| Bruce Nauman
is one of the most important artists of our time. Early in his career,
he abandoned painting in favour of sculpture, performance, installation,
film, video, photography and neon. This restless exploration of different
media reflects a continual questioning and reinvention of his artistic
practice. In the 1960s he was one of the pioneers of video art, making
a series of groundbreaking videos in which he filmed himself in his
studio performing various simple, often absurd, tasks. In subsequent
videos he has often used actors to repeat a written text, with nuanced
variations, so revealing the ambiguities and dead-ends of language.
Sound has always been important to his artistic practice, sometimes
as pure audio works, sometimes incorporated as an element in videos
or large-scale architectural installations. For
Raw Materials, his sound installation for Tate Modern, Nauman has
brought together 22 recordings of texts taken from earlier works
that span almost 40 years of his career. Walking through the Turbine
Hall, disembodied voices speak to you, or maybe just to themselves,
in a variety of styles. There are stark texts like ‘OK OK
OK’, which Nauman himself chants repeatedly until the phrase
distorts and seems to morph into new words. Longer pieces such as
‘False Silence’ or ‘Consummate Mask of Rock’
are cryptic narratives describing psychological states that are
at odds with the calm delivery of the voice. Somewhere in between
is ‘Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room’ in which
Nauman repeats the statement as if on the edge of asphyxiation,
his gasps and snarls building an atmosphere of claustrophobia and
intimidation. There are statements that explore sentence construction,
single words repeated over and over, stories that feed back into
themselves and go nowhere. Throughout, the tone of voice, the inflection,
and variations in rhythms dramatically shift meanings, from diplomatic
to psychotic, pleading to bullying, anxiety to mockery.
Plans for the Turbine
Hall layout
Nauman’s interest in lexical systems shares
something with the plays of Samuel Beckett or the philosophy of
Ludwig Wittgenstein. His fascination with deconstructing language
and exposing its inherent ambiguities is paralleled by his approach
to making art. In this work, the boundaries between sculpture, sound
and language are blurred. The Turbine Hall is empty, but has paradoxically
been filled with acoustic material based on the written word. It
could be described as a play on the notion of ‘volume’,
since as well as being a measurement of space and of sound, ‘volume’
suggests a text. It is precisely this sense of instability, where
a single thing has many layers of meaning that often contradict
one another, which Nauman’s work addresses.
The layering of fragments of previous works to create
a new whole adds to this complexity. Some of the texts are audio
components from videos or architectural installations, others are
written texts from Nauman’s sculptures, prints or drawings.
The diverse origins of the texts are significant, as Nauman has
commented: ‘I think the range of material and presentations
and intentions is important to the richness and density of the experience.’
However, by isolating the texts and presenting them as sound recordings,
Nauman admits: ‘Some texts are going to be reinforced, some
will lose a lot compared with my original intentions, but I think
that is okay. I’m just going to let that happen, however it
happens. They’re out of context, so they become a whole new
kind of experience… I am using these otherwise finished texts
as raw material for a whole other idea… I am not as emotionally
involved with the individual pieces as I would be if I were trying
to re-install each one. I’m using this stuff in a kind of
abstract way, or pretending it is abstract and allowing almost random
associations to appear.’
Rhythm has always been central to Nauman’s work.
Some of the recordings include loops (‘OK OK OK’ or
‘No No No No – New Museum’) where single words
are repeated over and over, with a different emphasis each time.
Some of the loops are short and a pattern quickly emerges. Even
background sounds that initially seem arbitrary evolve into percussive
polyrhythms. Early in his career, Nauman was inspired by composer
John Cage, who argued that chance occurrences and ambient sound
can hold equal status with intentional composition. Other audio
(‘Good Boy Bad Boy’ or ‘World Peace’) follows
a pattern in which different words or phrases are conjugated like
verbs, repeated in different voices to extract a variety of meanings.
‘100 Live and Die’ is a particularly musical work that
creates a rhythm by attaching a word like ‘scream’ or
‘fail’ to the alternating endings ‘and live’
or ‘and die’. In each recitation the chorus of voices
chanting the hundred phrases moves in and out of sync, in a way
that recalls the modular music of composer Steve Reich. ‘Music
plays a role in a lot of my work’, Nauman has said. ‘Even
when there is no music’.
Sound responds to different spaces in particular ways
and the Turbine Hall has a unique sonority. The low-level hum of
generators can still be heard, a reminder of the building’s
previous existence as a power station. This was influential in defining
the project, as Nauman explains: ‘The first time I visited
the Turbine Hall there was a group of Henry Moore sculptures on
view. The first thought I had was to use the overhead cranes to
fly them around the space… I think that what edged me toward
an audio environment was the turbine drone and how it varied as
I moved from place to place.’
Nauman decided against placing the recordings in a
thematic or chronological order. He says: ‘I started with
the idea of using ‘Thank You Thank You’ at the entrance,
but after that the arrangement was quite intuitive, and based more
on the texture and intensity of the relationships than narrative
structure. I do feel that the last piece in the room – ‘World
Peace’ – is in an appropriate place, provides a resting
place, but of course people will have to walk through the space
to leave the museum proper.’
In ‘World Peace’ we hear a man and woman
recite a series of simple phrases around the verbs ‘talk’
and ‘listen’, such as ‘I’ll talk/ They’ll
listen’ and ‘You’ll listen to us/ We’ll
talk to you.’ In each instance, the statement is reversed
in the following line before moving on to the next in the sequence.
The title can be taken as a wry comment on global-political misunderstanding.
With an economy of means, Nauman simultaneously represents the simplicity
and complexity of communication.
Ben Borthwick
Assistant Curator, Tate Modern
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