Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio & Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square; Charlemagne Palestine, Island Song

Watching Nauman's "Stamping in the Studio", I got a clear sense of what Rosalind Krauss meant when she said that the medium of video is narcissism. To create this video, it would have been easy for Nauman to create a short clip of himself stamping around, and then edit it into a long loop, much like in the Wonder Woman video. This is something that video easily accommodates. But he didn't. Considering that this was just an excerpt, he must have been going at it for quite a while. For the viewers, it's a pretty boring video. Nauman's long gallop around the room makes the experience more significant for the artist than for the audience. Whatever message he's trying to send, narcissism is an intrinsic part.

Watching Nauman in "Pinchneck", I think, this would be charming... if he were five. But the scene of a grown man just playing around like this is really kind of annoying, because it conveys a sense of egotism. Does he have nothing better to do with his time? Luckily, it's a short clip.

When Nauman started walking backwards along the square, I wondered if he had just played the tape backwards, so I immediately went back and forth along the video. I found that he looked down as he was going backwards, and didn't when he had been going forward, so he must have been actually walking backwards. But this seemed to me to almost violate the performance, because Nauman's intent might have been to make the audience wonder at exactly that. Then I wondered what might possess a man to do something so excruciatingly tedious? It seems like something a prisoner in solitary confinement might do to keep himself from going crazy.

Charlemagne Palestine, in "Island Song", reminded me of that one guy from the Police Academy movies who only made noises. Except while that guy was funny, Palestine is just annoying. It's hard to imagine what those few people on the streets were thinking as they watched this guy bellowing and grunting through town with a big backpack. Watching the video, I wondered why he had to spoil a nice ride with his damn growling. It makes it feel like we're strapped to a wild-eyed psycho, or George of the jungle. Which we are, in a sense. When he says "gotta get outta here", it reinforces the impression that he's lost it, since it's clearly impossible to get off an island on a motorcycle. Well, unless he drives off the edge, which it seemed like he might at the end. When he stops grunting and is just honking the horn at the ocean, the sense of loneliness and isolation is very remniscent of the end of the Joan Jonas video, where she is howling at an unblinking image.