Bruce Nauman: Audio-Video Underground Chamber

by Achim Hochdörfer

Before spider holes made their media debut, there was Bruce Nauman's spectacular 1972-74 installation Audio-Video Underground Chamber. Its single concrete vault, with dimensions close to those of the human body, is buried--like a coffin--one and a half meters deep. Integrated into the space are a lamp, a camera and a microphone, which transmit image and sound to a gallery. The actual existence of the buried cabin is concretized only in the viewers' imagination by means of the live broadcast and two of Nauman's explanatory, blueprint drawings. Image and sound call up associations with the psychic and existential borderline areas around which Nauman's art often revolves, with feelings of isolation and claustrophobia, experiences of loss of communication and of orientation, and traumas such as that of being buried alive.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2005