Lip Sync (1969)
Black & white, sound. 57’
Bruce Nauman, 'Lip Sync'. Courtesy: EAI
Lip Sync, a highly influential conceptual performance video, is one of Nauman’s iconic early works. With the camera mounted upside down, framing only the artist’s mouth and neck in a tight close-up, Nauman repeats the phrase "lip sync" over and over in a loud whisper. Sound and image are intentionally unsynchronized and disjointed, while the upside-down view of Nauman’s lips and tongue in action provides a further disorienting quality. The whispered words, which Nauman articulates in an exaggerated manner, create an insistent, syncopated rhythm over the course of the 57-minute piece. In this durational exercise, the tense disjunction between the sound and image call attention to the distortions of the video medium and the mediated process of viewing.
