Andrew Graham-Dixon finds current political art in London a little repetitive
"RUN FROM FEAR" urges one of Bruce Nauman's neon signs, stationed uninvitingly above the entrance to his retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. The sign next to it lewdly modifes the message to "Fun from rear". This minimal neon installation dates from 1972, so Nauman's Freudian spoonerism can be ruled out as a ghoulish comment on the Aids epidemic. Nevertheless he probably relishes the grisly associations time has conferred on the piece; on the evidence of bis work in sculpture, neon and video over the last 20 years, Nauman is preoccupied to the point of obsession with death, sex and violence.
The main downstairs gallery flickers and clicks to the rhythmic glow and fade of Nauman's neon pieces of the Seventies and Eighties. Garishly coloured, these look at first like exuberant descendents of the Pop Art tradition that celebrates urban ephemera. But Nauman sets up a tension between his medium — neon, with its lighthearted connotations of flip advertising messages — and the deadbeat, nihilistic vision that he uses it to convey.
A large circular piece (from the Saatchi Collection) alternates a series of paired phrases that include "Cares/Doesn't Care", "Pain/ Pleasure", "Love/Hate" and "Life/Death". Another work DeathlEat (hung strategically by the entrance to the Whitechapel Café) simply spells "Death" with the middle three letters picked out in yellow.
The whole show is accompanied by the soundtrack of a video work. Violent Incidents, which filters through from a room upstairs. Here, a bank of 12 television monitors repeats ad infinitum a story of typically Naumanesque banality. The scene is a candlelit dinner for two. In the first version of the narrative a man holds a chair for a woman, but pulls it away as she sits down. She pinches...
