"If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art" - Bruce Nauman.
As the lockdown, some measures have been in place for nearly a year now, drags on interminably and some of us start to feel mentally drained by it all, it'd be very nice, useful even, if an artist, say Bruce Nauman whose show at Tate Modern I was visiting online (of course), was able to reveal mystic truths that helped us deal with our current situation.
Or any situation for that matter. But artists, especially conceptual artists like Nauman, have a tendency to make dramatic claims like that. Like our own PM, their promises often don't mean very much at all. I've seen conceptual art I've loved, I've seen conceptual art I've disliked, I've seen conceptual art I didn't understand, and I've seen conceptual art that is total and utter wank.
Clown Torture (1987)
But this would be the first time for me looking at conceptual art online. Which is neither what the artist nor the visitor would have wanted, or intended, for this work. I've missed going to Tate Modern (and other galleries). Not just for the art but the shops, being around other people, having a coffee or a pint afterwards - maybe a pizza, enjoying a walk along the South Bank, and buying a vegan sausage roll in Greggs to eat on the train home.
Sat in my front room (and now having not seen a single friend or family member in real life for forty-six days), Nauman's show could never be as good as the genuine experience. But needs must - and it proved to be an interesting and worthwhile experience. Any kind of distraction, right now, is a blessing.
Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version) (1993)
Now seventy-nine years old, Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana and his work, from the start, has been a mish-mash of sculpture, photography, performance, and neon lights. He'd probably not accept the title of 'conceptual artist' but as he refuses to assign specific meanings to these, sometimes bewildering, installations I'm calling him one.
What else do you call an artist who claims the very act of him being in the studio makes him an artist. Marcel Duchamp's no longer around to ask? What else do you call someone who encourages viewers to assign their own meanings to his work and in doing so create potentially infinite alternate readings.
The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967)
I suppose you could call him a charlatan! But that would be unfair. The video installations of the first two rooms at the Tate were not available to online visitors but as they apparently consisted of intentionally mundane videos in which the occasional appearance of a cat or a mouse or Nauman himself performing dull and repetitive tasks I guess I didn't miss too much.
The neon signs, sometimes puns, sometimes palindromes, sometimes anagrams, and sometimes, as above, statements, were certainly more aesthetically pleasing if perhaps not as deep and meaningful, at least to me - we've established that Nauman expects different visitors to come to different outcomes with his work, as I think he'd like them to be.
The promise of a live hum from the neon which would, the curators claim, create a sense of danger when in close proximity with the work obviously never materialised online - but, to be honest, the likelihood of feeling a sense of danger when looking at art is negligible. The only time it's happened to me is when I went down one of Carsten Holler's slides into the Turbine Hall back in 2007.
Walks In Walks Out, sadly, has nothing going for it whatsoever. It's just Nauman himself walking in and out of a video. Which is supposed to make us think about scale but I think we can all think about scale quite easily enough should we need to. At least Clown Torture (which features an actor dressed as a clown sat on a toilet, suffering) is interesting. Clowns are tricky to incorporate into art or cinema without being cliched. They're either sad or evil. Rarely are they funny. Nauman's clown takes the sadness into deeper dimensions to reveal a sad truth about all of us.
Walks In Walks Out (2015)
Double Steel Cage Piece (1974)
We are all imprisoned by layers of masks we put on to present ourselves to the world. We alter realities depending on our audience and if you think you don't then why did you tidy up your bookshelf before that Zoom call? Why do you say words like 'fuck' and 'cunt' to your friends and not your nan? Why do you even smile at people?
Nauman had already explored ideas of anxiety and entrapment in 1974 with Double Steel Cage Piece in which one cage is encased by a slightly larger cage. There is a small walkway in the gaps between them but it is not large enough for anyone to move through comfortably. It seems Nauman had seen the minimalist art of Donald Judd and Carl Andre and decided he could fuse minimalism with conceptualism. It would probably upset a minimalist purist (the lack of meaning was the point) but it's a neat enough trick if you come at it with an open mind.
