Failing to levitate in my studio, 1966.

"There is an early example of Nauman's attempt at a new kind of equilibrium, though it fails. This doesn't stop the frequent reproduction of the famous photograph Failing to Levitate in My Studio (1966). So what is so important about Nauman trying to levitate? It's like trying to float but the medium isn't right. And when, even years later, Nauman encourages a horizontal Elke and Tony to try to raise themselves above the floor or sink into it, he departs from the usual relation to the support. In between, there is the hour-long performance at the Whitney Museum with his wife and Meredith Monk-Bouncing in the Corner (1969)-which involved leaning back at nearly a 30-degree angle and breaking the fall by slapping hands against the wall. Dan Graham called it "playing the architecture"; I would call it "playing space." Nauman seems to want to displace the body's relation to the vertical and the horizontal. Floating in water wouldn't achieve this; floating in air would, if he could.
It reminds me of the infant described in Paul Schilder's article on clinging and equilibrium (Paul Schilder, "The Relations between Clinging and Equilibrium,"International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 'LO (1939), pp. 58-63). The infant can defy gravity by the strength of its grasp; the new-born can suspend itself by its grasp. Schilder's point is that while it clings to the mother, the infant sucks and this secures the infant's equilibrium. Sucking and clinging-a masterful suspension, we might say-constitute an equilibrium in the field of an infantile organization of space. Later, the infant's clinging works quite differently; it helps to attain and preserve an upright posture. This is an adult organization of space and mastery of gravity. The former is predominantly libidinal, the latter has more to do with the evolutionary denlands of postural independence. I am talking about establishing an equilibrium different both from that which is a fusion with the mother's body and that which is a conquest of gravity. There is activity and mastery in each of these two organizations of equilibrium in space. Now, the necessity for independence from the mother is obvious. So why would we have a further need: that of a respite from postural independence? It is not so much that we want not to be upright. And certainly, we do not invite passivity. What we need is respite from an entire system of seeing and space that is bound up with mastery and identity. To see differently, albeit for a moment, allows us to see anew."

Parveen Adams, Bruce Nauman and the Object of Anxiety.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/779072

(cc) plotseme.net / Jean Cristofol
12/69377