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From the Archives: Interview with Nick Cave

admin — Mon, 15 May 2017 07:00:20 +0000

“…Once the Rodney King incident happened, I realized at that moment that I was an artist with a social conscience. […] But you know, honey, we got a lot of work to do around the world,” says Nick Cave in conversation with Tori Bush. At a time when energies toward resistance might be flagging, we find inspiration in Cave’s work with the community in Shreveport and in his philosophy of enacting change through artistic practices. This interview was originally published on December 4, 2015.

Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2015; mixed media. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

Shreveport is a border town at the crossroads of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. The city is known for its musical history—the term “Elvis has left the building” was coined there. But Shreveport also suffers from crippling issues of injustice. Shreveport prosecutors use peremptory challenges to bar people of color from juries, and juries in Caddo Parish “now sentence more people to death per capita than juries in any other county in America.” Beyond disparities in the justice system, Shreveport has the fourth-highest rate of persons living with HIV in Louisiana. In 2013, 22.8% of the residents lived below the poverty line. Poverty, health, and the justice system are all intertwined here, and this year visual artist Nick Cave is in residence at these crossroads, participating in a residency with the Shreveport Regional Arts Council. How does a visual artist address these problems? From October 2015 to March 2016, Cave is working on a multi-dimensional project that attempts to speak to the disparate realities of the citizenry.

Tori Bush: What led you to create this project in Shreveport? How does the history and context of each place inform your projects?

Nick Cave: The Shreveport Regional Arts Council contacted me when I was working in Detroit on a project titled Hear Here. They were interested in working with visual artists who practice within a social spectrum as well. And I was very interested in the project, to work with social organizations, which for me was a different outreach than I was familiar with. And I was even more interested in the fact that SRAC was using art as a kind of healing device. I was very interested in that, and really that is why I came on board with the project. It allowed me to go even further into the fieldwork. This project is the way I’m interested in working right now. I come to a city with an idea, and the city builds the project. And the thing that’s so fascinating here is that this is really Shreveport’s project. I’m acting as the director.

I said from the start, this project is not going to be a wow-wow, bang-bang performance, where everyone is going to have a good time. We are working with social-services organizations that aid citizens who are trying to reenter society. We are dealing with serious issues. How can I come to this project with compassion? How can I create a work that is reflective of the voices of the community? How can I leave with an imprint so that it is moving, and not just fluff? It’s allowing me to rethink the role of my work and the purpose of this project, and take myself out of the center of it.

Nick Cave working with students in Shreveport, LA. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: Tell me a bit more about how this is making you rethink your work—is this community work an evolution of your own process as an artist?

NC: Well, it has made me realize everyone that is involved—we are finding roles so that citizens of the community all have a major part in the project. Shreveport Regional Arts Council has been having these amazing bead-a-thons, and thirty beaded blankets are being made at Shreveport Arts Center by everyone in the neighborhood who comes. [Local poet] Poetic X is working with individuals and families about the role of the service organizations, and what they are trying to overcome, and for the opening performance he’ll use these stories to tell an amazing narrative as a spoken-word piece. During the performance, individuals will come and place these blankets on Poetic X as he is reading. For me it is all very sensitive work. I don’t want anyone to feel that I am coming in and exploiting them. And so I have to think about that really clearly.

TB: Can you tell me a bit more about the community groups you are working with in Shreveport? What is the role of each community group in the project? Can you tell me one great story from your time there?

NC: We’ve been working with Mercy Center, Providence House, Lighthouse Ministries, and Hotel McAdoo. Every time I come to Shreveport I visit each house and speak with everyone there and thank them for being involved. You know, everyone wants to feel that they matter, and to say, “Oh my god, this is amazing” just puts a glow on their faces.

Mercy House is one of the organizations helping persons with HIV. There is one individual there, Larry, who is so spectacular, and he is so committed to the narrative in the blanket he is creating and talking about what that means to him, using the blanket as a sense of comfort, protection, a form of warmth. He talks about how happy he is to be part of this project. And I told him the other day that I will put him in a major performance piece titled Upright, which is an initiation piece, a piece about empowerment. Larry will transform by stripping down to his shorts and tank top and then he’ll be rebuilt into a new, sculptural object. Again, I’m looking at ways in which I can help facilitate individuals in positions where they may not have this opportunity before.

Nick Cave working with members of the community in Shreveport, LA. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: And you’ve already spent a significant period of time in Shreveport?

NC: I’ve already been here five times. I’ll be back in December for a few days, and then I’ll be here for January, February, and March, a week to two weeks each month.

