Hangar Bicocca is well-known for hosting special exhibitions of the most renowned contemporary artists, with special attention to innovation and experimentation. Nauman’s dark and radical aesthetic is blending with the industrial architecture of the museum and elevates the curation of the exhibition into a memorable experience. The exhibition “Neons Corridors Rooms”, curated by Roberta Tenconi and Vicente Todolí with Andrea Lissoni, Nicholas Serota, Leontine Coelewij, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen and Katy Wan, gathers thirty works created since the second half of the 1960s that explore the most innovative dimension in the practice of Bruce Nauman, with a focus on his spatial and architectural research. Some of Nauman’s most representative installations, from many international public and private collections, are hosted in the capital of fashion and design. Covering over 5,000 square meters in the Navate gallery of Pirelli HangarBicocca, the exhibition brings together various types of corridors and rooms, along with six neon pieces, five video and sound works, and a selection of “Tunnels”, Nauman’s sculptural models for underground architecture.

Bruce Nauman is one of the most influential figures in the international contemporary art field. His work is disruptive, penetrating and absurd and is often a physical as well as mental experience. In a career spanning over fifty years, Nauman has investigated the human condition and the deeper meaning of art-making, embracing a wide variety of different media such as installation, video, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing, and sound.
 His early studies in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, which he undertook before moving to art studies at the same university, allowed him to “unlock” innovative techniques, analyse the mental grasp of objects and study the rules of logic. Confronted with the “What to do?” question in his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realisation: art became more of an activity and less of a product. Many of his art pieces invite the viewer to interact physically and mentally. A good example is ‘The Double Steel Cage Piece (1974)’. This sculpture consists of two cages, one contained inside the other. The piece is experienced completely differently from outside and from within. Entering the maze, a claustrophobic experience is following that in a certain sense, leads to nothing: the inner cage is sealed and inaccessible. Another creation by Nauman makes us wonder: how a mouse, a cat and a random moth can transform into an iconic art piece? The installation displayed in the Cubo, “Mapping the Studio II” with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat chance John Cage), 2001 introduces to the viewer, animals as stage performers and resumes the key role of the studio in Nauman’s creative practice.

“I was sitting around the studio being frustrated because I didn’t have any new ideas, and I decided that you just have to work with what you’ve got. What I had was this cat and the mice, and I happened to have a video camera in the studio that had the infrared capability. So I set it up and turned it on at night and let it run when I wasn’t there, just to see what I’d get … I thought to myself why not make a map of the studio and its leftovers … it might be interesting to let the animals, the cat and the mice, make the map of the studio. So I set the camera up in different locations around the studio where the mice tended to travel just to see what they would do amongst the remnants of the work.”

Nauman filmed one hour per night intermittently over several months to generate nearly forty-two hours of footage. He set up the camera at various locations, recording approximately six hours at each location. The action is provided by the artist’s tailless cat, the mice and the occasional moth. Nauman thought of the areas he filmed as providing a kind of stage, on which it was the performers were going to show up gradually. For Mapping the Studio II with color shift, flip, flop & flip/ flop (Fat Chance John Cage), he manipulated the footage, seven screens imperceptibly mutate in colour from red to green, to blue, then back to red over fifteen or twenty-minute periods which vary from screen to screen. At the same time, the screens flip from left to right and top to bottom at approximately fifteen- minute, synchronised intervals. The sound is the real-time ambient noise of wind, rain, horses whinnying, dogs barking, coyotes howling, the cat meowing and the whistle of a distant train, reflecting the studio’s rural setting in Galisteo, New Mexico. The American musician John Cage (1912-1992), who composed the ambient sounds of the uncontrollable animal performers, had an important impact on Nauman’s work and vice versa.

The last part of the exhibition introduces the project: “Raw Materials”. An introspective sound installation is showcased in the outside area of Pirelli HangarBicocca. For this project, Nauman has brought together 22 recordings of texts taken from earlier works that span almost 40 years of his career, a work that was initially commissioned for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2004. The audio recordings, relating to as many previous works of the artist, are played on a loop, tracing his long career through a succession of cross-references, flashbacks and acoustic alterations.
 Walking through the area running parallel to the Navate, disembodied voices speak to you, or maybe just to themselves, in a variety of styles. There are stark texts like ‘Ok Ok Ok’, which Nauman himself chants repeatedly until the phrase distorts and seems to morph into new words. Single words repeated over and over, stories that feed back into themselves and go nowhere. Other audio (‘Good Boy Bad Boy’ or ‘World Peace’) follows a pattern in which different words or phrases are conjugated like verbs, repeated in different voices to extract a variety of meanings. Throughout the tone of voice, the inflection and variations in rhythms dramatically shift meanings, from diplomatic to psychotic, pleading to bullying, anxiety to mockery. Early in his career, Nauman was inspired by composer John Cage, who argued that chance occurrences and ambient sound can hold equal status with intentional composition. ‘Music plays a role in a lot of my work’, Nauman has said. ‘Even when there is no music’.

As an epilogue or prologue to the exhibition’s narrative, the video installation “Anthro/ Socio (Rinde Spinning)”, 1992 is featured in the Reading Room and accessible from the museum’s entrance hall. The image of the rotating head of performer Rinde Eckert obsessively repeats sentences as “Feed Me/Eat Me/ Anthropology; Help Me/Hurt Me/Sociology,” and “Feed Me/Help Me/Eat Me/Hurt Me.” Expanding on his research into the deconstruction of language and the use of the disembodied voice, even the title evokes Nauman’s perpetual interest in the observation of human nature.

To conclude, the game of cognitive perception does not provide the key to the action for the viewer but is rather part of the unresolved tension between perceiving, experiencing and feeling. Geometry, sound, language and color appear to be a concealed source of emotion. The free associations that the audience develops increase the authenticity of awareness and the sustainability of the experience. Art does not give answers, raises questions.