Tuesday, December 19, 2017
Nick Cave Case study repost
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Saturday, December 16, 2017
Galina Shevchenko Nick Cave Case Study 3
Galina Shevchenko
Case study #3
Nick Cave: The Carnivalesque of the Baroque Gesture.
Nick Cave’s
sound suites and immersive environments are dense multifaceted aesthetic
entities, bearing distinct multi-dimensional and temporal qualities along with
the dynamic charge of historical,
cultural, and emotional cores, all intensely intertwined.
In this
study I will attempt to explore the contemporary baroque essence of Nick Cave’s
work, manifesting itself through its colorful appearance and through its carnivalesque
performance. I will particularly look at
his use of color through the prism of
David Batchelor’s “Chromophobia”[1],
as well as at the elements of “carnivalesque” (in Bakhtinan sense[2])
that seem to emanate profoundly from Cave’s
work.
I first
encountered Nick Cave’s work at the 2015 MCA show The Freedom Principle[3],
dedicated to the Experiments in Art and Music. Nick Cave’s majestic
installation Speak Louder appeared to
me as one of the most evocative pieces of the exhibition. Silent Sound Suited mannequins
cloaked into exquisitely folded garments composed of fabric completely covered
with the mother of pearl buttons performed ceremonial togetherness shining and
shimmering, dazzling and seducing the viewer into the mystery of unknown ritual. All the elegant participants connected through their spectacular
garments/skin into one beautiful organism of bodies with the heads in the shape
of loudspeakers screaming silently. The mannequins’ poses, and particularly the
varied directions of the loudspeaker heads implied movement and sonic unity of
communication between the ritual’s participants. The whole installation felt like a three
dimensional freeze frame from a fantastical operatic performance. It felt
extremely contemporary and extremely baroque. Deleuzian Baroque fold, infinite
and generative, propagating meaning and carrying energy, transcending through
gestures and surfaces, celebrating its rhizomatic becoming materially and
conceptually was right in front of me, silently performing, communicating: singing,
screaming whispering in multitude of
voices.
a.
Delving
deeper into the work of Nick Cave I have discovered an amazing universe of
color, folds, ornamentation and multiple
planes of reference.
The Baroque
refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It
endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of
things coming from East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, classical folds… Yet
the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold
over fold, one upon the other. [4]
According to
Gilles Deleuze, The Baroque “operative function” refers to infinite work or
process that intertwines physical and spiritual, the high and the low.
The problem
is not how to finish the fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through
the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity.
It is not only because the fold affects all materials that it thus becomes
expressive matter, with different scales, speeds and different
vectors(mountains and waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain) but
especially because it determines and materializes Form. It produces the form of expression, a Gestaltung, the generic element or infinite line of inflection, the
curve with a unique variable. [5]
Nick Cave’s
sound suites and performances associated with them carry the baroque essence
that Deleuze is referring to.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
Infinitely
elaborate, ornamental, multi-textural and multi-functional Nick Cave’s sound
suites and sculptural environments produce multitudes of meanings. They are
contemplative, indulgent, rebellious, resisting and performative, visually and
functionally. The first sound suite had
been created by Cave as a therapeutic response to his grief and rage and
ultimately a protest to the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police
officers.
“That
incident was so traumatic for me. It flipped everything upside down,” he says.
“But art has been my savior. I was able somehow to translate those emotions.”
The endless video loop of the King beating drove Cave to thoughts about
humiliation and response, silence and outrage. Having long worked with found
materials, he started to realize how the most humble stuff — the fallen tree
twigs and sticks he saw everywhere on the ground — could be woven into a
symbolic body armor. By cutting the sticks into three-inch lengths and wiring
them to a handmade undergarment, he produced a kind of Abominable Snowman
silhouette on which thousands of the sticks hung loosely like bristling fur. It
seemed like a defensive image, “a kind of outerwear to protect my spirit,” he
says. But it had an aggressive feel too, projecting “the power within the black
male, that intimidation and scariness.”[6]
g.
When Nick Cave talks about sound
suites functions in his interviews, he repeatedly reiterates that they conceal
race, class gender. He usually pronounces these three categories as one word raceclassgender[7],
which makes it sound like a single heavy
weight load that he is protesting against, and is trying to liberate himself and
his audience from.
Tree twigs, mother of pearl
buttons, glitter, brocade, ornamental blankets, crochet, mardi gras beads, - the polyphony of textural voices get
assembled in this act of resistance. In
the multitude of materials used for the
sound suites explosive color and exquisite ornament remain the most consistent constants.
David Batchelor in his book Chromophobia identified the controversial
complexity of the politics of color within the European cultural history.
