In 1992, when Nick Cave made his first vocal suits, the textured, full-body clothing for which he is best known, it was his response to Rodney King being beaten by police officers. Cave described this configuration as an “inflammatory response,” a conduit of anger and helplessness directed at something theoretically wearable and visually enveloping.
The first suit, with its spiky skin of twigs and branches, was a remedy for both racial profiling and physical weakness—the armor as a protest. The continued relevance of the soundtrack, 30 years later, is both a triumph for the 63-year-old and an unending nightmare. Cave has created nearly 500 models.
Copy from 2011, shown "In addition to," A beautiful and deeply sad survey of Cave's work at the Guggenheim, shows how soundsuits have evolved since then, into semi-autonomous beings. A massive exoskeleton of chopped branches and draped over a metal production organ, it looks human, but only only. His shoulders slumped, and the weight of his massive head made him look like Maurice Sendak's creature—something monstrous, terrifying and sad. She stands as a giant, an entity that, in the Jewish tradition, is carved out of the earth and animated as the protector of an oppressed community.
Cave made many versions of twigs, but these are outliers; Vocal suits tend to be elaborately ornate, forgoing organic materials for consumer products, laden with scaffolding of lost toys or resplendent with beads, buttons and artificial flowers. Unlike that first suit, intended to camouflage the wearer like a piece of tactical equipment, Cave's vocal suits are now as inconspicuous as a brass band in a monastery. They reach fantastic levels of luminosity, sprouting towers from classroom balls or covered in tousled hair, like monstrous dolls swarmed into Manic Panic's lair.
Voice prostheses are the most famous part of Cave's practice (he translated it into mosaics in subway lanes Down Times Square and bloated photo puzzles) Of course the draw is here, but it's also part of his larger project, which focuses on the black American body and the ways in which it is devalued and brutalized. sponsored Naomi Beckwith, Scan is a condensed version that originated earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, in Cave's hometown. This past January, the Guggenheim appointed Beckwith as chief curator and deputy director, and she has modified the exhibition here.
As in Chicago, "Furthermore" is organized into three sections titled "What Was," "What Is," and "What Should Be," a rough lens of the past, present, and future through which Cave's themes can be internalized. (The gallery wisely avoids the word “Afrofuturism,” which has recently been broadened as a curatorial concept; attempts to look to the future have not been successful, as the past few years have shown.)
It is likely that this structure would have flowed naturally over the museum's rotunda, but this building is currently occupied Alex Katz. Instead, it is sliced between three floors of galleries in the tower, in imprecise chronological order. ("What It Was" includes work from 1999 to 2015, a time frame that overlaps the next two, so anyone hoping for a literal read of the Cave's development will be held back.) Sections focus on the many bodies of Cave's work: its larger bas-reliefs; cast in bronze sculptures; Finally, soundsuits. Cave's performance and video work, often suggestive, are largely absent, presumably due to considerations of space. (There are three short films buried in the museum's screening room that are worth seeing.)
- Department of plastic arts and exhibitions
However, recurring motifs emerge: a cave-magpie's eye for shiny objects, an ardor for recycling, and his affection for whimsical mimicry of the natural world. The action here is united by a twin horror: the myriad of psychological oppression endured by black Americans—ugly caricatures and published images grafted onto Americana cliches like carnival games and spit, the echoes of which are still felt—and the sea of plastic trash that threatens to choke us. Likes Curt Schwitters, Cave delights in shimmering trash, but the tchotchkes rescued from Cave are meant to chime in with the way life in this country is so easily thrown away. There's a graceful moral consideration about material acquisition, and a haunting evocation of the ways time folds in on itself—how nothing is ever lost, not even the creepy herbal motifs, if they are remembered.
The middle section largely turns into the cave's found cast bronze sculptures, many of which spread the artist's disembodied limbs and are decorated with intricate floral motifs. They are confrontational, sometimes eloquently, as in the pieces in which arms and hands reach from the walls in vague gestures, outstretched and towel-laden, poses suggestive of servility and evocation of psychological negativity, Like Robert Guber But with a hair less merciful.
Elsewhere, where a head rests on an American flag assembled from spent shotgun shells or a stack of comically flag-print T-shirts, the effect is plain and flat. They seem to want to invoke surrealism's ability to make sense of disaster, but it pales in comparison to the everyday surrealism of surviving this country, which is beyond art's ability to depict it. As in “Platform” (2018), an installation of hideous bronze gramophones sprouting limbs, much of the experience of American life can be equated with opening one’s mouth to scream and finding no sound.
All fashion is, after all, a kind of armor. And sound suits are, in essence, clothes. In drapery, subtlety, and a sense of drama, they show the hand of a courtier (Al-Ghoussein, in particular, called out the brilliant mind of Alexander McQueen. Razor clam dress). As much as Cave suits suggest forms of indeterminate folklore, the ornate headdresses that follow from the exuberant costumes designed for J'Ouvert's ceremonies and original ceremonial regalia, they also pull from the drag camp, baroque stage costumes of funk acts like George Clinton and Earth, Wind and Fire, and Vanity. Excessive by Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler.
How he ran an eponymous fashion line in the 90s, He convincingly exploits the irony of fashion, and its simultaneous desire for concealment and recognition, in ways that both survey black cultural history and illuminate its own fears. “Hustle Coat” (2021), a trench coat that disguises a jacket of striped jewels and Rolexes, is a witty spectacle gag on street hawkers, but also an idea of “ghetto coolness,” a style of confronting deprivation.
"Golem" in Hebrew can mean "incomplete". Cave's vocal prostheses are supposed to be moved by the body, by which it produces the gangling, rustling, and clattering sounds that give it its name. Lined up neatly, politely fixed, looking at them can be frustratingly anti-climactic. They're an amazing level of craftsmanship (and conservation), but they want to achieve their goal, which is to move and rock.
Cave art turns on performance, Communion through rituals and shared grief. In their absence, we imagine the weight of a suit made of hundreds of stocking monkeys, and take at their word the strength of their talismanic power.
Artists now like to invoke the idea of joy, a radical challenge in the face of so much plotting against it. The gallery's mural text evokes the word. But there is little joy to be found. In their ability to anonymize and deny identity, voice groups propose a model of a utopian future, in which gender, race, and sexual orientation become irrelevant.
Meanwhile, the sonic suits are tragic figures, bracing for violence, and their bric-a-brac shells poised to absorb the pain, which inevitably comes. The effort required to wear their extensive braces makes them arduous, at least therapeutically unsound. They ask us to think about the kind of country we have left, if that's what it takes just to survive.
Nick Cave: Furthermore
through April 10, 2023, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-423 3500; guggenheim.org.
Source link
0 Comments