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Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham’s Politics of Presencing:

boredom exposing inauthenticity of 1960s-70s time-
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Article  in  Journal of Film and Video · January 2016

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 Nauman and Graham’s Politics of Presencing: Boredom Exposing
Inauthenticity of 1960s–70s Time-Consciousness
nevena ivanova
Clutch at the moments as I may,
they elude my grasp:
each is my enemy, rejects me,
signifying a refusal to become involved.
—E. M. Cioran, “The Fall into Time” (173)
bruce nauman and dan graham are
among the pioneers of video art, having
started exploring the potential of the medium
for performance and installation as early as the
late 1960s. The ephemerality of the technically
imperfect video image suited those video art­
ists who were interested in conceptual works,
in actions, and in events, which stressed the
primacy of idea and process over finished works.
Artists working conceptually, such as Nam Jun
Paik, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Dan Graham,
Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman, are above all
concerned with the live character of video, the
directness and simultaneity of recording and
reproduction. As this article is intended to show,
this specific “presentness” of the so-called live
media (television, video, digital, and networked
media) played a significant role in tuning the
broader cultural context of the 1960s and 1970s
toward what Pamela Lee identified as “chrono­
phobia” or a crisis of time (Lee xii).
The 1960s Crisis of Time
The crisis of temporality began as an immediate
effect of the postwar condition. The epoch after
dr. nevena ivanova is an assistant professor
at the Institute for the Study of Societies and
Knowledge at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Her work is within the fields of media aesthetics,
philosophy of technology, and biophilosophy, fo­
cusing on concepts such as creativity, emergence,
temporality, individuation, and perception.
journal of film and video 71.1  /  spring 2019
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JFV 71_1 text.indd 35
World War II is acknowledged as the Cold War’s
“nuclear arms race,” or as Jacques Derrida char­
acterized it in his 1984 essay “No Apocalypse,
Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles,
Seven Missives),” as a “cours de vitesse” or
“speed race.” We found ourselves thrown into
an economy of speed in which “a few seconds
may decide, irreversibly, the fate of what is still
now and then called humanity—plus the fate
of a few other species” (Derrida 20; emphasis
added). He continued to note that “no single
instant, no atom of our life (of our relation to
the world and to being) is not marked today,
directly or indirectly, by that speed race” (20).
Thus, our relationship with time, space, and
speed was put radically into question. This was
a question not simply of increased velocity but
of an entirely altered experience of temporal­
ity and historicity that had characterized the
human subject’s relationship with time.
According to Derrida, the economy of speed
of the nuclear epoch involved “the crossing
of certain thresholds of acceleration within
the general machinery of culture, with all its
techniques for handling, recording and stor­
ing information” (20). Principal among such
techniques was “real-time computing,” which
was developed as a direct response to the
threat of nuclear destruction during the Cold
War in the United States, with projects such as
the SAGE continental air defense system and
the APRANet, which later became the Internet,
as well as research into computer graphics,
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 interfaces, artificial intelligence, and cybernet­
ics. These projects embodied a situation in
which the technical achievement of ever-greater
speed of detection and feedback had become
a matter of survival, particularly with the devel­
opment of intercontinental ballistic missiles,
which combine the range and speed made pos­
sible by rocket technology with the destructive­
ness of nuclear weaponry (Gere 109).
The immediate threat of atomic destruction
during the Cold War in the 1950s brought about
a new specification about time: its radical
shrinking to degree zero—in the “legendary
‘four-minute warning,’ which was supposed to
take place between an attack being detected
and the bombs exploding” (Gere 103–04)—
where no interval was left for consideration and
proper decision. “The threat of annihilation
in a few hours or, eventually, minutes, meant
that previous linear models of development
and progress, whether at a personal or societal
level, were no longer tenable” (Gere 104). The
present grew to enormous dimensions, every
second loaded with life-and-death importance.
In one way, it was the instant—open, blank,
and empty—when a fatal thing could happen
all of a sudden. As Heidegger puts it in “What
Is Metaphysics?,” it is only when we encounter
the finality of death that we can experience
being in its totality. At the same time, “just a
few instants” was the time in which the radar
warning systems could detect and prevent un­
expected attack. Thus, degree zero indicated
that pregnant fraction of time that bore both
annihilation and salvation. And in yet another
way, the present became disconnected from
the past (which could no longer provide the
source of legitimation and identity) and from
the future (perceived as increasingly unpredict­
able and devoid of perspective). Modernist
conventions of time based on progress, chro­
nology, linearity, permanence, and incessant
dismissal of the present broke down and
opened a gap, where new modes of attention to
the here-and-now began to emerge. The main
characteristic of this shift was the obsession of
artists and critics, unprecedented in Western
36
JFV 71_1 text.indd 36
culture, with the present-time duration—its
real-time unfolding, its fleeting transience, and
its slipping actuality.
One possible response to this situation was
a newborn Zen-like awareness of what was
happening “now,” in the immediate environ­
ment, illustrated in John Cage’s seminal piece
4'33" (first performed in 1952 by pianist David
Tudor). In accordance with the radical changes
in postwar conceptions of history, presenc­
ing, and speed, “Cage’s piece drew attention
to the need to pay attention to the immediate
environment and to be able to interpret the
noise it produced as [readable] signal” (Gere
95). The bemused audience at the first perfor­
mance of 4'33" and the Ground Observer Corps
of volunteers who scanned the sky for coming
aircrafts during the first years after World War
II were both new kinds of observers, neces­
sitated by a context in which the time available
to pay attention was radically contracted. Thus,
4'33" seemed intent on forestalling the very
acts of protention and retention through which
consciousness synthesizes time and replacing
them with the indefinite experience of the now,
or what Christian Wolff calls “zero time” (29).
On the other hand, it became obvious for
many theorists of the 1960s that technology
had its own temporality—“techno-time”—which
was considerably different in its rhythms and
principles of organization from the biological or
social temporalities. According to Herbert Mar­
cuse, culture is constructed around narratives
and progression from tradition and memory
toward future, while the operational rationality
of technology works only in the omnipresent
plain of the given facts (Marcuse 98).
