Recontextualising Roland Barthes through Bruce Nauman’s video installations and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty

ABSTRACT

A recontextualisation of Roland Barthes’s concepts of the third meaning and the punctum is presented through an analysis of Bruce Nauman’s installation art and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Nauman’s use of repetition in his Clown Torture video installation creates a trauma to form through looped video footage, which is shown to thwart narrative progression and, in effect, render the moving image static; in this way, it is demonstrated to function like a film still. Through use of a signifier taken out of context, Nauman’s methods are shown to achieve what may be termed a ‘third meaning in motion’. In Nauman’s video, Barthes’s notion of the punctum becomes evident due to the manipulation of time via the looping mechanism. The obstruction of signification that viewers experience is shown to activate a ‘performative punctum’. Furthermore, an examination of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty offers a fitting parallel to Nauman’s work, in terms of subversion of clear meaning formulation along with an attack on the audience’s sensibilities. This analysis represents an expansion of the field of application of Barthesian semiotics from the still image to the moving image.

KEYWORDS:

• Roland Barthes
• Bruce Nauman
• Antonin Artaud
• Postmodern Sculpture
• Third Meaning
• Punctum

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Chris Doyen

Chris Doyen is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Bristol. He completed his undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature at California State University Long Beach, after which he attended California Institute of the Arts where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Critical Studies Writing Program. Research interests include modern and postmodern sculpture, semiotics and phenomenology. His doctoral thesis recontextualises Roland Barthes’s theories through an analysis of Bruce Nauman’s video installations. He is particularly interested in the effects of sensory manipulation on the viewer’s perception in the exhibition space. The dissertation explores works of sculptural installation and performance art by Nauman that subvert traditional art historical norms, particularly those of sculptural representation, in terms of both form and content. Further, the dissertation illustrates how the mechanisms of Nauman’s installation videos, such as repetitive looping and caustic imagery and sound, test the viewer’s comfort thresholds and potentially impede meaning reception by paralysing the viewer’s perception of space and time. This trauma inflicted on and by the formal aspects of the sculptural installation situates the viewer in the position of the film still, enacting signification through experience.