Bruce Nauman  (American, b. 1941)

Performance Corridor, 1969

Wallboard and wood

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 

…by the early 1970s, with his corridors and other large-scale rooms and environments, Nauman had withdrawn his own presence, shifting the focus of his work to manipulating the movement and experience of the beholder. Performance Corridor (1969) marks the pivotal moment of this transition. The work originated as a prop for a solitary, videotaped performance, 

Walk with Contrapposto (1968), in which Nauman is seen walking up and down a narrow passageway, shifting his hips back and forth with each step in an exaggerated imitation of the conventional pose of classical sculpture. The corridor itself was a makeshift structure: two parallel wallboards form a 20-inch-wide passage that is blocked at one end; the narrow space could just contain the movement of the artist’s body. For the Whitney Museum in New York’s seminal 1969 show,Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, Nauman transferred this prop to a public exhibition space, where it was left to the individual beholder, deprived of instructions, to decide whether or not to enter the structure and how to move through it.

Performance Corridor imposed certain physical limits on its audience, but Nauman nevertheless recalled feeling some frustration at not being able to more fully “control the situation.”¹ In subsequent corridors, he developed a number of devices to accomplish just this, from mirrors and intense, colored fluorescent light (see, for example, Green Light Corridor, made in 1970) to the closed-circuit video technology of contemporary surveillance systems.