Blink: the viewer as blind man in installation art

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As might be said of all of these works, this piece involved the examination of the boundary between sculpture and theater, art and time. As though engaged in one of Eadweard Muybridge's time-motion studies or in a philosophical dialogue with Gotthold Lessing, Nauman imitates the iconic pose of classical sculpture, but sets it in motion down a narrow hallway, the very form of which suggests a linear and temporal progression from one end to the other. Once this stage set was displayed as a sculpture itself, however, seemingly affirming the more static features of that medium, it had the ironic effect of installing the viewer as a surrogate performer. Instead of Nauman entering the narrow opening and traversing the cramped hallway, the viewer found himself squeezed between its featureless walls. What is interesting about this transition from prop to sculpture and from Nauman to the viewer is the artist's specific understanding of the viewer's role and his careful attempts to constrain that role. His comments about these early forays into installation remind us that he was working in a historical moment in which the rules and conventions of the medium were still being worked out. "It was just two parallel walls," Nauman remarks,

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  that stuck straight out from the studio wall about twenty feet and
  about twenty inches apart. I remember it wasn't very big--I can
  remember some bigger ones. I finally just decided it was fine the way
  it was, it didn't need the performance. I think it was very hard for
  me to present it without any particular instructions, because I felt I
  didn't want people to make their own performance. I wanted to control
  the situation, and I felt that by giving something as simple and
  uninflected as that corridor, that I was allowing people a lot more
  latitude than I was used to. (22)

The corridor-as-installation seemed to invite the viewer's direct participation, indeed to be meaningful only with that participation, so it was troubling to an artist famously involved in solitary, conceptual experimentation. To say that the viewer's body was installed in this work is to recognize that while that body became an unpredictable element in the piece, it was at the same time disciplined by the limits and rectitude of the walls by which it was surrounded. Nauman has stressed in several interviews, both from the early 1970s and more recently, that he wanted to control the behavior of his audience. (23) In a sense, what he describes is a desire to install an ideal participant in the work, to set the participant up as one would a work of art and manage its parameters. The corridors thus become metaphors for the exhibition space itself, the white unadorned walls of a gallery. Just as installation art is by definition produced in response to and is contained within the site where it is erected, so the audience member responds to, plays within, and is enclosed by Nauman's claustrophobic space.