As in the related film by Bruce Nauman, the title pretty much tells you what you need to know.
We might understand a “place” as those aspects of a location that remain the same over time, or we might understand it as an accumulation of everything that has occurred in that location over time. By either account, understanding a place requires return visits; in this sense, we can only understand a place by reference to our body moving through it.
This work starts by defining a place through geometry, namely the perimeter of the building that houses the University of Waterloo’s Fine Arts department, and then explores it through the embodied act of walking that perimeter.
A perimeter is a liminal space, serving as a boundary that separates what it contains from what it excludes. In this case, the perimeter contains a set of art institutions (studios, galleries, classrooms) and separates it from the broader world (campus, city).
In Bruce Nauman’s 1967 film, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, the artist filmed himself walking around a square laid out in masking tape on the floor of his studio. He stated, “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.”
The current work shifts the perimeter to the exterior of the studio. The comparison to Nauman’s film raises the question of whether an action undertaken outside the studio or gallery can be art merely because it is intended as such by the artist or whether, as in this case, when a recording of the action is brought back into the gallery, it can do so only when the interpretive framework or context of the art world is in some way re-imposed on that action.
