Bruce Nauman at the Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal

The Musee d’Art Contemporain is having a retrospective on the work of Bruce Nauman, an influential American artist. The exhibit showcases his use of various media, from sound and video installation to neon and sculpture, to address an equally varied smorgasbord of themes, such as war, violence, apathy, language, and what the artist perceives as our frustrating inability to truly commune with each other (expressed through the Clown pieces.) The expo greets you with a series of his neon work. Plays on words (RUN FROM FEAR - FUN FROM REAR,) anagrams (WAR-RAW) as well as acoustic-visual poems (SILENCE-VIOLENCE-VIOLINS) make you smile, but also carry profound, striking messages of revolt against our apathy to the global state of things and what he describes as "the ability people have to ignore situations they do not like." After a gallery of video installations where redundant movements in a distorted visual field point out the fallacy of our perceptions (meh…) a sculpture-fountain of floating bronze fish with water jetting periodically from them contrasts silence and noise, and makes for a relaxing moment – be patient, wait until the water stops flowing, you will be rewarded. The next installation will blow you away. You enter a dark room with six large screens projection the rapidly rotating faces of men shouting feed me anthropology - eat me sociology. It is at once fascinating and terrifying.
The entrance to the exhibit is 8$, but note that a membership to the MAC is 10$ for students and residents of Montreal, which gives you free access to all exhibitions and access to evenings at the museum, the Nocturnes, with music and guided tours exclusively for members – the next nocturne is on August 3rd.