Bruce Nauman — Live-Taped Video Corridor

1970

Artists: Bruce Nauman · Year: 1970 · Medium: Closed-circuit video installation — narrow corridor with two monitors showing pre-recorded footage and delayed live feed · Substrate: Sheetrock corridor approximately 25 feet long and 20 inches wide; two TV monitors stacked at far end; one monitor plays pre-recorded footage of the empty corridor, the other plays live video with a time delay · Place: New York / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Leo Castelli Gallery (exhibition); Whitney Museum (acquisition) Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970) is a narrow sheetrock corridor, twenty-five feet long and twenty inches wide, with two stacked television monitors at its far end. The top monitor shows footage of the empty corridor pre-recorded before the exhibition. The bottom monitor shows live video from a camera behind the viewer, with a time delay. As the viewer walks down the corridor toward the monitors, they see themselves approaching from behind — with the delay producing the disorienting effect of watching oneself move seconds ago. The piece is one of the earliest major closed-circuit video installations by a conceptual artist. Nauman's argument — that video as a medium permits specific investigations of self-observation, time, and embodiment that are unavailable in other media — has been one of the structural claims of video art ever since. Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and other 1970s conceptualists produced adjacent closed-circuit pieces; Nauman's Corridor is the most widely-exhibited and most-often-cited example. Nauman is, in the broader conceptual-art canon, one of the major American artists of the late twentieth century; his Corridor sits within a much wider practice that includes neon text, cast-latex sculpture, performance, and photography. But the Corridor specifically exemplifies his engagement with video technology, and its inclusion in this archive is as a cybernetic-art moment that entered mainstream art-historical attention. Lore Nauman produced the first Live-Taped Video Corridor in his own studio in Pasadena before exhibiting variants at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1970. The piece has been restaged multiple times in different venues; each version requires a site-specific corridor construction. The Whitney Museum acquired an edition in the 1970s and has periodically re-exhibited it. Sources • Whitney Museum — Nauman collection • Bruggen, Coosje van — Bruce Nauman (Rizzoli, 1988) • Leo Castelli Gallery — exhibition records