After the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, Nick Cave found himself walking outside looking for twigs. What he would ultimately do with them, he didn’t know yet. But something about King’s story compelled him to collect and build from this discarded material. Through careful drilling, he wove them together into a large, humanoid sculpture. Only when it was done did he realize that he could wear it.
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“And then the moment that I wore it and moved, it made sound,” Cave recalls. “All of a sudden I heard something and I was like, ‘Oh.’ That led me to think about roles of protests. In order to be heard, you’ve got to speak louder.”
Nick Cave’s Art on theMART Projection. [Photo: courtesy of Art on theMART]Forothermore is a portmanteau of “forevermore” and the “other.” “It’s really talking about those that are not forgotten. So, at the end of the day, when I think about this work, this work is in honor of George Floyd, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor. I mean, we could just go on and on,” Cave says. “And so this is really my acknowledging those lives that have been lost to gun violence, police brutality. In their honor, it’s for us to understand [their] impact. We may not think that we are affected by that, but we all are certainly affected by it.”
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Nick Cave, Drive-By (still) 2010. [Photo: James Prinz]You might consider the entire exhibit as an architectural Soundsuit: a safe space Cave has carefully designed to challenge and disorient you, while bolstering your psyche with tole flowers and sequins. (He even removed several significant pieces from the exhibition to better choreograph visitors’ experience and allow pieces to breathe.) As he says in a video at the beginning of the exhibit, before you walk through a dizzying space of thousands of spinning mobiles, his work “sits on the fence of beauty and ugly . . . beauty is what gives my work the strength to overcome the darkness.”
Nick Cave, HEARD•NY, 2013. [Photo: James Prinz]The meaning of Soundsuits has been unpacked many times by art critics and Cave himself, but each explanation—even his own—always plateaus at 90% of what you feel when looking at them. When worn by dancers, they are a protective, second skin, anchored by the experience of being profiled as a Black man in America, but offering anyone the sensation of erasing their identity and seeing who is left inside.
No two people move the same way in a suit, Cave explains. The suits are a shield and a celebration. Their sound is also protest, an agitation, or a squeal of pain. “I’m interested in, how do you understand the potential within that object?” says Cave, perhaps because to see the potential of a Soundsuit is to recognize the potential in yourself.
Cave tells me that many of the objects he chooses for his work are picked in response to tragedy in his life, while he often discovers their meaning later. “A moment something happens that emotionally triggers me, is the moment that I’m grappling, trying to find the material language to bring understanding in that moment,” says Cave. “It’s like being a teenager and you can’t quite communicate what you’re feeling.”
As he became an artist and began taking residencies—before Soundsuits were a gleam in his eye—that improvisational nature served him well. “I would just grab my backpack and just jump on a plane. I would send no materials, nothing. I literally just grab my backpack and just go. I could be gone for like six months. I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to make when I get there. I’m going and I’m just going to figure it out.’ So, I’ve always been this artist that’s been curious about, who am I and what does this medium mean to me? And how am I going to approach clay? How am I going to approach wood?” Cave says. “I’ve always just jumped in. And for me, I think the most important thing is finding the means necessary to support the idea. Not everything can be in wood. Not everything can be in fiber. Not everything can be in clay. I’m interested in, what’s going to best to illustrate what it is that I want to say?”
“You strip away what you know about the fundamentals of dance and you start to think more about the physicality of my action with these limitations and restrictions,” Cave says. “And yet I’ve got to project within those limitations.”
