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Unless Wittgenstein and Samuel Beckett are on your bedtime reading list, official descriptions of Bruce Nauman's exhibition, opening today at Walker Art Center, make it sound like so much artsy tedium. 

But just get into the galleries - yow! They're a cerebral circus of light, sound and motion. Videotapes of frenetic clowns and a battling couple make disconcerting symphonies; choruses of neon words and pictures light up entire walls; a grim carousel of contorted taxidermy forms goes round and round, etching a quiet gray line on the floor. 

Even in an era that has made sensory overload a way of life, Nauman's art provokes and surprises in an unforgettable way. 

Nauman, 52, is a genuine Big Deal, and so is this show, a 30-year retrospective of his multifarious career. Co-curated by Walker director Kathy Halbreich and Neal Benezra of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., it opened in November in Madrid and will conclude its tour next year at New York's Museum of Modern Art. 

The show is this month's Art in America cover story - an itchy paean by critic Peter Schjeldahl (who will be here to lecture on Nauman's work April 26). Schjeldahl calls the artist ``the best - the essential - American artist of the last quarter century.'' 

Halbreich agrees, comparing him to 18th century Spanish master Goya in his scope and importance. ``He's interested in what makes us human,'' she says. For a guy with this kind of reputation in art, Nauman plays life in a remarkably low-key way, on a ranch outside Santa Fe, N.M., where he trains horses, reads mystery novels and enjoys the wide-open spaces with his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg. In a 1992 profile of her, Vanity Fair called Nauman a ``multiple-threat vanguard artist-cum-sensitive cowboy ... the Sam Shepard of the art world.'' 

Nauman's personal bearing has links to his work, in which he has flirted with self-revelation while ultimately covering up himself. Endlessly the subject of his own sculptures, videos and photographs in the early stages of his career, he was criticized for narcissism during a 1972 retrospective. 

Yet the man who once smeared his testicles with black stage makeup before the camera is gentle and pleasant by phone, with an easy laugh and an ego that seems to be well in check. 

``In the beginning, I really wanted to control the viewer's apprehension of the work as much as I could - there was a certain amount of insecurity,'' he says. ``Over the years, it became easier to allow interpretation. Sometimes, (the interpretations) are are very far-fetched, sometimes they add to the work, and add to my understanding of it.'' 

Yet he is loathe to be the one doing the explaining. He'll offer detailed descriptions of his art-making process, but ask him about the meaning of a work, and the words stop flowing. 

Appropriately, the show opens with a series of 1967-68 films in which the artist covers his face and body with opaque stage makeup, all the while wearing a poignantly blank expression on his face. 

The rest of the first gallery gathers works in a wealth of different media; Nauman always seeks the right material for the idea instead of vice versa. There's a slow-paced black-and-white video, ``Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube,'' that recalls the somnolent films of Andy Warhol, and a corridor of cell-like rooms outfitted with neon, video and sound. 

A group of early sculptures includes ``Henry Moore Bound to Fail,'' a waxed plaster mold of Nauman's arms tied behind his back that refers to the art-historical baggage Nauman felt in Moore, who sculpted monumental figures. A curious collection of colored-wax heads dangle from wires in the gallery center, like an eerie science-fiction experiment. 

Apparent here and throughout the show is a rough finish and crude economy of materials, which has characterized Nauman's work as far back as graduate school, when he abandoned painting as too ``lush'' a medium for his ideas to come through. 

``I wanted the weight of the idea to be important, and I mistrusted the idea of beautiful paint, or anything that seemed too easy,'' he explains. ``I preferred things more prickly.'' 

Even though the works use raw, unconventional materials, and expose their means of the support or the machinery that makes them tick, they exude an off-kilter grace and a keen understanding of form. 

``It's a considerable talent to try not to make things beautiful and end up with very beautiful objects,'' says Benezra. 

The beauty of the work doesn't mitigate the prickly aspect, however. The three cell-like rooms, for example, bear messages meant to discomfit. First, in neon, a crude rendering of the child's word game, hangman, perhaps a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein's assertion that language is not a strictly verbal construct. Nauman takes the game to its grim, grown-up conclusion by making the hangman die again and again, with a dangling tongue and an exaggerated erection. 

The next, the ``Good Boy Bad Boy'' room, uses image and sound in two videos in which a man and a woman utter sometimes judgmental phrases that make viewers feel like they've been summoned to the principal's office. 

The last room contains no images at all, only words - ``sleep and live, sleep and die; kill and die, kill and live'' - issuing from speakers. Standing inside listening to the actors' staccato delivery is not a happy experience. 

Further on, the discomfort gets even louder. ``Clown Torture'' was inspired by such diverse sources as the Harlem Globetrotters (who Nauman remembers chasing around the court with a bucket of ``water'' that was really confetti) and experimental musician Steve Reich, whose mastery of repetitive rhythms intrigued Nauman, a onetime musician himself. 

Despite such uncomfortably funny passages as a clown sitting on the toilet with a magazine, the upshot is a genuinely horrifying work, due in part to the repetition: a clown on the floor screaming ``No, no, no!'' or getting struck by a falling bucket over and over again. 

The piece is fascinating as a strictly abstract exploration of sound and image, yet the creepy narrative can't help but suggest some of the sorrier aspects of the human condition, the endless struggle that is life. 

Some of the sculptures are gentler in form, but with references no less menacing. The elegant-looking ``South America Triangle,'' for example - with an upside-down chair suspended within a triangle of steel beams - magically, horribly suggests torture by corrupt regimes. 

No wonder Nauman has been relevant to so many generations of artists - from those who questioned making traditional objects to artists today who bring increasing social consciousness to their work. 

Although Nauman says it was difficult for him to reconnect with a number of early works in the retrospective, the sound sculpture ``Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room'' is ``still very powerful for me. 

``A number of these early works were made when I was young and didn't have an audience in the first place. The struggles, frustrations and joys of doing work were more raw. There was a time, (evident) in that piece in particular, when there was a certain naivete that allowed you to do things that five years later would be hard to do - a way of exposing yourself.'' 

``Get Out of My Mind,'' made in 1968, remains powerfully effective to viewers, too. A simple chamber is filled only with Nauman's loud, menacing whisper entreating us to ``get out of the room, get out of my mind.'' To remain in the room is to defy the artists plea; there's a terrible, yearning tension between engagement and alienation. 

Here, and elsewhere, we are given to understand Nauman's interest in Beckett, whose sense of existential futility informs may works - the auto-erotic hangman, the enclosed rooms and corridors, the fragmented humor that makes for horrible wholes. 

But where does it all leave us? 

Halbreich recalls an exchange with a board member at the show's opening in Madrid, who lamented, ``There are so few answers!'' 

Halbreich's response: ``One (answer) is you're born; the other, you die. In between, everything is questions.'' 

As for the artist, he admits to being driven by a certain darkness of vision. Nauman recalls a conversation with Schjeldahl, a poet as well as critic: ``We both felt our work came from a sense of anger and frustration, which doesn't make individual works, but motivated you to get into the studio. For Peter and I, it was what got us going every day.'' 

As he recovers from the rigors of helping shape the retrospective, Nauman continues to work, recently employing a super-slow-motion camera to record everyday objects and odd activities. 

``Someone called me a pessimist, but that can't be true or I couldn't do anything,'' he says. ``I think I'm an optimist to do anything, to even put it out in the world.'' 

As if to underscore the heart at the center of his often brutal work, Walker has concluded the show with a 1967 neon, inspired by a beer sign in his San Francisco storefront studio window. Blue letters within a pink spiral spell out ``The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths.'' 

It sounds corny, but in Nauman's case, it seems to be true.