Video killed the Photographer

Gregory Crewdson is the one that looks like a dairy cow

The New Yorker has posted a fascinating time-lapsed video of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for forty-one hours. Mr. White stays remarkably calm during his ordeal.

Welcome April 1st -- Day of the Fools

Sweded -- Gondry Revolution

• American Beauty.
• Air Force One.
• Alvin and the Chipmunks.
• An Inconvenient Truth.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• American Pie.
• Apocalypse Now.
• Around the World in 80 Days.
• Armageddon.
• Back To the Future Part 2.
• Bambi.
• Batman Begins.
• Be Kind Rewind.
• Big.
• The Big Lebowski.
• The Birds.
• Blade Runner. And again.
• Boogie Nights.
• Boys In The Hood. Official.
• Braveheart.
• The Breakfast Club.
• Bridget Jones Diary.
• Charlies Angels.
• Children of Men.
• Cliffhanger.
• Contact.
• Crazy/Beautiful.
• Die Hard. And again.
• Dirty Dancing. And again.
• Easy Rider.
• Edward Scissorhands.
• Exorcist.
• Face Off.
• The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
• Fight Club.
• Forest Gump. And again.
• The Forty Year Old Virgin.
• Freaky Friday.
• Full Metal Jacket.
  
• Ghost.
• Ghostbusters. Official.
• Goldfinger.
• Goodfellas.
• Gone with the Wind.
• Groundhog Day.
• Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire.
• Home Alone.
• Hook.
• Indiana Jones.
• Jaws.
• Jurassic Park. And again.
• The Karate Kid. And again. And again. And again.
• Kill Bill. And again.
• King Kong.
• koyaanisqatsi
• Labyrinth.
• Lars and The Real Girl.
• The Last Samurai.
• Lethal Weapon.
• Lolita.
• Lord Of The Rings. Part 1 & Part 2. And again.
• The Matrix. And again. And again.
  
• My Fair Lady.
• Predator.
• Pretty Woman.
• The Princess Bride. And again.
• Psycho. And again.
• Purple Rain. And again.
• Pulp Fiction. And again. And again.
• Rambo.
• Repo Man.
• Reservoir Dogs.
• Robocop. Official.
• Rocky. And again.
• Run Lola Run.
• Rush Hour 2. Official.
• Say Anything.
• Scarface.
• The Science of Sleep.
• Scream. And again.
  
• Shaun of the Dead.
• The Shining. And again. And again.
• Sideways.
• Silence of the Lambs.
• The Sound of Music.
• Speed. And again.
• Star Wars.
• Star Wars Episode IV.
• Taxi Driver. And again.
• The Thing.
• Titanic. And again.
• Top Gun. And again.
• Total Recall.
• Twister. And again.
• Waterworld.
• When A Stranger Calls.

via http://snacked.blogspot.com

Brandon Hardesty

(born 1987) is an American comedic performer noted for his YouTube fame. Hardesty posts original comedy videos as well as "uncanny" recreations of scenes from movies, playing every part himself. The Village Voice writer Julian Dibbell has called his works "Web culture at its finest."[1On YouTube, Hardesty goes by the username "ArtieTSMITW," which is an abbreviation for "Artie: The Strongest Man in the World," a character from one of his favorite childhood shows, The Adventures of Pete and Pete. His most popular videos are his Re-enactment videos, in which he chooses a movie scene, and re-enacts it himself, playing all the characters. Another popular series is Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make, in which he goes through a series of making noises and faces. To date, Hardesty has had four of his videos featured on the front page of Youtube: his reenactment of a scene from The Princess Bride, his reenactment of a scene from Uncle Buck, a video dubbed "Three Impressions" which is simply three of Brandon's celebrity impersonations, and his "Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make III" video, which has had over 3,000,000 views. Hardesty is currently the 84th most subscribed and 12th most viewed comedian on the popular video sharing website, YouTube.[citation needed] In April of 2007, Geico Auto Insurance used "Strange Faces and Noises I Can Make III" in a television commercial. After a portion of the video plays, apparently on a computer screen, a narrator says, "There may be better ways to spend 15 minutes online."

