The lighted tubes sequentially illuminate and then click off, animating the interaction between the men; one moment their arms and hands dangle by their sides, in the next the same arms and hands are outstretched; their torsos alternate between upright and slightly bowed with bent knees.
In concert with their extending hands, their penises flicker between flaccid and erect. It marked the beginning of a flurry of activity in , in which Nauman utilised neon silhouettes largely based on cardboard templates of his own body, continuing his long practice of casting his physical form as a measure or standard.
As the tubes flash on and go dark, the neon functions less like a line drawing than a dynamically moving sequence with a durational flow, a constantly looping narrative that rapidly cycles between poses.
In Welcome Shaking Hands , a conventional greeting of male-to-male social exchange is revealed to be fraught and sexual at its core, as the collegially outstretched hand becomes an analogue for the brightly lit penis that is cocked out at the same angle, and rendered in the same colour, as the forearm. Due to the superimposition of the figures, and the fact that the sequence of animation includes a moment when all the bodies and their parts are simultaneously illuminated, these two pairs of men multiply into a scramble of limbs, torsos, faces and erections.
There is something humorous, of course, about Nauman making visible the veiled eroticism of a common custom, but this humour is uneasy, meant to provoke the discomfort that is typical of the artist: his work, like these neon men, alternates between the abject and the aggressive.