Chromophobia manifests itself in
the many and varied attempts to
purge color from culture, to
devalue color, to diminish its significance,
to deny its complexity. More
specifically: this purging of color is usually
accomplished in one of two ways.
In the first, color is made out to be
the property
of some ‘foreign’ body – usually the feminine, the oriental,
the primitive, the infantile, the
vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In
the second, color is relegated to
the realm of the superficial, the supplementary,
the inessential or the cosmetic.
In one, color is regarded as
alien and therefore dangerous; in
the other, it is perceived merely as a
secondary quality of experience,
and thus unworthy of serious consideration.[8]
h. 
i.
Chromophobic or chromophilic,
there is usually something apocalyptic in
these stories of color. Something
oceanic, perhaps. Color is dangerous.
It is a drug, a loss of
consciousness, a kind of blindness – at least for a
moment. Color requires, or
results in, or perhaps just is, a loss of focus,
of identity, of self. A loss of
mind, a kind of delirium, a kind of madness
perhaps.[9]
Color is brought forward in
Cave’s work, exaggerated, elaborated and celebrated. The viewer is seduced into
the colorful irresistibility of Cave’s ornamental constructions that seem to
fuse the spirit of high fashion and vernacular culture ceremonial and tribal,
revealing and deceiving, ultimately, carnivalesque.
Color is as fundamental to Cave work as the quality of carnivalesque.
j.
Nato
Thompson in has essay on Nick Cave Out of
the Riot Comes a Dream: the public and Private Iterations of Nick Cave points
out that “Cave follows in a long line of cultural reactions to collective
trauma in the production of what might simply be called costumes”.[10]
The wearing
of costumes and masks in particular, has played an obvious role in ritual and
folkloric traditions across the globe but also continues in contemporary
Western festivals such as Halloween and various iterations of carnival which
present opportunities for the general public to become “other”.[11]
To support
his argument, Thomson mentions the work of the Russian literary critic Michail
Bakhtin who defined the term carnivalesque
and identified it as a revolutionary driving force within the European
culture. I find Thomson’s allusion to
Bakhtin revelatory in understanding of Cave’s work. I studied Bakhtin in Russia
where his work originated, but was kept censored and concealed, while being
widely available in the West. Bakhtin’s heroic intellectual feat of resistance
against Stalinist oppression is truly exemplary. He wrote on carnivalesque while being persecuted and
exiled. Cave’s resistance and activism is clearly contextualized within this legacy.
Carnivalesque performance is a celebration of
difference and intentional exaggeration.
Traditionally
carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and
established order; marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges,
norms, and prohibitions. Carnivalesque is the productive force, baroque
exuberant and irresistible.
As opposed
to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary
liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked
the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions.Carnival
was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, renewal. It was
hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.[12]
This
temporary suspension of rank created during the carnival time prompted the
development of particular art forms and creative forms of expression, forms of
language and gesture. This form of expression has become much more dynamic and
expressive and stood apart and in opposition to the officially accepted
cultural norms.
All the symbols of the
carnival idiom are filled with this pathos of change and renewal, with the
senseof the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a
characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of “inside out”, of the “turnabout”,
of the continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear, of numerous
parodies and travesties, humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and
uncrownings. …
Folk humor denies, but it revives and renews at the same time. [13]
According to Bakhtin, development of the
culture of feasts in Europe beginning from Ancient Rome, has been linked to the
moments of crisis, of breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of
society and man. Moments of death and revival, of change and renewal always led
to a festive perception of the world.
They were the second life of the people who for a time enter the utopian
realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance[14].
Bakhtin also
discusses the term of “grotesque” as a visual concept of re-discovered Roman
ornamentation and as a conceptual device of infinite ornament, extreme
exaggeration standing in opposition to classical austerity and symmetrical
proportions. [15]
Carnival is also an allowance for therapeutic
sacrilege which I find extensively present in Cave’s work especially when he
muses on the images of African American identity and processes the painful past
of slavery and oppression through incorporating of found objects that are
associated with it.
Cave’s work is infinitely grotesque and
ornamental. It plays with the cultural
tropes and perceptions of race, subverting the views of acceptability and unacceptability.
k. 
l.
In Cave’s interview at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston he talks about the effect his sound suites are
producing for a performer, that steps into it: It erases gender race class, it frees you out
of inhibitions. You have to willing to
transition and become this other thing, you have to be able step into
unfamiliar. [16]
Nick Cave is
an artist with clearly identified civic responsibility. He produces baroque
works, exploding with color, ornamentation, rhizomatic multiplicity and phantasmagorical
sacrilege. He engages communities
through the universal spirit of carnival, baroque celebratory rebellion a
special condition for the entire world’s revival and renewal of which everyone takes
part.
m.
n.
o. 
p.
