'Raw Materials' by Bruce Nauman at the Tate Modern, 2005
When I was thinking of inspirational media the other day as I was writing up my friend's photography exhibition, I remembered Bruce Nauman's stunning sound sculpture Raw Materials that I experienced at the Tate Modern in London in January of 2005. I went back through my LJ to see what I had written (because surely I would have written up the exhibit which made such a huge impression on me that I talked about it for weeks afterward to friends), but then I realized...I didn't start this LJ until the end of March of that year. D'oh!
I went to London in January for a week-or-so visit to N while he was in grad school in 2005. It was cold, but I found plenty with which to occupy myself during the day while he was at class - at that point it was my second trip to the city and so I knew my way around a bit, and so I explored some things I hadn't gotten to on my first trip, primarily indoor things like museums since it was so cold outside. I've never been a big fan of modern art, but I visited the Tate Modern because it was rather provocative to me: it is housed in an old power plant on the south bank of the Thames directly opposite St. Paul's Cathedral with the Millennium Bridge in between. From the outside, it looks very impressive as this massive power plant building with a giant smokestack chimney rising like a great finger against the London sky. I visited the museum one afternoon, and although I did not love all the art, I really loved the museum and I would absolutely go back.
The sound sculpture was the first thing I experienced when I walked in the main entrance which opens into the central multi-story high space called the Turbine Hall. Along both sides of this long wide space, there were stations projecting 22 different audio tracks. If you stood in the center between two audio stations, you would hear bits of words from both which was rather disconcerting. Some of the audio was pleasant while others were disturbing - it was a fascinating concept based in Nauman's love of language and communication, that is better explained here and here. There is a wealth of info at those links including video and an interview with the artist about the sound sculpture.
Needless to say, I loved that installation so much and was so fascinated by it that I dragged Nicola off to see it later in the week, and he also found it very interesting.
Here are a few more resources:
Visual Artist Nauman Exhibits Raw Materials at Tate Modern Museum
By Mix Editors
Jan 18, 2005 4:51 PM
Marquee Audio and Sound Directions have carried out a unique sound system installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern (Bankside, London) in support of conceptual visual artist Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials exhibition. Raw Materials runs until March 28, 2005.
For his fifth Unilever Series commission, the American artist has deployed a wide range of spoken texts in a way that orchestrates and measures the space of the enormous hall, with the complex routing and signal protocols carried out within Soundweb DSP architecture.
Sound Directions took 21 diverse audio tracks and samples from previous works, and playing out via a series of 28 directional electrostatic speaker elements, run 100V line and distributed the length of the Turbine Hall.
The company built special sound baffles and enclosures, which recess into the giant industrial girders of the room and are designed in such a way as to “draw” visitors down the hall. To this are added four high-power suspended dome speakers.
Marquee Audio, meanwhile, was invited to supply all the additional hardware and designed an elaborate cabling infrastructure in which the complex routing protocols have been carefully stored in the BSS Soundweb DSP engine.
The signals are taken from a 24-track, looping, solid-state playback device, with the audio information and samples stored on a series of CF cards, offering 16-bit/44.1kHz audio processing.
Nauman first arrived on-site in July 2004 for a system demonstration. “He was interested in using the structure of the building and wanted a blurring of sounds, so that if you were standing in the middle of two sound sources, you could receive both loud and clear,” recalls Sound Directions’ Fergus Rougier. “And so we had to define the space between the speakers to a low hum.”
Rougier admits that the success of the installation is due in no small part to Soundweb, a detail which Marquee Audio’s Andy Huffer agrees with: “With 21 different sounds, but 35 separate outputs to route, we considered some sort of matrix-possibly an analog patchbay,” he says. “But the obvious solution was via DSP processing, with five 9088iiLL Soundwebs and a 9000ii network hub providing the necessary 40x40 matrix.
“We had to create a system that would enable us to route any of the content anywhere,” Huffer continues. “As time was against us, we needed to program up a visualization of the room with each speaker point represented by a source selector. This offered us great flexibility and made it easy to navigate, set up and change level controls on-the-fly with EQ and a minimum of compression.” Additional protection for the system has been created by a 100Hz highpass filter, also built into Soundweb.
Huffer says that the beauty of Soundweb was its flexibility and the fact that during the test period, the system integrators were constantly able to re-patch. “In fact, the gain settings changed constantly, right up until the day before the show opened,” he reports.
