He is a titan of the artworld whose work can be savage, prescient or slapstick. Ahead of a major show, the US artist looks back on studio stunts and liquid lunches with legends
Bruce Nauman is telling me a story from his childhood. “I had a friend in high school who was a little bit of a loner,” says the artist, speaking by phone from New York. “If someone hit him with a snowball when we were walking to school, he wouldn’t just throw a snowball back, he’d attack. He’d get ’em down on the ground and pound on him.”
It is a story that seems to chime with Nauman’s art, where the line between peaceable interaction and sudden violence often seems terrifyingly thin. The artist, about to be the subject of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern, is interested in the moment a social ritual or game pivots into cruelty. In the 1986 video work Violent Incident, a smartly dressed couple are at a table set for cocktails and dinner – but the date soon descends into a vicious brawl. You can feel pushed away by his work, alienated. “Get out of my mind, get out of this room,” urges one sculpture, via a disembodied voice that echoes round an empty space lit by a single bulb. It’s as if you’ve been sucked into the artist’s head – and it’s not a happy place to be.
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