A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, though occupying only four rooms at the Menil Collection in Houston, is an intense, richly complex and subtly disturbing exhibition. The curator in Houston, Franklin Sirmans, has helped create a fluid, dynamic exhibition space that highlights the extraordinary diversity of Nauman’s production from 1964–69 and establishes key themes and paths of development, while leaving many connections open-ended and available for viewers to pursue for themselves. Drawings, sculptures, photographs, video/film, and sound installations are all placed within the same spaces, and highly visceral, body pieces mix with the intellectual play of word-game works. As a result, the exhibition is wonderfully changeable, allowing for very different experiences in successive viewings. One actually hears the exhibition before seeing it. Initially identifiable only on the level of noise, the show is present the moment the door of the normally hushed Menil is opened. As one enters the corridor leading to the galleries, the noise becomes louder and also more varied. Muffled voices, breathing, and a mechanical whine separate themselves from other still-unidentifiable sounds. Walking down this hallway in the Menil, an institution so much shaped by Surrealism, begins to take on the quality of...