Nick Cave Gives Exactly What You Want

(Photo by Tyler Beard)

Since I put my journalistic hat on the shelf over a year ago I was a bit surprised when I received an invitation to attend the media preview for Nick Cave’s exhibition Sojourn at the Denver Art Museum. Was this a clerical mistake? Inviting a journalistic apostate turned art dealer to a sacred press junkit seemed akin to letting a fox browse the hen house. Still, I felt the early private look at Cave’s work, which I’ve been following for a number of years, was worth any potential embarrassment when the media relations staff saw me and realized their blunder. Besides it wouldn’t be the first time I crashed a party.

However, when I arrived and saw how lean Denver’s press core has grown, I decided it only fair to at least attempt to justify my presence at the preview.  And so, I’ve dusted off the keyboard to share some thoughts on the exhibition...

Since I first came across images of Nick Cave’s exuberant wearable art among the pages of both high and low brow art rags, I’ve been hoping for a chance to experience it in person. His most well known series – dubbed sound suits for the clacking noise made by early prototypes configured out of thousands of twigs –  are handmade outfits that engulf the entire body head-to-toe in thrifted skins made of glittering bobbles, beads, buttons, fake neon hair and various campy figurines. Transforming the wearer into a swapmeet deity, the suits resemble otherworldly tribal shamans come to life from a pile of your kooky aunt’s brick-a-brack collection.

Looking back to the exhibit, Sojourn seems an appropriate title. The show is very much a journey through the artist’s various modes of craft. Trained in fine art, textiles and dance, Cave incorporates this trinity of skills into his universally appealing objects. The exhibit begins in a dark room filled with a line of shimmering all-white sound suited mannequins. The surrounding black walls adorned all over with small buttons gives the sensation of twinkling stars in a galactic abyss. At the center a procession of shimmering guardians look down upon the viewer — truly an auspicious way to begin a voyage.

From this dark corridor I exited into a more traditional gallery space, a white walled hallway containing a single wall-sized object: a largely indigo oval covered in variously hued sequin depicting the artist’s childhood impression of looking up at a Southern night sky. However, this piece to me fell flat literally and figuratively in comparison to Cave’s more astonishing three dimensional pieces. This was reinforced for me when considering a much more spatially alluring, and charged brocade of shiny found objects by El Anatsui also on display at the DAM in their Material World’s exhibit.

Turning around I found at the opposite end of this hallway the first of a series of sculptures which put Cave’s found object formula into play in a purely static form. Here the artist created shrines for a series of found ceramic dogs that he places on cushioned furniture.  Surrounded by gaudy canopies of found trinkets the figurines are elevated to the status of sphinx like guardians of kitsch. Amidst these canines are a series of “paintings”, made from the same materials. While it was difficult to accept these works as paintings, they did appear to function as windows into a dimension overflowing with colorful and carefully arranged precious junk. Formally what these pieces lose in the potential energy of the sound suits, they gained for me in their environmental possibilities and I wished the pieces would break free from their confining geometry so I could literally enter this other meticulously tacky universe. These new pieces, all created specifically for the DAM are, like all of Cave’s work, a feast for the eyes and would certainly look handsome in an upscale loft. However, this seems in part problematic as I get the sensation that this easy digestibility is part of the impetous for the work at this point.

The following room is dedicated to a small a horde of multicolored soundsuits. This is the Nick Cave that people of all ages and all levels of the art world have come to adore. Assembled together en masse, there is no denying their collective aura. Here the personages succeed in perpetuating their own mythic qualities looking like a troupe of otherworldly beings. The suits include numerous archetypal forms of power and sex with plenty of phallic references (think Papal miters, KKK hoods, African tribal masks) lending them a historical poignancy without becoming overtly political.

Again while the work has an immediate impact in its laborious craft and recognizable signifiers of power, I can’t help but feel that there’s something of the safe marketing mind at work in steering away from any overtly challenging gestures. This rang true even more so for me after hearing Cave discuss how the work evolved from his reaction to the invisibility of the black body in America after the Rodney King beating in LA. Unlike his earlier sound suits, on display in some of the videos in the exhibition which transmit the duality of marginalization and empowerment through their camouflage materials and brooding monochromatic tribalism, the recent bobble covered, hyper-colorful objects feel candy-coated and crafted perfectly to function as a funky treasure in an Aspen ski chalet.

Bringing the exhibition to a close are two slow motion video projections. Depicting mesmerizing slow motion performances of the fashionable art in action, I found these two side by side projections exemplified the marked split in Cave’s work between brightly colored product display and charged meditations on power relations. In one of the videos, performers wear sound suits made of rainbow colored hair. Rolling, dancing and jumping on pogo sticks, the video highlights the playful ability of the activated bodies to create eye catching brightly plumed shapes.  Consequently this video comes directly from Cave’s work with the clothing brand United Colors of Beniton. Conversely next to this film is a mirror image of a performer in a single sound suit made from thousands of black tubes. Shifting their body and limbs to create a rippling display of darkness I couldn’t help but see rippling waves of oil, a dark and shifting Rorschach, pulling me into its depth and for a change not allowing my eye to skim easily across its surface.