Bruce Nauman, the iconoclastic bad-boy hermit genius of the American art world, is surely one of the most influential artists working today. His innovative videos-monitor or projection, multi-channel and sculptural or singular and iconic-as well as his wrenching figural castings, his conceptual word play, and his disturbingly anonymous architectural constructions, have each spawned major strands of present-day international art practice. But a large number of his greatest themes occur in neon or other works he has made with lights, in the sporadic series begun in 1966 with Neon Templates, one of a cluster of his provocative explorations of the body of the artist. From these earliest neon works — which include The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) and My Name as Though It Were Written on the Surface of the Moon — to spirited if transgressive drawings of his cartoony clown subject limed in neon, Elusive Signs provided an accurate picture of Nauman’s extensive artistic career. Central to the exhibition and to his achievement were examples of his vast explorations of text, ranging from the terse Raw War to the overpowering One Hundred Live and Die.

To complement this insightful survey of Nauman’s light-based art, the Henry Art Gallery displayed a related text drawing, Eat Me/Feed Me. The Henry also presented three of his early single-channel video works in the museum’s lobby, in the elevator, and playing in the Media Gallery on the lower level.