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

Introduction

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) is an artist who works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, video, photography and performance, among others. On more than one occasion, Nauman has been credited as a pioneer of both installation art (Auping 2004, 11) and video art (Lewallen 2019, 15), and he has also been identified as the most influential artist since Andy Warhol (Plagans 2014, 18). Nauman’s work typically resists easy characterisation and categorisation.

Rather than creating a work of art that hangs on the wall, Nauman instead produces one in which the viewer is able to participate. Employing various tactics to attack viewers in the exhibition space, the artist himself once compared the feeling of standing in one of his own artworks to ‘dancing with one shoe nailed to the floor’ (Cross 2003, 176). Moreover, David Levine in Bruce Nauman: Artists on Artists Lecture Series, reports one critic’s contention that ‘You could always recognise a Bruce Nauman piece by the way it made you want to leave the room immediately’ (2019, 62). These descriptions go some way towards explaining the disturbing experience of walking through a Nauman installation; however, in the end they fall short of clarifying how exactly the artworks prompt these intense reactions. The impetus for this article began as a search for answers to the question about what prompts a spectator’s need to flee a Nauman installation, a search which ultimately led to Roland Barthes and Antonin Artaud.

Although Barthes applied his theories of the third meaning and the punctum solely to film stills and photographs, a unique line of argument that will be advanced in the first section of the present article involves the claim that in Nauman’s work the looping of the short videos essentially renders the moving image static, allowing for application of Barthes’s theories. A fundamental assertion illustrated in the beginning of this study centres on the view that a nexus exists between a work like Nauman’s Clown Torture and Barthes’s notion of the third meaning – which he also calls ‘obtuse’ – involving a sign that resists signification. This article contends that the repetition of the looping mechanism in Clown Torture results in a layering effect that hinders signification. In that the Nauman installation prompts a participatory experience in the spectator, the phrase ‘performative third meaning’ is introduced as a new term added to the discussion of Barthesian semiotics.

The present analysis extends our understanding of Barthesian semiotics by pushing Barthes’s notion of the punctum for the first time into the realm of the performative. As presented in his book Camera Lucida, Barthes’s idea of the punctum involves some particularly striking element of a photographic image that bruises or wounds the viewer (1980, 27). The second section of the present analysis represents the first of its kind in applying the concept of the punctum to video. However, in this case, rather than the punctum being a particularly odd detail of a photograph, the contention is that in Nauman’s video installations the punctum instead involves an action depicted in the moving image, this action coming to light solely because of the closer inspection provided by the time offered by the looping.

This notion of an active punctum has a further corollary in the Nauman artwork, one that involves the viewer’s body and performance. The mechanisms of Nauman’s sculptural installations have their roots in Minimalist sculpture, such as artworks by Donald Judd and Robert Morris, works whose imposing presence in the gallery or museum shifted much of the focus from the object itself onto the viewer’s bodily presence in the exhibition space. Richard Schechner in his book Performance Studies refers to Rebecca Schneider’s point about this significant reorientation of emphasis:

We have become accustomed to posit the rise of (solo) performance art as a direct result of late capitalism and the object's famous loss of aura […] the site of the work shifted to the place between the object and the maker, the object and the viewer, the object and any given context […]. This space between viewer and viewed was closely aligned with dance and theatre, where any product is more profoundly in the process, in the action, than in any formally discrete object. (2006, 159)

Nauman pushes things further, so much so that the parameters of the present study warrant invention of new terminology to convey an expansion of Barthes’s concepts. Thus, due to the ways in which the Nauman artwork acts to charge the exhibition space, it triggers what may be called a performative punctum by sparking the spectator’s perception of, and physical involvement in, a space of traumatised signification.

The contention is, then, that the spectator, therefore, performs the punctum; the ramifications of this argument result in an expansion of Barthes’s theory into the realm of the performative by literalising the concept of the punctum. In the latter half of this article, the new term ‘sonic punctum’ is also introduced in relation to Nauman’s Clown Torture as a way of explaining the effect of the caustic sound on audiences. Because time and death figure prominently into Barthes’s notions of the punctum, this later section examines time in relation to Nauman’s Clown Torture. A further corollary of death and trauma in Barthes’s conception of the punctum then leads to a comparison of the motif of repetition in Nauman’s Clown Torture with repetition in a work from Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster Series.

Lastly, the final section of this study examines how the Barthesian punctum as wound, which is present in Nauman’s Clown Torture, finds a further corollary in Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. In that Artaud’s work frustrates attempts by the audience to formulate a clear meaning, it mirrors the cryptic quality of Nauman’s artwork as elucidated through Barthes’s notions of signification. The way Artaud attacks the audience is paralleled in Nauman’s work, the result of which makes the audience’s experience in the space trump the importance of the art object or literary work itself. This phenomenon is echoed in Barthes’s essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1987), which heralded a move towards regarding the primacy of the reader’s response to a work of literature over and above authorship.

