Shining luminescent in the current artistic dirth that is York, a selection of Bruce Nauman’s output is on show at our city’s best exhibition space. Displaying a range of media including neon signs, sculptural installations and video work, this small exhibition of nine works shows the American artist’s versatility and humour.
York Museums Trust has grasped an excellent opportunity to display works in the Tate collection outside of London, as part of the Artist Rooms initiative which takes big name artists to galleries outside the Tate walls.
The show begins with two television sets vertically stacked on which videos loop of the artist washing his hands. This piece, ‘Raw Material Washing Hands, Normal (A/B)’, is a bold one to place first in the exhibition place; it is challenging because the action of hand washing is so commonplace that it verges on inconsequential, hardly ripe for documentation. It, like all of the pieces in the exhibition, becomes clearer when you begin to see how Nauman’s work largely looks at subtle interplay of language and behaviour and how they create meaning. Why is the person washing their hands? What is the ‘Raw Material’? The looping makes it seem obsessive, are they ill or are they guilty of something? Such questions are raised by each piece.
The conclusions you draw are so natural that they almost pass you by, until you realise that perhaps other people are interpreting differently. It is here that Nauman’s interest in the human power of expression becomes apparent.
Connotations of a hand gesture or a particular inflection in speech which can instantaneously create reactions in people, conscious or otherwise, are the subject of the most interesting pieces on view. A sculpture of a lewd hand gesture, ‘Untitled (Hand Circle)’, is wry, as is the word play essential to a neon work set in the altar space, ‘VIOLINS VIOLENCE SILENCE’, which flashes the words in turn to show the disparity between assonance and meaning in the English language. The stand-out work is ‘Good Boy Bad Boy’, a video which, simultaneously looping two videos, questions how the way of speaking can change meaning as the two floating heads repeat the same 100 phrases in an increasingly irritated manner.
A real strength of the show is the exhibition space itself. The disjunction between medieval sacred architecture and sculptures in neon and cast iron brings another layer of meaning to the works, site specific interpretations of liturgy and the sacred Word, which would not be considered in the common white cube. The exhibit is worth seeing for this reason alone.
York St Marys’ exhibition manages to be an introduction to Nauman’s work without feeling piecemeal. Though I was personally left a bit nonplussed by a couple of pieces, his general theme is approached from multiple angles through various media which provide a fresh viewpoint each time. It casts a (neon) light on human behaviour and interaction which you can laugh at and enjoy but also learn something about yourself.
R.H.
Bruce Nauman is on at York St Marys till 10th November 2013. For their website click here.
ARTIST ROOMS is a series of nation wide exhibitions of contemporary art acquired for the U.K. through the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate. For more information and to see where else exhibitions are being held, click here.