This is especially true of real-time tech­
nologies or live media, which radically
distort what Stiegler calls “event-ization
[événementialisation]”—namely, the taking
place of time (16). In a media-saturated world,
narrative collapses into simultaneity of infor­
mation, or what Fredric Jameson describes
as “spatialization of time” (25). A shift from
sequential narratives toward a spatial projec­
tion in real time can be observed in a variety
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 of media art, video installations, and kinetic
sculptures of the 1960s and ’70s. Jameson de­
clares that video (encompassing video art and
television) deprives humans of their memory,
through the constant re-acting of history into
mediated permanent present (25). Video fails
to produce memory, or as Jameson notes,
“memory seems to play no role in television,
commercial or otherwise . . . nothing here
haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the
manner of the great moments of film” (70–71).
Instantaneity and presentness of live media
destroy the time interval and erase spatial
distance. “The more memories we store on our
online databanks, the more the past is sucked
into the orbit of the present, ready to be called
up on the screen. The sense of historical con­
tinuity or, for that matter, discontinuity, both
of which depend on before and an after, gives
way to the simultaneity of all times and spaces
readily accessible in the present” (Huyssen
253). In his L’Espace Critique (1993) Paul Virilio
joins these critical voices:
[T]he exhaustion of time should . . . be un­
derstood . . . as the effect of technologies of
communication. Since the implementation of
television, it is not so much space that ab­
sorbs time as time itself—the instantaneous
time of electronic transmission—that erodes
the temporality of delay . . . time is now pos­
tulated as abolishing its own existence as
interval, duration, and retardation. (quoted
in Ross 84–85)
Early Video Art’s Response
to the Crisis of Time
The crisis of time described in the previous
paragraphs reverberates deeply throughout
1960s art and culture. In this article we will
focus on the way video-art pioneers address
this crisis via the (re)presentation and experi­
ence of “presencing.” The concept of pres­
encing designates the present moment in its
emergence, potentiality, and insubstantiality.
In this form “presencing” is distinguished
from the term “presence,” which affirms onto­
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logical primacy of identity, permanence, and
substance over differentiation and emergence.
The concept of presence has been advanced by
traditional Western metaphysics and actively
deconstructed by Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze,
and twentieth-century philosophers. The phe­
nomenon of presence/presencing has been
subjected to numerous artistic interpretations
throughout Western history. In the 1960s, how­
ever, the medium of video seemed to provide
a new aesthetic tool for its exploration—the
prolonged real-time duration. The extended
duration technique was later sophisticated by
the use of digital and immersive media, but
this article will focus on the initial steps of its
inception.
In the context of George Kubler’s art histori­
cal methodology developed in The Shape of
Time, each work of art comes as a solution to
a specific problem. Artistic experiments form a
sequence when they address the same prob­
lem and build on previous solutions. Each se­
quence can be regarded both as a closed series
and as an open-ended expanding class. When
a past problem reappears under new condi­
tions, a previously closed sequence is open
again (Kubler 36). For example, the problem
of presence and its capture by visual means
has been reactivated under various disguises
throughout the history of Western culture. In
ancient religious art, true presence equals
eternity and permanence situated beyond the
everyday ephemerality of becoming. For this
reason, there is a clear ontological distinction
between the material (the paint, the wood, the
canvas) depicting the eternal cult object and its
symbolic content (the divine).
It was not until the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries that time and change as
such took central stage in artistic experiments.
In avant-garde paintings focused on the pres­
ent moment, such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude
Descending a Staircase or impressionists’ ex­
plorations of light’s transformations over time,
the content is mundane, upfront, and literal—
consecutive moments of simple movements or
luminosity depicted in color palettes. However,
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 in these paintings time is represented as dis­
crete frozen bullets of change (the Aristotelian
vision of time as a measure of movement)
rather than experienced directly. It was only
during the second half of the twentieth century
that multiple visual art experiments began to
“transmit” time directly in its everyday manifes­
tations of ephemerality, uneventfulness, and
entropy. From a media perspective, paint and
canvas appear to be materials too solid to acti­
vate the emergent fluidity of presencing. A fur­
ther step in the direction of fluidity makes the
cinematographic medium. Yet film still fastens
time in fixed durations, where presence and
absence are clearly differentiated as discrete
units, such as frames and intervals, following
each other in rapid sequence. Although cinema
(along with some paintings) successfully gener­
ates the illusion of fluid movement and liquid
time, this article will focus on the question of
how electronic media (and specifically video),
which became available for artistic use in the
late 1960s and early ’70s, provided artists with
new tools to activate presencing in its imma­
nence and instantaneity.
Theorists and practitioners of media from the
1970s onward indicate the specificity of video
as a “present-time medium” (Graham, Video
62), given its indexical immediacy, self-referen­
tial feedback, and real-time image generation.
The simultaneous recording and broadcast­
ing of audiovisual flow enables a unique co-
presence between the image and its referent
(Ross 86). Because of its self-referential nature,
video closes the gap between viewing and
performing (Graham, Video 62). Such instant
feedback leads to Rosalind Krauss’s dismissal
of video art as narcissistic practice (50–64). The
presentness of video is criticized also by Fredric
Jameson as “the failure to produce memory”
(70–71). In contrast, Bruce Kurtz is inspired
by its power to transform “even the events
of ancient history into the flowing present,
whether or not what is being telecast, or what
appears on the monitor, is actually live, taped,
or filmed” (234). The distinction between video
and cinematographic language is considerable,
according to Kurtz: “Film, with its twenty-four
38
JFV 71_1 text.indd 38
complete still frames per second, is an illu­
sion of movement, while television, with its
constantly changing configuration of dots and
light, is an illusion of stillness” (235).
The video signal has an electronic nature. It
exists as a light dot, which, in constant linear
movement, builds each video image pixel by
pixel, line by line. Video imaging originated as
an audiovisual signal transmitted in real time
(used in television broadcasting), and only later
did the technology of video recording allow
temporary fixation of the audiovisual data on
magnetic tape. In contrast, the light values of
each movie frame must be first permanently
fixated onto the celluloid film and only then can
be projected as consecutive images separated
by empty intervals. Moreover, due to their sig­
nal nature, video images allow for self-reflexive
simultaneous recording and viewing, known as
a feedback loop.
Therefore, we can see that with early video
art, the problem of presencing is raised on a
new level, since no artistic tools in visual arts
before the existence of electronic media could
reactivate the present moment in its actual
flow. The following sections map some of the
ways in which early video-art practices of the
1960s and ’70s manipulate present-time dura­
tion and trigger a potential re-attunement of our
capacity to engage with the present moment.
