Nick Cave hits Seattle

The Nick Cave show at the Seattle Art Museum fills the entire set of galleries that were devoted to Picasso, lots and lots of space. His costumes made from recycled materials seem like creatures that are both playful and threatening. They are meant to be worn and we see what a difference it makes when they are in both the video in the gallery and in the performances staged last week.
The costumes worn by dancers were multicolored and hairy, so they swooped in and out like a live abstract painting. They seem playful and friendly. There was one taller brownish colored costume that one inevitably read as male for no good reason that became a type of playful bear like partner to the purple, yellow, green and shocking pink colors.
These costumes are a long way from where Nick Cave began.
I missed the press preview and all the lectures, so I refer you to Jen Graves for more information.
Here I will simply mention that the earliest costumes are made of sticks. There is a recreated one in the exhibition. The idea of the costume is to eliminate gender, race, age, all the markers of identity that can lead to prejudice. The wearer becomes an abstracted being. But a costume can also be threatening, as in the case of the Ku Klux Klan, which seems to be a lateral reference.

Here you see the entrance to the exhibition with this enormous bear.  He looms over us, but he is not scarey. One little girl declared “But there isn’t any zipper” !

But the artist is a dancer and a costume designer of extraordinary talent. We see him dancing in one video, trying to escape an entangling vine like enclosure. He fails, although he tries over and over. In another dance shown on video, with one of the stick costumes, or related to that, brown, with appendages, the figure is like a threatening apparition. It becomes the manifestation of our fears of dark creatures, and by extension our fears of African Americans. But the creature as it leaps and crouches seems to possess a power that goes beyond the real, a power that is shaman like, recalling the costumes of native healers or African so called “witch” doctors.
So wearing  these stick like costumes, no heads show, they are only shapes that evoke both magic, power, and fear.
But the costumes on display here are joyful, funny, noisy, colorful. They have a spirit of celebration. And then there are the costumes used in the performance.
I saw it at Remix, Seattle Art Museum’s celebration. The whole museum was alive with music, people making art with Romson Bustillo, people dancing, looking at art. Those famous cars with by Cai Guo Qiang with their leds of light shooting out, become part of the party scene ( in another context, I have spoken of those cars, also as an odd set of mixed references on this blog, are they exploding ? or are they simply fun? it depends on our mood).

So the spirit of the figures was amplified by New Orleans style jazz music, the sense of celebration. There was no sense of threat really, except that slight sense of the unusual that might set people off outside the art museum. Apparently, there are spontaneous performances planned for the streets as well, and that will be fun of course.
So has Nick Cave given up his idea of genderless, classless, etc. No, but now it is just fun, there is no sense of a deep political statement about racism in our society ( apparently he made the first costume at the time of the Rodney King incident). Of course, I, for one, always resist the just for fun. I am always wanting artists to change the way people think, because there is still so much prejudice going on, and it is only getting worse and worse. The entire union busting endeavor is an attack on women and minorities who are the majority in the public unions that are being targetted.
But we will give time for a party, and it is wonderful to have an African American artist featured so prominently at the museum (the Jacob Lawrence Galleries, intended to be for African American artists seem to be lagging a bit in terms of that commitment, but there is, finally, another major show there coming up soon.)