Zvukovna odjeća sastavljena od žice, perja, vlasulja, gumba, lutaka, listova, metala, plastike i drugih nađenih predmeta koji zajedno šuškaju dok se krećeš/plešeš i stvaraju buku. Vudu-odijelo za životinjski buket nepoznatog podrijetla koji priziva duhove. Ljudi kao pernate biljke koje rastu iz središta zemlje. Cvijeće koje pleše.
Jori Finkel: I Dream the Clothing Electric
“Could someone bring me a hairbrush?” he asked.
He was using his fingertips to smooth the surface of one of his newest pieces: a mannequin cloaked head to toe with a pelt of dyed human hair. The front featured bright pink spots against a dark brown background; the back, pink and purple zebra-style stripes.
“The hair creates an animal sensibility,” said Mr. Cave, who is himself bald, with a trim gray goatee. “You know it’s hair, but you don’t know where it comes from. It’s seductive but also a bit scary.”
So is a video of Mr. Cave, an Alvin Ailey-trained dancer, completely covered by the pelt. In the video he throws the electric-colored hair back and forth in a highly stylized, percussive, tribal-looking dance.
Over the last decade Mr. Cave has become known for making colorful, extravagant sculptures with this kind of double life: they can stand alone in galleries as visually compelling art objects, or they can be worn by dancers as vehicles for sound and movement. He calls them Soundsuits.
Some Soundsuits, like a bouquet of metal toys and tops perched on top of a bodysuit made of crocheted hot pads, make a clanking commotion. Others, like the Soundsuits made of human hair (bought already dyed from a wholesaler in New York), tend to fall in the quiet, whispery range. All come to life in performance.
Yerba Buena’s director, Kenneth Foster, who described his institution as “deeply multidisciplinary,” called Mr. Cave a natural choice for the center for that reason. “So many visual artists cross over in a way that the performance world would be aghast at,” he said. “Nick is one of the rare artists as strong in his secondary field as he is in his home art form.”
The current exhibition, which runs through July 5, features 40 Soundsuits, along with related photographs, videos and sculptures, prompting Mr. Cave to call it his most complete show to date. It is also his first survey on the West Coast, and will travel to the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2010.
He said he called the show “Meet Me at the Center of the Earth” — and planted a globe sculpture at the center of the main gallery — because he hopes the fruits of his imagination will help bring strangers together, if only to compare their perplexed responses. “I’ve been a voyeur at other shows of mine in the past, and I’ve seen complete strangers talking to each other,” he said. “They were saying, ‘What is that?’ Or, ‘I remember when my mother made doilies like that.’ ”
Mr. Cave, 50, credits his own mother with kick-starting his career by responding so enthusiastically to his very earliest artworks, like handmade birthday cards. It also helped, he said, that he was raised in central Missouri without much money.
“When you’re raised by a single mother with six brothers and lots of hand-me-downs, you have to figure out how to make those clothes your own,” he said. “That’s how I started off, using things around the house.” (He apparently took after his oldest brother Jack, a Chicago designer. As he installed his show, Mr. Cave wore a Gaultier shirt paired with one of his brother’s designs: a pair of long shorts made of conservative gray fabric with a flashy sport stripe running down the sides.)
He learned to sew at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he was a 1982 graduate. He described his first garment as “very flamboyant pants and shirt with a harlequin sensibility.” He said textiles immediately interested him for their expressive potential.
But then so did dance. During college he began studying dance through an Alvin Ailey program, training in Kansas City during the year and New York one summer. “I was always interested in movement,” he said, “but I knew I didn’t want to devote myself exclusively to dance. I wanted to bridge dance and art.”
It wasn’t until 1992, after he had obtained a master’s degree at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and landed a job teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where he is director of the graduate fashion program), that he took a major step in that direction. He made his first Soundsuit out of twigs.
“It was a very hard year for me because of everything that came out of the Rodney King beating,” he said. “I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man — as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as less than.”
One day, sitting on a bench in Grant Park in Chicago, he saw twigs on the ground in a new light: they looked forsaken too. He gathered them by the armful and cut them into three-inch sticks. He drilled holes through the sticks, so he could wire them to an undergarment of his own creation, completely covering the fabric.
As soon as the twig sculpture was finished, he said, he realized that he could wear it as a second skin: “I put it on and jumped around and was just amazed. It made this fabulous rustling sound. And because it was so heavy, I had to stand very erect, and that alone brought the idea of dance back into my head.”
The twig Soundsuit, now in a private collection, was the first of hundreds. With the help of several assistants he has made suits out of everything from sisal (“It looked like porcupine quills”) to hundreds of plastic buttons topped by an abacus (“I saw it as a face guard”), one of many flea-market discoveries. Beads, sequins and feathers — always sewn, never glued — are also favorite materials.
