Bruce Nauman: Raw Materials
Until March 28; Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London

“THANK you - Thank YOU – THANK – YOU” says the Tate Turbine Hall as I walk through its doors. I mistakenly think that people are shouting at each other, spoiling the art. But actually, where is the art? With a prestigious commission to fill the massive hall, what has revered video artist Bruce Nauman chosen to put in it?

To begin with, he’s put some thank yous at the door. Alternately barking and purring, Nauman’s voice is coming at me from speakers left and right, fitted neatly into the hall’s great steel pillars. Ahead of me, a deep moan fills the space. Swelling and fading, I wonder if it could be the wind groaning through the turbines. Whatever it is, it seems to be everywhere.

Beneath the groaning, the babble of voices is strangely disconnected from the anxious clusters of visitors scattered around the hall. People are behaving oddly, taking tentative steps, heads down, and stopping often, as if pinned to the spot by some invisible force.

I step away from Nauman’s thank yous, and within seconds I’m hit by a ribbon of sound which stops me in my tracks. A child is telling me sweetly, “You MAY not want to be here. You may NOT want to be here.” It’s spooky. He’s clearly too young to understand all the subtle permutations of the sentence which he’s delivering. His voice sounds so clearly in my ears, having been imperceptible a moment ago, and the thank yous, just yards away, are almost inaudible now.

Nauman has stripped 16 ribbons of sound down the length of the hall, and getting to the bottom is like battling your way through a jungle’s dangerous undergrowth. Voices shriek at you, “WORK! WORK!” and “THINK! THINK!” (after which you immediately expect to hear “FECK, GIRLS!”). A female voice calmly intones “You can’t reach me, you can’t hurt me, I can suck you dry”. In the form of a cold-hearted riddle, it is as if the building herself is speaking to you.
The most effective voice of all seethes, “Get out of my mind, get out of this room”. Deep into the hall by now, speedy escape is not an option. Having suffered all these voices in your head, you really do feel that the pain is mutual; that you have somehow become an unwelcome presence in this voice’s head.

It’s interesting that this fragment is so compelling, because out of a total 21 audio tracks, it’s the only one which originated as a pure sound installation, created in 1968. Most of the other voices in Raw Materials have been extracted from videos made by Nauman over the past four decades, or recorded from written texts which he has exhibited. These, his previously finished works, are now revisited as raw materials.

That makes this show something of a retrospective, while it is also, undeniably, a new work. A host of seminal video pieces are represented by their soundtracks, in many cases losing very little of their impact if not gaining some. Nauman is a master of conjugating communication: one little sentence can be twisted into countless different meanings. Here, rubbing up against each other, those meanings can find new inflections.

Raw Materials is an unmissable experience. However, neither its contents nor its concept is new. The contents are recycled. The concept was seen six months ago when the Newcastle gallery, Baltic, unveiled Susan Hiller’s latest work. Commissioned to create a piece specifically for the gallery’s massive, light-filled fourth floor, Hiller embedded 20 speakers in the flat pillars which range along the walls, just as Nauman has now done. Sensors triggered audio tracks to start playing voices when you stepped into range, creating bands of sound just like Nauman’s.

There is one big difference, though. With its light, white surroundings and preoccupation with the near death experience, Hiller’s room was heaven to Nauman’s shrieking, industrial hell.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 14.11.04