BEING A NUISANCE

By ROBERT HUGHES

SHOULD ART BE SEEN AND NOT heard? An old-fashioned notion--the catalog to the Bruce Nauman retrospective, currently at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, has a human ear on its cover. And indeed, no show was ever noisier. Go in, and you hit a wall of sound, all disagreeable: moanings and groanings; the prolonged squeak of something being dragged over a hard surface, like a knife on a plate; repetitious rock drumming; voices reciting mantra-like inanities; and (in its own room full of TV monitors titled Clown Torture) the hoarse voice of Nauman, dressed as a clown, in a baggy suit of vertical stripes that slyly recalls the garb of concentration-camp prisoners, shrieking, "No, no, no, nonono!" while writhing and jerking on the floor.

Nauman, beyond much dispute, is the most influential American artist of his generation. Born in 1941, he is of the same artistic age as Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Susan Rothenberg (whom he married in 1989), but the artists whose work he most counts for are younger; it is safe to say that hardly a corner of the mix of idioms at the end of the 1980s, from video to body pieces to process art to language games of various sorts, escaped Nauman's influence.

There's no mystery about why this should be so. What Nauman practices is a form of psychic primitivism, or atavism if you prefer. His art is chiefly about two states: compulsion and regression. When you see a videotape of him smearing his face with black or green greasepaint, you aren't sure whether he's disguising himself or simulating the fecal games of a backward child. Autism is the governing metaphor of his work's "look"--the long-winded rituals of trivial movement, the ejaculatory phrases, the bouts of ungovernable rage.

He is therefore a kind of guru to artists who seek gnomic "enactments" of pain, are obsessed by splits between private and public identity--including their own feelings of victimization--and treat the body as canvas. Not for nothing does one of Nauman's video pieces feature a bewildered rat in a Plexiglas maze, scuttling about under the bombardment of rock drumming. It's Nauman's idea of the relationship between artist and audience. The artist as hero is long gone from American culture, and the artist as social critic is ineffective, but Nauman, with the example of Dada before him and a slackly therapeutic culture all around, has cut himself a different role: the artist as nuisance.

Nauman doesn't think art has much to do with pleasure. Just about everything that could turn you off is catnip to him: aggro, solipsism, tension, repetition, torpor and bad jokes that may have come out of a misanthrope's fortune cookie. Boredom too. Try watching a fuzzy tape of Nauman overstretching a simple phallic pun by very slowly "manipulating" a long fluorescent tube. You don't so much enjoy this show as endure it; you get through it. Then, in the coffee shop, you peruse the catalog and find such hyperbolic drivel as this, by co-curator Kathy Halbreich: "Like the great 17th century metaphysical poet John Donne, who, faced with a world of expanding information and concomitant chaos, mastered paradox through meditation.Bruce Nauman creates art that is a drama of a particularly physical sort of imagining." Well, yes: remember Black Balls, 1969, eight minutes of Nauman's fingers rubbing black pigment in close-up on his scrotum? "O my America! my new-found land."

Nauman is good at a particular sort of put-on, a sour clownishness. He makes art so dumb that you can't guess whether its dumbness is genuine or feigned. When you see his spiral neon piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, you assume it's irony, the cadaver of "inspirational" American romanticism-until you reflect that maybe that's what Nauman really thought, or what the vestigial romantic in him would have liked to think, but in no case can the mere neon sign deliver on its promise, and this frustration (one assumes) is part of the piece.

When it is really silly, the dumbness can be disarming, as it was with Nauman's predecessor, the American Dada gagman Man Ray. Witness early Nauman photo pieces like Self-Portrait as a Fountain, 1966-67, the artist expelling a jet of water through his pursed lips. And it is fully in the tradition of Marcel Du-champ, whose puns were equally feeble. An early Nauman like From Hand to Mouth, 1967 (a wax cast of the artist's arm, shoulder and throat) is a retread of Duchamp's 1959 With My Tongue in My Cheek, a cast of the old dandy's cheek delicately swollen by the pressure of his tongue inside.

Much is made of Nauman's use of words. His slogans--EAT AND DIE, TOUCH AND LIVE, HATE AND DIE and so on, done in flashing neon--are laconic, all right, but Beckett and Wittgenstein they're not, though the co-curator, Robert Storr, tries stubbornly to argue otherwise. Such eminent names--and Alain Robbe-Grillet's too--function as votive tin cans hung on the tree of Nauman's reputation, enhancing the piety with which one is meant to approach it.

Much of the sculpture from the '70s sounds better--or, at any rate, odder--as a conceit than it looks on the floor or the wall. It may be that the impulse to multiply the height of the letters of his written name 14 times their normal size and then trace the result in neon tubing satisfies some inner necessity for Nauman, but for anyone who isn't Nauman, it's meaningless. And you soon lose interest in the "animated" neon pieces, with their spasmodic one-two, on-off movements of violence or puppet sex. They are one-liner art, no matter what windy claims surround them.

Nevertheless, there are moments, individual works in the show, that develop a peculiar grip. An early one is a small white room with nothing in it except two speakers on opposite walls, from which comes a hissing, weirdly broken repetition of two phrases, recited by Nauman: "Get out of this room. Get out of my mind." The paranoid intensity of this cell has to be experienced to be believed. Another is a video piece: the projected image of a mime, with a chair suspended from the ceiling behind it and a green wax head on the chair. A disembodied voice, calm and in control, first tells the mime, "Shit in your hat," which he pretends to do, and then runs through a set of other instructions, which are obediently acted out; the result is an effective metaphor of weakness and humiliation.

The best piece in the show, both horribly vivid and weirdly distanced, is the room-size Carousel, 1988. Four motor-driven arms swing on a pivot. From each hangs what appears to be the flayed carcass of a deer or a wolf. (They are, in fact, hard plastic-foam molds.) These casually suspended mock bodies are covered in graphite paint, and they drag on the floor, producing an unremittingly irksome scraping noise and leaving a silvery circular trail behind them, round and round. You don't feel empathy with the dead animals--the molds are too blank to evoke much more than the merest ghost of pathos--but you shudder at the gratuitousness of their posthumous torment. It's like a brief glimpse of animal hell, going on forever.