Marquee Audio also had to design cable runs on a macro scale, with Rob Whittaker project-managing the whole installation. “In the end, we went for a multi-pin-type arrangement, with break-out boxes hidden behind the girders,” says Huffer. “The biggest problem was just the sheer scale of the building and having to gain access when the gallery after hours, so we needed a cabling solution based on speedy installation.”
Summing up, Rougier says that Nauman was delighted with the way in which his concept was realized. Paying tribute, he says, “Bruce was also a delight to work with. He knew exactly what he wanted and is a mathematician who also understands electronics, which was really useful for a project like this.”
http://mixonline.com/mixline_live/Nauman-Raw-Materials-118058/
Inside the mind of Bruce Nauman
The latest artist commissioned for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has filled it with sound. The result is an enormous, invisible sculpture, writes Adrian Searle
by Adrian Searle
Tuesday October 12, 2004
Guardian
'Thank you. Thankyouthankyou thankyou. " These are the first and last words you will hear, entering and leaving Tate Modern via the main Turbine Hall entrance, from today until March. Delivered with the disingenuous gratitude of a stage performer, and with the soulless garrulousness of an electronic greeter, their sincerity is suspect. Thanks for what?
Stand still for a moment. Listen. The world is all a hideous clamour. The fifth Unilever Turbine Hall project, Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials, fills the space with a babble of declamations, interrogations and justifications. It comes at you in mounting waves; it whispers in your ear, it comes in shouts and incantations - suddenly an opera, or a radio in the background. Even though there is nothing whatsoever to look at - bar the 18 parallel pairs of speakers running the length of the Turbine Hall, several more on the far end wall, and one dangling from the roof over the bridge - Raw Materials is, almost, a sculpture.
When Nauman announced he was doing a sound piece, I instantly imagined a single voice flooding the hall, saying something terse and threatening, or a discreet whisper emanating from an unexpected corner. Something, in other words, to delay us for a moment, and perhaps alarm or confuse us as we passed. But so many voices, so many alarms? Start walking - take your chances.
We find ourselves revisiting the audio and verbal components of 21 of Nauman's works, made over a period of more than 30 years. They follow one another in carefully orchestrated sequence. Short, percussive, repeated single-syllable texts: Work Work; OK OK OK; No No No, paced between much longer works - extended dialogues, complex poetic texts, works whose jarring absurdities slowly harden into menace and confrontation.
The experience is a little like treading water beyond the surf, riding the troughs and swells of sound, each work another wave. Swept along by an unseen current, you are towed into deeper water, until you find yourself amid a flotsam of old routines and riffs, half-remembered snatches of things, the wreckage of words.
Nauman plays it all back obsessively, clinically, as though the listener might hear some secret, just like Beckett's Krapp with his dusty old spools of memories. But Nauman has used the most up-to-date equipment, adjusting the levels and attack of the voices so that the overall effect becomes intensely spatial. He has also said that he has ignored the original meanings and contexts of individual works in order to reinforce their musicality and emotional content. Both are considerable.
Nauman's art is all of a piece. You could call this a retrospective in sound, but like everything else Nauman does, Raw Materials does more than replay old work. For Nauman, everything remains material, to be used and used again. He has said that he has never been interested in finishing anything. To use an almost Naumanesque phrase, he is never finished, and never finishes finishing. His works are propositions, to be tested in light of one another. Louise Bourgeois's Turbine Hall project - the first in the Unilever series, in 2000 - was called I Do, I Undo, I Re-do. It is the same for Nauman.
Somewhere, a voice rasps: " Get out of my mind, get out of this room ," insisting, over and over, like one of those mocking, repetitive thoughts that sometimes ensnare us in the night. This is the Turbine Hall as the interior of the artist's head. By the end of it, the voices have taken up residence in your head, too. Nauman's Raw Materials winded me; it left me, when I finally got out of there, more of a liability on the street than usual.
Previous projects here have all provided visual spectacle or grand effect of one sort or another. Artists either live or die in the Turbine Hall. Juan Muñoz called the space "a killer". Or, as Nauman's voices have it: "Live and die, die and die, shit and die, piss and die ... fail and live, smile and live, think and live, pay and live ..." His insistence on using the things about him is a genuinely creative and rigorous process: he mines the near-at-hand, even his frustrated pacing about, drinking coffee and wondering what on earth to do next. In any case, we only have one ageing body, one mind, only the old words. Even the title Raw Materials is derived from an earlier series, Raw Material, a number of video and sound pieces from 1990-91 that involve sound exercises for the voice.
