Exhibition review- Bruce Nauman

If you are familiar with my work, especially the sex shops neon series, or if you have read my previous blog posts, it probably comes as no surprise that I love Bruce Nauman, in particular his neon works and wouldn’t miss his retrospective at Tate Modern.

Some of the neon works are normally on display in the permanent collection of the Tate so I had seen “run from fear/fun from rear” before but I had never seen works like “100 live and die” in all it electric glory and I was very excited to see it.  It was as mesmerising as I had hoped: each sentence flashing in turn in various colours, both advice on how to live our lives and political statements. And then suddenly they all light up at the same time and it is stunning.

However, beyond these works, this retrospective allowed me to discover so much more depth to Nauman’s work. I really think that seeing the odd installation amongst other artists’ work in permanent collections of various museums doesn’t do him justice at all.

Stepping into the gallery feels like stepping inside his world. It is a complete sensory experience: visual, auditive, and even physical, as you walk around the works and in some case become part of it ( for example in the “Going around the corner” piece, where the viewer/participant is filmed as they walk around a wall in the middle of the room).

There are performances playing on TVs in most rooms, or projected on the walls, and the space is punctuated by the flash of the neon works. There are a few sculptures- from very figurative casts of hands reaching for each other to the more conceptual cast of the space below his chair.

Apart from these few sculptures, nothing stays still in this space: there are voices and noises from the screens, the neons flash and hum, beams and chairs hang from the ceiling in one room…

The atmosphere is often playful- the neon works in particular are clever and full of humour, but at the same time it can be oppressive: the noise and the voices from several of the installations follows you around the room as you look at other works. Approaching the “Human Nature” neon work, and later in the “100 live and die” room, the chanting noises coming from the surrounding rooms together with the neon glows reminded me strongly of the final scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001, a Space Odyssey”.

And this is where seeing his work at a retrospective really worked for me. The pieces respond to each other, either in complementary or conflicting fashion- the lights and noises take on a life beyond the piece they come from to create this sense of outerwordliness that remained with me even after I left the exhibition.

Bruce Nauman works a lot with his body (such as in “walks in, walks out”) and the space he inhabits, and going through the exhibition you feel like you are entering a very choreographed, artificial world, where he occupies all the space, but where not everything is what it seems. 

And it is not surprising perhaps, that the work in the last room is entitled “Falls, pratfalls and sleights of hand”.

The exhibition runs at Tate Modern until 21 February 2021.