The mapping will trace series of closely related
artistic strategies. Adopting George Kubler’s
(37) art historical methodology, we will follow
the evolution of a cluster of audiovisual tech­
niques that directly activate embodied presenc­
ing, such as unedited duration, live feedback,
performance, and uneventfulness (lack of nar­
rative or signification). In early video-art experi­
ments, these traits combine into two types of
what I will call laboratories-of-presencing,1 with
“feedback” serving as a touchstone of distinc­
tion: the first type consists of linear videotapes
without feedback and the second type includes
closed-circuit video installations.
An entrance point into the analysis is pro­
vided by Andy Warhol’s endurance tests: Sleep
(1963), Kiss (1963), Eat (1964), Blowjob (1964),
and Screen Tests (1963–66). These cinemato­
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 graphic experiments can be considered as
prototypes to the video-based laboratories-of-
presencing. They perform a radical break with
the standard conventions of cinematographic
image construction, such as plot and montage,
and instead privilege the real-time aesthetics,
in which the time of the viewing is equal to
the time of shooting. They could be described
as a form of portraiture. The performers play
themselves, and Warhol indulges in the spec­
tacle of their bodies and gestures. However,
Warhol’s images maintain some level of dra­
matic suspense and perplexity, which increases
emotional engagement and expectation, typical
for the traditional film production but mostly
absent in scientifically sober video-based ex­
periments.
A detailed account of Sleep (1963, 16mm
film, b/w, silent, 5 hr. 21 min. at 16 fps) will
introduce us to the dynamics of boredom in the
aesthetics of endurance. In a five-and-a-half-
hour projection, the viewer is confronted with
close-ups of the face and body of the young
poet John Giorno, who is lying dormant. The
camerawork is static, and each shot lasts three
to four minutes, which is the duration of one
film reel. The film is silent and monochrome
and appears as a literal registration of nonactiv­
ity, as if filmed in real time. However, instead of
connecting all the takes as they were shot con­
tinuously one after another, Warhol duplicated
some of them. As a result, although the re­
corded duration is unedited, there exists a hid­
den repetitiveness in the unfolding of the pro­
jection. This operation reinforces our realization
that due to their uneventfulness, all shots in
this film are mutually replaceable or even re­
peatable without altering the impression of the
footage. Another manipulation of the real-time
unfolding is the slowing down of the image. The
film is shot at twenty-four frames per second,
yet it is projected at sixteen frames per second,
so that the effect is an unchanging but barely
perceptible slow motion.
What is the phenomenological experience of
time when the viewer faces such “film”? Hol­
lywood and mainstream cinema trained specta­
tors to expect fast-running action, drama, or
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at least emotional suspense to arise and be
relieved in the roughly one-and-a-half-hour
duration of a movie. Although postwar cinema,
as Deleuze’s analyses in his Cinéma 2: L’Image-
temps/Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985/1989)
show, suspends action-reaction patterns and
develops increasingly uneventful narratives,
utilizing static camerawork and very long takes,
still “something happens,” often at psychologi­
cal or existential levels. Let us take as an exam­
ple Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura [The
Adventure] (1960), considered to be the first
film that explicitly produces prolonged durée
or temps mort: an existential drama is in the
air, someone disappears, a loveless romance
begins, the characters feel lost and disoriented,
and time drags on slowly and hallucinatorily
toward the film’s inevitable ending.
In contrast, completely violating all cinemato­
graphic strategies, Warhol’s Sleep suggests
neither a proper beginning nor a legible ending
or any “happening” or “suspense” whatsoever.
What occurs is rather “non-occurrence,” “inac­
tion,” which additionally is an everyday situa­
tion, experienced on a daily basis by everyone
without exception. There is nothing here like
L’avventura’s inexplicable situation of a few
idle individuals, lost in their alienation from
each other and foreign to the deserted environ­
ment they find themselves in. Cinema confronts
us with the problems of isolation, deconstruc­
tion, and fragmentation of modern subjectivity.
In Sleep it is the body we are confronted with,
in its unconscious state, which occurs every
night. “Warhol’s experiment with ethnographic
representation consists of a shifting of ‘aura’ in
the cinema to the bodies of the people filmed.
Behavior is abstracted from both narrative
and documentary premises and tends to refer
mainly to the act of being filmed” (Russell 173).
There is no narrative in Sleep in any con­
ventional sense, no psychology or hidden
connotations regarding deeper mental states
such as dreaming; factually, nothing happens,
even in the most inconspicuous of ways. A vein
rhythmically pulses on a neck; an abdomen
rises up and down in the slow regular rhythm of
breathing; a sleeping face is viewed in profile;
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 unidentifiable body parts are shown—three- to
four-minute-long shots, substituted in a silent
sequence. The body of the viewer is captured
in a way that corresponds to the image’s dor­
mant state, localized in the limited space of the
theater’s seat and forced to stay immobilized
for an unusually prolonged duration (five to
six hours). Such a situation is reminiscent of
meditative conditions, where the monks sit
through hours, days, and weeks of meditation
or, if we use the Zen term, “just sitting” (zazen
or shikantaza). What is the experience of an
untrained body/mind, however, when it is un­
expectedly confined into the condition of just
sitting?
Shifting from side to side, at first quietly and
then with increasing impatience, we experi­
ence our body as a duration machine. The
bones poke through, head lolls on the stem
of its neck. With each moment that passes,
the eyes play tricks while the mind wanders:
we see things that aren’t there or perhaps
discount what is there. Self-consciousness
descends over the audience at first, but that
self-consciousness quickly dissipates and
the body registers anticipation’s disappoint­
ment. The erect carriage of the committed
cineaste gives way to the slouch and sprawl
of the tired, the jaded, or the bored. (Lee
287)
This description is written about Empire,
probably the most (in)famous of Warhol’s “en­
durance tests,” but it is equally valid for the ex­
perience of Sleep. Continuing the description,
Pamela Lee writes that “[i]n its peculiar tracking
of time in (fictive) real time,” the Warhol film
“offers a perversely meditative experience,
fidgeting continuously between moments of
sheer restlessness, boredom, and pronounced
anticipation” (287; emphasis added). Warhol
shares a presumably exaggerated but telling
anecdote about the viewing of Sleep, in which
“one viewer had to be tied to a chair with a
rope by Mekas upon hearing what was about
to be screened” (quoted in Lee 287). Strate­
gies of duration in Warhol’s earliest films were
specifically designed to “challenge the specta­
40
JFV 71_1 text.indd 40
tor’s passivity. One cannot help but be aware of
one’s own body in the theater as one watches
a man sleeping for six hours (Sleep 1963);
to leave the theater during the projection is
perhaps the epitome of the embodied viewer”
(Russell 160). Every average viewer, including
Warhol himself, “was bored by the film, bored
by the prospect of having to watch it for six
hours straight” (Lee 287; emphasis added).
