Mr Chris Doyen

The title of my dissertation is Moving Sculptural Aesthetics: Bruce Nauman’s Video Installations,  explores how the mechanisms of Nauman’s installation videos, such as repetitive looping and caustic imagery and sound, impede meaning reception by paralyzing the viewer’s perception of time and space. The formal aspects of the sculptural installations situate the viewer in the position of the film still, enacting signification through experience. The focus on sensory manipulation examines the use of sound, light, duration, circularity, and imagery in video and installation art that test the viewer’s comfort thresholds, potentially opening up what can be described as a liminal space in the viewer’s perception. Analysis centers on artworks that achieve this sense of defamiliarization through intervention into the exhibition space, resulting in disorientation that thwarts the traditional experience of audience gratification through meaning reception. This dissertation will explore works of sculptural installation and performance art that subvert traditional art historical norms, particularly those of sculptural representation, in terms of both form and content. Along with this phenomenological approach, of interest is the structural underpinning of postmodern sculpture as art object, in terms of semiotics and signification. In this respect, philosopher Roland Barthes’s theories of the third meaning, punctum, and fifth term are utilized in this dissertation as lenses to analyze Nauman’s artworks.