On The Eighth Day We Watched The... REPLAY

Howard Dean's Scream (or the ultimate performative piece)

Dean's campaign suffered a blow when a last-minute surge by rivals John Kerry and John Edwards led to a disappointing third-place defeat for Dean in the 2004 Iowa Democratic caucuses, representing the first votes cast in primary season. Dean had been a strong contender for weeks in advance in that state, battling with Dick Gephardt for first place in the polls. To the surprise of the Dean and Gephardt campaigns, Dean finished third in Iowa behind Kerry and John Edwards, with Gephardt finishing fourth. Since Dean had spent months leading Iowa tracking polls, his third-place finish was widely considered a sign that the campaign was losing momentum.

Dean attended a post-caucus rally for his volunteers at the Val-Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa and delivered his concession speech, aimed at cheering up those in attendance. Dean was shouting over the cheers of his enthusiastic audience, but the crowd noise was being filtered out by his unidirectional microphone, leaving only his full-throated exhortations audible to the television viewers. To those at home, he seemed to raise his voice out of sheer emotion. Additionally, Dean began his speech with a flushed-red face, clenching his teeth as he rolled up his sleeves.[17]

According to a Newsday Editorial written by Verne Gay, some members of the television audience criticized the speech as loud, peculiar, and unpresidential.[18] In particular, this quote from the speech was aired repeatedly in the days following the caucus:
“ Not only are we going to New Hampshire, Tom Harkin, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York … And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! Byaaah!!! ”

This final "Byaaah!!!" has become known in American political folklore as either "the Dean Scream" or the "I Have a Scream" speech (an allusion to "I Have a Dream").

Dean conceded that the speech did not project the best image, jokingly referring to it as a "crazy, red-faced rant" on The Late Show with David Letterman. In an interview later that week with Diane Sawyer, he said he was "a little sheepish … but I'm not apologetic."[19] Sawyer and many others in the national broadcast news media later expressed some regret about overplaying the story.[17] In fact, CNN issued a public apology and admitted in a statement that they indeed may have "overplayed" the incident. The incessant replaying of the "Dean Scream" by the press became a debate on the topic of whether Dean was the victim of media bias. Such reports certainly fit with reports of "unelectability," as shown by Green's Atlantic Monthly piece. The scream scene was shown an estimated 633 times by cable and broadcast news networks in just four days following the incident, a number that does not include talk shows and local news broadcasts.[20] However, those who were in the actual audience that day insist that they were not aware of the infamous scream until they returned to their hotel rooms and saw it on TV.[17]

Video Self Portraits and Time

Tom Sherman is a Genius and Bruce Sterling Rocks

Vernacular Video

By Bruce Sterling January 28, 2007 | 7:19:01 AM

((("Extreme sports, sex, self-mutilation and drug overdoses will mix with disaster culture; terrorist attacks, plane crashes, hurricanes and tornadoes will be translated into mediated horror through vernacular video." Yeah man! Bring the noise!)))

Vernacular Video

by Tom Sherman

Video as a technology is forty years old. It is an offshoot of television, developed in the 1930s and a technology that has been in our homes for nearly sixty years. Television began as a centralized, one-to-many broadcast medium. Television's centrality was splintered as cable and satellite distribution systems and vertical, specialized programming sources fragmented television's audience.

As video technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of complete decentralization. Forty years later, video technology is everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralized digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power. Video gear is portable, increasingly impressive in its performance, and it still packs the wallop of instant replay. As Marshall McLuhan said, the instant replay was the greatest invention of the twentieth century.

Video in 2007 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists--it is the peoples' medium. The potential of video as a decentralized communications tool for the masses has been realized, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age.

Surveillance and counter-surveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era--it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson's POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity. There are currently camcorders in twenty per cent of households in North America.

As digital still cameras and camera-phones are engineered to shoot better video, video will become completely ubiquitous. People have stories to tell, and images and sounds to capture in video. Television journalism is far too narrow in its perspective. We desperately need more POVs.

Webcams and video-phones, video-blogs (VLOGS) and video-podcasting will fuel a twenty-first-century tidal wave of vernacular video.

