|
|
|
|
|
Suit Yourself
John Haberin New York City
Nick Cave and It's Time for Me to Go
Write it off as just another sign of male condescension, but I shall never understand fashion, especially high fashion. Who would want to wear that?
With Nick Cave, the answer is simple: he himself tries his Soundsuits on for size, and then they take on a life of their own. A Guggenheim retrospective lingers on the politics of their glitter and confinement. At his gallery, one could already linger over the hopes and the blackness. 
Cave got his break in New York among emerging artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where he found a welcome. As "It's Time for Me to Go," its 2022 artists in residence make the case for a culture's memory and its myths.
Cameron Granger sets the tone for all three when he speaks of biomythology. You may not know the coinage, by Audre Lorde, the poet, but you can easily guess what it means. Memories are what an individual shares with others, and what a culture or community shares is its myths. Granger's very being is tied up with memories of home, his grandmother's home, and his sense of loss has inspired not just an attempt to pin those memories down in his art. It has also driven him to account for that loss, sincerely or not, with a story about space aliens. Jacob Mason-Macklin and Qualeasha Wood would just as soon bring the myths, the boasts, and the loss back to earth.
Glitter and confinement
To be sure, Nick Cave is not a fashion designer, although he claimed his own fashion line in the 1990s and is about as fashionable as an African American in a scornful nation can ever be. (Even the market for high fashion might balk at the price of art.) Nor is he his namesake, the popular musician, but he has an eye to performance and an ear for sound. He has worked with the Alvin Ailey dance company and performed live in New York's Grand Central Station. When he fashioned his first Soundsuit, of twigs, the sound of their rustling and rubbing together took him by surprise (and gave the series its name). So, I suspect, has their catching on, but a combination of fashion, glitter, comedy, and (yes) politics sure sounds like a recipe for success.
Politics entered from the start. Born in 1959, Cave was in a Chicago park when the news reached him of the death of Rodney King in 1991. He looked for an emblem of black experience in a cheap and tawdry cage, and he has been suiting up ever since. He was in the forefront of Black Lives Matter long before it had a name. He doubled down on the project with the murder of Trayvon Martin, and he has made text art in his gallery window, tolling the seconds it took to strangle George Floyd. The suits just grew more user friendly, with flowers and chandeliers more than outright trash.
Their friendliness has only increased, but he seems never to have found something tacky that he did not like. It roots him in the Chicago streets and, at the American Folk Art Museum just last year, outsider art. His retrospective opened just in time for the holiday season with rows of Christmas ornaments, the spheres decorated still further to rub it in. They share a panel with dominoes, and one can imagine his neighbors picking up the game outdoors on a summer day. The retrospective also ends with a display of glitter, Tondos much larger than the mirror-like circles of Renaissance art—and with swirls of color from sequined fabric and glass beads. The ceramic flowers are artificial too.
The suits are confining all the same, but then the dominoes rest on shelves in the form of a maze. They hug the body closely, in rigid verticals or less than sexy curves. They cover the head as well as the full body, leaving at most a sneaker—and, like art for Lonnie Holley, the hint of an African mask. (Virgil Abloh is not the only black artist who makes sneakers into fashion.) Stereotypes are confining, too, and Cave cannot get enough of them either. A boy in blackface appears again and again, his mouth open, smiling for a minstrel show or screaming for help.
The curator, Naomi Beckwith, has no use for chronology, but then Cave has always, well, suited himself. He gets three tower galleries for "It Was," "What It Is," and "What It Shall Be," set apart from Alex Katz on the museum's ramp. If that sounds portentous, they amount to a room apiece for getting his bearings, discovering politics, and running with both in the Tondos and Soundsuits. The central floor has him at his angriest, with heads strewn on a table as if left to die, and with sculpture in black. Even there, though, he cannot stay angry for long. He amplifies the message, but with the nostalgia of old-fashioned gramophone speakers and a sophisticated sense of humor.
Only a raised black fist breaks the silence, and the Soundsuits themselves never make a sound. Can he get past that, to make his politics truly relevant to his art? Can he get past pleasing the audience, or is he only the latest fashion? The show's title, "Forothermore," is too clever by half as well. Still, he keeps coming back for good reason. Someone has to speak for black America's pleasures and confinement.
Expectations and hope
Five years before, Cave opened in the galleries the Thursday before an election that must have made it hard for him to focus on art. People were calling it the most important election in memory. They could see a real chance in 2018 for turnout among nonwhites, younger voters, and others who so often sit out midterms. They could see a chance, too, to reject the fear and hatred at the heart of Donald J. Trump's policy and appeal. Cave could only be jealous: they were raising expectations and offering hope.
He has, after all, staked his career on expectations and hope. He just may not pin them on politics or even a finished work of art. He might be happy enough if you carried a tune in your head and broke into a dance—and there is no getting around the debt of his Soundsuits to the costumes of African ritual and dance. Thirteen years after his appearance among emerging artists at the Studio Museum, you may no longer want to call him a performer who happens to make art on the side. Increasingly, too, he makes art about the dark currents of African American life. He just would rather translate them into color, movement, and sound.