I’m so interested in finding out who is here in terms of musicians, actors, dancers, etc. Can this project be a magnet and draw the community together? How can this project be a facilitator to keep creative people here thinking and continuing this kind of work with one another? Once this project is over, I’m gone. So how can I leave a lasting imprint?

TB: Can you outline all the moving parts of this project?

NC: I’ll be doing an exhibition with a series of short films that will open in February in Shreveport. That exhibition is titled Spotted. The major piece, this Upright piece, will open in March. There are nine initiates who are going through this process of stripping down, they come on stage in their street clothes, fold their clothes, and stack their shoes on top. Then they proceed to sit down on the stool, and then we build them up into a shaman of sorts. As we are done building them, we say, “You are complete,” and in that moment, they writhe and become liberated.

When you’ve been initiated, you can stand in the world differently. And I think it is up to all of us, we can have cheerleaders, we can have supporters, but it comes down to us as individuals, how do we now proceed? Do we have the tools to proceed? Like Larry, for example—he is amazing person and I want him to recognize this by creating a platform on which he can stand.

TB: You’ve said you built your first Soundsuit in response to the Rodney King beating as a way to create a barricade between yourself and the world. Do you feel that your suits are more impactful when there is a heightened awareness of the inadequacy of the justice system, for example, in Shreveport?

NC: I think once the Rodney King incident happened, I realized at that moment that I was an artist with a social conscience. That has allowed me to be a renegade and ask myself what can I do to find new ways to create work that is not offensive, and allows me to lead an audience into an experience—and yet, once you are there, you can decide whether you want to address what is behind the work.

But you know, honey, we got a lot of work to do around the world. I wish that there were forty Nick Caves and we were all dropping projects on all the same day and then moving to the next destination, because it’s a lot to do.

Nick Cave. Soundsuits, 2015; mixed media. Courtesy of Shreveport Regional Arts Council. Photo: Casey Jones.

TB: So what comes next?

NC: After Shreveport, we are working on a major project at MASS MoCA. I’m so excited about it. That exhibition is titled Until and I’ll tell you a little about it. I’m putting you into the belly of a Soundsuit. It’s a piece that is political, but it allows the audience to walk into this space that talks about what gets me fired up and motivated to do the work that I do and why I do it. It’s a kinetic piece with this moving environment that shifts. At some point you are twenty feet in the air experiencing something. All these different entry points allow you enter into the work, and it really comes down to what is going on socially in the world.

TB: You once said, about putting on a Soundsuit, “I was no longer Nick. I was a shaman of sorts.” To me, your Soundsuits read as having a cultural connection to Mardi Gras Indian Suits, and I know Dan Cameron has done an excellent job revealing that connection curatorially. Carnival is a moment when anything is permitted. Our ingrained social and political structures are thrown out the door and hierarchies are temporarily overthrown. The performance of Carnival occurs on the border between art and life. Do these ideas resonate with you? Do you hope your performers exist outside of social or political structures, if only for the moment they have the suit on?

NC: Yeah, that is exactly what I’m trying to do. I have got to come up with a tool that works as seducer to some degree. I have to be able to pull you in. How can I diversify my audiences? What role do I have to play to be part of that shift? I have to take that seriously. That is why I’m interested in coming into these cities and understanding what is going on in the neighborhoods. We are still struggling with people who don’t feel comfortable going into museums. As a visual artist I ask how artists can be part of enacting a change.

TB: And do you think that change is actually happening in the United States?

NC: I do these lectures and I go to art openings and I’m looking around and I’m like, no. I need more diversity here. That is in my top five goals I must achieve for each project. How can I change this climate? What do I need to do? We as visual artists need to continue to be renegades and say, “Yes I am here to do a project, but what is the social service?”

Third Space: Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art

Jordan Amirkhani — Tue, 18 Apr 2017 07:00:16 +0000

As university presidents, corporate CEOs, and political leaders on the left and right toss the terms “multiculturalism” and “postcolonial” around in speeches and promotional materials, I am reminded that these buzzwords of the new transnational order have resisted domestication and dilution through the sharp, thoughtful, uncomplacent writing of Homi K. Bhabha.[1] Bhabha’s recognition that cultures must be understood as complex intersections of multiple places, historical temporalities, and subject positions—narratives marked by ferocious forms of intolerance, geographical evacuations, conquests, and ethical conundrums—has impacted the realm of cultural production in tremendous ways. Curated by Wassan Al-Khudhairi for her home institution, the Birmingham Museum of Art, Third Space: Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art powerfully mobilizes many of Bhabha’s ideas, specifically his concept of a “third space,” or a space that “challenges our sense of historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People.”[2] Through deep encounters with the rapidly expanding and shifting coordinates of global contemporary art, Third Space animates the rich relations and unique specificities at work in the contemporary aesthetic production of the Global and American South. Pushing viewers to think within as well as beyond the limits of national borders, the exhibition shapes a powerful narrative of internationally shared forms of marginality.

