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Exhibition text to Reinterpreting Body Pressure curated by Sofie Halder and Claire Deuticke
As we gather to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Body Pressure (1974), a curious if relatively little-known piece by Bruce Nauman, one question naturally arises: what significance does such an art work still hold for us today?
Let’s start with some context. Body Pressure was born in the early seventies, at a time when Nauman had already shifted his interest from working with his own body to experimenting with that of the viewer. These were the years of some of his most playfully immersive installations, such as Live Taped Corridor or Going around the corner piece, both from 1970, which famously used architecture and surveillance cameras to complicate the visitors’ linear perception of space and self. The built environments guided the visitor’s movements like scores in a performance; Nauman wanted to create works that ultimately depended on the beholder’s direct participation for their completion.
Body Pressure works in a similar fashion. Here, however, unlike in his previous pieces, Nauman’s instructions are clearly explained through printed language. Body Pressure consists of a simple text on pink-colored paper, taped to the gallery wall as well as distributed to the visitors during the exhibition. Due to its materially ephemeral and linguistically replicable status, the work is not relegated to one unique, auratic (Walter Benjamin’s hic et nunc) encounter, but it can be experienced and performed anywhere and anytime, as many times as possible. This liquid, flexible relationship with viewers, space and temporality is one of the reasons why the work lends itself, continuously, to new investigations and alternative interpretation.
The result is a work that implies no right or wrong way of being performed; any experience of Body Pressure is equally valid. This is already implied in the intersubjective structure of the text, as it constantly addresses an unspecified “you”, one that doesn’t exist in the singular, but in the plural, in the social: the collective sum of all the beholders and performers through whose bodies the work has come to life and will continue to be realized each time. The phenomenological energy of the text’s descriptions, their emphasis on the particularity of bodily feelings, are reflected in the operational logic of the piece itself: there is no identical experience of Body Pressure, since all bodies are, in themselves, already fundamentally differently. As such, its meaning is indeterminate, alternatively depending on the who, where and when of its interaction: never interpreting, but, really, always reinterpreting.
The elastic qualities of the work ensure its timelessness. Let’s try a mental exercise: imagine the sheer amount of people who have performed the piece since its inception; the corporeal, kinetic energy expended by thousands of bodies for each reincarnated realization of the text; you might begin to feel the pressure of fifty years of experimentation pushing on yourself. Language is a material thing: a simple string of words holds incredible physical power, enough to profoundly shape our perception of reality, if not reality itself. “The poem and the stones carry equal weight”, the artist once remarked.
This exhibition, then, is but another material consequence of the chain reaction Nauman set in motion many decades ago. The works presented here compose new, fresh layers of meaning in the geological life of the piece; each one of them, in its unique, peculiar combination, offers an entirely new interpretation of Body Pressure, re-embodying the work, willingly or not, in the here and now.
With this premise, the exhibition does not struggle to bring forth interesting affinities between the birthday-piece and the new actors on the stage. Most of the artworks deal with the inescapable human questions of what it means to be a body in space; how that experience is shaped by external, often hard to detect, socio-economic pressures; the weight of language, culture and history in defining gender, sexuality, and the broader self. Queerness, posthumanity, object-oriented ontology are some of the useful new terms and lenses that greatly enrich the mix, partially defying Nauman’s initial point of view to push the discussion in different, more inclusive directions.
So, what’s the point? This exhibition is not a mere exercise in art history. It is a way of showing that good artworks are (and stay) alive, and as such, have the power to influence and move people physically, emotionally, and intellectually. It shows the amalgamated, complex relationship that art has with its viewers, the spatially and temporally social nature of its existence; the fact that we are carriers of all that we have seen and touched; our collective belonging to an even larger, orgiastic system of people, things, selves: “this may become a very erotic exercise.”
* Greta Schödl – Straßenpoesie (1980)
* The poem and the stone carry equal weight (2024)
* Notes on Emily Fielding’s Documentation of a Field in Cheshire (2024)
* Cloud Traces (2024)
* We looked in vain at the darkness (2023)
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