Bruce Nauman, Tate Modern, review: an oddly elating house of horrors

Bruce Nauman makes a habit of turning images back-to-front. So, let’s start by considering what the 78-year-old American artist is not. He is not, to be frank, a purveyor of visual pleasure. He doesn’t do beauty in the manner of, say, Matisse, who once wrote that art should be like a good armchair, providing relaxation from fatigue. Coming across one of Nauman’s installations is more like encountering a live wire. Danger: high voltage. Don’t visit his new retrospective at Tate Modern, then, if you want a fix of joie de vivre. Nauman deals in adrenaline rushes, not sugar highs.

Here, like fragments of a nightmare, are a few flashes from the show. Steel cages and surveillance cameras. Spinning, screaming disembodied heads. Scary clowns. And, around a corner, a monitor broadcasting footage of – creepy! – you or your doppelganger walking briskly out of shot. It’s very Blair Witch. Have we taken a wrong turn, into a house of horrors?

“The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths,” proclaims a swirling neon sign, like something above a godforsaken bar in nowheresville, at the exhibition’s threshold. Yeah, right. Nauman – who once produced a print of the words “Pay Attention Motherf*****s” – is being ironic. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” would be more like it. Throughout, we hear off-stage howls and wails, like the cries of sinners from Dante’s Inferno.

So much shouting, and an atmosphere of foreboding and claustrophobia: prepare, too, for flashbacks to the darkest days of lockdown. In a smart touch, the first work we see, by the escalator from the Turbine Hall, is a pair of stacked monitors screening close-up, looped footage of someone manically washing their hands. The health secretary would be pleased.

Why would anyone choose to endure this torture-fest? Nauman isn’t the only modern artist to treat his viewers like masochists, but still: Tate’s show opens with vindictively mundane video footage of his studio by night that lasts for nearly six hours. With Warhol’s durational films, you get to gaze at, say, the Empire State Building. Here, though, you’re lucky if you catch a cat slinking past a chair.

For all that, though, I left this superb exhibition feeling elated. Why?

The son of a General Electric salesman, Nauman studied maths and physics before committing to fine art. Since 1979, he has lived on a ranch near Santa Fe, where he trains horses. Occasionally, he’s described as an artist’s artist – often a euphemism for someone who makes demanding work that’s tough to categorise. Here, though, it means more. As you walk through this exhibition’s 13 rooms, arranged thematically and mostly filled with individual installations, it is astonishing to note how inventive and influential Nauman has been. Honestly: this show is like a primer on how to make contemporary art.

I’ve already mentioned one of his neons (hello, Tracey Emin) – but, at every turn, we find ideas subsequently cherry-picked by others. A concrete cast of the space beneath Nauman’s chair anticipates the work of Rachel Whiteread. A room saturated with fluorescent yellow light throws forward to Olafur Eliasson. The tense, political oeuvre of Mona Hatoum is predicted by Double Steel Cage Piece (1974), a chilling installation of two mesh enclosures, one inside the other, separated by a narrow gap, which foretells Guantanamo Bay, Trump’s detention of migrants on the Mexican border, mass incarceration in America.

Nauman, the great influencer, isn’t afraid of being influenced, either. His works are subtle sallies on art history, not dumb, provocative empty gestures. He openly admires Rodin, while an early black-and-white video engages with the “contrapposto” pose of ancient sculpture. Pinch Neck (1968), a 16mm film of the artist manipulating his flesh to create ridiculous facial expressions, reminded me of Rembrandt’s exercises in distorted self-portraiture.

So, Nauman is a touchstone for artists – and keeps a sly eye on tradition. This, though, doesn’t capture the unforgettable power of his art. How best to describe it? For me, it all clicked into place when I learned that, as a student, he was obsessed with Samuel Beckett. Because behind Nauman’s austere oeuvre, which customarily fuses menace with wit, is the theatre of the absurd. One early piece consists of a taped recording of a scream embedded in a concrete block. All we see is the device’s cord and electric plug poking out. It could be a tragicomic prop for an existential skit.

Elsewhere, in the disturbing video installation Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime (1990), a female mime artist responds to a bossy man barking instructions out of shot: “Sit! Roll over! Lie down!” Aside from its obvious commentary on male-female relations, this piece – like much of Nauman’s output – suggests that free will is a falsehood. There are philosophical insights, here, that leave the mind reeling. The impotence of the individual, cast adrift on a great sea of cosmic nothingness, is a constant preoccupation.

This, I suspect, explains the artist’s interest in childhood, another recurring theme. Clowns, card tricks, games of musical chairs and hangman: all feature at Tate Modern, but given a dark yank, to evoke the powerlessness of infancy. Nauman’s work is full of proxies for the viewer – watched, manipulated, infantilised, controlled. Autonomy, in this worldview, doesn’t exist.

The finale is Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version) (1993), which features a magician’s eerily glowing hands – as green as an alien’s, or the Wicked Witch of the West – performing a card trick, against black. It doesn’t sound like much, but, slowed down and projected across a wall, accompanied by rumbling, ominous noises as the magician riffles through the deck, the footage becomes mesmerising, epic, infinite. Here is a Big Bang moment, a spark of creation in the abyss – conjured, ex nihilo, by a spectral deity whose purpose we cannot fathom.

Hands against a void: is it absurd to divine an allusion to Michelangelo’s fresco of God imparting the spark of life to Adam via his fingertips? Perhaps. After all, this is, ostensibly, nothing but a two-bit trick. As ever, with Nauman, the joke’s on us – but this time, at least, the mood is benign, not stern. Maybe there will be a happy ending, after all.

From Oct 7 until Feb 21. Details: tate.org.uk