In light of the aforementioned points, this article’s careful scrutiny of Barthes’s thought in relation to Nauman’s video installations and Artaud’s work results in an expansion of Barthesian semiotics in various ways. It expands the field of application of Barthes’s concepts of the third meaning and the punctum from the still image to the moving image. This also represents a movement away from photography and film towards video installation and sculpture and into the fine arts in general. The impact of these assertions changes the framework surrounding the way Barthes’s work is discussed, as well as that of Nauman.

Layered signification: the Barthesian third meaning in Nauman's Clown Torture

The participatory nature of the experience in a Nauman installation like Clown Torture (1987, Figure 1) invites the spectator’s attention at that same time that it repels it. Regarding his interest in purposeful defamiliarisation as a tool to prompt disequilibrium in his audiences, Nauman has stated that ‘What really interested me […] is what it is about certain spaces that makes us feel uncomfortable, and […] what emotions do we have when we sense a room is not right. I didn’t want to escape that condition. I wanted to go right to it’ (Walsh 2018, 54). The repetitive looping of Nauman’s Clown Torture video installation ultimately leads to a layering of signification that hinders attempts to engage with the content of the artwork. Repetition interrupts narrative progression and figures into the production of a third meaning.

Figure 1. Bruce Nauman, Clown Torture, 1987 (still) four colour video monitors, four speakers, four videotape players, two video projectors, four video sources (colour, sound) dimensions variable. The Art Institute of Chicago, Watson F. Blair Prize, Wilson L. Mead and Twentieth-Century Purchase funds; through prior gift of Joseph Winterbotham; gift of Lannan Foundation © 2023 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York, courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York

In his essay ‘The Third Meaning’ Barthes notes how the obtuse meaning does not merely indicate a different type of meaning; instead, it subverts meaning production altogether: ‘[…] it outplays meaning – subverts not the content but the whole practice of meaning [as] a new – rare – practice affirmed against a majority practice (that of signification) […]’ (1977b, 62). Barthes analyses film stills extracted from the overall context of Sergei Eisenstein’s films, leading to this theory of the third meaning. Taking the film still out of context as Barthes does ends up breaking the narrative sequencing just as the looping of Nauman’s videos thwarts forward narrative progression. In Clown Torture, as layers accrue upon each viewing, meanings paradoxically become destabilised rather than more solidified. Regarding this obstruction of signification present in the third meaning, Barthes (1977b, 62) notes that ‘the signifier (the third meaning) is not filled out, it keeps a permanent state of depletion (a word from linguistics that demonstrates empty, all-purpose verbs […])’ (emphasis in the original). An accumulation that disrupts signification finds echo in Barthes’s description of the third meaning as ‘the supplementary meaning,’ (1977b, 54-55) which he labels as ‘obtuse’:

First and foremost obtuse meaning is discontinuous, indifferent to the story and to the obvious meaning (as signification of the story). This dissociation has a de-naturing or at least a distancing effect with regard to the referent. (1977b, 61)

Barthes also asserts that ‘The obtuse meaning is a signifier without a signified, hence the difficulty in naming it’ (1977b, 61). In this way, Nauman’s Clown Torture obstructs the mechanism of signification, widening the gap between signifier and signified, which works towards a partial hollowing out of the sign.

The term ‘floating signifier’ provides a useful comparison to the third meaning. We might describe a floating signifier as the result of a disconnection between signifier and signified. Claude Levi-Strauss mentions the floating signifier in relation to his analyses of the ‘zero symbolic value’ of the concept of ‘mana’, which could be thought of as human thought entering another dimension (1950, 64). In this context, Levi-Strass refers to the floating signifier in relation to art:

I believe that notions of the mana type, however diverse they may be […] represent nothing more or less than that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientific knowledge is capable, if not of staunching it, at least of controlling it partially. (1950, 63)

Also referred to as an empty signifier, a floating signifier ‘is variously defined as a signifier with a vague, highly variable, unspecifiable, or non-existent signified’ (Chandler 2007, 78). However, it might also be illustrative to look earlier in the history of semiotics to the idea of the arbitrary nature of the sign, as plainly asserted by Ferdinand Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1906-1911). For example, there is obviously nothing inherent in the word ‘clown’ that would relate that signifier to a comedic costumed figure. According to Saussure (1986, 102), ‘When we listen to an unknown language, we are not in a position to say how the sequence of sounds should be analysed: for the analysis is impossible if one takes into account nothing more than the phonic side of the linguistic event’. This idea of the arbitrariness of signification serves to underscore the disconnect between signifier and signified evident in Nauman’s Clown Torture video.

