Modern Painters | March 2009
Tailor-Made Music
A few years ago, Nick Cave found himself picking up single gloves off the sidewalks of Chicago, the city the Missouri-born artist now calls home. Once he’d amassed a fair-size collection of lone gloves and mittens, he realized the impulse stemmed directly from the loss of his youngest brother, who died of an infection after accidentally swallowing a penny. Cave created a sculpture, titled Trust, using the found gloves. How do you find beauty in loss? This is the question Cave attempts to answer through his work, and he often succeeds in springing the lock on crusty old castoffs to reveal the vivid possibilities lying within.
Cave lives and works in the South Loop, just a few blocks from where the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, and countless other rock, jazz, and blues singers belted their hearts out in the ’50s and ’60s. The proximity of legendary recording studio Chess Records is appropriate, since the 49-year-old artist is known for his “soundsuits,” stunningly elaborate costumes that sometimes double as instruments. Often, these suits feature a precarious headdress made from a variety of materials, such as porcelain birds or Victorian-style metal flowers, and the suits appear to writhe with artificial life—the final effect being something like a Dalíesque Las Vegas showgirl.
Cave made his first soundsuit while he was in art school, in response to the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991. At the time, he was studying at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, and Cave took advantage of the campus’s wooded surroundings by collecting hundreds of twigs from the ground. Using the twigs, he began to build a figure based on the superhuman version of the man King’s assailants claimed to have seen—they explained their behavior by describing King as threateningly “buffed out”—resulting in a form that looks like a cross between a woolly mammoth and Chewbacca.
At first, Cave thought the twig suit would be a sculpture, but then he realized he could put it on. When he began moving, the twigs rattled like a shakere. “I started noticing the ways it affected other senses apart from sight,” Cave recalls, “such as smell and sound. Then I began to see the potential in making such a suit, and it became something else, something not really related to the King beating at all.”
Since then, Cave has made some 200 soundsuits, many of which function as costumes and as sculpture. He is currently collaborating with choreographer Ronald K. Brown, who will create a dance using the suits to be performed in the galleries of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where Cave’s solo exhibition opens this month. Despite having danced with Alvin Ailey for several years, Cave is not involved in the actual choreography. “I would like to experience my suits as a member of the audience,” he explains, rather than as someone controlling the conditions of their display.
During a recent visit to Cave’s studio, two assistants were busily sewing fabric pieces in preparation for a show at Jack Shainman in New York, and as Cave leaned down to give instructions (“Make sure you stitch around the pattern”), I noticed a huge selection of thrift-store sweaters in several neat piles on a nearby table. Most were gaudily trimmed with embroidered flowers and sequins, which Cave removes and uses to decorate his creations. For Cave, who considers flea-market scavenging part of his practice and has traveled as far as Minnesota for three-day-long flea markets, such overlooked items as plaster Easter bunnies and trashy secondhand clothes—or lost gloves—can be inspiration for raiment worthy of a peacock. “I am always looking at material in terms of potential,” he says. Indeed, the artist’s array of materials evokes a vast range of referents, and as a result his suits are likely to conjure myriad associations, from Alice in Wonderland to Mummenschanz to raffia tube dresses from the Ivory Coast or porcupine-quill tunics from Cameroon. Which is to say that they are more complex, both emotionally and in terms of their engagement with history, than they may at first appear. “On the surface, the suits can be fun, whimsical, and outrageous,” Cave says. “But when you break it down, and start really looking at them, there’s a dark side.”
“Meet me at the Center of the Earth: New Work by Nick Cave,” will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Galleries, San Francisco, from Mar. 28 through Jul. 12.
Modern Painters | March 2009
Tailor-Made Music
A few years ago, Nick Cave found himself picking up single gloves off the sidewalks of Chicago, the city the Missouri-born artist now calls home. Once he’d amassed a fair-size collection of lone gloves and mittens, he realized the impulse stemmed directly from the loss of his youngest brother, who died of an infection after accidentally swallowing a penny. Cave created a sculpture, titled Trust, using the found gloves. How do you find beauty in loss? This is the question Cave attempts to answer through his work, and he often succeeds in springing the lock on crusty old castoffs to reveal the vivid possibilities lying within.
Cave lives and works in the South Loop, just a few blocks from where the Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, and countless other rock, jazz, and blues singers belted their hearts out in the ’50s and ’60s. The proximity of legendary recording studio Chess Records is appropriate, since the 49-year-old artist is known for his “soundsuits,” stunningly elaborate costumes that sometimes double as instruments. Often, these suits feature a precarious headdress made from a variety of materials, such as porcelain birds or Victorian-style metal flowers, and the suits appear to writhe with artificial life—the final effect being something like a Dalíesque Las Vegas showgirl.
Cave made his first soundsuit while he was in art school, in response to the Rodney King beating in Los Angeles in 1991. At the time, he was studying at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, and Cave took advantage of the campus’s wooded surroundings by collecting hundreds of twigs from the ground. Using the twigs, he began to build a figure based on the superhuman version of the man King’s assailants claimed to have seen—they explained their behavior by describing King as threateningly “buffed out”—resulting in a form that looks like a cross between a woolly mammoth and Chewbacca.
At first, Cave thought the twig suit would be a sculpture, but then he realized he could put it on. When he began moving, the twigs rattled like a shakere. “I started noticing the ways it affected other senses apart from sight,” Cave recalls, “such as smell and sound. Then I began to see the potential in making such a suit, and it became something else, something not really related to the King beating at all.”
Since then, Cave has made some 200 soundsuits, many of which function as costumes and as sculpture. He is currently collaborating with choreographer Ronald K. Brown, who will create a dance using the suits to be performed in the galleries of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, where Cave’s solo exhibition opens this month. Despite having danced with Alvin Ailey for several years, Cave is not involved in the actual choreography. “I would like to experience my suits as a member of the audience,” he explains, rather than as someone controlling the conditions of their display.
During a recent visit to Cave’s studio, two assistants were busily sewing fabric pieces in preparation for a show at Jack Shainman in New York, and as Cave leaned down to give instructions (“Make sure you stitch around the pattern”), I noticed a huge selection of thrift-store sweaters in several neat piles on a nearby table. Most were gaudily trimmed with embroidered flowers and sequins, which Cave removes and uses to decorate his creations. For Cave, who considers flea-market scavenging part of his practice and has traveled as far as Minnesota for three-day-long flea markets, such overlooked items as plaster Easter bunnies and trashy secondhand clothes—or lost gloves—can be inspiration for raiment worthy of a peacock. “I am always looking at material in terms of potential,” he says. Indeed, the artist’s array of materials evokes a vast range of referents, and as a result his suits are likely to conjure myriad associations, from Alice in Wonderland to Mummenschanz to raffia tube dresses from the Ivory Coast or porcupine-quill tunics from Cameroon. Which is to say that they are more complex, both emotionally and in terms of their engagement with history, than they may at first appear. “On the surface, the suits can be fun, whimsical, and outrageous,” Cave says. “But when you break it down, and start really looking at them, there’s a dark side.”
“Meet me at the Center of the Earth: New Work by Nick Cave,” will be on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Galleries, San Francisco, from Mar. 28 through Jul. 12.
