Exhibition of the week Bruce Nauman
Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org.uk). Until 21 February
Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential artists of the past 50 years, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941, he rose to prominence in California in the 1960s, and has since 1989 been based at his remote ranch in rural New Mexico, where he continues to produce the experimental conceptual art that has been a touchstone for artists from Tracey Emin to Jenny Holzer to Steve McQueen. It’s tricky to sum up what Nauman does, but put in the simplest terms, he creates “delicate visual poetry” from “humble” materials, working in a “baffling” array of media that takes in film, neon signs, drawings, performance art, photography, and sculpture fashioned from concrete and steel. Yet wildly varied as his work is, all of it is underpinned by an antagonistic coldness; there is humour too in his work, but it is “always nervy and problematic, never openhearted or fun”. You could call his style “existential psychominimalism with serial-killer moods”. This new exhibition at Tate Modern presents an excellent overview of Nauman’s five-decade career, tracing his “madcap journey of artistic exploration” from the 1960s to the present day. It is a “darkly brilliant event” that deftly demonstrates why he is quite so revered.
One of Nauman’s chief preoccupations is “the body, and its response to physical and psychological pressure”, said Nancy Durrant in the London Evening Standard. This will not be lost
“Nauman’s art is an endurance test by other means,” said Laura Cumming in The Observer. One famous work on show here is the aptly titled 1987 video work Clown Torture, in which “whitefaced clowns in demonic make-up” are filmed “furiously shouting and shoving” as they repeat the same, nonsensical joke over and over again. Nauman once said that he wanted the experience of looking at his work to be “like getting hit in the face with a baseball bat”. Judged by these criteria, it rarely fails: the “punch” it delivers can be “so disabling as to numb all response”; yet it can also “amaze”. The “gruelling vaudeville” on show here will leave you drained – but you won’t forget it in a hurry.
on visitors: in the course of the exhibition, you will sit through videos presenting dull events – “a coffee spillage”, for instance – played out in painfully protracted slow motion; be subjected to the “near-unbearable shouting” of a disembodied head in his 1992 installation piece Anthro/Socio (Rinde
Spinning); and find yourself confronted with a 1974 sculpture consisting of
“a wire cage placed inside a wire cage”. The mood is so oppressive that a neon light flashing “multicoloured, cheerfully threatening phrases like RED AND LIVE or SUCK AND DIE” seems “oddly pretty” by comparison. Nauman “deliberately gets on your nerves”, and clever as he undoubtedly is, a “significant amount” of this show is “quite unpleasant”.