Nevertheless, Charles Peirce, in his writings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, had what could be said to be a more nuanced notion of the sign, which he asserted actually consists of a kind of tripartite nature: symbol, index and icon. Peirce’s notion of symbol coincides with the arbitrary nature of the signifier as outlined above, such that a word, for instance, functions as a symbol, in that it stands in for an idea (1998, 9). An icon, which Peirce also refers to as a ‘likeness’, looks quite similar to its referent; a photograph would qualify as an icon (1998, 13). Lastly, the indexical nature of the sign, according to Peirce, would consist of a more one-to-one correspondence with its referent, for example the image of a hand pointing in a certain direction (1998, 163). For our purposes in the analysis of Nauman’s Clown Torture video images, Peirce’s notion of symbol becomes relevant in exposing the greatest gulf between signifier and signified whereas the iconic quality of Nauman’s video images bridges that gap considerably.

In the end, the Clown Torture footage becomes a floating signifier due to the looping mechanism that abruptly truncates any sense of narrative, acting to aggressively unmoor signifier from signified. The devastating impact of this disruption of narrative continuum essentially pulls the rug out from under the audience. In ‘The cognitive dimension of narrative discourse’ Greimas et al. underscore ‘the fiduciary contract’ of narrativity, which is based on the cultivation of a type of ‘accord’ with audiences. A sense of equilibrium develops when descriptions of a story’s events conform with the way we think they should be. Indeed, Greimas et al. focus on clarity as a kind of compact upon which audiences rely:

As for knowledge about the events, it can be said that this knowledge adheres, in a certain way, to the events themselves and to the characters and action: both are what they appear to be, what the enunciator says about them; it is an unambiguous discourse. We are dealing here with a narrative without surprises […] where no double-dealing can enter [emphasis original]. (Greimas et al. 1989, 569–570)

Certainly, a sense of enigma and surprise characterises much of Nauman’s work. The lack of context clues provided for the events depicted in Clown Torture destabilises the ground upon which audiences stand during their attempts to make sense of the work. ‘If the narrative is thus laden with meaning,’ Greimas et al. write, ‘it is because narrative events are not distributed haphazardly … [emphasis added]’ (1989, 566). The palpable ambiguity in Nauman’s work spawns deliberate discord between artwork and receiver. This is not to say that Nauman’s Clown Torture has no meaning; the key assertion is that the mechanisms of the video installation work against meaning production, whereas traditionally artworks work towards it. Regarding Nauman’s retrospective at the Schlauger Basel and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ken Okiishi notes how it ‘confounds the impulse to make coherent statements about it’ (2018). This uncertainty about the artwork affects audiences’ reactions to it.

In the Nauman video, the third meaning shows itself in motion, leading to what may be termed a ‘performative third meaning’. This performative third meaning is achieved during the moment the clown scoots forward on his backside as if in slow motion and screams ‘No!’ In Clown Torture, the scooting action, on one level, seems literally to denote a person moving forward. A second level of meaning could, for example, be connected to the symbolism of the movement, such as indicating fear or surprise. A third meaning becomes evident via the looping mechanism of the video, which highlights the uncommon action of scooting forward, instead of a typical moving away from frightening stimuli. The action itself becomes inexplicable, serving absolutely no purpose. It is in this sense that it falls outside explanation, just as the third meaning itself falls outside language (Barthes 1977b, 61). The movement functions as an incomprehensible element of the piece. Regarding the obtuse nature of the third meaning, Barthes suggests, ‘If the obtuse meaning cannot be described, that is because, in contrast to the obvious meaning, it does not copy anything – how do you describe something that does not represent anything?’ (1977b, 61). In interrupting horizontal narrative flow, the scooting action becomes the vertical detail that perverts one’s natural sense of time marching forward, this within the larger looping mechanism of the videos which also prevents forward-moving narrative progress.

Presence in absence: Signification in Barthes and Nauman as purposeful ambiguity

Works by Nauman and Barthes involve a corralling of the audience into ‘a space’ purposefully suffused with a sense of ambiguity – often as provocation. Regarding Barthes’s theories, Elena Oxman (2010, 75) in ‘Sensing the Image: Roland Barthes and the Affect of the Visual’ duly notes the continuing intelligibility of what might ostensibly be labelled an unintelligible signification: ‘these “broken signs” (signes décrochés) elude determinate meaning and yet they remain “intelligible”’. This chimes with Nauman’s work, which evades accessible signification and classification, all while continuing to sustain powerful engagement with audiences in spite of, or perhaps because of, this fact. The issue is no longer so much about the meaning of the art object or piece of literature – nor about artistic or authorial intent – but instead centres on audience experience. Oxman refers to Barthes’s Oeuvres Complètes (2002), wherein he explores the notion of the power of artworks being a function of the distance artists put between their intent and the ultimate end product of their work, without veering off into impenetrability:

[…] Barthes associates this realm of ‘uncertain signifiers’ with a particular aesthetic vocation: ‘The art and originality of the film director is situated in this zone (of broken signs); one could say that the aesthetic value of a film is a function of the distance that the auteur knows how to introduce between the form of the sign and its content without leaving the realm of the intelligible’ (1040) (Oxman 2010, 75).