Roar Materials would have been as apposite a title, and is also just the kind of language game Nauman plays in the text piece You May Not Want to Be Here, read by a small child, who hesitates at a point when "here" is replaced by "hear". You hear the child's momentary wavering over the homonym, like a train switching tracks over a set of points. We do the same, time after time, as we make our way down the length of the hall. How strange that Raw Materials should open at the moment of the death of Jacques Derrida, the master of language games.
Unaccountably, I found myself getting upset. This came as a shock. Tears are for wimps and Bill Viola fans. Yet there is something in the cumulative presence of the human voice that can lead one to feel lost, adrift in one's own life. This was also something Derrida thought about. To remember a voice is itself an act of mourning.
Nauman's idea sprang, so I understand, from the constant low hum that leaks into the Turbine Hall from the working electricity substation that still occupies part of the south side of the former Bankside Power Station. Nauman has been extremely aware of the Turbine Hall as a chamber of sound, and the way noise both floods the space and is dispersed and distributed within it. Raw Materials is as much sculpture as anything else. It makes you, too, totally aware of the volume of the space and where you are in it. I became intensely conscious of my own body and its orientation - whether I was standing a little to the left or right, closer to or further from one speaker or another, tracking the advance and retreat of different voices as I walked. I found myself looking down much of the time, and walking slowly, like a man who has dropped a coin or lost a beloved.
We walk the walk; Nauman and his actors and collaborators talk the talk. They rant, they tell jokes, they tell us alarming things. They soothe us and jerk us out of ourselves. Performance artist Rinde Eckert sings "Feed me eat me anthropology" in a loop. His wiry voice seems to take an arc into space. Nauman's own voice insinuates, slithers and chews and rasps his way across the Turbine Hall at ear level. It's like being pestered on the street.
Nauman starts yelling "Think!" over and over. The command slices down the stairwell from above the bridge, crashing in from afar. Once you stand on the bridge, the words effectively flatten you to the floor. I move away, crabwise, but the voice is so insistent that it drowns any possibility of independent thought, and circumscribes my movements. I think I'm acting, remembering Nauman's own pacing in his early videos, which I'm starting to mime from memory. I also suddenly recall the physical effect of Richard Serra's two massive steel blocks, which once sat in the long hall of the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain, and how their sheer presence, their weight and mass seemed to affect people's movements, even at a distance. Words also have mass, a similar hidden weight.
I first encountered Raw Materials early on a Sunday morning, during a sound check. The first visitors of the day seemed initially confused by the voices, the rising cacophony. Bewildered, many circled about and slowly became entranced, if not a bit scared, while a few hardier souls walked, oblivious, towards the shop or the lifts. When Raw Materials was switched off, everyone suddenly stopped. It was a great moment, a great image. Who says this is a sound piece?
· At Tate Modern, London SE1, until March 28. Details: 020-7887 8888.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1325196,00.html
Sounds to make the mind race
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 13/10/2004
Bruce Nauman's Tate Modern installation is a disturbing, compelling sonic experience writes Richard Dorment
Remember the crowds stretched out on the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, irradiated by the reflected light of that giant orange sun?
In The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson used smoke and mirrors to create an illusion that seemed to hold the whole country spellbound. The huge popularity of The Weather Project inadvertently created a problem for its successor. To make an effective work of art for that space is difficult enough, but whoever was unlucky enough to follow in Eliasson's wake would never be loved.
Which is why it was a stroke a genius to invite the American artist Bruce Nauman to create this year's project for the Turbine Hall. Nauman doesn't "do" charm. Few artists care less about whether an audience likes his work or not. He's astringent and aggressive, and you can count on him to wipe that smile right off your face.
The essence of what I've come to think of as the "Nauman moment" is this. Think of one of life's irritations - for example, a recorded message asking you to choose from one of five options, each of which has its own recorded message offering further options - and then ratchet up the annoyance factor until you want to scream.
Nauman has a knack for repeating simple, everyday actions and words to get under your skin, needling you until you want to swat him away like a mosquito. But even as he's tormenting you, you are mesmerised, and walk away feeling that you have learned something about how we communicate or fail at communication.