What Are the Current Characteristics of Vernacular Video?

Displayed recordings will continue to be shorter and shorter in duration, as television time, compressed by the demands of advertising, has socially engineered shorter and shorter attention spans. Video-phone transmissions, initially limited by bandwidth, will radically shorten video clips.

The use of canned music will prevail. Look at advertising. Short, efficient messages, post-conceptual campaigns, are sold on the back of hit music.

Recombinant work will be more and more common. Sampling and the repeat structures of pop music will be emulated in the repetitive deconstruction of popular culture. Collage, montage and the quick-and-dirty efficiency of recombinant forms are driven by the romantic, Robin Hood-like efforts of the copyleft movement.

Real-time, on-the-fly voiceovers will replace scripted narratives . Personal, on-site journalism and video diaries will proliferate.

On-screen text will be visually dynamic, but semantically crude. Language will be altered quickly through misuse and slippage. People will say things like I work in several mediums [sic]. Media is plural. Medium is singular. What's next: I am a multi-mediums artist? Will someone introduce spell-check to video text generators?

Crude animation will be mixed with crude behaviour. Slick animation takes time and money. Crude is cool, as opposed to slick.

Slow motion and accelerated image streams will be overused, ironically breaking the real-time-and-space edge of straight, unaltered video.

Digital effects will be used to glue disconnected scenes together; paint programs and negative filters will be used to denote psychological terrain. Notions of the sub- or unconscious will be objectified and obscured as quick and dirty surrealism dominates the creative use of video.

Travelogues will prosper, as road films and video tourism proliferate. Have palm-corder and laptop, will travel.

Extreme sports, sex, self-mutilation and drug overdoses will mix with disaster culture; terrorist attacks, plane crashes, hurricanes and tornadoes will be translated into mediated horror through vernacular video.

From Avant-Garde to Rear Guard

Meanwhile, in the face of the phenomena of vernacular video, institutionally sanctioned video art necessarily attaches itself even more firmly to traditional visual-art media and cinematic history. Video art distinguishes itself from the broader media culture by its predictable associations with visual-art history (sculpture, painting, photography) and cinematic history (slo-mo distortions of cinematic classics, endless homages to Eisenstein and Brakhage, etc.).

Video art continues to turn its back on its potential as a communications medium, ignoring its cybernetic strengths (video alters behaviour and steers social movement through feedback). Video artists, seeking institutional support and professional status, will continue to be retrospective and conservative. Video installations provide museums with the window-dressing of contemporary media art.

Video art that emulates the strategies of traditional media, video sculpture and installations or video painting reinforces the value of an institution's collection, its material manifestation of history. Video art as limited edition or unique physical object does not challenge the museum's raison detre. Video artists content with making video a physical object are operating as a rear guard, as a force protecting the museum from claims of total irrelevance. In an information age, where value is determined by immaterial forces, the speed-of-light movement of data, information and knowledge, fetishizing material objects is an anachronistic exercise. Of course, it is not surprising that museum audiences find the material objectification of video at trade-show scale impressive on a sensual level.

As vernacular video culture spins toward disaster and chaos, artists working with video will have to choose between the safe harbour of the museum and gallery, or become storm chasers. If artists choose to chase the energy and relative chaos and death wish of vernacular video, there will be challenges and high degrees of risk.

Aesthetics Will Continue to Separate Artists from the Public at Large

If artists choose to embrace video culture in the wilds (on the street or on-line) where vernacular video is burgeoning in a massive storm of quickly evolving short message forms, they will face the same problems that artists always face. How will they describe the world they see, and if they are disgusted by what they see, how will they compose a new world? And then how will they find an audience for their work?

The advantages for artists showing in museums and galleries are simple. The art audience knows it is going to see art when it visits a museum or gallery. Art audiences bring their education and literacy to these art institutions. But art audiences have narrow expectations. They seek material sensuality packaged as refined objects attached to the history of art. When artists present art in a public space dominated by vernacular use, video messages by all kinds of people with different kinds of voices and goals, aesthetic decisions are perhaps even more important, and even more complex, than when art is being crafted to be experienced in an art museum.