In the case of works by Barthes and Nauman, any sense of empty signification is, though, also balanced by a provocative weightiness. Oxman concludes her essay on Barthes with the intriguing prospect of how a fissuring of meaning acts as a revolutionary force with the potential to spawn new media: ‘Indeed, crucial to Barthes’s conception of criticism is that it not simply seek the fissures of meaning, but that out of these fissures it produce new forms of discourse – that it imagine possibilities for sense beyond the given [emphasis original]’ (Oxman 2010, 87). Though Barthes has yet to be linked to Nauman to the degree presented in the present article, Oxman’s sentiments regarding Barthes’s exploration of uncharted territory apply with equal force to many of Nauman’s projects. Nauman’s pioneering roles in the development of both video art and conceptual art, as well as a career devoted to an intermingling of media, testify to his willingness to cross boundaries. The enigmatic quality of a work like Nauman’s Clown Torture continues to be part-and-parcel of the power of the unique spaces he creates, spaces that are thoroughly imbued with this sense of being something ‘beyond the given’.

Susan Sontag (1983) labels Barthes’s work as imbued with an ‘aesthetics of absence’ (xxxvi). This aesthetics of absence may be characterised as involving ‘the empty sign, the empty subject, the exemption from meaning’ (Sontag 1983, xxxvi). Sontag concludes her introduction on Barthes by invoking the term kenosis, which she defines as an ‘emptying out’ (Sontag 1983, xxxvi). Nauman’s Clown Torture, too, pivots on this sense of presence in absence, particularly in what seems to be the rather heavy, charged space of the essentially empty video installation. In a noticeably empty installation space essentially void of any traditional art objects, the endless repetition of the video along with the caustic sound both serve as a powerful forces to solidify the situatedness of the installation site.

Regarding a deferral of meaning through what may be called less than specific signifiers, Andrew Brown in his book Roland Barthes: The Figures of Writing explores the idea of ‘deictics’ (n.d.) in linguistics, which can be defined as ‘relating to or denoting a word or expression whose meaning is dependent on the context which it is used (such as here, you, me, that one there […])’ (Oxford Languages). Other words such as this, those and then also function in this manner since the words rely on a particular context for meaning, remaining essentially empty until that context is provided; therefore, the word stands in an indexical relationship to meaning. Similarly, Brown focuses on the function of an exclamation such as ‘That’s it!’ the energy of which is like the experience of a sudden epiphany, or what one might call an ‘Ah-ha!’ moment. However, when we hear the phrase ‘That’s it!’ the meaning of the word ‘That’ of course hangs in suspense until further elaboration, referring to something at a certain remove from itself in space and time. Intriguingly, Brown refers to this phenomenon as producing a site:

The punctum thus joins the list of those many Barthesian sites where language’s representational capacities seems [sic] to reach a limit, which Barthes himself allegorically suggests by the exclamatory reduction to which such experiences force language: c’est, ça!’, tel!, ça-a-été! What these exclamations point to cannot be named properly […]. These exclamations are a restatement of a constant theme running through [Barthes’s] work: that of the literary text as a figure that points in silence to something outside itself, but to which our only access is the text itself. (Brown 1992, 279)

The way an exclamation such as this functions as a kind of empty placeholder, with emphasis deferred elsewhere, is indicative of the way in which a Nauman artwork often seems to purposely vacate signification, leading audiences to the search for meaning outside the sign.

Time and the sonic punctum of Clown Torture

The Clown Torture video installation consists of four different television monitors, featuring one of four different clowns; one of the scenes is also projected on the wall of the darkened gallery. The most harrowing of the images portrays a clown cowering on the floor in abject fear, shouting ‘No!’ incessantly. What has not been written about in the literature on Nauman is the Barthesian punctum of Nauman’s Clown Torture, likely because the punctum has traditionally been a particular detail of a photograph, not a moving image. A claim made in the present study is that, in Nauman’s video, on the other hand, the punctum is an action. The punctum occurs via the clown screaming a prolonged ‘No!’ Barthes refers to the effect of the punctum on the viewer as a ‘mark’ (1980, 26) or a ‘burning’ (Barthes 1980, 98). In Clown Torture, noise acts as a sonic punctum, searing itself into the audience’s psyche. Barthes writes, ‘A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (1980, 27). He also refers to it as something that ‘stings’ the viewer; it is a ‘wound’ (Barthes 1980, 26–27). Crucial here to keep in mind is the fact the punctum connotes a sense of violence.

