Nick Cave, Guggenheim review — turning bric-a-brac into joyful, furious art

Nick Cave’s art beams joy and fury, though the first is so glaring that it takes a moment to recognise the other. The sculptor (not the musician) seems to dance through the world, picking up glittery scraps and whirling them together into gleeful totems and shrines. Forothermore, the Guggenheim’s new retrospective in New York, enfolds viewers in that exuberance, encouraging them to step back for the whole wild spectacle and then close in to examine the encrustations, skeins and collectibles that give each piece its texture and complexity. There’s a soulful darkness glimmering through the profusion.

Cave assembles stuff with the voraciousness of a magpie and the industriousness of a beaver. All four large panels of “Wall Relief” (2013) explode with shimmering beads, loose chandelier crystals, ceramic birds and bouquets of plastic flowers, as if a bomb had gone off in a crafts store. Scattered among the variously tacky, cute and charming bric-a-brac are larger objects with more complicated overtones. Decorative bourbon bottles and gramophone horns suggest long-ago parties and scenes of cobwebbed glamour.

Frequently, Cave turns up antique kitsch objects, which he calls “relics”, with their sting of bigotry intact. At the heart of “Sea Sick” (2014) is a nausea-inducing ceramic spittoon in the form of a black man’s head. When it was in everyday use, tobacco chewers would expectorate into the open skull, and the ugly caricature just sat there in mute acceptance, mouth agape, teeth showing. Cave reprograms this popular racist trinket by surrounding it with objects and paintings. A pair of bronze hands presses against the man’s temples; a gilded plastic ship hangs overhead; and 11 more painted 18th-century vessels scud along over picturesque waves, their sails swollen. The sight of all those masts tilting every which way produces a sudden need for Dramamine, while the intimations of violence evoke Turner’s wild and disturbing “Slave Ship”. Presumably the fleet’s cargo holds teem with slaves whose effigies are manufactured to receive the white man’s filth.

“Rescue” (2021) refers to the way Cave scoops up and redeems oddities that would otherwise get thrown out: life-sized ceramic dogs, for instance, which he collects and enthrones in bright upholstery. My favourite is a bull-mastiff lounging on a pink microsuede chaise beneath a Christmas-tree-like structure that is draped in fake flora and fauna.

These grand, opulent works try to correct for cruelty or neglect. The dogs represent loyalty that goes ignored and dignity that is disrespected but can at least be partially redeemed by art. Cave’s magnanimity extends to tag sale items and estate giveaways — lifetimes’ worth of gewgaws and ornament that wind up first on a junk pile, then in the museum. For Cave, each object is full of both history and potential, old tales and as yet unwritten stories. “I’m very interested in this kind of reimagining and repositioning of discarded objects, where what we knew of it in the past is relegated to some new meaning or understanding,” he says in a text panel. One person’s gaudiness expresses another’s pain.

The best-known products of that fascination with castoffs are the wearable “Soundsuits” he began making in the early 1990s. Distraught after watching the television footage of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King, Cave sat in a Chicago park trying to process the scene of raw, public and vengeful violence carried out in the name of law and order. “I felt like my identity and who I was as a human being was up for question,” he later told The New York Times. “I felt like that could have been me . . . How do I exist in a place that sees me as a threat?”

Wandering in the park, he started idly gathering twigs. Later, he sewed these bits of broken nature into a kind of pelt that he could don and feel simultaneously conspicuous and anonymous. Over time, the “Soundsuits” evolved from that first camouflage overall into more flamboyant mixtures of costume, armour and Mardi Gras floats.

The Guggenheim has summoned a small crowd of these outfits (he’s made hundreds), which have grown ever more rococo. One suit is bedazzled with baubles extracted from some ancient childhood when kids still entertained themselves with non-digital gizmos: spinning tops, beach pails, globes emblazoned with extinct nations. Another is a tower of squirming sock-monkeys resembling a pile of snakes. A third is so profusely studded with fake bunnies, kitties and puppets that the overload of cuteness becomes unbearably sinister.

These creations, which Cave has sometimes worn for his performances, elicit nervous grins. They’re fun and frightening, irresistibly sparkly but larded with carnival creepiness. Recently, he has marched his playful zombies into outright gloom: “8:46” alludes to the length of time (eight minutes, 46 seconds) that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died. (A second suit, “9:29”, refers to a different timing of the same event.) A mantle of bright funeral flowers overlays the figures’ black shrouds but does little to lighten the sense of grief.

The Guggenheim show balances opposite emotional extremes with great theatricality. In Cave’s world, history demands such contradictory responses because celebration and desperation are thoroughly mingled. Sometimes, though, darkness edges out subtlety, especially in a recent series built around bronze casts of his own body parts. A screaming, tormented head rests on a stack of shirts printed with an American flag motif. A dark disembodied hand reaches through a stack of white towels. A wilting bouquet dangles from a muscled arm. These determinedly disturbing works feel heavy, as if, having reached his sixties, Cave now experienced the demands of relevance as a terrible burden.

Still, his sense of humour hasn’t dissipated yet. “Hustle Coat” (2021) consists of a black trenchcoat hanging in a golden niche, pulled open to reveal a curtain of silver watches, necklaces, belts and pendants like a chainmail lining. This was once the uniform of muttering peddlers, who flashed passers-by with their stock of knock-off bling, then buttoned up again whenever cops drew near. Cave respects the hustle, smiles at the obvious subterfuge, and grimaces at the circumstances that make it worthwhile — all while spinning cheap glister into elevated art.

To April 10, guggenheim.org

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