True to his reputation for orneriness, Nauman has decided not to show visual art at all in the Turbine Hall. He has created a vast sound installation that fills the space in a way I would not have believed possible. In Raw Materials, he brings together 21 audio pieces made over a period of 40 years, positioning his loudspeakers in the girders on either side of the long incline down the Turbine Hall.
You experience the work first as an unintelligible cacophony of voices accompanied by the sound of the artist humming tunelessly in the background. This white noise becomes mixed up with the sounds made by visitors as they wander through the space.
But as we progress down the great ramp, we pass each speaker and hear individual voices whispering, shouting, singing and cracking bad jokes. I'm always suspicious of the term "sound sculpture", but here you really do feel your body reacting to sounds that are sharp and piercing, or else rotund, caressing, and seductive.
And I defy anyone to walk straight down the ramp in the Turbine Hall to the ticket desk without stopping every few feet to listen. Watch how people zigzag across the gallery, or stand stock still, enveloped by one of Nauman's poetic texts, conundrums or word games.
For what the voices on his tapes are saying is well worth listening to. One of the first pieces we hear is called You May Not Want to Be Here. A child's voice simply recites these words over and over, accenting or omitting a different word at each repetition to change the meaning from a question to a threat.
In Work Work these two words are repeated endlessly, until sound becomes detached from meaning, and what we hear is a tone of voice that is imperative, cajoling, persecuting or as desperate as a drowning man calling for help. One consistent theme in Nauman's sound pieces is the idea that we don't hear words, only sounds and voices. The mind edits out what it doesn't want to hear. What is said is very often less important than how it is said.
Nauman uses the space artfully, varying the emotional mood. At times, it is as though someone has left a television on, tuned to the squawk of a children's TV programme. Elsewhere voices turn crazy and psychotic: "Get out of this room! Get out of my head!"
What Nauman is doing, I think, is treating the Turbine Hall as though it were a person's mind, a place in our head in which each of us hears scores of voices, all the time, some angry, others persecuting, others like a snatch of song maddeningly going round and round.
As happens here, we tend gratefully to drown out our memories and regrets, and our angry and accusatory thoughts in the white noise of everyday life. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when we're unable to sleep, those voices become very loud and very insistent indeed.
I'd hate to be working at Tate Modern for the next five months, but for the rest of us, Nauman's work does something very rare in art: it tells us something about ourselves we didn't know.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/10/13/banau13.xml
I went to London in January for a week-or-so visit to N while he was in grad school in 2005. It was cold, but I found plenty with which to occupy myself during the day while he was at class - at that point it was my second trip to the city and so I knew my way around a bit, and so I explored some things I hadn't gotten to on my first trip, primarily indoor things like museums since it was so cold outside. I've never been a big fan of modern art, but I visited the Tate Modern because it was rather provocative to me: it is housed in an old power plant on the south bank of the Thames directly opposite St. Paul's Cathedral with the Millennium Bridge in between. From the outside, it looks very impressive as this massive power plant building with a giant smokestack chimney rising like a great finger against the London sky. I visited the museum one afternoon, and although I did not love all the art, I really loved the museum and I would absolutely go back.
The sound sculpture was the first thing I experienced when I walked in the main entrance which opens into the central multi-story high space called the Turbine Hall. Along both sides of this long wide space, there were stations projecting 22 different audio tracks. If you stood in the center between two audio stations, you would hear bits of words from both which was rather disconcerting. Some of the audio was pleasant while others were disturbing - it was a fascinating concept based in Nauman's love of language and communication, that is better explained here and here. There is a wealth of info at those links including video and an interview with the artist about the sound sculpture.
Needless to say, I loved that installation so much and was so fascinated by it that I dragged Nicola off to see it later in the week, and he also found it very interesting.
Here are a few more resources:
Visual Artist Nauman Exhibits Raw Materials at Tate Modern Museum
By Mix Editors
Jan 18, 2005 4:51 PM
Marquee Audio and Sound Directions have carried out a unique sound system installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern (Bankside, London) in support of conceptual visual artist Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials exhibition. Raw Materials runs until March 28, 2005.
For his fifth Unilever Series commission, the American artist has deployed a wide range of spoken texts in a way that orchestrates and measures the space of the enormous hall, with the complex routing and signal protocols carried out within Soundweb DSP architecture.