In the following paragraphs, we will inves­
tigate in close detail what exactly such bore­
dom could signify regarding the perception
of time. According to Heidegger, “boredom is
something that we are fundamentally opposed
to from the very beginning” (The Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Metaphysics 90; emphasis
in the original). It manifests itself “wherever
we are opposed to it, wherever we drive it
away—whether we do so consciously or un­
consciously” (90; emphasis in the original),
and that is the way we can recognize its pres­
ence. Upon being confined into the unbearably
prolonged viewing of Sleep, we find various
ways of “passing the time”—smoking, chatting
with our neighbors, dozing, and so on. “The
resulting films drastically reduced the roles of
director and viewer alike. . . . the viewer, for the
first time in the history of the commercial ex­
ploitation of persistence-of-vision, was relieved
of the obligation—perhaps even a large part of
the desire—to pay attention to the screening”
(Rayns).
Distracted attention, or what Heidegger
calls “passing the time,” does not reveal the
essence of boredom as such—it demonstrates
only our frantic attempts to avoid facing it, our
automatic reaction against it (Fundamental
Concepts 91).
As Pamela Lee insightfully observes, prob­
ably no one has—or very few viewers have—ac­
tually watched all six hours of Sleep’s nonactiv­
ity “performance” from its first frame to the
last, all eight hours of Empire’s still image, or
all five hundred of Warhol’s Screen Tests. “[F]
ew, not even the most slavish Warhol devotees,
could claim to have passed the anti-auteur’s
cinematic endurance test. As the Warhol clichés
would have it, this is a movie more frequently
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 discussed than seen, a concept best played
out in the mind’s eye [rather] than actually
burned—and interminably so—on the retina”
(Lee 283).
Who would willingly subject herself to watch­
ing a movie as long as a night of sleep, a movie
in which narrative comes to a virtual standstill?
“The ‘achievement’ of Warhol’s early films is to
force the issue of duration as something that
might be imaginatively projected into the fu-
ture, but which is practically . . . challenging to
experience in its actuality” (Lee 283; emphasis
added). “It stages the paradox of a long, seem­
ingly interminable now: the present repeated
as futurity” (Lee 293; second emphasis added).
From Lee’s citation it becomes obvious the,
inauthentic attitude toward time underlying
the experience of boredom—an impatient ex­
pectation and projection into the future, which
reveals a need in the spectator to escape the
present moment. Instead of fully concentrating
on the present unfolding of the world, which
includes both the vibrations of light and sound
on the video screen and the spectator’s bodily
micro-sensations of inactivity, the viewer im­
patiently projects her attention into the future.
Such projection into the future signifies that
time is regarded as an abstract entity, detached
from the intimate bodily presencing of the
viewer and objectified as present-at-hand. Such
a concept springs from a centuries-old Newto­
nian understanding of absolute time,2 which
passes uniformly from past to future through an
almost nonexistent present instant, and things
just happen “in” it without affecting its velocity
or rhythm.
To what extent, however, is the experience of
“waiting for something to happen and nothing
would” in these viewings boring? What consti­
tutes its boringness? First, according to Heideg­
ger, superficial boredom shows itself when we
are “bound to” (Fundamental Concepts 108) a
particular situation and “we become impatient”
(Fundamental Concepts 94). We are “forced”
to sit through one or more hours of viewing an
“empty image” in a situation when we expect
something else. We expect that the image
will move and something will happen, but our
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expectation goes unfulfilled. This is why we
become impatient, restless. Thus, what is really
oppressive for us is this impatience. We want to
escape from our restlessness and frustration. Is
boredom then this impatience? Although impa­
tience is related to boredom, it is not what de­
fines it. “The impatience rather has to do with
the manner and way in which we want to get
boredom under control and are often unable to
get it under control” (Heidegger, Fundamental
Concepts 94). What lies behind impatience is
the assumption that boredom is triggered by
external factors that we cannot control. In Cre-
ative Evolution Bergson also relates boredom to
impatience in his well-known example:
If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I
must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts.
This little fact is big with meaning. For here
the time I have to wait is not that mathemati­
cal time which would apply equally well to
the entire history of the mathematical world,
even if that history were spread out instanta­
neously in space. It coincides with my impa­
tience, that is to say, with a certain portion of
my own duration, which I cannot protract or
contract as I like. (Bergson 9–10)
Impatience in Bergson’s example suggests
boredom with the present condition (waiting
for the sugar to melt) because we want to jump
to a future result (melted sugar). The present is
regarded as a highway between two points—
the point when we put the sugar into the water
and the point in time when it will be dissolved.
This example illustrates the underlying under­
standing of time as a linear sequence of nodes,
independently unfolding.
We blame the object as the factor causing
our boredom. It is not that the boring object has
forcefully fastened us, however. We have volun­
tarily given ourselves over to it with an expecta­
tion to stay entertained; yet this expectation
goes unfulfilled as the object refuses to engage
us. Thus, superficial or “inessential boredom
creeps into us from the outside” (Heidegger,
Fundamental Concepts 84), through the experi­
ence of a concrete “boring thing”—book, film,
person, situation—that leaves us empty.
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 Laboratories-of-Presencing without
Feedback: Time as “Bad Infinity”—First
Degree of Boredom
Early video-art experiments (Bruce Nauman’s
minimal performances, John Baldessari’s I
Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, and other
works) bring this experience of boredom to a
paradigmatic level. Nauman’s 1967–69 studio
performances, such as Pacing Upside Down,
Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), Stamping in
the Studio, Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., Walking in an
Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a
Square, and Wall-Floor Positions, recorded on
videotapes and projected in loops, are espe­
cially characteristic of the new generation of ex­
tended duration techniques. Whereas Warhol’s
proto-laboratories-of-presencing are defined
as cinematographic since they keep remains of
individuality shining through the physical per­
formance of their characters, Nauman modifies
this trait in the direction of complete de-person­
ification and de-contextualization of the face.