Some Soundsuits are made for performance; others go straight into the gallery system, mainly through the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York (where Soundsuits this winter sold for $45,000 each). Some are durable; others more fragile. But all, based on the human body, look as if they could easily spring into motion. The potential for dance is implicit in all of them.
The Soundsuits also explore themes of costuming and masquerading. Mr. Cave said he discovered this identity-altering power early on. “When I was inside a suit, you couldn’t tell if I was a woman or man; if I was black, red, green or orange; from Haiti or South Africa,” he said. “I was no longer Nick. I was a shaman of sorts.”
The extravagant ornamentation, colors and textures also connect the Soundsuits to tribal cultures. For instance in fashioning a piece out of doilies, he said, “I might be thinking about Kuba cloths, Haitian voodoo flags or Tibetan textiles.”
Still, the suits remain open to many other associations. Kate Eilertsen, the former Yerba Buena curator who oversaw the exhibition, talked about their resurrection of “traditional craft forms like macramé and crocheting,” while the New York curator Dan Cameron, in an essay for the show’s catalog, cites the “social sculpture” of the artist Joseph Beuys, the legacy of the drag queen Leigh Bowery in the London underground performance scene and the ornate costumes of African-American Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans.
“I think he’s picked up the threads of these — I wouldn’t say outlaw but slightly marginalized — traditions and pulled them into the front and center of museum culture,” said Mr. Cameron. He also praised the way Mr. Cave connects “static objects in a museum space with human movement,” comparing him in this respect to the sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney.
The Yerba Buena show highlights the performance potential of Mr. Cave’s work through a gallery of video projections, documenting the suits in action. The museum has also commissioned Ronald K. Brown, the New York choreographer, to stage performances using Soundsuits in its galleries from May 28 to 31.
Mr. Brown has one element in mind already. He plans to use a vigorous dance style from Senegal called Sabar to breathe rather explosive life into the suits. “I want to use that style,” he said, “because the arms and legs are very expressive. The legs extend so far from the body.”
Mr. Cave is not collaborating on these dances, but he is curious to attend them to see how the suits behave. He imagines this will inform his own long-term plan to choreograph an ambitious performance by 90 dancers wearing Soundsuits. Encouraged by a conversation with Chicago’s mayor, Richard M. Daley, who saw his show at the Chicago Cultural Center a few years ago, he hopes to stage this extravaganza in 2012 in Millennium Park there. “More and more I’m thinking of using the Soundsuits as a kind of orchestra. You could take three or five and record a concert,” he said. “Or you could take 90 Soundsuits and make a full symphony out of them.”
Claudine Isé: The Sounsuits of Nick Cave: Contemporary Art of Material Culture?
“It was a very hard year for me because of everything that came out of the Rodney King beating,” he said. “I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man — as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as less than.”Cave, you’ll remember, had a show at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2006. I really wish I’d been living in this city at the time so I could have seen it–Cave’s stuff is blowing my mind, and I need to know more about it, look at it up close and in person, watch the fur fly, so to speak.
One day, sitting on a bench in Grant Park in Chicago, he saw twigs on the ground in a new light: they looked forsaken too. He gathered them by the armful and cut them into three-inch sticks. He drilled holes through the sticks, so he could wire them to an undergarment of his own creation, completely covering the fabric.
As soon as the twig sculpture was finished, he said, he realized that he could wear it as a second skin: “I put it on and jumped around and was just amazed. It made this fabulous rustling sound. And because it was so heavy, I had to stand very erect, and that alone brought the idea of dance back into my head.”
The Fowler Museum explores art and material culture primarily from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, past and present. The Fowler seeks to enhance understanding and appreciation of the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the world through highly contextualized interpretive exhibitions, publications, and public programming, informed by interdisciplinary approaches and the perspectives of the cultures represented.Don’t get me wrong: the Fowler is a fantastic institution and will do a superb job with this show. My quibble is with what seems a questionable location of Cave’s work in terms of “material culture” when it really is better understood in terms of contemporary artistic practice–which is, you know, highly interdisciplinary itself nowadays, and which is why institutions like Yerba Buena’s are an ideal context for it.
Cave shows his Soundsuits at Jack Shainman alongside Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Michael Snow, Odil Donald Odita, Bob Knox, Tim Bavington–a diverse stable of artists involved in a wide range of practices, some interdisciplinary in nature, some less so. Check out Cage’s bio: He’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville and a bunch of other smaller contemporary art venues. That the Los Angeles venue of his biggest exhibition to date will be a cultural history museum rather than a contemporary art center seems a little out of context given where Cage has shown previously.
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