Have you ever tried to perfect a break dancing move for eighteen straight minutes? Have you ever tried to disappear under water? Have you ever pushed a building in the hopes of moving it just a little? Robert Boland has; these actions and others have formed the bulk of his series of six videos called Methods for Training, which includes Toilet, the video shown in Making It Alone. For this series, Boland set up an immobile video camera and filmed himself repeating and attempting to perfect certain actions or gestures, often in public spaces. In the course of the videos, the actions are improvised; however, the concepts are not, for who would ever attempt to clean the same public toilet several times over the course of eleven minutes?

In Toilet, the viewer has a waist-level view of the institutional toilet and the character cleaning it. It feels intimate, and the audience becomes a part of the action. Yet, the viewer remains outside of the frame and the camera placement ensures that the audience cannot get in the way of the action. For most of the video, the viewer has only the visual context of the back of a cut-off figure doing work. According to Boland, this voyeuristic aspect remains important because the audience mostly sees the center mass of the character and not the action. The character, then, blocks out everything but the task, and the viewer is not automatically part of the action but only occasionally let into it.

There is also focus and earnestness in the way that the character delves into the task without seeming to question the purpose of repeating it. Boland, a former wrestler, claims that the physicality of action in Toilet mirrors the aggression and focus of the sport. The action becomes like a drill, but not something that the character had been told to do. The character’s action and appearance suggest a vaguely institutional inclusion, as if he may be a cog in the wheel of a larger machine, but maybe not. For example, his clothing, a blue tee shirt and green cargo pants, seem on one hand militaristic and uniform-like, but also civilian in that they are simple clothes to which a civilian audience can relate. Through his appearance, the figure seems almost universal, but the repetition of his work keeps his action from being fully understood as institutional.

Looking at the Methods of Training series, one cannot help but see the studio films made by Bruce Nauman in the 1960s as a source. In this series, Nauman set up a still camera and filmed himself repeating an action, such as tossing a tennis ball. According to Boland, he enjoyed these films because Nauman questioned not only the action but also the purpose of the action. Boland states that he arrived at his video series through thinking about the interaction between artist and object in the sculpture-making process. For works such as Toilet, however, he has removed the sculptural output so that only the persistence and ritual of the action remain.

Despite the repetition of the action, Toilet has some surprises. The sound created by the action has rhythmic properties that are almost mesmerizing in their minimalist repetition, lending an interior beauty to a mundane task. The swishing brush and the metronomic dripping of an unseen faucet become complementary. Composer and Zen practitioner John Cage used to tell students to “let sounds be themselves,” meaning that we should consider all sonorous material as music. If the repetition of the action seems fulfilling in its Zen purposefulness, that’s not an accident. According to Boland, who studied at a Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan a few years ago, the purpose or concept of his work might be Zen, but he concentrates on specifically Western actions and tasks. The video contrasts the singlemindedness and mental discipline of Zen monastic traditions with the concentration and physical discipline central to wrestling. And, the idea of play is also important because the video contrasts seriousness with humor in the character’s delectation of his work. (There is an unexpected ending—be sure to see the whole video).

As we observe the video, we become absorbed in the action. The few breaks where Boland exits the frame become a shock of stillness, revealing the gleaming white toilet, which becomes austere and sculptural from the camera’s vantage point. Then, we find that we have been concentrating on the action as much as the character has. We understand it. We have been trained.