Aesthetics are a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty. For the purpose of this text, aesthetics are simply an internal logic or set of rules for making art. This logic and its rules are used to determine the balance between form and content. As a general rule, the vernacular use of a medium pushes content over form. If a message is going to have any weight in a chaotic environment--where notions of beauty are perhaps secondary to impact and effectiveness--then content becomes very important. Does the author of the message have anything to show or say?

Vernacular video exhibits its own consistencies of form. As previously elaborated, the people's video is influenced by advertising, shorter and shorter attention spans, the excessive use of digital effects, the seductiveness of slo-mo and accelerated image streams, a fascination with crude animation and crude behaviour, quick-and-dirty voice-overs and bold graphics that highlight a declining appreciation of written language.

(((This is a pretty good essay, huh? Somebody should make a video about this! A quick, cheap, dirty video, that lasts ninety seconds, where you steal the soundtrack and cut-and-paste all the footage! And then we could put in IN A MUSEUM! Wow!!)))

To characterize the formal "aesthetics" of vernacular video, it might be better to speak of anesthetics. The term anesthetic is an antonym of aesthetic. An anesthetic is without aesthetic awareness. An anesthetic numbs or subdues perceptions. Vernacular video culture, although vital, will function largely anesthetically.

The challenge for artists working outside the comfort zone of museums and galleries will be to find and hold onto an audience, and to attain professional status as an individual in a collective, pro-am (professional amateur) environment. Let's face it, for every artist that makes the choice to take his or her chances in the domain of vernacular video, there are thousands of serious, interesting artists who find themselves locked out of art institutions by curators that necessarily limit the membership of the master class.

(((Huh? I'd have to counter that for every museum video artist there are about 25 million YouTube teens with video phonecams they got for Christmas, but never mind, carry on:)))

Value in the museum is determined by exclusivity. With this harsh reality spelled out, there should be no doubt about where the action is and where innovation will occur.

The technology of video is now as common as a pencil for the middle classes. People who never even considered working seriously in video find themselves with digital camcorders and non-linear video-editing software on their personal computers. They can set up their own television stations with video streaming via the Web without much trouble. The revolution in video-display technologies is creating massive, under-utilized screen space and time, as virtually all architecture and surfaces become potential screens.

Video-phones will expand video's ubiquity exponentially. These video tools are incredibly powerful and are nowhere near their zenith. If one wishes to be part of the twenty-first-century, media-saturated world and wants to communicate effectively with others or express one's position on current affairs in considerable detail, with which technology would one chose to do so, digital video or a pencil? ((((Huh. Well, I'd have to say "pencil." In fact, now that I think it over, I'm absolutely sure about "pencil." For instance, it's easy to design a video camera with a pencil, but impossible to design a pencil with a video camera.)))

Artists must embrace, but move beyond, the vernacular forms of video. Artists must identify, categorize and sort through the layers of vernacular video, using appropriate video language to interact with the world effectively and with a degree of elegance. Video artists must recognize that they are part of a global, collective enterprise. They are part of a gift economy in an economy of abundance. Video artists must have something to say and be able to say it in sophisticated, innovative, attractive ways. Video artists must introduce their brand of video aesthetics into the vernacular torrents. They must earn their audiences through content-driven messages.

(((Or, as Cory Doctorow likes to put it, video artists could become "whores in a village of nymphomaniacs", go broke in a vast global torrent of vernacular gibberish, and vanish as conclusively as Viking skalds.)))

The mission is a difficult one. The vernacular domain is a noisy torrent of immense proportions. Video artists will be a dime a dozen.

Deprofessionalized artists working in video, many sporting MFA degrees, will be joined by music-video-crazed digital cooperatives and by hordes of Sunday video artists. The only thing these varied artists won't have to worry about is the death of video art. Video art has been pronounced dead so many times, its continual resurrection should not surprise anyone. This is a natural cycle in techno-cultural evolution. The robust life force of vernacular video will be something for artists to ride, and something to twist and turn, and something formidable to resist and work against. The challenge will be Herculean and irresistible.

