Night move: the indifferent grandeur of Bruce Nauman.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-JAN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Bruce Nauman's "Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)," a video installation that has opened at the Dia Center for the Arts, is five hours and forty-five minutes long. It consists of seven large DVD projections (each about twelve feet high by fifteen feet across) on the walls of a cavernous room. The gray-green images, shot in darkness by infrared light, are low-angled, static views of small areas inside Nauman's studio at his ranch, in Galisteo, New Mexico. They are still-lifes, essentially, though at varying intervals they are animated by skittering mice, a prowling black cat, and a streaking moth or two. The animals' eyes glow spookily. Night sounds are heard: wind, barking dogs, a faraway train whistle, a water heater kicking on, a violent spate of rain, an insect bumping against the microphone, desultory vocalizations of the cat. Using a relatively cheap automatic camera, Nauman taped the footage in hour-long chunks over a period of several months in 2000. Abrupt changes in a scene -- objects appearing, disappearing, or shifting -- indicate the start of a new segment. Once in a while, the artist's cowboy-booted legs can be glimpsed leaving the premises after he has turned on the camera. The enlarged digital images flutter and shimmer, as the camera's dithering...

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