Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art has built a reputation for adventurous fashion shows, but none of the finery seen on their catwalk is comparable to Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, on view in Meet Me at the Center of the Earth.
Sprawling through two exhibition halls in SMoCA, the show is like a mix-up of outsized storybook dioramas, indoor sculpture park and Mardi Gras costume storage rooms, with hints of an ethnographic museum—if the culture studied was, say, from Sun Ra’s Saturn.
Otherworldly exotic, the Soundsuits come from the studio of fabric sculptor and former Alvin Ailey dancer Nick Cave, who maintains the atelier tradition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he directs the school’s fashion program and leads a large group of young artists and fabricators in his own workshop.
The Soundsuits, named for the sounds the fabric sculptures make when worn, are made from a startling range of found material. Pieces of cloth with beads and sequins, bits of knitting, crocheted potholders, human hair and gloves picked up in the streets of a Chicago winter have been carefully sewn together to construct dozens of creatures that, Cave says, are inspired by the West African festival of Egungun, a celebration of the Orisas, or ancestors of the Yoruba people.
From Haiti to Brazil and New Orleans, the rituals brought over to the Americas through the Middle Passage of slavery have blended with other religious practices to form a synchretic religion—Voudoun—that melds Christianity with Native American and African traditions. The first Soundsuit made of twigs was, however, a personal ritual and response by the artist to another more recent memory.
In 1994, two years after the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, Nick Cave collected twigs from a park near his home, and began to break them in small pieces and drill holes through the wood. Like beads, they were sewn in rows to assemble a rough fabric that he used to construct a huge half-human beast—a reaction to Los Angeles police officers describing Rodney King and other African American men as “monsters… bigger than life.” At first, the twig-man Cave had made stood alone as his own monster, but when he shimmied inside the creature he was surprised that it made a soft clicking sound like wind through brush when he moved. So, the Soundsuits were born.
Unlike many artists who have a solo practice, Cave brings his teaching role at the Institute into his own studio by working with fabricators who, Cave says, “are artists in their own right,” to make the Soundsuits, which over the years now number over 200. Meticulous in overseeing the rigors of craft, Cave works closely with each artist to see where she might best fit in the studio, but is not a harsh overseer. The studio flows through subtle interactions, not directives. He explains, “I have ideas in my head, but there is no drawing, it all comes from intuition, a sort of letting go from trained discipline to allow the materials to lead the way. It’s a meditation. The work has brought clarity.”
Brilliant in their quiet array in Scottsdale, the Soundsuits come alive in performances that the artist has staged across the country in traditional performance spaces, and on the street. An upcoming project will present 70 Soundsuits worn by local musicians, dancers and actors in each place that he visits.
“Ideally, I’d like to travel the world doing work with each community I visit,” said Cave, “The art thing is all fine and dandy, but what’s really important is humanitarian work.”
The word “humanitarian” sounds a bit odd, or strained, until one recalls that Cave is not only a visual artist and organizer, but a performer whose roots in dance bring a constant urgency to not just look at other bodies, but to feel his own skin. Magazine photos and streaming video are phantoms. The Soundsuit covers every inch of its wearer like an embrace.
“The whole idea of physical touch is going to become obsolete—it’s crazy disturbing.”
For those of us not equipped with these new skin ticklers, Cave conjectures what will happen when his crew of Soundsuits passes by on the street in your town.
“You could be out to lunch or having a screwed up day and turn the corner, and what the hell? How are you going to deal with that at the dinner table? Like—I saw a man in a twig suit today?
Nick Cave—Meet Me at the Center of the Earth
On View to November 29
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
7374 East Second Street
Scottsdale , AZ 85251
Tel.: 480.994.ARTS
Website: www.smoca.org
Email: smoca@sccarts.org
Soundsuit Performance with Nick Cave
Wednesday November 4, 7 pm
at Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, next to SMoCA.
Admission $15. Call 480. 994.2787 or visit www.scottsdaleperformingarts.org for tickets.
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