Osiris, Volume 28 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press Journals
Published: 2013-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

Perception of the Audiovisual Field

In a ten-minute black-and-white video that Nauman made in 1967–8, Playing a Note on the Violin while I Walk around the Studio, he walks to and fro, incessantly sawing at a violin. The camera rests in a fixed position, image and soundtrack run asynchronously, and now and then Nauman disappears from the frame. He reported in an interview, “In one of those first films, the violin film, I played the violin as long as I could: I don’t know how to play the violin, so it was hard, playing on all four strings as fast as I could as long as I could. I had ten minutes of film and ran about seven minutes of it before I got tired and had to stop and to rest a little bit and then finish it.” When asked by the interviewer, “But you could go on longer than the ten minutes?” Nauman replied, “I would have had to stop and rest more often. My fingers got very tired and I couldn’t hold the violin any more.”23

In Violin Tuned D.E.A.D. of 1969, Nauman tackled the relation of time and bodily movement in his violin playing from a different angle: “I wanted to set up a problem where it wouldn’t matter whether I knew how to play the violin or not. What I did was to play as fast as I could on all four strings with the violin tuned D, E, A, and D, rather than the customary G, D, A, and E.”24 This video lasts for one hour. The visible effort of the player, Nauman explained, conveys to the viewer the sincerity of his activity: “If you are honestly getting tired, or if you are honestly trying to balance on one foot for a long time, there has to be a certain sympathetic response in someone who is watching you.”25 The extended duration of the performance not only exposes the viewer to a sensorimotor schema, but it also leads to the player’s exhaustion, which in turn becomes visible and thereby even more strongly appeals to the viewer to comprehend the sensorimotor schema. In the video, Nauman turns his back to the camera, the axis of which is again rotated by ninety degrees. As he explained to the interviewer, the violin strings are tuned to the pitches D, E, A, and D, and he plays the open strings from the lowest to the highest in one down-bow, that is to say, in the particular order of the letters D, E, A, D, producing the sound in one movement.

In the video, Nauman is seen only from the back. According to the phenomenological analysis of perception, a viewer is able to imagine the side of an object that is hidden from view. The object’s reverse side is made “co- present,” by “analogous apperception,” as this process was described by Edmund Husserl: “An appresentation occurs even in external experience, since the strictly seen front of a physical thing always and necessarily appresents a rear aspect and prescribes it for a more or less or determined content.

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