Test Tape Fat Chance John Cage

Seven screens show videos of as many places in Bruce Nauman's studio during the summer of 2000. He filmed these slices of night life with an infrared camera and processed them during editing. But one person is conspicuous by his absence: the artist. From time to time, only a cat wanders between the workbenches. Test Tape Chance John Cage is an incursion into a place dedicated to creation. It highlights the silence, sleep and inactivity at the heart of the creative process.

This studio video is Nauman’s distanced look at his own creation. He unveils a part of his daily life as an artist, thereby strengthening the aura surrounding the act of creation. “I made this video as a way to map abandoned areas and work zones in recent years,” he says.

Test Tape Chance John Cage was exhibited for the first time by the Pinault Collection during the 2008 “Passage du temps” (“Passage of Time”) show at the Tri Postal in Lille. It was also presented at the Palazzo Grassi-Punta della Dogana during the exhibition “Mapping the Studio”, whose title is no coincidence.