h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A friend drew my attention to the following and I think it sounds rather cool and would possibly be somethign that others might like to go along and do in the afternoon at some point before the drunkeness of the evening kicks into full swing::


The Sunday Times - Culture



October 17, 2004

Art: Listen without prejudice
Bruce Nauman's audio art is a shocking noise, but it makes the Tate's
vast
Turbine Hall feel almost intimate, says Waldemar Januszczak



Depending on whether you are a pessimist or an optimist, the Turbine
Hall at
Tate Modern is either a hugely daunting and problematic space for art
or a
uniquely exciting venue bulging with potential. What is certain is that
it
adds up to one heck of a challenge. I had the good fortune to see it
when it
was still filled with proper turbines, before they turned Bankside
power
station into Tate Modern, and I remember vividly how doomy and oily it
was,
how cavernous and user-unfriendly. These were the bowels of Bankside,
and
the adjective that sprang immediately to mind was "hellish".
Thus, the sensible observer must surely favour the pessimist's opinion
of
this gigantic post-industrial cavern. The Turbine Hall is bigger than
big:
it is the largest space for art in the world. The simple act of filling
it
is a logistical nightmare. And the harsh industrial atmospheres that
prevail
in here are not naturally sympathetic to art, you would think.



Certainly, this is no space for shy artists, nor unduly sensitive ones.
There is no room for nervousness or hesitation. To work in here, you
need to
have a vein of megalomania running through your aesthetics. Or, better
still, you need to have a vein of aesthetics running through your
megalomania. Which brings us to Bruce Nauman.

Sooner or later, someone was going to tackle the problem of the Turbine
Hall
by seemingly leaving it empty: in art, sooner or later, someone always
resorts to leaving a space empty. With hindsight, it was entirely
predictable that this someone would be Nauman. He is the most damnably
varied of the big hitters currently in action in contemporary art.
Sometimes
he sculpts. Sometimes he makes videos. Sometimes he uses neon.
Sometimes, as
in the Turbine Hall today, he is a sound artist. Whatever his method,
there
is an inviolate hipness about his art, an unbluntable edge of
revolution and
protest. Born in Indiana, raised by the 1960s, Nauman has never
retreated
from the fight against the squares. He may be 63, but he remains
hard-core.

So, you walk into the Turbine Hall and there's nothing there. Nothing
to
see, at least. No obvious art. No thingumajigs.

No clutter. Just the gothic looming of the Turbine Hall itself, sans
turbines, and you. But - and this is a smart and successful trick - it
doesn
't feel empty. It feels inhabited. Packed, even. Because as soon as you
step
in, you become aware of a huge sea of noise stretching away before you:
whispers, murmurs, bangs, shouts, swearing, poems, confessions,
exhortations. The cacophony fills the space and seems to extend to the
far
end of the Turbine Hall - which is about the length of two football
pitches.
So, this is a spectacular whopper of a cacophony.

It actually consists of 21 individual sound pieces, all playing at
once. As
you walk down the long entry ramp that is Tate Modern's single most
effective architectural feature, you gradually become aware of
different
voices saying different things in different pieces. Each piece is
produced
by two speakers facing each other. Each, therefore, forms a stripe of
sound
across the hall. Each is followed by another stripe of sound, then
another -
until you end up with a student's scarf of these sound stripes
stretching
from one end of the world's largest art space to the other. Wow.

As usual with Nauman, the things being said make no obvious narrative
sense:
the 1960s didn't invent the happening to confirm the status quo but to
disrupt it. The first voice you hear at this parti- cular superstereo
audio
happening shouts "Thank you" over and over, and makes something utterly
aggressive out of what ought to be a display of gratitude. A little
further
along, another guy screams "Okay, okay, okay", and you know it's not
okay,
and never will be. This punchy one-word stuff is interspersed with
Nauman's
prolix sound duets, tortuous urban dialogues in which male voices duel
anxiously with female ones. Think of Beckett. Think of Freud. Now get
rid of
all the common sense. "I was a good boy," he says. "You are an evil
man,"
she replies. "That was good," he responds. "I am an evil woman," she
retorts.

These are tense, fractured, neurotic games of vocal ping pong, and I
won't
make the mistake of writing down any more of them for you, because,
frankly,
they look lousy on the page. Senseless. Ungrammatical. Tough. But
that's not
how they work in the room.

In the room, they seep and creep into your consciousness with that
subcutaneous sneakiness that radio fans will know all about. Nauman
favours
sound because sound is so adaptable. Pressing your ear to the speaker
for a
particularly quiet piece, you find yourself within kissing distance of
his
mutterers and monologists, plunged into their Colgate zone. But take a
few
steps back into the room, back into the cacophony, and the intimacy
turns
into its opposite, the anxious roar of the crowd that seems so
unavoidably
to represent the tone of our modern world.

So, to get to the point, I ended up admiring this thing a lot. It
infiltrated me like a dose of gamma rays. By engineering a succession
of
tense and nervous one-on-ones with a set of broken but thoughtful
speakers,
Nauman manages to avoid the grandiloquence that has, alas, proved so
tempting for earlier artists taking on this space. The recurrent
intimacy
you feel here makes something worn and human of the huge and inhuman
Turbine
Hall. Basically, it populates it.

That said, there is not a pope's chance in Baghdad of Nauman's effort
proving as popular with the general public as the previous occupant of
the
same space, Olafur Eliasson's must-see The Weather Project, which
created a
full-size outdoors in here, complete with setting sun, and turned
audience
participation at the Tate into another new art form. Nauman's sound
piece is
made of altogether sterner and tougher stuff, even though it isn't
actually
made of stuff at all.



Bruce Nauman, Tate Modern, SE1, until March 28

Sounds interesting... Where and when should people wishing to join you there meet? And what's the nearest tube to this location?

No idea! Guess those wantting to go along could all meet up in a pub near the tate modern first, then head off to it when they've all arrive? I'm sure nighthoover's voice witll be there