Four Corner Piece, 1971

In the late 1960s, Nauman began to produce complex sculptural installations incorporating video monitoring to create disorienting, often unsettling experiences of self and space, suspending viewers uneasily between subject and object, and between observing and being observed. In Four Corner Piece, the viewer is invited to enter a narrow, white-walled passageway in the shape of a square. In its corners, monitors on the floor display live video feed from cameras installed in the opposite corner. At each turn of the passageway, a new monitor comes into view just in time for visitors to glimpse themselves from behind, turning the corner and disappearing: a potentially endless loop of chasing one’s own fugitive image.