Un/common Cultures: Racism and the Rearticulation of Cultural Difference

Abstract

In a space like the Tate Modern in London, Bruce Nauman's video installation ''Anthro-Socio'' plays across several televisions, distributed through di√erent rooms that project color or black-and-white versions of Man's appeals to feed or eat him, help or hurt him.The e√ect is to imbed the viewer in a structure of address that is at once intimate and ubiquitous, disturbing yet seductive.Nauman forces the viewer to enter the installation as a participant-observer, then literally turns that experience on its head as he confronts the viewer, as an alienated spectator, with upside-down images of the opera singer Rinde Eckert's revolving head (''Rinde Spinning'' or ''Rinde Facing Camera'') sonorously exhorting ''Feed me/Eat me: Anthropology'' . . .''Help me/Hurt me: Sociology.''The multiply positioned televisions and projection surfaces, all playing the same thing, but in di√erent tonalities, speeds, and chronometric loops, produce an e√ect that is at once poetic, arrhythmic, and cacophonic-as if one is listening to a broken-down choir or a Gregorian dirge.And indeed, it is di≈cult, moving through the space, to distinguish the varied visual and aural forms of enunciation from the overall ''mass e√ect'' the installation is designed to produce.It seems impossible to imagine even disciplinary knowledge without the intercession of the media form.