Night move: the indifferent grandeur of Bruce Nauman.

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 sensor continually readjusts to the lights and shadows. The over-all effect is swimmy and subaqueous.

Nauman, who is sixty years old, is the most durably respected and controversial of living artists. Some people, who object to his controlling, hermetic ways, can't stand him. Others -- Naumanians, if you will -- hang on his productions as on the utterances of an oracle. (I'm a Naumanian.) Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the son of a salesman for General Electric. At the University of Wisconsin, he pursued serious studies in mathematics and music, and then abandoned them in favor of old-fashioned training in drawing and painting. He discovered contemporary art on visits to the Art Institute of Chicago. At the University of California, Davis, in 1964, he went cutting-edge with a run of exploratory works in many mediums. These led to a dazzling show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in 1968.

Nauman is commonly regarded, along with Richard Serra and the late Eva Hesse, as one of the Big Three innovators of post-minimalism. From the Bay Area, he moved first to Pasadena and then, in 1979, to New Mexico. There Nauman trains horses and raises cattle, among other activities that help him to weather legendary spells of artist's block. A persistent theme in his work is the question of what, if anything, it means to be an artist alone in a studio, faced with the daunting challenge of making something out of nothing. One iconic early work is a spiral neon sign that reads, "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." Is this profundity or rubbish? It's both and neither; it's Nauman.

"Mapping" recalls the pioneering videos that showed the young Nauman taking gruelling, choreographed walks in his empty studio. Those works played with the notion of the artist as a cottage industrialist of meaning, whose every deliberate action in his working space can't help but be art. Nauman was responding to a cultural situation that was new in the sixties: the dubiously avid embrace of formerly underground avant-gardism by mainstream audiences. His stance was aggressively skeptical. Nauman's formative influences included Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and Ludwig Wittgenstein -- masters of doubt. In works that featured nerve-racking environments (a corridor so narrow that you could pass through it only sideways; an empty gallery in which his recorded voice could be heard snarling, "Get out of my mind, get out of this room!"), he made caustically whimsical pocket theatre out of his own painful self-consciousness, as if to signal the ridiculousness of the whole enterprise. In that period, Nauman alienated quite a few viewers. I remember feeling threatened, almost to the point of panic, by works that imposed themselves mentally as Serra's looming sculptures do physically. But gradually I got the hang of Nauman's honesty, of his self-abnegating discipline. He plays rough but fair. He has influenced generations of artists as a free-floating conscience -- ...