What complicates matters even more is time. In Barthes’s analysis of the punctum in photography, of particular note for the purposes of this investigation is that he explicitly denies the applicability of the notion of the punctum to the medium of film, principally because of this aspect of temporality: ‘[…] I don’t have time: in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image […]’ (Barthes 1980, 55). In light of this, it is illustrative to consider a point made by Hans Belting in his book An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, regarding a specific aspect of the medium of film:

The film exists as a medium only for the split-second that that [sic] it projects its image. It amounts to a radical temporalisation of the image and thus calls forth a different kind of perception in the viewer. We identify with an imaginary situation as though we ourselves had stumbled into the movie picture. Our mental images cannot be clearly distinguished from those that reach us through the technology that produces the fictional images of the film […]. In the viewer it creates the impression that the fleeting images flowing before his eyes are nothing other than his own images, like the ones he experiences in imagination and in dreams. (Belting 2011[2001], 52)

This radical film time that develops into a fictional world is one into which the audience enters by way of the imagination; by contrast, the brevity of Nauman’s video clips consistently inhibits this type of immersion. Rather than stumbling into a fantasy, the formal characteristics of the work, including being accosted by sound and mired down in the continual looping of images, force viewers to struggle through the space.

A powerful consequence of the manipulation of time in Nauman’s video is that it acts as an incendiary device enabling the punctum itself to activate the third meaning. The present analysis qualifies as a first in showing Barthes’s theories of the third meaning and punctum working in tandem, while remaining thoroughly separate concepts. The present study represents an expansion of the field of Barthesian semiotics to include the moving image, by conveying a moving third meaning and performative punctum in video art.

Barthes’s punctum and death

Another aspect of the punctum, besides it being something that wounds or pierces the viewer, is the punctum’s relationship to death, which is tied up with the connection photographs have to time as a record of what once was and what is no longer. Just as, for Barthes, the photographic image of a person is already imbued with a sense of that person’s death, for Belting photography entails an imminent time-trap:

At the precise moment of exposure, every photograph falls into the trap of time […] there is a sense in which, during our lifetime, we die the moment we are photographed […]. Roland Barthes therefore said that in photography, ‘I have become Total-Image, which is to say, Death in person’. (Belting 2011[2001], 121–122)

The function of the image was initially to stand in for those who had passed away. Belting point outs how ‘the Greeks of Plato’s day hardly remembered that images had once served as vessels of embodiment, replacing the lost bodies of the dead’ (Belting 2011[2001], 84). For Belting, the issue at hand is more than just photographs having some element of death to them. Here, a photo is so thoroughly tied up with death that the connections seem to run deeper than that to which Barthes ascribed. Belting refers to an almost one-to-one correspondence of the image with death:

All that the image still provided was the experience of absence, an experience previously restricted to the encounter with the dead body. The image no longer filled a gap but became a metaphor for death itself. It could not transform death or embody the life of a person, for it was itself like death. (2011 [2001], 111)

The strength of this notion came as the picture literally functioned as a conduit to communicate with the departed (Belting 2011[2001], 115). In this manner, the image contained a certain capacity to overcome the power of death, granting a stay of sorts in allowing the dead to remain on earth in the presence of the image. Belting says as much when he observes the original intent of image-makers:

[…] banishing death was the original goal that mankind hoped to achieve through the image, but now, in spite of all, the image leads us to a new experience of death. The subject, in the moment when his lighted image is frozen by the camera, is like a living dead person. (2011[2001], 121)

Though images of people may be said to be suffused with a sense of their impending death, gruesome images of carnage and of death itself will be shown in what follows to have a somewhat different overall effect. This, then, leads to an examination of the effects of trauma on the image.

On repetition intensifying trauma: Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol

The impact of accumulation through the looped imagery in Nauman’s videos finds a fitting comparison in the serial images of Andy Warhol. Hal Foster in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (1996, 131) refers to Warhol’s notion of the power of repetition to draining imagery of its impact:

Warhol glosses this embrace of boredom, repetition, domination: ‘I don't want it to be essentially the same – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.’ Clear repetition is both a draining of significance and a defending against affect, and the strategy guided Warhol as early as the 1963 interview: ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect.’ [emphasis original]

Foster argues a similar phenomenon occurs in Warhol’s Death and Disaster Series from 1962-1964.

Warhol’s White Burning Car III (1963, Figure 2) depicts a fiery car wreck multiplied five times over, with what looks to be the ejected driver impaled on the telephone pole flanking the left of the photograph. Had this artwork consisted of just one of the photographs, the viewer’s attention would be focused on just that one image. The fact that the artwork duplicates the scene five times causes the audience’s eyes to range over the images, without always focusing on just one. The repetition, then, works to dilute the impact of the content. Viewers may find their eyes flitting between the five photos, comparing those on the left with those on the right, in a search for discrepancies in the depictions, such as the fact that on the panel on the lefthand side, the houses have been cropped out, so that the telephone poles line up precisely with the left margin, which draws attention to the hanging man. Foster points out how Warhol’s repetition of multiple car crash images acts to simultaneously dilute the trauma at the same time that it redoubles it:

[…] the Warhol repetitions not only reproduce traumatic effects; they also produce them. Somehow in these repetitions, then, several contradictory things occur at the same time: a warding away of traumatic significance and an opening out to it, a defending against traumatic affect and a producing of it. [emphasis original] (1996, 132)

Of course, there are certainly more of the violent images in number, but in regards to the power, the repeated scenes of violence may act to actually desensitise the audience to the carnage, diluting the impact of the depicted disaster.

