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There are certain artists who need no introduction; their work, reputation and influence is so vast it almost goes without saying. Bruce Nauman is one such artist. Nauman has been recognized since the 70s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists, yet he separates himself from the art world, living on his New Mexico ranch where he breeds horses and creates artistic mind-games. Nauman has said that the human condition—and the frustration, anger and despair arising from our treatment of one another—is his subject matter. |
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Almighty Bruce – Suzie Walshe
There are certain artists who need no introduction; their work, reputation and influence is so vast it almost goes without saying. Bruce Nauman is one such artist.
Nauman has been recognized since the 70s as one of the most innovative and provocative of America’s contemporary artists, yet he separates himself from the art world, living on his New Mexico ranch where he breeds horses and creates artistic mind-games.
Nauman has said that the human condition—and the frustration, anger and despair arising from our treatment of one another—is his subject matter. He once stated that his “work comes out of being frustrated about the human condition, and about how people refuse to understand other people.” Nauman is under no illusions and doesn’t think he can change this but that it’s just “a frustrating part of human history.”
The Tate gallery uses this statement as the foundation of its survey into Nauman’s diverse output. The exhibition “Make Me Think Me” highlights the alternately political, prosaic, spiritual and crass methods by which Nauman examines life in all its brutal details, mapping the human arc between life and death. Nauman exploits his own fluency in these multifarious forms of discourse. They are the basis for his shrewd and penetrating cultural assessments. Since the mid-1980s, primarily working with sculpture and video, he has developed disturbing psychological and physical themes with imagery based on animal and human body parts.
This exhibition is divided into two sections, the first which examines Nauman’s wordplay in pieces that undermine and reconfigure language, includes the palindromic neon “Raw War.” The second looks at his manipulation of his own, and the spectator’s body, including an hour’s walk around his studio. For all this the show achieves only a superficial order; within 20 minutes of walking through the exhibition it is clear that Nauman’s work does not lend itself to organized curatorial structures.
This could be a problem, but only if you allow yourself to “view” the work within a gallery context rather than pieces of art, surviving independently in their own environment. The power within his work is the lack of commitment to any specific style—the intention is to mix different visual languages that nullify one another. Crucially it is this swirling inner contradiction that visually shows how successful his work is at dealing with the human condition—contradiction is Nauman’s way of showing the unavailability of certainty about anything—specifically the human body.
Nauman’s influential output suggests that the body, rather than being a unified repository of sensory perceptions, is in fact in conflict with itself. The role of the body is what surprised me in his work—the human body was clearly important but it is an invisible presence, the body is not really there in his work—it has been somehow negated, existing only in fragments, allusions and traces.
Performance Corridor for example, incorporates surveillance cameras and closed-circuit video systems that function like electronic mirrors. The virtual mirrors and real mirrors allow spectators to see places that they might not imagine they would be able to see. A strange, frustrating sense of dislocation is engendered by denying physical access to what can be seen.
Nauman’s installations demonstrate how easily perception can be prized apart and might be more fragile and contingent than we allow, his work causes you to feel perpetually at odds with the situation.
The majority of his work however, is characterised by this interest in language which often manifests itself in a playful, mischievous manner. For example, the neon Run From Fear- Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail which literalizes the title phrase and shows the artist’s arms tied behind his back. There are however, very serious concerns at the heart of the work. Nauman seems to be interested in the nature of communication and the inherent problems of language, as well as the role of the artist. The viewer enters a world where words become objects; puns and palindromes, anagrams and repetitions, paradoxes and transpositions. Meanings frequently shift and disappear.
World Peace, for example, addresses language and miscommunication. In this five-channel video projection, four women and one man talk over each other while repeating ad nauseam: “I’ll talk, you’ll listen to me,” “You’ll talk, I’ll listen to you,” “They’ll talk, we’ll listen to them.” By running these phrases over one another, Nauman reduces each to absurdity. It becomes clear that no one is listening to anyone else. In our role as viewer we are invited in many of his works to actively participate, in this work we are able to sit within the installation so that the speakers surround us. As you work through the exhibition the implication of the viewer becomes clearly an actual facet of the work—according to Bakhtin’s notion of “utterance,” a spoken word immediately becomes part of a dialogic relationship and its meaning is determined not at the moment it is spoken but at the point at which it is received. So you (as viewer) become a serious part of the work—as receiver of Nauman’s message you complete the work, this of course filters into core issues of postmodernism (think Roland Barthes) and the death of authorship.
Surprisingly the sound of Nauman works more coherently than the visual in the gallery space, and links to Nauman’s own fascination with space, and the ways it can alter our behavior and self-awareness. The room is filled with an onslaught of voices that range in tone from melancholy, sinister, abusive and bossy, to poetic, tender, cajoling and deadpan. The sound is deployed not unlike a sculptural material, one that orchestrates and measures its surroundings—controlling the visitor to an overwhelming extent; choosing which components are heard and when, depending on how they choose to move through the space.
Because it challenges our senses and our understanding, Nauman’s work is not exactly pleasant to experience. But beauty is not, after all, his concern. The aesthetic ingredients of his work are antithetical to socially endorsed definitions of beauty and value. His art seeks to produce in the viewer a mental and physical state likely to generate the idea he wants to get across. And at times, it seems like the state most likely to be produced by Nauman’s ideas is irritation, confusion, or even anger.
A friend of mine who works at the Tate told me a few months ago that they would be having an exhibition of Bruce Nauman work, he was dreading having to listen to three months of Nauman’s verbal mind-games, Nauman’s repeated chatter on a loop for six hours is definitely not going to put anyone into an easy state. But this is the point of Nauman, it’s grating, irritating, uncomfortable—but impossible to ignore or forget—this is after all the artist who declared that he would like his work to have the same effect on its viewers as a crack across the skull with a baseball bat.
Spatial context and chronology aside the biggest problem seemed to be that there is little that feels genuinely new. The only piece of work from the past five years, the disturbing Three Heads Fountain, which features a set of the coloured casts of heads Nauman has been making since the 80s. Nauman does have a habit of recycling ideas. There’s something of that sense of repetition here. Despite the almost incomparable visceral power of his best work, he has the ability to be shocking, repetitious and boring all at the same time. But then I thought that perhaps I was missing the point—work is stripped of its original contexts and redeployed as material for this new work; repetition makes his work all the more agonised, raw and confrontational, so this could easily be yet another analytical mind game Nauman has used to out smart us. He is reintegrating our physical traits, our metaphysical attributes, and our relationship to both society and nature. The artworks meaning is amplified by its evolution, repetition and resolution.
Nauman challenges traditional notions of art, on the one hand dematerializing art objects and on the other making the immaterial solid (as in Cast of the Space beneath my Chair from 1965). Works of this category are what Nauman does best; it is such work that leads him to be one of the most influential artists of our day. Its clear Nauman’s emotive use of materials has inspired Rachel Whiteread’s casts of negative space and Tracey Emin’s brash neon messages.
Nauman is serious news again. Since ‘Raw Materials’ at Tate Modern; ‘Shit in Your Hat’ was included in the keynote show at the last Venice Biennale. He was included in this year’s Berlin Biennale and the long video work ‘Mapping the Studio’, was displayed recently in London, and is currently on show in the Pompidou Centre in Paris. And now this retrospective at the Tate, so regardless of how frustrating or annoying it can be, Bruce Naumans work remains an almighty force with no intention of disappearing.