Bibliography
Mikhail Bakhtin Rablais and His World, Translated by
Helene Iswolsky, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington, Indiana, 1984.
David Batchelor Chromophobia Focus on Contemporary Issues Series.
Published by Reaktion Books London, 2000.
Nick Cave:
Epitome With contributions by Andrew
Bolton, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Nato Thompson and Nick Cave. Published by Prestel, Munich :: London :: New York, 2014
Nick Cave: Until by Denise Markonish MASS MoCA Exhibition
Catalogue, published by DeMonico Books and Prestel Munich :: London :: New
York, 2017
Gilles Deleuze The Fold.
Leibniz and The Baroque. Foreword and Translation by Tom Coney, The Athlone
Press, London, 1993.
Richard Lacayo, The Noisemaker, published by the Art section of Time.com,
March 26, 2012
Online References/Resources
Notes
[1] David Batchelor Chromophobia
Focus on Contemporary Issues Series. Published by Reaktion Books
London, 2000.
[2] Mikhail
Bakhtin Rabelais and His World, Translated by Helene Iswolsky, Indiana
University Press, Bloomington,
Indiana, 1984.
[3] https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2015/The-Freedom-Principle-Experiments-In-Art-And-Music-1965-To-Now
[4]
Gilles Deleuze The Fold, p.3
[7] Art Talk: An interview with Nick
Cave at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston Published by ICA Boston May 21, 2015
[8]
David Batchelor Chromohobia, p.22
[9]
David Batchelor Chromohobia, p.51.
[10]
Nick
Cave: Epitome, Out of the Riot Comes a Dream:
the public and Private Iterations of Nick Cave
by Nato Thompson, p.27.
[11]
Nick
Cave: Epitome, Out of the Riot Comes a Dream:
the Public and Private Iterations of Nick Cave
by Nato Thompson, p.27.
[13]
Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais
and His World, p.10-11.
[14]
Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais
and His World, p.33-34.
[15]
Mikhail Bakhtin Rabelais
and His World, p.33-34.
[16]
Art Talk: An interview with Nick Cave at the Institute of
Contemporary Art/Boston Published by ICA Boston May 21, 2015
Image Reference
a. Nick Cave, Speak
Louder, 2011. Mixed media including black mother-of-pearl buttons,
embroidery floss, upholstery, metal armature, and mannequins; installed: 93 ½ x
199 x 123 in. (237.5 x 505.5 x 312.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Jack
Shainman Gallery Photo: James Prinz Photography https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2015/The-Freedom-Principle-Experiments-In-Art-And-Music-1965-To-Now
b. c. d. Installation
view, Nick Cave: Sojourn, Denver Art Museum, Colorado, June 9–September 22,
2013. http://www.jackshainman.com/artists/nick-cave/
e. Nick Cave,
Soundsuit, 2013, mixed media including fabric, crochet blanket, doilies, and
sequins, 108 x 27 x 14 inches, NC13.036
f. Nick Cave,
Sculpture, 2013, mixed media including ceramic birds, metal flowers, ceramic
Doberman, vintage setee, and light fixture, 88 x 72 x 44 inches, NC13.019
g. Nick Cave, Untitled , 2006. http://adobeairstream.com/art/nick-cave-on-practice-performance-and-violence/
h. Nick Cave. Architectural Forest,
2011. Bamboo, wood, wire, plastic beads, acrylic paint, screws, fluorescent
lights, color filter gels, and vinyl, 136 x 372 x 192 in. Courtesy of the
artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. © Nick Cave. Photo: James Prinz
Photography
i. Nick Cave-mosphere, Cranbrook-mosphere Courtesy of the artist and Cranbrook Art Museum
j. Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2016.
Mixed media, including vintage toys, wire, metal and mannequin, 84 x 45 x 40
in. Courtesy of the Lewis Family. © Nick Cave. Photo: James Prinz Photography
k. Installation
view of Nick Cave: Here Hear. Courtesy of the artist and Cranbrook Art Museum
l. View of the ‘Map in Action’
Room
Courtesy
of the artist and Cranbrook Art Museum
m. Nick
Cave, “TM 13” memorializes the death of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed
Florida teenager who was fatally shot.
Courtesy
of the artist and Cranbrook Art Museum
n., o., The Gabriel Brass Band
performing with dancers from Sidewalk Detroit in Cave’s Soundsuits
Courtesy
of the artist and Cranbrook Art Museum
p. Nick Cave
Courtesy
of the artist and Cranbrook Art Museum
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