During the Cold war period, behavioral studies in the USA and elsewhere became a flashpoint of political debate. Their aim was to predict (and manipulate) human behavior and to reduce the complexity of social phenomena to a sequenced protocol of rules. Radical contemporary practices of art often assumed a similar discourse on the modification of human habits and social routines. Not, however, to simply oppose the conditioning of psychosocial behavior, but “to dive headlong into the race between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the use of the new techniques of conditioning,” as proposed in the first issue of the International Situationiste in 1958. This talk examines how Bruce Nauman's art – in particular his corridor installations and tunnel pieces – can be located in relation to behavioral studies and its experimental 'situation' of behavioral control and, furthermore, what implications can be derived from this nexus for today’s neoliberal subject.
Conference on the exhibition
Saturday 10.45 am
Running the Maze: Postwar Art and the Environments of Behavioral Control
Eric C.H. de Bruyn
Eric C.H. de Bruyn is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art History Department, Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2017 he was Assistant Professor and Chair of the graduate program of Film and Photographic Studies at the Institute for Cultural Disciplines, University of Leiden. He is an editor of Grey Room and has curated film programs at the mumok in Vienna, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum in New York. His writings on contemporary art, media, and theory have appeared, among other places, in Artforum, Art Journal, Grey Room and Texte zur Kunst. Recent publications include “Corridors, Tunnels, and Mazes: Bruce Nauman and the Spaces of Behavioral Control”, in: Bruce Nauman: A Contemporary, published by Schaulager, Laurenz Foundation, in collaboration with Eva Ehninger, Basel: Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager, 2018, “Polke’s Spectral Media,” in: Sigmar Polke: Film and Art, edited by Barbara Engelbach and Ursula Frohne, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2016, “Empire’s Hologram,” in: Cinema in the Expanded Field, edited by François Bovier and Adeena Mey, Zurich: JRP Ringier, Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2015, and “Revolutions within Revolutions,” in: Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent, Ghent: Ludion, 2015.