Sound Directions took 21 diverse audio tracks and samples from previous works, and playing out via a series of 28 directional electrostatic speaker elements, run 100V line and distributed the length of the Turbine Hall.
The company built special sound baffles and enclosures, which recess into the giant industrial girders of the room and are designed in such a way as to “draw” visitors down the hall. To this are added four high-power suspended dome speakers.
Marquee Audio, meanwhile, was invited to supply all the additional hardware and designed an elaborate cabling infrastructure in which the complex routing protocols have been carefully stored in the BSS Soundweb DSP engine.
The signals are taken from a 24-track, looping, solid-state playback device, with the audio information and samples stored on a series of CF cards, offering 16-bit/44.1kHz audio processing.
Nauman first arrived on-site in July 2004 for a system demonstration. “He was interested in using the structure of the building and wanted a blurring of sounds, so that if you were standing in the middle of two sound sources, you could receive both loud and clear,” recalls Sound Directions’ Fergus Rougier. “And so we had to define the space between the speakers to a low hum.”
Rougier admits that the success of the installation is due in no small part to Soundweb, a detail which Marquee Audio’s Andy Huffer agrees with: “With 21 different sounds, but 35 separate outputs to route, we considered some sort of matrix-possibly an analog patchbay,” he says. “But the obvious solution was via DSP processing, with five 9088iiLL Soundwebs and a 9000ii network hub providing the necessary 40x40 matrix.
“We had to create a system that would enable us to route any of the content anywhere,” Huffer continues. “As time was against us, we needed to program up a visualization of the room with each speaker point represented by a source selector. This offered us great flexibility and made it easy to navigate, set up and change level controls on-the-fly with EQ and a minimum of compression.” Additional protection for the system has been created by a 100Hz highpass filter, also built into Soundweb.
Huffer says that the beauty of Soundweb was its flexibility and the fact that during the test period, the system integrators were constantly able to re-patch. “In fact, the gain settings changed constantly, right up until the day before the show opened,” he reports.
Marquee Audio also had to design cable runs on a macro scale, with Rob Whittaker project-managing the whole installation. “In the end, we went for a multi-pin-type arrangement, with break-out boxes hidden behind the girders,” says Huffer. “The biggest problem was just the sheer scale of the building and having to gain access when the gallery after hours, so we needed a cabling solution based on speedy installation.”
Summing up, Rougier says that Nauman was delighted with the way in which his concept was realized. Paying tribute, he says, “Bruce was also a delight to work with. He knew exactly what he wanted and is a mathematician who also understands electronics, which was really useful for a project like this.”
http://mixonline.com/mixline_live/Nauman-Raw-Materials-118058/
Inside the mind of Bruce Nauman
The latest artist commissioned for Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has filled it with sound. The result is an enormous, invisible sculpture, writes Adrian Searle
by Adrian Searle
Tuesday October 12, 2004
Guardian
'Thank you. Thankyouthankyou thankyou. " These are the first and last words you will hear, entering and leaving Tate Modern via the main Turbine Hall entrance, from today until March. Delivered with the disingenuous gratitude of a stage performer, and with the soulless garrulousness of an electronic greeter, their sincerity is suspect. Thanks for what?
Stand still for a moment. Listen. The world is all a hideous clamour. The fifth Unilever Turbine Hall project, Bruce Nauman's Raw Materials, fills the space with a babble of declamations, interrogations and justifications. It comes at you in mounting waves; it whispers in your ear, it comes in shouts and incantations - suddenly an opera, or a radio in the background. Even though there is nothing whatsoever to look at - bar the 18 parallel pairs of speakers running the length of the Turbine Hall, several more on the far end wall, and one dangling from the roof over the bridge - Raw Materials is, almost, a sculpture.
When Nauman announced he was doing a sound piece, I instantly imagined a single voice flooding the hall, saying something terse and threatening, or a discreet whisper emanating from an unexpected corner. Something, in other words, to delay us for a moment, and perhaps alarm or confuse us as we passed. But so many voices, so many alarms? Start walking - take your chances.
We find ourselves revisiting the audio and verbal components of 21 of Nauman's works, made over a period of more than 30 years. They follow one another in carefully orchestrated sequence. Short, percussive, repeated single-syllable texts: Work Work; OK OK OK; No No No, paced between much longer works - extended dialogues, complex poetic texts, works whose jarring absurdities slowly harden into menace and confrontation.
