This unbalancing may perhaps be identified with the principle that Michel Serres borrows from Lucretius of the clinamen , the theory of the origin of the world in a first tiny deviation, or asymmetry in the orderly rain of atoms, which makes the world possible at all, even as it makes it impossible ever for the world to add up or come to consummation. In this piece, Nauman videotaped himself walking slowly and with awkward precision around a track marked out on the studio floor. As he walks, arms behind him, he lifts his leading leg high before him and, as it lands, lifts his following leg high in the air behind. The unbalancing of the walk is doubled by the fact that Nauman taped the movements with the camera on its side, so that he appears to be walking up a wall, gravityless. The concentrated, careful, sometimes even tender attention to awkwardness is a feature of the work of both artists.
Clumsiness speaks of the infiltration of falling in human action.
The English word clumsy is derived from a Northern dialect word klumse , which means benumbed by cold. The clumsy one is weighed down by his cold or numb body, by a body that he does not fill or coincide with sufficiently to command. His body is faster and slower than itself at once. His body is of a piece with the ground, but has not yet acquired the grace of the ground. Here, the experience of seeing the pratfall repeated slowly and set against renderings of hands performing various kinds of play with eggs and cards is to run together the different forms of movement, to create an impossible imaginary new syntax of bodily movement.