What endures on screen are the twitches of a
body balancing against gravity in various repeti­
tive positions. Often this body is beheaded yet
remains casually realistic, something unimagi­
nable in conventional and, to some extent, even
experimental cinema. Such degraded-in-resolu­
tion, seemingly unedited recordings of mundane
situations resemble early-day homemade videos
or present-day surveillance footages. With the
video medium comes also the hour-long contin­
uous shot, which was impossible with film reels
that lasted approximately four minutes each.
42
JFV 71_1 text.indd 42
In Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. (1968, videotape,
b/w, sound, 55 min. loop), for instance, the
camera is fixed in a single long shot and turned
on its side (Figure 1). Nauman stands with his
back to the camera, drawing the bow of the
violin simultaneously across all four strings,
tuned to D, E, A, and D (instead of the usual G,
D, A, E). As his position is inverted, it seems
that he defies the laws of gravity, being capable
of walking on the vertical surfaces of the room’s
walls. The tunes are played invariably for the
duration of one hour. At first hearing, the
resultant reverberation sounds like a scratch­
ing noise rather than an articulated musical
phrase. As the sound recurs over and over
again, this simple acoustic occurrence gains
significance (not signification, though), as ten­
sion grows into the body of the listener. Nau­
man writes:
I started to think about [this videotape] once
I had the violin and I tried one or two things.
One thing I was interested in was play­
ing . . . I wanted to set up a problem where
it wouldn’t matter whether I knew how to
play the violin or not. What I did was to play
as fast as I could on all four strings with the
violin tuned D.E.A.D. I thought it would just
be a lot of noise, but it turned out to be musi­
cally very interesting. It is a very tense piece.
(Please Pay Attention 147)
In his minimal performances Nauman experi­
ments with various yet repetitive patterns of
movement around his studio, striking deliber­
ate postures in relation to the floor and the
Figure 1: Bruce Nauman,
Violin Tuned D.E.A.D.
(1968). © 2017 Bruce Nau­
man/Artists Rights Society,
New York.
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 walls. His body plays with established boundar­
ies of gravity and balance and turns feet, legs,
hands, and torso into ritualistic instruments
probing into all the most estranged dimensions
of the surrounding space. The scrapes of feet
scratching the floor or hands rubbing the walls
are the kinds of sounds that accompany these
images.
Nauman, as well as Warhol, employs strate­
gies of duration and repetition to render his
videotapes purposefully boring to watch. Each
individual video is as long as one hour, and in
the gallery space they are played in a loop and
thus rendered virtually endless. If the viewer
chooses to stay during the whole duration of
the video, her attention will be strained by the
recurring monotone rhythm. The indeterminacy
of such prolonged duration and the incessant
repetition of the same aimless gesture trans­
forms time into repetitive bad infinity. It seems
as though the same gesture goes on and on
and on indefinitely. Such repetition brings min­
ute differences in its consequent moments, the
gradual exhaustion of the artist mirroring the
exhaustion of the viewer. It could be said that
the duration unfolding on the screen is experi­
enced as present-at-hand; in other words, the
time on the screen passes in its own rhythm
as an independent resistant-to-the-process-
of-viewing entity. This impression is facilitated
by the relatively small size of the 1960s-70s
video monitors, the degraded resolution, and
the lack of colors and visual vividness—what
Catherine Elwes calls “miniature theatre of
the box” (Elwes 11)—which does not allow the
illusion of immersion to occur. These techni­
cal characteristics of the medium combined
with the structural elements of the early video
laboratories-of-presencing—lack of narrative
and signification, static camerawork, con­
tinuous shooting, and unedited unfolding of
time—produce inauthentic experience of time
manifested as boredom and detachment of the
spectator from her own authentic involvement
and presencing. However, although the boring
things “leave us empty,” “[i]n becoming bored
by something we are precisely still held fast by
that which is boring”—“we do not yet let go, or
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JFV 71_1 text.indd 43
we are compelled by it, bound to it for whatever
reason, even though we have previously freely
given ourselves over to it” (Heidegger, Funda-
mental Concepts 92).
As Elwes argues, early trapped-in-the-box
one-channel videos are carefully orchestrated
so that they capture the visceral empathy of the
viewer. However, this unconscious empathic
reflex enters in interesting contraposition with
the minimal performances of Nauman. Mirror­
ing Nauman’s restless, repetitive wobbling and
his body’s gradual exhaustion while groping its
way around, we are growing impatient for that
moment that will break him free from that mo­
notony. We get increasingly detached from our
own emerging potentiality (presencing) and ex­
perience “our” time passing independently as
a line of “now points” fastened to the unfold­
ing of the video image. The expected “future
point” of breaking is somewhere on that line
but never happens. This temporal suspension
is experienced as almost resistant to our own
rhythmic dynamics. What is generated as a re­
sult is a split and a confrontation between our
diverted temporality and our being. Faced with
this split, we are trying to speed up time and
shorten its length, because for us time’s own
pace becomes too slow and its length too long.
Passing the time, says Heidegger, is “a confron-
tation with time” (Fundamental Concepts 96;
emphasis in the original). It is not a matter of
simply spending time, but a matter of killing it,
of making it pass more quickly. This means that
it is going slowly. Yet “the length of time plays
no role”; “we fight against the progress of time
which is slowing down and is too slow for us,
and which in boredom holds us in limbo. We
fight against this peculiar vacillating and drag­
ging of time. This vacillating and dragging of
time contains whatever it is that is burdensome
and paralyzing” (Heidegger, Fundamental Con-
cepts 97; emphasis in the original).
It seems as though we feel paralyzed and
alienated by the calculated oscillation of the
passing seconds, minutes, and hours. As a
result, what we are trying to do in speeding
up or shortening time by the means of casual
activities is kill it, which means we want to
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 make the interval of time between the point
in the present (our viewing now) and the ex­
pected point in the future (end of the record­
ing) disappear. Does time pass more quickly
whenever we have found such a distraction?