The experience is a little like treading water beyond the surf, riding the troughs and swells of sound, each work another wave. Swept along by an unseen current, you are towed into deeper water, until you find yourself amid a flotsam of old routines and riffs, half-remembered snatches of things, the wreckage of words.
Nauman plays it all back obsessively, clinically, as though the listener might hear some secret, just like Beckett's Krapp with his dusty old spools of memories. But Nauman has used the most up-to-date equipment, adjusting the levels and attack of the voices so that the overall effect becomes intensely spatial. He has also said that he has ignored the original meanings and contexts of individual works in order to reinforce their musicality and emotional content. Both are considerable.
Nauman's art is all of a piece. You could call this a retrospective in sound, but like everything else Nauman does, Raw Materials does more than replay old work. For Nauman, everything remains material, to be used and used again. He has said that he has never been interested in finishing anything. To use an almost Naumanesque phrase, he is never finished, and never finishes finishing. His works are propositions, to be tested in light of one another. Louise Bourgeois's Turbine Hall project - the first in the Unilever series, in 2000 - was called I Do, I Undo, I Re-do. It is the same for Nauman.
Somewhere, a voice rasps: " Get out of my mind, get out of this room ," insisting, over and over, like one of those mocking, repetitive thoughts that sometimes ensnare us in the night. This is the Turbine Hall as the interior of the artist's head. By the end of it, the voices have taken up residence in your head, too. Nauman's Raw Materials winded me; it left me, when I finally got out of there, more of a liability on the street than usual.
Previous projects here have all provided visual spectacle or grand effect of one sort or another. Artists either live or die in the Turbine Hall. Juan Muñoz called the space "a killer". Or, as Nauman's voices have it: "Live and die, die and die, shit and die, piss and die ... fail and live, smile and live, think and live, pay and live ..." His insistence on using the things about him is a genuinely creative and rigorous process: he mines the near-at-hand, even his frustrated pacing about, drinking coffee and wondering what on earth to do next. In any case, we only have one ageing body, one mind, only the old words. Even the title Raw Materials is derived from an earlier series, Raw Material, a number of video and sound pieces from 1990-91 that involve sound exercises for the voice.
Roar Materials would have been as apposite a title, and is also just the kind of language game Nauman plays in the text piece You May Not Want to Be Here, read by a small child, who hesitates at a point when "here" is replaced by "hear". You hear the child's momentary wavering over the homonym, like a train switching tracks over a set of points. We do the same, time after time, as we make our way down the length of the hall. How strange that Raw Materials should open at the moment of the death of Jacques Derrida, the master of language games.
Unaccountably, I found myself getting upset. This came as a shock. Tears are for wimps and Bill Viola fans. Yet there is something in the cumulative presence of the human voice that can lead one to feel lost, adrift in one's own life. This was also something Derrida thought about. To remember a voice is itself an act of mourning.
Nauman's idea sprang, so I understand, from the constant low hum that leaks into the Turbine Hall from the working electricity substation that still occupies part of the south side of the former Bankside Power Station. Nauman has been extremely aware of the Turbine Hall as a chamber of sound, and the way noise both floods the space and is dispersed and distributed within it. Raw Materials is as much sculpture as anything else. It makes you, too, totally aware of the volume of the space and where you are in it. I became intensely conscious of my own body and its orientation - whether I was standing a little to the left or right, closer to or further from one speaker or another, tracking the advance and retreat of different voices as I walked. I found myself looking down much of the time, and walking slowly, like a man who has dropped a coin or lost a beloved.
We walk the walk; Nauman and his actors and collaborators talk the talk. They rant, they tell jokes, they tell us alarming things. They soothe us and jerk us out of ourselves. Performance artist Rinde Eckert sings "Feed me eat me anthropology" in a loop. His wiry voice seems to take an arc into space. Nauman's own voice insinuates, slithers and chews and rasps his way across the Turbine Hall at ear level. It's like being pestered on the street.
Nauman starts yelling "Think!" over and over. The command slices down the stairwell from above the bridge, crashing in from afar. Once you stand on the bridge, the words effectively flatten you to the floor. I move away, crabwise, but the voice is so insistent that it drowns any possibility of independent thought, and circumscribes my movements. I think I'm acting, remembering Nauman's own pacing in his early videos, which I'm starting to mime from memory. I also suddenly recall the physical effect of Richard Serra's two massive steel blocks, which once sat in the long hall of the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain, and how their sheer presence, their weight and mass seemed to affect people's movements, even at a distance. Words also have mass, a similar hidden weight.
