Can everyone hear at the back? (original) (raw)

Everyone loved Olafur Eliasson's installation in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall. Visitors lay on the floor and used their bodies to spell out messages in the mirrored ceiling. They brought picnics and chilled as if their lives depended on it. It's a hard act to follow. Bruce Nauman, the fifth artist to show in the Unilever series, is an artworld insider. His Tate Modern work, which opens on Tuesday, will use sound, primarily the human voice. It will 'revisit the artist's obsession with language, and how repetition affects meaning'.

Nauman was born in 1941 in Indiana. He studied at the universities of Wisconsin and California. Making art in fibreglass, neon tubing and Styrofoam, he was successful early on. In 1968 he signed with the dealer Leo Castelli.

His work gives no ground to hedge-betters. His presentations can be absurd, captivating, infuriating - and sometimes ear-splittingly loud. After visiting a 1994 Moma show, the critic Robert Hughes, a fan, observed: 'No show was ever noisier.' He concluded that Nauman 'has cut himself a different role: the artist as nuisance'.

But he is also hugely respected, admired as much for his range - he's worked in sculpture, video, photography, film, printmaking, performance, and with materials as varied as concrete, wax, stone and animal parts - as for his ability to dramatise elements of our experience that we would rather not examine too closely.

He is most often associated with videos, and neons. His best-known neon, Vices and Virtues (1988), ran around a building in La Jolla, San Diego, that was devoted to earthquake testing. The vices run one way, at one speed, the virtues another. Nauman admits to many influences - Beckett, Wittgenstein, Cage, Glass, La Monte Young, Meredith Monk. And he has had a profound influence on many artists.

Martin Creed
Winner of 2001 Turner Prize for his piece Work No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off

'I think he's the King, basically - Elvis! I first saw Nauman's work at Anthony D'Offay when I was a student. One of my favourite pieces is Walking In an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square (1967-68). It's a black-and-white film shot in the studio, where he's drawn a square. He does these funny walks. There's another one, where he's walking around the square playing a violin.

'I like his touch. There's a messiness about the way he presents things, and that messiness I find free. It's as if he does just enough to allow the work to live, then beyond that he doesn't really care - I love that. Many of the works seem very rough and ready and direct, a kind of freshness. The work's also kind of silly, sometimes, and funny.'

Barbara Kruger
Artist whose works superimpose pithy phrases on appropriated photographs

'I am sure this show will be huge. Nauman's work addresses a particular audience. He uses the reductivist tendencies of the so-called avant garde; there's a certain minimalist tendency coming through perceptualism, and I really admire that.

'All of us, especially here in America, are colleagues in a place where any notion of an examined life, of what it means to create commentary about culture - which is what art is, from a still life to a photograph - is marginalised. It's so scary right now.'

Jenny Holzer
American conceptual artist

'I am on fire about the prospects for the Tate. Nauman makes sense in and out of the artworld - he shares this with Beuys and a handful of others. I keep these artists in mind every time I start a piece. I was a liberal arts student when I first saw his work, and it was so puzzling, funny and worrisome that it helped me run to visual art. I stored the thought that language had its place in art. I'm reluctant to tag Nauman as solely American because his work cuts it in most places. What seems somewhat American, however, is that he uses nondescript materials at hand, as well as TV, rather than precious art substances. Best of all, his language pieces are accessible and smart, and this is the good old part of American culture, that one does not talk down to the people.'

Richard Wilson
Artist whose 20:50, the lake of sump oil, is on permanent display at the Saatchi Gallery

'When I'm playing with the early stages of an idea, I reach for my Nauman books in the way one might reach for a cookery book or a car manual for clarification. They reassure me and open my eyes to how the rough and ready can also appear alive and beautiful.

'I am not a fan of the later video works: it's the early sculptures that interest me, the works that seem to ask what sculpture could be. In these you sense him spending time trying to find a way of making an object. They seem to have a raw, unfinished appearance, especially the Tunnel and Circle, Square and Triangle series.

Robin Klassnik
Director, Matt's Gallery, London E3

'Nauman has influenced probably every art student using video. He is a fantastic artist. What he did in the Sixties and Seventies was so groundbreaking, but it is still currency today. Every time you assess people in art school you find a Nauman clown jumping up. He has had a great influence, too, in the way he deals with architecture - in the way architectural skills are coming back into the art schools. His works are not just one-liners: they are serious dealings with architecture, space, and sound.

Conrad Shawcross
Young British sculptor, snapped up by Charles Saatchi shortly after leaving college

For me, Nauman is at his very best when he uses humour to reconcile seemingly disparate or even opposing elements to reveal that they are in fact two sides of the same coin; banality reveals profundity, idiocy intelligence.

John Baldessari
American conceptualist based in California

'There is a seriousness of purpose in Bruce's work. I think the mark of any great artist is that they continue to provide nourishment for younger artists, and he has always certainly done that. I remember seeing his first show here [at Nicholas Wilder Gallery in LA, 1966] and being impressed by his utter originality. With Bruce I have never seen anything I did not like.

'The work always seems to be very influenced by minimalism and conceptualism - that would be his context. In some ways, I would compare Bruce to Sol LeWitt; they are very astringent, but I always sense the humour and absurdity in their work.'

ยท The Unilever Series: Bruce Nauman is at Tate Modern, London SE1 from Tuesday to 28 March 2005; www.tate.org.uk