"If a Tree Falls," as the show's title had it, does it make a sound? No matter, for Cave asks you to supply your own. It may have lacked his signature Soundsuits, but it takes as a motif those speakers from old phonographs, the kind with ribs like umbrellas. Cast in bronze, they flair out into space as well as amplify imagined sounds. As for John Keats, "heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." A concurrent show, "The Let Go," converts the Park Avenue Armory into the space for visitors to break into dance in response.
Other black casts leave motion implicit but in greater peril. They run to body parts, most especially heads and arms. Some lie on black pillows, in an uncertain state of life or rest. Others lie on stacks of folded American flags, in display cases modeled after colonial furniture, or beneath bronze-colored eagles. An assemblage modeled from magnifying glasses holds them all up to scrutiny. The remaining wire constructions, in his Tondos, take their swirling patterns from turbulent weather or the brain scans of young black men diagnosed with PTSD thanks to unwarranted police action and gun violence.
This sounds serious, but take heart. One would never know the dark history of those colorful swirls or a reference point for the magnifiers in the surveillance state—or, for Michel Foucault fans, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison plan of 1787. The bronze heads pick up the elegance of Constantin Brancusi, and the arms suggest the athletic ideals of urban culture. Think of a basketball balancing on a finger for Hank Willis Thomas. They seem remote from slavery, Black Lives Matter, or the supposed crisis of the black male. Even the folded flags look neat but comforting.
Besides, they erupt into still more color, from scores of artificial flowers. For all the contemporary allusions, they also come with a heavy dose of nostalgia, much like the phonograph speakers. Cave's showmanship in lieu of sorrow may link him to bad boys in art, mostly white, but he could be art's ultimate nice guy at heart. He is the second artist in a row to have both the gallery's Chelsea spaces as well, after Toyin Ojih Odutola. It can feel at once meandering and repetitive, and (as the show's title suggests) it may not make a sound. Will it suffice to raise expectations and to offer hope?
Myth and memory
For the fourth straight year, artists cap their residency uptown as guests at MoMA PS1, while the Studio Museum is closed for expansion. Where all three speak of loss, Jacob Mason-Macklin makes up for it by taking to the streets. His paintings are not quite portraits and or the iconography of a city in the tradition of Edward Hopper. They depict street corners as intersections, with pedestrians, buses, and motorcycles on equal terms. People go to keep moving or to hang out. 
They go to look and to be seen.
Women pose like the three graces on one of those concrete islands designed as a barrier between traffic and bike lanes, framed by men on the sidewalk leaning in. Color, too, brings them together and keeps them apart. Mason-Macklin favors splashes of oil that turn day into night and night into day. Yellow trees push against traffic lights and break for a spot of brick red from public housing just across the street. Blue shadow and sunlight divide a body roughly in half, like a naturalized Picasso portrait. It makes for a refreshing change from realism for Alice Neel—in its style, its closeness to the African American community, and its perpetual motion.
They need not acknowledge one another in order to interact. Is there space left for privacy, in daily life or in memory? Qualeasha Wood would say no, even in the bedroom. If Lorde has calls herself a warrior, Wood is a "black femme," to the point that even the Internet objects. More than one image has the dread 404 error, "Warning: Can't Load Fetishization," but there she is anyway. These paintings are tapestries, from a Jacquard loom, but glass beads and thick acrylic leave the old world to fend for itself.
Her self-portraits face glimpses in black and white of half-closed doors and strangers in the night. And that brings things back to Cameron Granger, for whom architecture is everything, if only he can remember. He has, deservedly, the central room for a video in which he and siblings measure out the cracked tiles and peeling paint. To the right, it morphs into actual stairs, in wood, and a room round the back feels way too small to contain his childhood or his life today. He has furnished it mostly with books, another site of both a sanctuary and a sharing. Sure enough, Octavia Butler, the black sci-fi writer, tops the heap.
Wait long enough, and video becomes a less personal account of loss. Space invaders come to earth and explosions level everything. Generals appear in found footage to talk of their plans. They reek of TV in the 1950s. One last room has the aliens alone. If they seem awfully clichéd, the comfort of memory is like that, too.
Can Mason-Macklin's Harlem or Wood's pretend screen shots themselves avoid clichés? Can Granger pare back the fantasy to measure out the space and the memories? A fancy word to sum up an exhibition should always raise alarms, especially when it is all too obvious what it means—like "Forothermore" for Cave at the Guggenheim. The show's title, "It's Time for Me to Go," is little better. Yet Granger could be speaking for all three, in typewritten documents of his feelings: "this is where you found heaven."
Nick Cave ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through April 10, 2023, and at Jack Shainman through December 22, 2018. "It's Time for Me to Go" ran at MoMA PS1 through February 27, 2023.