You have the repeated action, and at the same time, over a long period of time you have mistakes or at least chance, changes, and you get tired and all kinds of things happen, so there’s a certain tension that you can exploit once you begin to understand how those things function. And a lot of the videotapes were about that.  Bruce Nauman, quoted in How Did New York Change Bruce Nauman? Looking Back on a Radical Period in the Artist's Career, Artspace magazine, August 3, 2015

The synchronous disappearances of Ader, Burden, and Goldstein have been given various justifications: the desire for the dematerialization of (art-) object and (artist-) subject inherent to conceptualism; the omnipresence of death in the context of the Vietnam War; the temptation of magic’s sleight of hand; and a fascination with the morbid and the sublime. Philipp Kaiser, Disappearance — California, c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein,

What Cassavetes has done is astonishing. He has made a film that tenderly, honestly and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live. Roger Ebert, December 19, 1968

What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman’s virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism. Nick Schager, Slant, July 24, 2003

[Peckinpah] got so wound up in the aesthetics of violence that what had begun as a realistic treatment — a deglamorization of warfare that would show how horribly gruesome killing really is — became instead an almost abstract fantasy about violence. Pauline Kael, New Yorker, April 4, 2016

In 1971, Chris Burden disappeared for three days without a trace. That work, entitled Disappearing, gives its name to this exhibition, which examines the theme of disappearance in the works of Burden and his contemporaries in 1970s Southern California, Bas Jan Ader and Jack Goldstein. Philipp Kaiser, Disappearing — California, c. 1970: Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein

in·ter·me·di·ate /ˌin(t)ərˈmēdēət/ adjective 1. coming between two things in time, place, order, character, etc. “an intermediate stage of development” synonyms: halfway, in-between, middle, mid, median, intermediary, intervening, interposed, transitional. noun 1. an intermediate thing. verb 1. act as intermediary; mediate. "the theory said that by intermediating between buyers and sellers, middlemen lower the costs of transactions"