Figure 2. Andy Warhol, White Burning Car III, 1963. Silkscreen ink on linen. © 2023 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In contrast, the multiple monitors in Nauman’s installation, instead of just one, intensify the effect of the caustic imagery, the depictions colluding to create a sense of confusion. The fact that each of the five monitors shows a different scene results in a visual and aural onslaught that has the tendency to overwhelm the senses. Regarding the actions being depicted, however, each of the snippets comes divorced from any overall context, like a few scenes from a film that was never completed. Rather than a single Eisenstein film still analysed by Barthes, Nauman’s short scene already comes delivered bereft of any overall narrative context and then it is set on repeat. In their lack of narrative progression, Nauman’s moving pictures, which are, of course, longer than a film still but shorter than a full film scene, come across as frozen in time as a film still.

The effect of trauma on the power of denotation

The traumatic aspect of the experience within a Nauman installation parallels the thread of trauma underlying some of Barthes’s theories. Brown points out how ‘elements of this Lacanian theory of the real as something that is always a trauma for totalising philosophical or ideological systems subtend many of Barthes’s images and preoccupations […]’ (1992, 241). Brown goes on to clarify this relation to trauma:

While Barthes in general does not establish any pure aesthetics of the shock effect, the wounding, seductive energies he locates, in language as in life, are, in their various ways, just as traumatic. For trauma, as theorized by Freud and Lacan and their followers, covers a complex of ideas that recur in various guises throughout Barthes’s work. (Brown 1992, 242)

Consider Barthes’s notion of the trauma photo. A photograph depicting a traumatic accident is as literal or, one might say, inconsequential as a photo of an ordinary everyday occurrence. For Barthes, this is because ‘the shock-photo is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorisation can have a hold on the process instituting the signification’ (Barthes 1977a, 31). Barthes goes on to say that ‘assuming this (which, in fact, is already a connotation), the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths, all captured “from life as lived”) is the photograph about which there is nothing to say … ’ (1977a, 30-31). In her article, Oxman underscores Barthes’s notion of the power of trauma to stall the image in denotation, preventing the development of connotations: ‘This subversive function of the traumatic image portends Barthes’s later theories of the “obtuse” meanings and the punctum, which he opposes to the connotative meanings (or studium) of culture’ (2010, 75). Brown is also one who takes the opportunity to analyse the power of denotation to thwart signification:

This provides us with a clue as to the potentially traumatic nature that, across his analyses of certain types of literary language (and, as we shall see, other cultural phenomena too), Barthes comes to see as inherent in denotation […]. Denotation becomes a central concern in two senses: it challenges theory; and, concurrently with this, it seems to form a potential kernel of unanalysable opacity at the heart of various forms of representation. (1992, 266)

The reason the trauma photograph fails to provoke any conversation is that it in effect stifles connotation. To clarify, a photograph depicting trauma is not shocking precisely because the point of the image is to depict the trauma. The following observation by Brown goes some ways towards explaining why, in the end, the trauma photo fails to surprise: ‘[…] what is really shocking, as Barthes points out, is something that shocks in the absence of any signifying intention – something which is not coded as shocking […]’ (1992, 271). In other words, if the initial intent was already to shock, the end result may not make as strong an impression as a viewer caught off guard by some surprising detail captured by accident in a photograph that was not at all intended to shock.

If we grant the fact that there is, indeed, nothing to say about the fixed image of trauma, surely the same cannot be said of Nauman’s video installation since it definitely does not qualify as a realistic depiction of life as lived, but is rather a representation of it in the guise of, for instance, costumed clowns. Barthes asserts, ‘One could imagine a kind of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult is connotation; or again, the ‘mythological’ effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to its traumatic effect’ (1977a, 31). Therefore, the significant implication here in relation to Nauman’s artwork is that the artistic depiction of a traumatic scene through painting or video has the potential to evoke powerful connotations that rival or surpass those of real-life footage via photography.

Art as torment: Nauman and Artaud

A typical reader approaches a piece of literature with certain expectations, as do those who approach a painting or sculpture. In the case of works by Artaud and Nauman, audience expectations are often intentionally upended, which may prove to be a challenging experience for some. Nauman’s assault on the viewer’s sensibilities has a striking parallel in the tenets of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. What follows shows two primary aspects of correlation between Nauman’s work and that of Artaud: the first is a deliberate subversion of meaning production; the second involves an aesthetics of violence.