It does not. What happens is that we manage
to get distracted from paying attention to the
unfolding duration.
What we experience in early video laborato­
ries-of-presencing is time in its temporalizing,
in its oscillating. For the first time in the history
of Western art, I would suggest, the specta­
tor has been exposed to hours and hours of
unedited duration as it unfolds in its casual
everydayness and apparent meaninglessness.
Early videotapes offer neither emphasis on
some moments over others nor message or
enthralling story with easy shortcuts between
the significant points in the narrative line, nor
even emotional suspense. What they offer is
pure interval, opening, and rupture, empty of
signified content.
There is a second type of boredom observ­
able in these videotapes: that (supposedly)
experienced by the performing artists them­
selves.3 What we observe in this case is an act­
ing person seemingly immersed in purposeless
casual activities to the extent that she does not
notice the time passing and apparently does
not feel bored. According to Nauman, even the
most insignificant activity, if executed by the
artist in his studio, should be explored and
receive the proper attention and the necessary
time for its performance.
I had not support structure for my art then . . .
And a lot of things I was doing didn’t make
sense so I quit doing them. That left me
alone in the studio; this in turn raised the
fundamental question of what an artist does
when left alone in the studio? My conclu­
sion was that I was an artist and I was in the
studio, then whatever it was I was doing in
the studio must be art. And what I was in fact
doing was drinking coffee and pacing the
floor. It became a question then how to struc­
ture those activities into being art, or some
kind of cohesive unit that could be made
available to people. (Please 194)
44
JFV 71_1 text.indd 44
Thus, art becomes an artistically structured
yet purposeless process, in correlation to the
meaningless fluctuation of everyday time.
Nauman’s films put pressure on the very
notion of art by creating art out of boredom.
This goes against our conventional concep­
tion of how art is made and for what reasons.
We understand that art is created with a
purpose, with an aim or aspiration. We envis­
age a motive for the creation of art, not that it
happens as a way to kill time. Nauman’s re­
peated actions are just that. His occupation
is an activity of self-amusement, an activity
enacted to avoid boredom. (Tanga)
When asked, “Who is your art for?,” Nauman
replies, “To keep me busy” (quoted in Morgan
261).
Such boredom, Heidegger calls “being bored
with.” “In being bored with . . . a certain de­
tachment from that which is boring has already
occurred. . . . we are bored—almost as though
the boredom came from you” (Heidegger,
Fundamental Concepts 92). A gaze into con­
temporary YouTube culture would reveal similar
youth behavior, where millions of millennials
broadcast themselves performing casual activi­
ties in their everyday environments. However,
their narcissistic self-promotion seems to be
driven more by a desire for what Warhol named
“fifteen minutes of fame” than by profound
boredom. In this regard, the self-broadcasting
YouTube videos seem to lack the critical dis­
tance of early video-art performances.
Laboratories-of-Presencing with
Feedback: “Standing Now”—Second
Degree of Boredom
The second degree of boredom can be inves­
tigated in detail in the second group of early
laboratories-of-presencing, where a feedback is
added to the initial cluster of traits. At this stage
of the sequence, the spectators are invited to
enter technologically mediated environments,
which partially reflect and respond to their
movements. A feedback indicates a process
when past output is reintroduced into a system
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in order to alter its present and future behavior.
When an event is part of a chain of cause-and-
effect that forms a circuit or loop, then the event
is said to “feed back” into itself. The camera–
monitor feedback loop in early video art gener­
ates a specific closed-circuit temporality—or,
as the following paragraphs will show, what
Heidegger calls “standing now.”
A representative of this trend, Dan Graham’s
environment Present Continuous Past(s) (1974)
(see Figure 2) invites the spectator to interact
with her image through time-delayed layers
of video feedback. You enter a room and turn
toward the right wall to face a recording video
camera and a wall-size video monitor. The left
wall and the wall behind you are covered by
mirrors. The mirrors reflect in present time your
backside, the whole room (and the other spec­
tators if present), and the image-projection on
the monitor. Through a probing performance of
minimal actions (crossing the room, waving to
the camera, turning around to face your image
in the mirror behind, moving in different posi­
tions, etc.), you explore the spatiotemporal
convergences organizing this artistic environ­
ment. When you look at the mirror, you see
yourself and the reflection of the monitor. The
monitor, however, shows the image of the room
and your movements eight seconds earlier. This
effect is due to the fact that although the video
camera tapes what is immediately in front of
it, “the image seen by the camera (reflecting
everything in the room) appears eight seconds
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JFV 71_1 text.indd 45
Figure 2: Dan Graham,
Present Continuous Past(s)
(1974). Courtesy of the art­
ist and Greene Naftali, New
York.
later on the video monitor (via a tape delay
placed between the video recorder, which is
recording, and a second video recorder, which
is playing the recording back)” (Hall and Fifer
186). What is more, the video camera tapes the
entire reflection on the opposite wall-size mir­
ror, including the reflected image of the moni­
tor.
As a result, you become entangled in several
layers of time regression unfolding on the mir­
ror–monitor circuit—the real-time mirror reflec­
tion; the camera view recorded eight seconds
earlier and projected on the monitor now; and
also a smaller image of what was reflected on
the mirror from the monitor sixteen seconds
in the past and recorded by the camera eight
seconds earlier. An infinite regression of time
continuums within time continuums within
time continuums is built up (always separated
by eight-second intervals). Thus, you get
involved in an intensive perceptual and per­
formative process. “The time-lag of eight sec­
onds is the outer limit of the neurophysiologic
short-term memory that forms an immediate
part of our present perception and affects this
‘from within’” (Stemmrich 68). As you see your
actions eight seconds earlier on the external
point of view of the video monitor, you do not
recognize the time delay immediately but tend
to identify your present movements with those
eight seconds earlier. In this case, the informa­
tion from the monitor that is fed back to your
senses takes over the diverse bodily responses,
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 reenacting what in cybernetics is recognized
as “dominance feedback theorem.” According
to this theorem, the results produced by the
system are determined by the positive feed­
back loop, regardless of wide variations in the
input. What this means is that if a system has
the same feedback configuration, it will return
and amplify the same results and shut out all
other inputs.
