Recontextualising Roland Barthes through Bruce Nauman’s video installations and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty

Abstract

ABSTRACT A recontextualisation of Roland Barthes’s concepts of the third meaning and the punctum is presented through an analysis of Bruce Nauman’s installation art and Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Nauman’s use of repetition in his Clown Torture video installation creates a trauma to form through looped video footage, which is shown to thwart narrative progression and, in effect, render the moving image static; in this way, it is demonstrated to function like a film still. Through use of a signifier taken out of context, Nauman’s methods are shown to achieve what may be termed a ‘third meaning in motion’. In Nauman’s video, Barthes’s notion of the punctum becomes evident due to the manipulation of time via the looping mechanism. The obstruction of signification that viewers experience is shown to activate a ‘performative punctum’. Furthermore, an examination of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty offers a fitting parallel to Nauman’s work, in terms of subversion of clear meaning formulation along with an attack on the audience’s sensibilities. This analysis represents an expansion of the field of application of Barthesian semiotics from the still image to the moving image.