Audio-Video Underground Chamber

Bruce Nauman’s “Audio-Video Underground Chamber” consists of an empty concrete chamber that lies buried outside mumok. A camera and a microphone are mounted inside this coffin-like hollow space, transmitting pictures and sound to the interior of the museum via a small screen. The unchanging, silent image thus tells of a space that we can only enter in our imagination. As in the corridor installation made at the same time, Bruce Nauman’s focus in “Audio-Video Underground Chamber” is on the peculiar reversal of inside and outside, the concealment and inaccessibility of spaces, and extreme mental states such as claustrophobia. The work was first realized in 1974 on the initiative of the couple Anny de Decker and Bernd Lohaus, who ran a gallery in Antwerp at the time. The concrete chamber was buried in the garden of their private house, the screen was installed in the office at the gallery. Unfortunately, heavy rain the same year damaged the video camera and the microphone in the chamber. Since this time, the Belgian version has not been functional. The version for mumok was realized in November 2004. T