Absence/Presence - Sensation.

“If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.  At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product” (79).

In reading Caroline Jones’s Sensorium, I was particularly intrigued by Jane Farver’s description of absence/presence in Bruce Nauman’s artwork.  Farver writes, “Using his body as an art object—as a visual and audial element—he interrogated the act of making art” (79), creating videos of the process and letting us “see him, alone, mapping the boundaries of both his nearly empty studio and his own body” (79).  Simply through this act of videotaping himself, Nauman highlights the absence of material in his studio, as well as the presence of the artist and artwork with his self.  Somehow, the absence of “media” in the way we would understand it to be calls attention to the only presence we can recognize in the piece: the process of his art and the sensory experience of the artist himself.  By utilizing the presence of himself, the artist, and the absence of materials aside from space and his own body, Nauman recognizes the process of art as its own artwork.

Nauman’s 2000 work Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage), in which he used infrared technology to record images of space within his studio without himself present, is where he most interestingly applied the concepts of absence/presence to the sensory experience.  In one of the “incarnations” of this project, he taped the space underneath his desk (as seen on page 80) for several hours.  Without the artist present, how can the artist be creating the created?  

In Mapping the Studio, Nauman highlights the absence of everything we might associate with the “process” of art: materials, light, and, of course, the artist.  By doing this, we the viewers must search for other components that are present in order to formulate in our view the work of art.  While we might not expect anything to happen under a desk with its owner absent, Farver points out that the infrared camera captured an array of sensory experiences: “the comings and goings of the mice that infested his studio; his cat’s almost perfunctory pursuit of the rodents; many moths; and the ambient sounds of the rural desert community” (81-82).  She goes on to note that while the objects and setting of the space appear “inert and pallid, the studio’s night creatures, tracked through their body heat, are highly animated” (82).  Mapping the Studio may not be a work of art in the visual sense we are used to, but Nauman succeeds in capturing the senses of sight, sound, and feeling (as the images are generated through heat recognition); he captures a unique sensory experience, which is what we look for in a work of art.  His art is the process of its own creation, the activity of creating it, and the sensing of the space in which it is created.