Essentially, there are no opening scenes to any of the videos in the Clown Torture installation, nor any concluding scenes for that matter. The audience is dropped into the action in medias res, with each event acting as the main body of the brief narrative. In an interview, Nauman confided that he admired Lenny Tristano’s music for doing something similar:

… he hit you hard and he kept on going until he finished. Then he just quit. You didn’t get any

introduction, you didn’t get any tail – you just got full intensity for two minutes or twenty

minutes or whatever. It would be like taking the middle out of Coltrane – just the hardest,

toughest part of it. That was all you got. From the beginning, I was trying to see if I could

make art that did that. (Simon 1998)

In Clown Torture, the action starts, but then is abruptly halted and then repeated. These are climactic scenes shown over and over again bereft of any rising action or eventual denouement. In this respect, it can be difficult to come to terms with the logic of the portrayals because we are given too few pieces of the puzzle, so that not being able to see the action fully realised has the potential of provoking a sense of anxiety. The viewer, in effect, stands in the shoes of the clown who continually steps through the door to be doused with water: the attempt to construct meaning must be aborted and ultimately a repeat viewing of events does nothing to make things any easier to understand.

An example of the seemingly impenetrable quality of Artaud’s work can be seen in an excerpt from To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, a radio play (1949, 569) which reads, ‘ – I am not raving. / I am not mad. / I tell you that they have reinvented microbes in order to impose / a new idea of God. // They have found a new way to bring out God and to capture him / in his microbic noxiousness’. This mirrors Nauman’s sound pieces, wherein, through repetition, specific words or phrases veer towards an emptying out of meaning by moving towards pure sound. In her introduction to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1987), Sontag focuses on how Artaud’s work purposely refuses a clear thematics. She compares Artaud’s work to that of James Joyce, whose work some readers may find difficult to understand, but which in the end remains ultimately comprehensible. Artaud’s work, by contrast, shuns clear meaning. Sontag argues that ‘the unintelligible parts of Artaud’s late writings are supposed to remain obscure – to be directly apprehended as sound’ (1983, liii).

In another work, the first-person narrator of Artaud’s Here Lies (1947, 549) confides, ‘All true language / is incomprehensible, / like the chatter / of a beggar's teeth; / or the clap (whorehouse) / of a toothy femur (bloody)’. The writing here is reminiscent of the openness of a literary work such as Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’. However, although the literary onslaught of Ginsberg’s writing may at times border on incomprehensibility, it ultimately has a number of strong thematic elements that shine through – such as issues surrounding sexuality, politics, mental health, counterculture and more – calling to mind Sontag’s comment about how Joyce's meaning remains within reach. In contrast, meaning seems further from reach in works like Artaud’s To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, a radio play or Here Lies. Indeed, Sontag suggests of Artaud’s work that it is ‘in some intrinsic way unreadable,’ and that it ‘remains profoundly indigestible’ (1983, lix). Interestingly, the works seem to have a built-in propensity to undo meaning production that is also characteristic of some of Nauman’s artwork. Sontag refers to Artaud’s literary output as ‘work that cancels itself’ (1983, lvii). In that this cancellation involves an action, it can be seen to entail a degree of performativity. Tellingly, Sontag refers to Artaud’s thought as ‘an event, rather than an object’ (1983, lvii). Of particular importance for the purposes of the present analysis is that this is indicative of an operation, one that has the audience as its subject.

A further example comes by way of a brief phrase from To Have Done With The Judgement Of God about a decision ‘to die alive’ (1949, 559), which has a paradoxical circularity to it that one can find paralleled in Nauman’s work, particularly some of his neon sculptures that involve language, such as None Sing Neon Sign (1970), Raw/War (1971), Run From Fear/Fun From Rear (1972) and Violins Violence Silence (1981-1982). Sontag refers to a similar sense of circularity running through Barthes’s oeuvre. A reference to one of Barthes’s works about mythology reads, ‘Its form is empty but present, its meaning absent but full’ (xxiv). She goes on to note how in Barthes’s writing ‘arguments about many subjects have this identical climax: that absence is really presence, emptiness repletion … ’ (1983, xxiv). It is in the same enigmatic vein that in his essay ‘The Eiffel Tower’ Barthes ([1979]1983) can nonchalantly suggest about the Tower’s signification that ‘This pure – virtually empty – sign – is ineluctable, because it means everything’ ([1979]1983, 237). Sontag refers to Barthes’s ‘baffling of the Logos, of meaning itself’ (1983, xxx). Entering into this type of paradox allows Barthes, Nauman and Artaud to overcome the stranglehold of the binary, leading to the cultivation of a more expansive space.