(((Didn't Hercules die horribly, poisoned by the caustic blood of a centaur? I think I read that somewhere... oh wait wait, that would sure make a cool video!)))

Stanford Prison Experiment Vs Coco Fusco

Stanford Prison Experiment 1971

The Stanford prison experiment was ostensibly a psychological study of human responses to captivity and its behavioral effects on both authorities and inmates in prison. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of both guards and prisoners living in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only 6 days after it began instead of the 14 it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment's result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.

In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attributions of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be damaging electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.

Coincidentally, shortly after the study had been completed, there were bloody revolts at both the San Quentin and Attica prison facilities, and Zimbardo reported his findings on the experiment to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary.

VS

Coco Fusco Operation Atropos 2006

Interrogation is also the subject of "Operation Atropos," a new video by Coco Fusco, which makes its East Coast debut tonight at the City University of New York Graduate Center. (The screening accompanies the center's exhibition "Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict," organized by the Whitney Independent Study Program.)

The idea for the video began when Ms. Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches at Columbia University, was preparing a performance piece in which she assumed the character of a female interrogator at Abu Ghraib. She realized that to continue the work, she needed training in interrogation techniques. Through an Internet search she found a source of instruction: the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Program run by a private concern called Team Delta, based in Philadelphia.

The organizers of the program are former members of the United States Intelligence Agency and self-described specialists in the "psychology of capture." In its original form the course was used to train elite soldiers to resist interrogation if captured, and to extract information from political prisoners. Reconceived for the private sector — police officers, private security personnel and psychological researchers are among the clientele — the program is a grueling four-day immersion in methods of physical and mental persuasion, with the participants playing both captive and captor.

The course is offered only to groups, so Ms. Fusco solicited volunteers to join her. Six women, three of them former Columbia students, accepted the invitation. (It cost about $8,000 for the group; Ms. Fusco picked up the tab.) She also arranged to have the course videotaped, with the artist Kambui Olujimi as director of photography.

As the 50-minute video opens, Ms. Fusco is reading aloud from a briefing that laid out the ground rules for the ordeal ahead, clearly amused by the portentous language: "You will experience physical and psychological pain." The women share a piece of secret information they will do their best not to reveal under duress.

The course begins. The women are riding in a van through the woods in the Poconos when masked men stop them at gunpoint and direct them to strip to their underwear for a search. The women's clothes are exchanged for Day-Glo orange coveralls; their heads and faces are covered with blackout hoods. They are led, handcuffed, through the woods.

The make-believe nature of all this is periodically reinforced as "enemy soldiers" drop out of character to be interviewed about their work. Even so, a sense of real tension starts to build. Mr. Olujimi's darting, probing, camera work helps to create it. So does the sustained image of the women being pushed, prodded, forced to their knees, yelled at and insulted by the all-male interrogation team.

At one point, an interrogator explains to the camera that a particularly effective technique for breaking down resistance is to make a captive think that unless he or she yields information, another prisoner will be harmed. When this situation is simulated, one of the women in the group starts to cry. The psychological pressure is working. Fiction translates into emotional fact.

Another woman also starts weeping. But it turns out she is doing so deliberately, using the ploy of feminine vulnerability to avoid divulging her secret. The ruse works. Later, when the women are relaxing after their stint as prisoners, Ms. Fusco confesses that she had had to stop herself from laughing at some of the dialogue her interrogators delivered. As the film ends, she and her colleagues take turns interrogating their former captors, learning to do to others what has been done to them.

So what kind of political art is this? It isn't moralizing or accusatory. It's art for a time when play-acting and politics seem to be all but indistinguishable. "Operation Atropos" is reality television with the cracks between reality and artifice showing. It's in the cracks, Ms. Fusco suggests, that the political truth is revealed.

