Bruce Nauman’s most recent work is a seven-part large scale DVD installation. It shows interior views of his studio in Galisteo, New Mexico made at night using an infra-red camera. This important installation from 2001 shows his empty studio. You see the artist – or more precisely the artist’s back – very briefly when at the end of the working day he starts the infra-red camera and disappears into the world outside his studio.

Scarcely perceptible, this ‘appearance’ which is more of an ’exit’ underlines the impression of his not having been present and shows the basic pre-conditions for artistic production – pure absence as the presence of the self. The studio of the artist is regarded as a mythically charged place for the spiritual and material production of art. This glimpse of the studio is charged with the expectation that those mysterious, genius-like and secret moments of creation or at least what is regarded as the seemingly authentic act of artistic production may be captured. English and German text