Hardly mind blowing though. With Going Around the Corner Piece with Live and Taped Monitors, Nauman explored the then relatively new idea of mass surveillance. Us, the visitors, are filmed as we walk though the piece and, on reaching its end, we see a small video of us from behind and get the feeling we have been spied on.
How that makes us feel now, in 2021 - with social media, tracking devices, listening devices, and CCTV everywhere, is likely very different to how it would have made people feel back in 1970. I know this room in Tate Modern and I think this would have been an exhibit that if I had been able to attend the show in person would have been far more interesting.
Going Around the Corner Piece with Live and Taped Monitors (1970)
Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning) (1992)
Instead, somewhat perversely, I found myself surveying Nauman (or at least his work from the comforts of my own front room). Surveillance, now, is carried out by everyone everywhere every moment they're awake. It makes the world a more connected place but, sadly, it also makes the world a more suspicious, and sometimes more unkind, place.
Not that Nauman seems to be an artist concerned with suggesting Utopian alternatives. The furniture of 1983's Musical Chairs is useless. Intentionally so. Chairs with only two legs, no seats, and no backs that serve no purpose whatsoever. Nauman had spoken about the children's game of musical chairs as being something he felt was particularly cruel because the first kid to get knocked out always felt terrible about it and then had to watch everyone else play.
When he went on to link that with torture methods carried out in Apartheid era South Africa, I have to say I felt he'd made too daring an artistic leap but, hey he's an artist, so he gets to use artistic license. Further gloom continues with a violin tuned to D E A D, some drawings of spilled coffee, and the rotating disembodied head of a man which shouts "feed me, eat me, anthropology, help me, hurt me sociology" and other disturbing stuff.
A man desperate to have his most basic human needs catered for in a society that has become so self-serving that it may choose to deny him them. With One Hundred Live and Die, there is further exploration of the process of dehumanisation. The people here are represented simply by lines of text, some get to live, some get to die, but all are mere units. Units of productivity. Units of usefulness. As surely as many of us look at the huge death toll of Covid-19 and forget that for each one of those now nearly two and half million global deaths there is a person who lived, breathed, and loved and for each one of those people lost there are family members and friends mourning. People who will never laugh or smile again and people who will never see them laugh or smile again.
One Hundred Live and Die (1984)
Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime (1990)
Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime features a female mime artist executing movements to the orders of a dispassionate, and offscreen, male voice. It shows that not only do we dehumanise people, fifty percent of people, women, are dehumanised more than the other fifty percent. There has been great improvement, though still far to go, in the thirty years since this work was made but there are still a lot of men out there who believe that women should bend to their will and, when they refuse to, resort to often deadly violence.
It's an aesthetically pleasing work with a disturbing undertone. Black Marble Under Yellow Light, meanwhile, is simply aesthetically pleasing. It's nice to look at it, again it shows Nauman's debt to minimalism, but it has no meaning. Nauman is nothing if not slippery. One minute you like him, the next you're not so sure. Like all of us, he contains multitudes.
The show ends with Hanged Man in which, as with Musical Chairs, Nauman is pondering the cruelty of the games we have invented for children to play. In the game hangman, a stick man is executed if one child can't guess the letters of an unspecified word quick enough. It's quite a dark idea really but Nauman has gone one step further and drawn his Hanged Man with a boner. To reflect the myth that once a man has died from hanging, he will automatically get an erection.
I enjoyed this (partial) Nauman show but I wasn't quite as excited about as the unfortunate Hanged Man would have been had he been alive (and real) to enjoy his impressive standing ovation. If I had to use the Mull of Kintyre scale to review Nauman's work, and I'm sorry to end on such a crude note but Nauman did so don't blame me, I'd have to say this show was something of a semi. I'd need further stimulation before I could really commit to Nauman as an artist. Hopefully, soon (April, May, June, later) we can return to galleries again and I can finally get that satisfaction.
Black Marble Under Yellow Light (1981/88)
Hanged Man (1985)
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