Body Pressure

This text comprises one component of the spare sculptural installation, Body Pressure, that Bruce Nauman made for his exhibition “Yellow Body” (which also included two other works, the architectural sculpture, Yellow Room [Triangular] and the installation, Compression and Disappearance or Exit) at Konrad Fischer Galerie in 1974. For Body Pressure, Nauman built a false wall, similar in shape and dimensions to an existing gallery wall, and hung the text—which was produced as a large, bright pink poster with a single column of text running down the center—on an adjacent wall. According to Dorothee Fischer, a large number of these posters were printed; thus they were most likely also distributed to gallery visitors. The text is reproduced here according to the original, in which both German and English translations appear in alternating stanzas¹.