Monthly media and arts column

El;eanor Margesson reviews the Unilever Series exhibit 'Raw Materials' by Bruce Nauman, showing in the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern until March 28 2005.

If you walk into the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall between now and March 28, you could easily confuse it with entering the London Dungeon. Howls of ghoulish screams and echoing growls bounce off the walls of the massive space, while piercing shrieks mix with calmer, more insistent tones. Meanwhile, the hum of the vast generators, which originally powered the building, drone on in the background.

Sound sculpture: a woman listens in on Nauman's work

Yet, unlike the London Dungeon, there is nothing to see. The room is 'empty'. When Bruce Nauman, the well-known visual artist working mainly with video, came to the Turbine Hall to assess its space, he decided that the challenge could be met audibly rather than visually. This approach stands in stark contrast to the previous years' installations in the Unilever Series which have all seen artists rising to the challenge of filling the large and awkwardly shaped space with unique pieces built specially for this venue.

Soundwaves

Instead of a visual piece, Bruce Nauman has constructed a 'sound sculpture' out of 21 looped sound recordings played through flat directional speakers, which are fixed to the sides of the hall. As the spectator moves through each band of sound waves, listening to their interference and collision with one another, they experience an audio collage of sensations. The 'sounds' are all speech or sound uttered by the human voice taken from video and sound segments that Nauman has created over the last 40 years as stand-alone exhibits. Raw Materials is a retrospective cacophony of them all being played at the same time. They include the repeated sharp commands 'Work! Work! Work!' and 'Thank you! Thank you!', a small child's voice repeating the phrase 'You may not want to be here', a claustrophobic scream (performed by Nauman himself) and the piece at the far end of the hall, 'World Peace' comprised of a male and female voice projected from a speaker on either side of the space, exchanging variations of the phrase 'You talk, I'll listen'.

Although each individual recording is designed to have an impact, it is the overwhelming sense of everything together that is impressed on the visitor. None of the phrases are particularly out of the ordinary and may all be experienced through various forms of media or everyday conversations. Yet when they bombard the senses simultaneously, they create a strong desire to escape.

Watching others

It is interesting to stand and watch others as they experience the exhibit. Some walk slowly down the central line, hearing each sound in high quality stereo from both sides, some stand right next to a speaker on one side, with the intimacy of the voice reverberating physically inside them through loud sound waves. Some stand stock still at random positions on the ramp leading down to the ticket booths, reading their handout with its explanations or gazing at the ceiling, seeing nothing.

As with last year's 'Weather Project' by Olafur Eliasson, the installation provokes the observer into becoming a part of the artwork itself. The large neon sun enticed visitors to gather in front of it and the mirrored ceiling prompted them to sit or lie on the concrete floor, making patterns and movements while 'sunbathing'. The sodium light rendered everything black and white, which made people stare at each other in a way that would be socially unacceptable elsewhere. In 'Raw Materials', we find a similar sense of community built up between those going through the experience. Emotions are rubbed raw one minute and cosseted the next, expressions of puzzlement and bewilderment change to fascination, pleasure, anger and perhaps back to bewilderment again. The strange reality is that the place is filled even though it is totally devoid of visual stimulus.

Recordings from the past 30 or 40 years make up Nauman's sound collage. One of the loops shouts, 'Get out of my head! Get out of this room!'. It has a very unsettling effect, since the listener feels that this may be the very voice that exists in some people's minds. It brings to mind other voices that shout at us from within, voices that we cannot get out of our heads, whether in the white noise of daily living or specific guilt, troubles or problems that we find no rest from in the small hours of the night. As we are torn in dozens of different directions by the variety of information, commands and emotion that we consume through the media, we may also feel deeply unsettled. Yet Christians believe that the ultimate voice, or Word, was spoken by God through Jesus Christ. This Word told his followers to 'cast your anxieties on the Lord, for he cares for you'. His voice will not be switched off come March 28.

The art of noise

Soundwaves

Watching others

Main Articles

Other articles