However, if a perceiver views his behavior
on a five- to eight-second delay via videotape
(so that his responses are part of and influence
his perception), “private” mental intention
and external behavior are experienced as one.
The difference between the intention and the
actual behavior is fed back on the monitor and
immediately influences the observer’s future in­
tention and behavior (Graham, Two-Way Mirror
Power 55).
Consequently, this leads to inconsistent
impressions that you then respond to, and
thus, you get caught up in a feedback loop.
You feel trapped in a circular process of self-
observation, which is objectively visualized
and therefore subject to external control. Such
externalization produces specific experience
of the present moment, which the viewer tends
to perceive as spatial and unfolding somehow
outside her body. “Perception usually takes
place in the present. Thus, we are not in the
position of perceiving things past or future.
Graham constructs a space that makes a phe­
nomenon of constantly continuing presence
available to experience by visualizing temporal
distance in space” (Helfert; emphasis added).
As a result, you can make the present moment
an object of observation and thus gain an
analytical detachment from it rather than ex­
perience it on a visceral and deeply subjective
level.
Present Continuous Past(s) invites the viewer
to enter a space that surrounds her entirely and
covers her perceptual horizon. The mirror-based
architecture facilitates a solipsistic loop created
by the eight-seconds-delayed multiplication of
“(statically) present time” (Hall and Fifer 186),
thus freezing in space the subjective time flux
transmitted by the video. The juxtaposition of
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JFV 71_1 text.indd 46
the two mirror walls creates an environment
where only present time is visible and the
viewer’s movements, processing, and gradual
change become emptied of significance. Thus,
time is experienced as transcended, one frozen
“now” moment diffused in space. The pas­
sage of time seems canceled, while past and
future implode into the static visualization of
the present. Because the image in the mirror is
perceived as an enduring now, the time-space
continuum becomes illusionary eternal. Al­
though video materiality originates in the form
of electronic flux, here the audiovisual field is
captured between the two mirror walls into a
feedback loop of collapsed present. The spec­
tator’s vision is severed from the perspective of
her past and future as her current perceptions
are exponentially multiplied in the reverberat­
ing loops of eight-second delays.
The extended duration in a thus-created
situation is static and externally visualized in
space, rather than dynamically emerging inside
the body of the viewer. In such environments,
the present-moment experience remains fro­
zen in an artificially eternal now, described in
Heidegger’s second type of boredom, which he
regards as more fundamental and more difficult
to detect. It is characterized by specific “pass­
ing of time” in which boredom is warded off or
suppressed—that is, the person experiencing
boredom is not consciously aware of her un­
derlying disposition (Heidegger, Fundamental
Concepts 110). On the contrary, the person
finds herself in a situation where she passes
time enchanted by the interactions with things
and people as they present themselves. She
finds nothing explicitly boring, and yet “pass­
ing the time” takes on such proportions that
it lays claims to the whole situation for itself.
According to Heidegger, casually passing the
time is an activity necessarily related to bore­
dom, because we pass the time—or otherwise
said, kill the time—whenever we try to escape
from boredom (Fundamental Concepts 111).
Here passing the time is not one particular,
isolated occupation within the situation (such
as viewing an endless videotape) but the whole
situation itself, permeating everything incon­
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 spicuously. In the case of Present, Continuous,
Past(s), the situation embraces all activities of
the spectator—her exploration of the space and
her interaction with the camera, the screens,
and the mirrors—as well as the whole scene,
with all other participants who might be doing
the same. The spectators are carefree and leave
themselves to the natural unfolding of events.
What would be the experience of such a
present moment? Heidegger’s analysis shows
that during our participation in such events,
“this during [Während] does not even occur to
us. We pay no attention to enduring, i.e., to the
lasting flowing away and dissipating of time”
(Fundamental Concepts 121). We abandon our­
selves to the moment so that we stop noticing
time passing, and this is how “our whole time
become[s] transformed” (Heidegger, Funda-
mental Concepts 121; emphasis in the original).
The moment freezes still, but time does not
vanish. It does not pressure us anymore by
being “too slow” or “too fast,” yet it neverthe­
less shows itself—in such a way that we do not
have to reckon with it (Heidegger, Fundamental
Concepts 122). We transform our time so that it
does not appear. Abandoning it to the transpir­
ing of events, we take no note of its passage or
duration. Time stands still. Heidegger writes:
The enduring of the “during” swallows up,
as it were, the flowing sequence of nows and
becomes a single stretched “now” which
itself does not flow, but stands. The “now” is
stretched and made to stand and held in this
stretched standing in such a way that we are
entirely there alongside and part of whatever
is going around us, i.e., in such a way that
we are entirely present [ganz Gegenwart] for
what is present [das Anwesende]. Entirely
present [gegenwärtig] to the situation, we
bring our time to a stand. (Fundamental Con-
cepts 124; emphasis in the original)
The abiding of the now is therefore sealed
from the horizon of its history. Such now can
only remain present. It is not manifested as
future-oriented either. Sealing off the past
and unbinding the future does not eliminate
the now but takes away its possibility of a
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JFV 71_1 text.indd 47
transition into different temporal dimensions.
Fastened in a reverberating loop, the now
becomes stuck in its abiding standing, and
instead of flowing, it stretches itself indefinitely
(Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts 125). It is an
unchanging stretched now, where the properly
temporal dimension of time—its passage—with­
draws. As a result, the usual chronological nar­
ration of connected events shifts toward “the
absolute presence of the moment, to the theat­
ricality of isolated actions, gestures and poses”
(Frohne). This characteristic of early video
art, Krauss describes as “the prison of a col­
lapsed present” (53). In this prison there is no
escape from the actual present moment, which
is disconnected from its own past and future
orbits and feeds back onto itself ad infinitum.
If we try to see the past from this perspective,
it reveals itself as being the same as the pres­
ent; no change is assumed to have occurred.
In a similar fashion, the future is assumed to
bring an endless repetition of the same. We just
“await” its arrival with no particular interest,
because nothing will change. The uniformity of
past, present, and future is what we touch upon
here.
Numerous early video artworks explore the
subversive potential of “standing now,” such
as Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s Wipe Cycle
(1968), Vito Acconci’s Theme Song (1973),
Takahiko Iimura’s REGISTER YOURSELF: Unless
You Register You Are No Person (1972–78), and
Peter Campus’s Interface (1972), among others.
