World Peace Day Two (Brooke's Lips)

Bruce Nauman's World Peace Day Two is found by walking past Felix González-Torres's America, down a dimly lit corridor to a boardroom. From a distance, voices repeat what almost sounds like a mantra. Inside the softly lit space, an expansive square table stretches toward two vertically stacked monitors, placed on an anonymous utility cart. The top screen presents a close-up of a woman's lips and teeth-sometimes with a cigarette dangling from her mouth-as she repeatedly delivers a set of prescribed lines. Below, a second screen presents the same material, with the image inverted. The text of the recitations incorporates the phrases "___ will talk" and "___ will listen," substituting pronouns (I, you, we they, etc.) in a repeating pattern. At first the voices seem to carry on a brief but coherent dialogue. Soon however, the sense of coherence is stripped away through the layering of phrases, provoking a confused jumble of connotations and associations which give way to ambiguities that are rendered poignant in the context of a boardroom. Text written by Curator Bruce W. Ferguson and Vincent J. Varga for the exhibition catalog.