José Bedia. Mpangui Jimagua (Twin Brothers), 2000; acrylic and conté on canvas with objects; 122 x 355 x 188 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Birmingham Museum of Art.

Entering the newly renovated Jemison Galleries, the viewer is drawn to Cuban-born artist José Bedia’s multimedia installation Mpangui Jimagua (Twin Brothers) (2000), which immediately places ideas of crossings, migration, multiplicity, and exile at the center of the presentation. The son of a sailor, Bedia has lived outside of his home country since 1991. Here he paints a doubled silhouette that stretches off the wall and is pulled into space by the small boat attached to the assemblage. Dynamic and suggestive, the work emphasizes the movement of human capital across bodies of water as an ambiguous journey for those seeking new opportunities and financial security, or those fleeing as refugees or exiles. It is this idea of migration and the terrible contexts bound up in the histories of diasporic communities across the world that continues to appear in the exhibition, articulating culture as something mobile, durational, and thus continually in flux.

Nick Cave. Soundsuit, 2009; fabric with applique crochet and buttons, knitted yarn, metal armature, mannequin. Courtesy of the Artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, and Birmingham Museum of Art.

Nick Cave’s wearable, sculptural Soundsuit (2009) centers the second room of the exhibition, and places weight on the ways in which identity (particularly the categories of gender, class, and race) often appears in-between outward performativities and invisible concealments. These beautiful suits of armor are resplendent with jewel-toned appliqués of meticulously embroidered “throw-away” materials resonant of West African ritual costumes, as well as more “American” translations of these practices, such as by the Black Carnival Mardi Gras Indians. The suits signify as forms of bodily beautification and protection from outside force—from physical harm, judgment, or gaze. However, Soundsuit is also a garment of sensory and physical restriction; blinded by the cylindrical headdress and physically constricted down to the feet, Cave articulates identity, embodiment, and self-fashioning as forms of empowerment and entrapment simultaneously. This contradiction of freedom and constriction in regard to subjectivity mobilizes Bhabha’s sense of cultural hybridity toward more personal, lived articulations of self-identification and representation of the marginal body.

Merritt Johnson. Crow Booming the One Big Water, Gulls Flying Away, 2010; oil and alkyd on panel; 36 x 48 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Birmingham Museum of Art.

While each work in this exhibition could inspire book-length treatises on its significance to this incredibly rich show, I was left deeply moved by Crow Booming the One Big Water, Gulls Flying Away (2010) by the multidisciplinary artist Merritt Johnson. Descendant of the Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) and Blackfoot indigenous North American tribes, Johnson signals the seasonal migration of gulls across the ocean, mapping their aerial flight plans across destructive explosions of oil rigs in the Gulf. By attending to the murderous violence of indigenous peoples, animals, and the environment by the European colonizer, Johnson’s hard-edged, fragmented forms of bold, brilliant color operate as clashes between the human and nonhuman world. While the realm of nature offers up beautiful reminders of the ways in which animals and living cycles transcend the manmade borders, systems, and classifications imposed upon them, Johnson forces a recognition that these very beings are often destroyed by them nonetheless. Pushing Bhabha’s concept of a “third space” into a dialectic between human and nonhuman, this exhibition asks urgent and provocative questions of our current cultural climate—where it is going, where it has come from, and most importantly, what is/will be lost.

Third Space: Shifting Conversations About Contemporary Art is on view at the Birmingham Museum of Art through January 6, 2019.

[1] I extend my deepest thanks to the Birmingham Museum of Art’s Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Wassan Al-Khudhairi, and Sarah Tiambeng, Public Relations Account Executive for Third Space, for all of their help and support in the research and writing of this article.

[2] See Homi K. Bhabha’s text, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1994), 55.

Best of 2015 – Interview with Nick Cave

admin — Sun, 27 Dec 2015 08:00:19 +0000

As we continue our look back over the year, today’s selection for our Best of 2015 series comes from Shotgun Reviews editor Emily Holmes: “As the year wraps up, I was pleased to see Tori Bush’s recent interview with Nick Cave. I remember not knowing who he was when his work was at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and I regretfully missed the exhibition. Years later, I caught his work at the Seattle Art Museum. His work stays with me as some of the most imaginative (and effective) political work out there today. I, too, ‘wish there were forty Nick Caves and […] all dropping projects on all the same day and then moving to the next destination.’” This interview was originally published on December 4, 2015.