Bruce Nauman exhibition review: Thought-provoking but occasionally unbearable, this Tate Modern show gets on your nerves

Perhaps, when this exhibition was conceived, Tate curators intended that visitors would be allowed to squeeze themselves into the claustrophobic gap between the two sections of Bruce Nauman’s 1974 Double Steel Cage Piece, a wire cage placed inside a wire cage, with one very narrow door. Now, with Covid, you can’t, and all I can say is thank God for that because just standing near that doorway and contemplating pressing myself through it is very unpleasant indeed.

In fact, a small but significant amount of this career-spanning exhibition is quite unpleasant. The 78-year-old American sculptor and conceptual and performance artist has been working since the mid-1960s, and among his several preoccupations are communication and ambiguity in language, the act of making art, the body, and its response to physical and psychological pressure.

This last extends to the visitor, as Nauman deliberately gets on your nerves. You watch a coffee spillage or a close magic act in slow-mo (I have little patience for magic at the best of times, slowed down to a crawl it made me want to scream), or listen to the near-unbearable shouting of the 1992 installation piece Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning), which consists of several projections of a disembodied male head yelling things like “Feed me, eat me, anthropology” and “Feed me, help me, eat me, hurt me” extremely loudly.

The sound of this piece reverberates endlessly throughout the middle section of the show. This is a curatorial error. Not only are you sick of it before you see it, it undermines other works, such as the oddly pretty 1984 neon One Hundred Live and Die, which flashes multicoloured, cheerfully threatening phrases like RED AND LIVE or SUCK AND DIE. The neon tubes apparently emit a disconcerting hum, but you can’t hear it over the din. Three rooms later the yelling was ebbing slightly, and I found the quiet simplicity of “unsettling” sculptural installation Black Marble Under Yellow Light (1987) positively restful.

Still, there’s much here to like, especially in the early rooms. Nauman’s early performances (on screens) such as Walk with Contrapposto, in which the then-young artist walks slowly in a line, adopting a pose familiar from classical sculpture, his peachy bum swaying from side to side, is both witty and illuminating. First Poem Piece from 1968 plays with the words of one sentence, exploring their ability to mean different things. A lot of Nauman’s work is mesmerising and thought-provoking. I just wish some of it would shut up for a bit.