Numa Numa VS Acconci

Full video

Gary Brolsma NUMA NUMA Dance 2004

Internet-based video of American Gary Brolsma lip-synching the song energetically on his webcam brought the Numa Numa phenomenon to the US. Brolsma stated in an interview, "...I found it ["Dragostea din tei"] in another (I believe it was Japanese) flash animation with cartoon cats"Maiyahi by ikari.[3] Others have noted that it was first used in the Japanese flash animation Maiyahi by the Internet user "ikari".[4]

Brolsma uploaded his "Numa Numa Dance" to Newgrounds on 6 December 2004.[5] In the original video, Brolsma does not finish the entire song, ending at around 1:37. On Newgrounds it has since been seen more than 14 million times and copied onto hundreds of other websites and blogs, making it the second-most watched viral video of all time (only losing out to Star Wars kid).[6] He has also receive

d mainstream media coverage from ABC's Good Morning America, NBC's The Tonight Show, and VH1's Best Week Ever, and, according to The New York Times, was an "unwilling and embarrassed Web celebrity".[7] He canceled media appearances but reappeared in September 2006 with a professionally produced video, New Numa. This video, hosted on YouTube, marked the start of the "New Numa Contest", which promised US$45,000 in prize money and a US$25,000 award to the winner.[8]

VS.

Vito Acconci Theme Song 1973

In Theme Song, Acconci uses video as close-up to establish a perversely intimate relation with the viewer, creating a personal space in which to talk directly to (and manipulate) the spectator. He is face to face with the viewer, his head close against the video screen, lying cozily on the floor. Acconci writes, "The scene is a living room -- quiet, private night -- the scene for a come-on -- I can bring my legs around, wrapping myself around the viewer -- I'm playing songs on a tape recorder -- I follow the songs up, I'm building a relationship, I'm carrying it through." Smoking cigarettes, he begins a seductive monologue as he plays "theme songs" by the Doors, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Kris Kristofferson and others on a tape recorder. The songs are a starting point for his come-ons; the tenor of his monologues shifts with the lyrics. "Of course I can't see your face. I have no idea what your face looks like. You could be anybody out there, but there's gotta be somebody watching me. Somebody who wants to come in close to me ... Come on, I'm all alone ... I'll be honest with you, O.K. I mean you'll have to believe me if I'm really honest...." Theme Song, with its ironic mixture of openness and manipulation, is one of Acconci's most effective works

Star Wars Kid VS. Naumann

Star Wars Kid 2002

The boy made a video of himself swinging a golf ball retriever around as a weapon, imitating the Darth Maul character from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace who wields a double-bladed lightsaber. The video was filmed at the studio of his high school, and the tape was left forgotten in a basement. The original owner of the videotape discovered his recorded acts and immediately shared it with some friends. Thinking that it would be a funny prank, they encoded it to a WMV file and shared it using the Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing network.

Within two weeks, the file was downloaded several million times. An adapted version of the video was created, adding Star Wars music, texts, and lightsaber lights and sounds to his golf ball retriever.

As of 27 November 2006 it has been estimated by The Viral Factory that the videos had been viewed over 900 million times, making it the most popular "viral video" on the Internet. Because of the creation of YouTube, it may have been seen almost a billion times.[1]

VS.

Bruce Naumann stamping in the studio 1968

In 1966, just graduated, Nauman contemplated what it was that an artist was supposed to do. He concluded that 'if I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.' Art at this point 'became more of an activity and less of a product' and he began to use his body as a material.

Concerned to incorporate the mundane elements of daily life into his work, Nauman used his behaviour, obsessively pacing around the studio, as the starting point for a series of films and videos made from 1967-69. He recorded himself performing simple, repetitive activities, each responding to a specific 'problem' suggested in the title. Physically and mentally demanding, these actions were often performed for one hour – the length of a videotape. As a result, the threat of failure is ever present, evoking in the viewer an empathy Nauman described as a 'body response'.

Although made much later, Setting a Good Corner (Allegory and Metaphor) 1999, responds to a similar set of concerns. Once again, the artist records himself performing a repetitive, mundane task, this time from the daily life on his ranch in New Mexico.

The figure in these recordings, which are endlessly looped, becomes a metaphor for the rituals and struggles of human existence and owes much to the plays and stories of Samuel Beckett that Nauman first read in 1966. Nauman shares with Beckett an obsession with the human condition: both use repetitive, non-productive and often solitary physical activity to reveal the lot of humankind – its modes of behaviour, frustrations, abilities and frailty.