Bruce Nauman
at the Chicago Cultural Center, through June 20
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Other elements also contribute to the viewer’s discomfort. The unequal size of the bleachers creates a sort of power imbalance, as if one set were stronger or more important than the other. Two additional sets of bleachers in adjacent rooms face the walls that enclose the central room, creating an even more confrontational sense of entrapment. Another set of benches on the sidewalk outside the gallery faces and abuts a brick wall, which prevents one from sitting on the lowest bench. These benches all face the middle of the central room, fixed in the viewer’s mind as the place where imagined sight lines converge. That Nauman intended the bleachers to be seen as a whole, even though the parts cannot be viewed all at once, is suggested by the fifth element of Indoor Outdoor Seating Arrangement, a drawing that shows the placement of the bleachers but without walls.
Sitting on a bench facing a brick wall is even more constraining than sitting on a bench that closely faces another. Give this piece time to do its work, and your body starts to feel under stress. Just as “cutters” hurt themselves to see if they “still feel,” to paraphrase a Nine Inch Nails hit of a few years ago, Nauman makes one uncomfortable as a way of heightening self-awareness–of one’s existence in space and of the things that can impinge on that existence. This is not an insignificant issue to anyone who’s ridden on a crowded train or bus or lived in an apartment that’s too small. Though Nauman raises horses on the spacious New Mexico ranch where he lives, much of his work can be taken as urban.
Christopher Furman’s entrancing The Janus Machine at the Chicago Cultural Center involves the viewer in a very different way. A huge rectangular box with high walls covered in the synthetic material Tyvek, which Furman chose because of its resemblance to translucent rice paper, contains a winged walking machine with two metal legs that lumbers awkwardly around the perimeter of the box while its wings flap up and down. Each time the machine reaches a new side of the box, new mechanisms are activated; on one side, for example, gears move inside the box (which we see in shadow play) while an arm with a globe on it outside the box swings back and forth. A complete cycle takes four minutes, and then it repeats.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Michael Tropea.
