in themselves art, but are rather like names or delineations
that prepare us for an experience that lies elsewhere. Consistent with Ovalle's
interest in human perception, the room is the site of a biological experiment in
which the viewer's body becomes the scene of art. The viewer's eyes experience
such fatigue, growing so insensitive to the red spectrum of light that when
she blinks, the color seems to change as though someone had superimposed
a series of colored slides-first an intense orange, then apricot or peach, then
yellow. Looking out the window, the trees and grass are no longer green; the
sky is not blue but a disturbing postapocalyptic shade of sulfur. If she looks
from the room out one of the two doorways, the adjacent rooms, lit with
incandescent light, appear to be bathed in a green-blue tone. And as was the
case with Nauman's Green Light Corridor, when she exits the piece she experiences
an intense afterimage, a representation that colors everything she perceives and
casts doubt on her conception of the real. Like Plato's cave-dweller, the viewer
who is installed here suffers from Sight.
When Derrida asked what the day could mean to a blind man, he was not
thinking of Radio and its participants stumbling blindly out of the room, their
eyes burning with the color red as though touched by the sun itself If he had
seen this work, he might have thought about the way that, with its reference
to the radio, it introduces the experience of sound precisely where blindness
occurs. Indeed, for Derrida, this is the only place it can occur since sound, in
his view, is antithetical to vision. It is the medium of the blind. "Taking up time
rather than space in us," he remarks; the spoken word or sound more generally
"is addressed not only from the blind to the blind, like a code for the nonseeing, but speaks to us, in truth, all the time of the blindness that constitutes it." 3
Radio and the other works I've discussed here vigorously challenge the
time-space dichotomy by insisting on the temporality of Sight, making viewers
aware of the time of seeing. Manglano-Ovalle in particular draws together seeing and hearing as senses that equally take up time, that equally take up space,
that equally depend on the movement of invisible waves. In his hands, the light
of day (that is to say the sun), which we see out the gallery window, is made

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Hiigo Manglano-Ovalle, The Radio, 2007,

anodized aluminum, sound, and red film,
30 x 14 x 4 in. (76.2 x 35.6 x 10.1 cm),
installation view, Documenta 12, Kassel,
Germany (artwork Inigo ManglanoOvalle; photograph by Katrin Schilling!
documenta GmbH, provided by Max
Protetch Gallery, NewYork)

so alien that it begins to seem as though it were being broadcast around the
room, like a relentless and unintelligible sound. What is more, we ourselves are
the medium on which the light travels.When we exit the room, the red light is
carried as an afterimage in our eyes and moves along with each of us as though
carried on a wave between distant points. Like ears that cannot close to block out
a loud noise, the eyes cannot block out this red that seems to seep into everything and vibrate like sound waves in some tiny bone in the skull. As with the
other works of art I have discussed here, we are installed in Radio as blind men,
people who ponder the conditions of possibility for art in a time of skepticism,
in a time of touch-screens and picture phones, a time when we see with the tips
of our fingers, when we hear with our eyes.
Jane Blocker is associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota. She is author of Where Is
Ana Mendieta: Identity. Performativity. ond Exile (Durham: Duke University Press. 1999) and What the Body
Cost: Desire, History. and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2004). Her current
book project. Seeing Witness: Essays on Contemporary Art and Testimony. will be published in 2008.

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