In 1986, Bruce Nauman drafted a plan for a videotape (Circle of Death? Death by Mob Violence) in which six figures, grouped in a circle, beat a victim to death. This project was meant to transform the restrained violence of his South American pieces (South American Triangle, South American Circle, and South America Square, all 1984) into a direct, desublimated form. The analogy between the video project and the earlier pieces lies in the pressure discharging in the field of tension between periphery and center, whereby the center becomes the vanishing point of the external energy.

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