One of Bruce Nauman’s earliest, publicly exhibited works, Footsteps is part audio recording and part craft project. While the sound aspect of the work relates to Nauman’s longstanding use of his body as an art-making device, the interactive, assembly-required nature of Footsteps relates to many similar examples in SMS. To hear the piece, viewers would have to take apart the paper mount, form a loop with the magnetic tape and then manually maintain tension in the loop as it played on a reel-to-reel machine.

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