An aesthetics of cruelty

The lack of a clear message is exacerbated in works by both Nauman and Artaud by way of their adoption of an actively antagonist position in relation to the audience that often entails a direct affront to traditional mores. Sontag attests to Artaud’s clearly brutal aims:

In Artaud’s poetics, art (and thought) is an action – and one that, to be authentic, must be brutal – and also an experience suffered, and charged with extreme emotions. Being both action and passion of this sort, iconoclastic as well as evangelical in its fervor, art seems to require a more daring scene, outside the museums and legitimate showplaces, and a new, ruder form of confrontation with its audience. (1983, xxix)

Artaud’s writing brims with sexually explicit content, which at times appears to openly goad readers. An excerpt from Artaud’s Indian Culture serves as a compelling illustration: ‘Caffre of urine from the slope of a hard vagina, / which resists when one takes it. // Urinary camphor of the mound of a dead vagina, / which slaps you when you stretch, // when one aims from the top of the Watchtower of the Clown, / nailed tomb of the horrible father’ (1983, 537). Here, the use of the second person operates to forcefully coopt the reader into the debauchery. Regarding Artaud’s work, Sontag asserts that ‘its authority lies in the parts that yield nothing for the reader except intense discomfort of the imagination’ (1983, lviii).

While inside one of Nauman’s video installations, the viewer may feel as if time is not moving forward, which may generate a disconcerting feeling of being stuck, provoking a strong impulse to escape the endless repetition while approximating the types of sensations felt during a traumatic experience. In an essay by Christine Hoffman featured in the book Bruce Nauman: Theatres of Experience, published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name held at the Deutsche Guggenheim in 2003 and 2004, Hoffman analyses the motif of waiting found in Nauman’s work in relation to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty: ‘In Nauman’s Clown Torture (1987), the space of waiting has turned into a torture chamber of sense and sensibility. The torture is never-ending and Nauman’s mental spaces lie beyond the experience of waiting’ (2003, 58). Being caught in a loop enacts a kind of glitching, frustrating audiences’ search for gratification through meaning recognition.

Nauman’s attacks are ultimately levied at primal levels of human consciousness. In Bruce Nauman: Theatres of Experience, Susan Cross compares Nauman’s strategy with that of Artaud’s, noting ‘a mode in which one is shocked bodily into an awareness of … the uncanny … ’ (2003, 17). Cross goes on to observe that Nauman’s ‘use of a jarring cacophony of colour and sound again also evoke [sic] Artaud’s strategies, which sought to reveal and provoke the viewer’s most primitive, brutal instincts in an effort to overcome them’ (2003, 20). The formal aspects of works by Nauman and Artaud strategically perform a breaking down and bypassing of viewers’ normal defense mechanisms. ‘Against the centuries old priority that the European theatre has given to words as the means for conveying emotions and ideas,’ Sontag clarifies, ‘Artaud wants to show the organic basis of emotions and the physicality of ideas in the bodies of the actors … . Artaud’s criterion of spectacle is sensory violence, not sensory enchantment … ’ (1983, xxxii). The performative aspect of the idea of an operation conducted upon audience members as subjects is mirrored in Sontag’s invocation of attending an Artaud performance which she likens to a visit to a surgeon. ‘ … the audience should not leave the theatre “intact” morally or emotionally,’ Sontag notes, referring to the ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ involved (1983, xxxiv). Aligning art with a metaphor of surgery, involving the slicing open of the body along with further invasive procedures, evokes a certain degree of barbarism that is apropos of works by Nauman and Artaud.

Conclusion

The subversion of traditional narrative structure in Nauman’s Clown Torture has a disquieting effect on the audience’s experience of the artwork. A spectator’s traditional viewing experience consisting of serene contemplation of a painting on a gallery wall or a sculpture set on a pedestal in a museum is irreverently upended. Barthes’s incisive analysis of the power of the image becomes a useful framework to elucidate the complex mechanisms of one of Nauman’s most powerful artworks. Just as Barthes’s third meaning involves a signifier becoming unmoored from its referent, the audience in the Nauman installation is left comparably stranded in a kind of no man’s land. While Barthes refers to the punctum as some distressing element of a photograph that pricks the viewer, the incendiary effect of the performative punctum in Nauman’s art installation acts as a fuse to ignite the exhibition space, along with the viewer in that space; the result is an unequivocally hazardous evocation of Barthes’s description of the punctum as ‘a burning’ (Barthes 1980, 98).

One of Nauman’s earliest stated goals of artmaking was already clearly tinged with violence: ‘to try to make art … that was just there all at once. Like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat. Or better, like getting hit in the back of the neck. You never see it coming; it just knocks you down’ (Simon 1998). Nauman employs various tactics of sensory manipulation to get at viewers, turning audience members into active participants. In this respect, the strategies of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty that work towards attacking the audience and its attempts at meaning formulation become useful in an analysis of Nauman’s work by way of Barthesian semiotics.

The approach taken in this article has been to provide an opportunity to break down the mechanisms of Nauman’s artworks as a way of accounting for the intense reactions of audiences, who are oftentimes at a loss to describe the artworks, let alone explain their experience of being in the space of the installation. A primary contention of the present study is that this analysis represents an expansion of the field of Barthesian semiotics to include the moving image.

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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.