NICK CAVE
By Alissa Bennet
The beauty of artist Nick Cave's work is paralytic; discarded objects (both physically and historically) are transformed into absolute spectacle, glamorous and glittering monuments to the desire of the gaze. Some of his works, like the Soundsuits for which he is most known for, are literally kinetic when activated by the wearer (generally Cave himself). These works are constructed alternately of found objects such as twigs and bottle caps, or of psychedelically dyed human hair, and when the works are put on a body, they emit a sound specific to the material from which they are made. The Soundsuits shake and sway, blur and undulate, they swish and rattle in an ebullient celebration of vision and sound. Other works, specifically those constructed out of the readymade relics of America's romance with racism, offer themselves in static over-abundance: a lawn jockey balances what we can only interpret to be a slave ship on out stretched arms, a cross constructed in the form of a knick-knack shelve holds the same commercially produced Sambo doll on each of its receptacles in a visual reproduction of an echo. The commonality of all of Cave's sculptures is that each retains the ability to offer a particular sort of visual pleasure that accesses a deeper and much more sinister channel of narrative; Cave's utilization of the tropes of beauty is simply a means of immediate engagement, a way to stall viewers long enough to confront them with notions of alienation, socio-historical persecution, and a very personal request on Cave's part that we reconsider the absolute violence of history in order to conceive of a contemporary antidote for it.
Cave suggests that the Soundsuits in particular offer the spectator the opportunity to experience what he refers to as "a dream state," an encounter with a living and moving object dramatically othered from anything that can be located in reality. The Suits, which conceal the faces of their wearers and replace identity with something in between the nightmarish and the sublime, activate our desire for the spectacle while at the same time referencing the social and cultural constructs endemic to the horrors of American history. These works conflate the aesthetics of celebration with our notions of anxiety by simultaneously referencing the child-like desire to witness something magical with hegemonic concepts of race and racism. Many of the Suits are reminiscent simultaneously of the KKK robe and African tribal masquerade costumes, and as such they act as a flash point for the notion of the uncanny. They appear familiar to us not only because we are able to engage with them in a purely aesthetic sense, but likewise because they embody our fears of The Mystical Savage, the uncontrolled and uncontrollable.
The Suits that are constructed from hair are perhaps the most immediately legible; they are the literalization of the relationship between commodity and the body and as such offer us a confrontational interpretation of the relationship between race and labor: in short, the individual can and will be reduced to his physical potential for production, and in no means is this more clear than in the commodification of harvested of body parts. Slavery and the lingering racial stereotypes it left behind animalize the African American by reducing him to the capabilities of his body, and The Soundsuits work to exploit and reconfigure this relationship both conceptually and literally.
Concepts of labor are central to Cave's work, specifically because of notions related to craft fetishism. In the early 20th century, it became fashionable for the white bourgeoisie to purchase quilts handmade by African American women. These quilts, constructed of remnants, found fabrics, and worn-out garments were initially used both for warmth and as room dividers in slave quarters. The interest in collecting these quilts perfectly illustrates the means by which the utilitarian necessecity is transmogrified into luxury by means of cultural and racial tourism. When constructing a Soundsuits, Cave scours second hand shops for used and discarded garments which can then be patched together and re-appropriated, transforming the refuse of the everyday into the exotic, altering the status of excess simply by reconfiguring the means by which we encounter it.
While all of Cave's Suits are handmade by the artist, some obviously (and purposefully) pander to the spectator's desire to encounter the artist's hand in the products of his work. The concern with craft that each work displays is Cave's feigned expression of Accessory Beauty- the tactility and glamour of these works is simply a foil to engage the viewer in a dialogue, to confront the spectator with both the pleasure of voyeurism, as well as with his own connotations and cultural expectations of what these objects mean both in the context of the gallery and society.
The Soundsuits embody and reference disaffection and anonymity. By constructing the Suits as sculptural objects that appeal to our concepts of visual pleasure, Cave is ideally able to stall the gaze long enough to question us about our relationship to alienation and to ask how open we are to reconfiguring the social constructs under which all prejudices are allowed to proliferate. By denying the transparency that oppression typically shields itself with and replacing it with spectacle, Cave offers us parable, a new lens through which to view the familiar.
The true complexity of Cave’s work resides beneath the shimmering, clattering, and swaying surfaces of his sculptures. The tactile, visual, and auditory pleasure each work produces is a means of seduction, a way to bring the spectator close enough to ask him, with a swish of day-glo hair or the soft tick of colliding twigs, what is your relationship to the history of alienation and how can we go about progressing beyond it? “As an artist, I want to move forward,” Cave told me in a recent phone conversation from his Chicago studio. “ I want to move forward, and I want to bring you with me.”
