Bruce Nauman is one of my favorite artists and he often works with video in his art. I love many of his video works, especially those that deal with video surveillance and include live video of the audience as they interact with the work, but for this post I will focus on Revolving Upside Down. In a famous quote from an interview with Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere, Nauman said "If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art." This is an interesting concept that immediately drew me to Nauman and is clearly seen in many of his videos. Nauman often used video as a means of simply recording his actions as an artist in the studio. He would perform extremely banal actions, such as walking seen in the video below, but because he was an artist in the studio, he considered the actions to be art.
Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square
In Revolving Upside Down though, Nauman rotated the video camera so that his normally mundane activity, pivoting on one foot, appeared as a gravity-defying act. The camera recorded his movements upside down and completely changed the affect of the work. Nauman utilized the camera as more than a neutral observer and allowed it to influence the final work.
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