Dance Like Nobody’s Watching

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Nick Cave, “Soundsuit,” 2011

mixed media, including vintage toys, pipe cleaners, bugle beads, upholstery, metal and mannequin, 109” x 38” x 31” (Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, © Nick Cave; photo by James Prinz Photography)

When I sat down with Nick Cave at the Glenbow two days before the opening of his first solo Canadian exhibition, my final inquiry was “what question do you get asked the most?” 

“That’s a weird question” Cave replied, grinning quizzically. “I would say it’s more about the question not asked the most.”

Seeing Cave’s work in person for the first time, it can be difficult to reconcile his playful garments, elaborate assemblages and immersive installations with race, the oft under-questioned currency.

Yet his array of whimsical and dazzling chimeras, borne from negative experiences with authority and related oppression, aims to catalyze personal progress and societal agency. 

Think of it as responding to police brutality and shedding queer fear by turning the tables on repression with celebratory mantles that embrace unlikely power dressing.

Those already familiar with Cave's artistry will likely know his sound suits: oversized wearable art fabricated from a vast ensemble of materials that are often considered as consumable culture. First conceived after the 1991 beating of African-American Rodney King by Los Angeles police, Cave’s acoustic suits are at once an anonymous veil and a celebratory foil to the white noise of populist prejudice.

Buttons, beads, statuettes and souvenirs, many of them drawn from the artist’s personal and familial recollections are found in most of his works, including 3D paintings, sculpture and installation that make for an enveloping experience.

One genesis was losing a grandparent and thence memories of the family's china collectibles in a glass-fronted cabinet. Such examples of homage and personally loaded objects are assembled and transformed into elaborate and highly embellished forms. 

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Nick Cave, “Wall Relief,” 2013

mixed media, including ceramic birds, metal flowers, afghans, strung crystals and gramophone, 97” x 74” x 21” (courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, © Nick Cave; photo by James Prinz Photography)

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Nick Cave, “Wall Relief” (detail), 2013

mixed media, including ceramic birds, metal flowers, afghans, strung crystals and gramophone, 97” x 74” x 21” (courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, © Nick Cave; photo by James Prinz Photography)

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At the Calgary show – on view until Sept. 22 and the only Canadian stop for a tour organized by the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee – multiple sound suits are exhibited on a low runway-like plinth. It fills your peripheral vision and inspires thoughts of wearing one of these festooning garments. Indeed, Cave says he strives to convey “what it would be like to be consumed” by them. It’s a conceptual embodiment, if you will.

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Nick Cave, “Soundsuit,” 2013

mixed media, including vintage bunny, safety pin craft baskets, hot pads, fabric, metal and mannequin, 110” x 33” x 37” (courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, © Nick Cave; photo by James Prinz Photography)

Although I’ve known Cave’s art for more than a decade, I was awestruck when first entering the exhibition. I then struggled with what may seem like a problematic embrace of excess. But after sharing this challenge with Cave – that an over-abundance of authority and rampant consumerism are both undesirable excesses – I came around to his way of thinking. 

What’s key is how to create “a duality of the domestic and aesthetic” within the same object: a conceptual dueling and queering of the everyday into new content. When I suggested that a psychoanalytical or, rather, a reverse psychoanalytical context was in play, Cave nodded. “Yes, it’s very complex.” 

Above all, what ties this game is play itself. It helps make sense not just of the show’s title, Feat, but also how artful objects can playfully disguise rigorous theories for those who wish to dig deeper. Think of Cave’s creations as Amenable Objects, to invoke Canadian cultural critic and psychiatrist Jeanne Randolph’s splendid treatise, and then ask how to be more amenable to accommodating otherness with beauty. ■

Nick Cave: Feat is on view at the Glenbow in Calgary from June 29 to Sept. 22, 2019.