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[Bruce Nauman: "Poke in the Eye/Nose/Ear"]

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What is it, "Poke in the Eye?"

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"Ear?"

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What is it?

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"Poke in the Eye, Ear, and Nose?"

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"Eye, Nose, and Ear?"

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"Eye, Ear, and Nose?"

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Whatever. [LAUGHS]

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My videos always involve

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some idea of a human being in a unusual situation--

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and what happens.

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It's shot in a very slow motion

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with a high-speed camera.

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In this case it was projected as a large image.

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And so, you're watching this uncomfortable activity take place

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at the same time as you're watching

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the way the colors change;

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the way the creases in the skin changes;

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the way the shadows change

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and move across the screen very slowly,

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so that they do become very abstract.

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As things go in and out of focus,

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your attention moves around quite a bit.

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It's slowed down enough--

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things happen slowly enough--

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that it becomes almost like a moon landscape,

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and you start just watching the slow frame-by-frame changes.

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That's what I liked about it.

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Again, another way of taking an activity

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and changing it's meaning--

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abstracting it by stretching out the time,

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and allowing you to see things

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that you couldn't see otherwise,

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making you watch the formal parts of it.

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A lot of people were thinking about

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how to structure time.

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John Cage was making different kinds of ways of making music,

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and Merce was structuring dance in different kinds of ways,

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and then Warhol was making films that

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went on for a long period of time.

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One of the things I liked about some of those people

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was that they thought of their works as just on-going,

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and so you can come and go,

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and the work was there.

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And so there wasn't a specific duration.

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So where this thing can just repeat and repeat and repeat,

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and you don't have to sit and watch the whole thing.

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You can watch for a while, leave, and go have lunch.

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Or, come back in a week,

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and it's just going on.

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And I really like that idea of

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the thing just being there.

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It became almost like an object that was there,

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that you can go back and visit whenever you wanted to.

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It's probably more painful for the viewer than it was for me.

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[LAUGHS]

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I didn't hurt myself.

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[LAUGHS]