In Theme Song (1973, videotape, b/w,
sound, 33:15 min.), for example, Acconci uses
the close-up to extraordinary effect, construct­
ing a charged confrontation with the spectator.
With a disquieting intimacy, he shifts between
vulnerability and manipulation, candor and se­
duction, in his pop songs–driven “come-ons”
to the viewer. “Come on, I’m all alone . . . I’ll
be honest with you, okay. I mean you’ll have to
believe me if I’m really honest . . .” Both shift­
ers, the “you” and the “I,” sound deceptively
personal, singular, and direct. Nevertheless,
they remain fictive and thus nonspecific and
universal: “Of course, I can’t see your face. You
could be anybody out there” and “I am using
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 cliché phrases taken from popular songs and
pretending them to be personal.” Here again,
the spectator is faced with the second type
of boredom as Heidegger describes it: she is
somehow completely immersed in the situation
and left empty at the same time. Hypnotized
by Acconci’s chanting—“come here, it is only
now, now is all that matters, there is no need
to be more than that” (emphasis added)—the
spectator leaves herself behind. Cut off in both
directions of past and future, the present im­
plodes, and the peculiar “now” stretches itself
infinitely.
The “now” has no possibility other than
that of being the “now” of nows at that par­
ticular time . . . There are not several nows,
but fewer and fewer, indeed merely one, a
stretched one which stands . . . In this trans­
formed form our whole time is compressed
into this “standing now” of the duration of
the [artistic event]. This standing time—this
is we ourselves; it is our self as that which
has been left behind with respect to its prov-
enance and future. (Heidegger, Fundamental
Concepts 125; emphasis in the original)
Regardless of the intriguing interactivity in all
laboratories-of-presencing with feedback, we
still feel somewhat empty. The casualness of
these situations subverts our feeling of engage­
ment and agency, and we are left unsatisfied.
As a result, such leisurely involvement in the
occurrence of events “does not so much drive
off boredom” (Heidegger, Fundamental Con-
cepts 118) as expose it.
Conclusion
As analyzed here, laboratories-of-presencing
(1960s–70s) are based on the specific po­
tentialities and affordances of early video.
The selected artistic experiments employ and
elaborate extended duration as a main tool to
trigger new awareness of presencing. These
videotapes and installations do so by means
of a fixed camera, continuous shot, and lack of
montage. Likewise, withdrawing any message
to the spectator, they involve her in an unevent­
48
JFV 71_1 text.indd 48
ful present-time situation based on minimal
body performance. The early laboratories-of-
presencing were divided into two groups: with
and without feedback. The first group confronts
the viewer with literal representation of dura­
tion, which engenders boredom and uneasi­
ness with the unfolding of now. The viewer is
faced with time as a linear object with its own
speed and feels oppressed by its perceived
slowness. She tends to project impatient ex­
pectation into the future in an attempt to avoid
facing the present as it transpires. The second
group engages the spectator with its interactive
environments in such a way that she does not
notice time passing and ignores its duration
completely. The participant dwells in an artifi­
cially rendered eternal “now,” which stands still
and stretches infinitely. Again, there is even
deeper boredom experienced here, since the
future is envisioned as endless repetition of the
same present moment.
In this first stage of its development, the video
medium brings two features unprecedented for
visual arts—real time and self-reflexivity. How­
ever, the video images are monochrome, lack
resolution and detail, and are usually “impris­
oned” in box-sized monitors, which cannot im­
merse the spectator in a physical presence and
rather keeps intact the traditional subject–ob­
ject opposition upon which vision is grounded.
Thus, the novelty that early video brings to the
experience of time is achieved analytically,
rather than deeply intuitively and viscerally,
as is the case with the 1990s immersive video
installations (Ivanova). The present moment is
visualized spatially, and its passage is frozen
into artificial eternity. In terms of Heidegger’s
understanding of authentic and inauthentic
temporal experience, we could say that early
laboratories-of-presencing provoke inauthentic
relation to time: by representing it as a linear
flow independent of the spectator’s (non)activ­
ity (the first group) and by freezing the instant
and the complex dynamics of emergence into
“standing now” (the second group). An impor­
tant characteristic common to all laboratories-
of-presencing is their everydayness. It could be
speculated that for the first time in the history
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 of Western visual arts, early video experiments
expose mundane everydayness as the central
subject of art without any attached signification
or drama to soften its dullness. In this regard,
early laboratories-of-presencing emphasize
ordinary arrangements of the body (postures,
movements, and gestures) associated with
habitués and try to raise new awareness toward
them. What they achieve is the provoking of
boredom, which according to Heidegger’s the­
ory of moods disturbs the unconscious comfort
within the conventional everyday casualness
and confronts Dasein with its own existential
emptiness (Agamben 63–70)
The next step in the series of laboratories-
of-presencing comes with the introduction of
high-speed, high-resolution video cameras;
LCD/plasma wall-sized displays, which envelop
the viewer into complex architectures; and
digital manipulation of the audiovisual granu­
larity. Here, the “immediate now” is what again
comes into focus—same as the early labora­
tories-of-presencing with feedback—although
with a significant twist: the “now” experienced
in 1990s video installations is not standing
but flowing, or rather it is experienced in its
immediate emergence. What is understood by
“experienced” here is a transformative visceral
engagement with the complex dynamics of
time, rather than detached grasping of its pas­
sage at an analytical level. The 1990s laborato­
ries-of-presencing transform the everydayness
into a ritual. Thus, the basic mood toward this
mundane durée is modified from ennui and an
attempt to escape the “now” and toward an in­
tensive entanglement with the present moment
in its impermanent fluctuation and emergence
(Ivanova).
notes
1. The use of this metaphor was suggested to me by
Ingrid Hoelzl.
2. See Newton 6–12.
I. Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself,
and from its own nature, flows equably without
relation to anything external, and by another name
is called duration: relative, apparent, and common
time, is some sensible and external (whether ac­
curate or unequable) measure of duration by the
journal of film and video 71.1  /  spring 2019
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JFV 71_1 text.indd 49
means of motion, which is commonly used instead
of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a
year. (Newton 6)
3. Also see John Baldessari’s I Will Not Make Any
More Boring Art (1971), I Am Making Art (1971), and
Teaching a Plant the Alphabet (1972).
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