Good Boy Bad Boy

Bruce Nauman is a wildly influential artist whose work has explored the poetics of confusion, anxiety, boredom, entrapment, and failure since the 1960s. Nauman was a key figure in the experimental film and video movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s with such works as Dance or Exercise Around the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance). After 1973, film and video become conspicuously absent from his work, replaced largely by language-based neon sculptures. He returned to video more than a decade later, with Good Boy Bad Boy. Of this decision, the artist recalled, “I think it’s because I had this information that I didn’t want to put into a neon sign. . . . I had thought about presenting it as a performance, but I have never felt comfortable with performance. And so video seemed to be a way to do it.” Conceived as a didactic moral statement, the installation employs two actors, Joan Lancaster and Tucker Smallwood, who are presented in close-up, like newscasters, on two separate monitors. Each recites a one-hundred-line commentary on the human condition that includes passages such as “I was a good boy/You were a good boy/We were good boys” and “I hate/You hate/We hate/This is hating.” Directly confronting the viewer, they deliver each repetition with increased emotional intensity, shifting in and out of sync with one another.