I first encountered Raw Materials early on a Sunday morning, during a sound check. The first visitors of the day seemed initially confused by the voices, the rising cacophony. Bewildered, many circled about and slowly became entranced, if not a bit scared, while a few hardier souls walked, oblivious, towards the shop or the lifts. When Raw Materials was switched off, everyone suddenly stopped. It was a great moment, a great image. Who says this is a sound piece?
· At Tate Modern, London SE1, until March 28. Details: 020-7887 8888.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1325196,00.html
Sounds to make the mind race
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 13/10/2004
Bruce Nauman's Tate Modern installation is a disturbing, compelling sonic experience writes Richard Dorment
Remember the crowds stretched out on the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, irradiated by the reflected light of that giant orange sun?
In The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson used smoke and mirrors to create an illusion that seemed to hold the whole country spellbound. The huge popularity of The Weather Project inadvertently created a problem for its successor. To make an effective work of art for that space is difficult enough, but whoever was unlucky enough to follow in Eliasson's wake would never be loved.
Which is why it was a stroke a genius to invite the American artist Bruce Nauman to create this year's project for the Turbine Hall. Nauman doesn't "do" charm. Few artists care less about whether an audience likes his work or not. He's astringent and aggressive, and you can count on him to wipe that smile right off your face.
The essence of what I've come to think of as the "Nauman moment" is this. Think of one of life's irritations - for example, a recorded message asking you to choose from one of five options, each of which has its own recorded message offering further options - and then ratchet up the annoyance factor until you want to scream.
Nauman has a knack for repeating simple, everyday actions and words to get under your skin, needling you until you want to swat him away like a mosquito. But even as he's tormenting you, you are mesmerised, and walk away feeling that you have learned something about how we communicate or fail at communication.
True to his reputation for orneriness, Nauman has decided not to show visual art at all in the Turbine Hall. He has created a vast sound installation that fills the space in a way I would not have believed possible. In Raw Materials, he brings together 21 audio pieces made over a period of 40 years, positioning his loudspeakers in the girders on either side of the long incline down the Turbine Hall.
You experience the work first as an unintelligible cacophony of voices accompanied by the sound of the artist humming tunelessly in the background. This white noise becomes mixed up with the sounds made by visitors as they wander through the space.
But as we progress down the great ramp, we pass each speaker and hear individual voices whispering, shouting, singing and cracking bad jokes. I'm always suspicious of the term "sound sculpture", but here you really do feel your body reacting to sounds that are sharp and piercing, or else rotund, caressing, and seductive.
And I defy anyone to walk straight down the ramp in the Turbine Hall to the ticket desk without stopping every few feet to listen. Watch how people zigzag across the gallery, or stand stock still, enveloped by one of Nauman's poetic texts, conundrums or word games.
For what the voices on his tapes are saying is well worth listening to. One of the first pieces we hear is called You May Not Want to Be Here. A child's voice simply recites these words over and over, accenting or omitting a different word at each repetition to change the meaning from a question to a threat.
In Work Work these two words are repeated endlessly, until sound becomes detached from meaning, and what we hear is a tone of voice that is imperative, cajoling, persecuting or as desperate as a drowning man calling for help. One consistent theme in Nauman's sound pieces is the idea that we don't hear words, only sounds and voices. The mind edits out what it doesn't want to hear. What is said is very often less important than how it is said.
Nauman uses the space artfully, varying the emotional mood. At times, it is as though someone has left a television on, tuned to the squawk of a children's TV programme. Elsewhere voices turn crazy and psychotic: "Get out of this room! Get out of my head!"
What Nauman is doing, I think, is treating the Turbine Hall as though it were a person's mind, a place in our head in which each of us hears scores of voices, all the time, some angry, others persecuting, others like a snatch of song maddeningly going round and round.
As happens here, we tend gratefully to drown out our memories and regrets, and our angry and accusatory thoughts in the white noise of everyday life. But sometimes, in the middle of the night when we're unable to sleep, those voices become very loud and very insistent indeed.
I'd hate to be working at Tate Modern for the next five months, but for the rest of us, Nauman's work does something very rare in art: it tells us something about ourselves we didn't know.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/10/13/banau13.xml