For a week in March 2013, within the vast Beaux-Arts-era Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central Station in New York City, the space came alive at twice-daily intervals with a group of some 60 Alvin Ailey School dancers performing to the sounds of a live harpist. But this was no ordinary flash mob, like the kinds of wedding proposals often seen on YouTube. In multi-coloured layers of fine materials reminiscent of a mop head and decorated with intricate beading, the dancers formed the basis of life-sized horse puppets, complete with sculptured horse heads, as part of a site-specific project by American artist Nick Cave. Specially commissioned by Creative Time and the MTA, New York’s transport body, the performance, *Heard NY*, celebrated the centennial of Grand Central in a way that deeply engaged a vast and unsuspecting public audience through movement and sound.
“There is such a focus on holding onto jobs and simply surviving, that dreaming often fades,” Mr Cave told the *New York Times* at the time, noting that the concept for the performance stemmed from the history of horse-drawn carriages used by the MTA in the 19th century. “The idea was to bring something to the public that could stimulate or jump-start that kind of thinking. It’s about looking at early puppetry and the simplicity of something mundane that can take on a dream-like presence and carry a magical element. It’s about reconnecting to a dream state of being, as dreaming allows connection to purpose in life. The work is intended to serve as an instigator to some degree.”
In November, a version of the work will come to Sydney, presented by multidisciplinary arts centre Carriageworks. For two days, lunchtime performances will take place in yet-to-be-announced public spaces throughout the city. “The concept is about intersecting high-traffic urban areas, such as Pitt Street Mall,” explained Mr Cave during a planning visit to Australia earlier this year. “It is important to create engagement in that specific moment and location, so that someone stepping out of an office for lunch unexpectedly encounters a unique performance experience.”
“These costumes represent fantastical, otherworldly creatures…”
Mr Cave’s practice is representative of the prolific cross-pollination of music, art and fashion that defines 21st century culture. Indeed, while his art practice straddles performing and visual arts, the artist also serves as a professor of fashion design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is based, and sees no great divisions between the various mediums. “I have students come into the [fashion] program from a fashion background and are interested in video, performance and installation, which is how I work, because there is this whole other side to fashion that’s about presentation, about exhibitions, couture runway shows. The design element is one part of it, and that’s the beauty of it, because it’s not just about what happens in the [design] studio, but also the format in which you show it, and what ideas of display mean and look like.”
Yet Mr Cave’s artistic output originates from a more authentic place than many of the well known, and commercially driven, collaborative projects that define the contemporary art-fashion collisions. Born in 1959 in Missouri, the United States, Mr Cave has said that growing up with modest means instilled in him a creative spirit. “When you’re raised by a single mother with six brothers and lots of hand-me-downs, you have to figure out how to make those clothes your own,” he told the New York Times in 2009. “That’s how I started off, using things around the house.” It led him, quite naturally, to learn to sew more professionally, studying at the Kansas City Art Institute. While doing so, he enrolled in an Alvin Ailey dance program, studying between Kansas City and New York City, drawn to the expressive possibilities of movement. It wasn’t until later that the two worlds, of art and dance, collectively formed the art practice for which he has become known.
Mr Cave rose to prominence with what are called Soundsuits, which he describes as, “a sculptural object that, with movement, generates sound based on the way it is fabricated.” Typically, these costumes represent fantastical, otherworldly creatures, with appendages of “hair, metal bottle caps, buttons, twigs, anything I can get my hands on”, he says, that rise up and off of the body so as to transform and transfigure the body, removing the obvious link to the human form. In one, a web-like constellation steams upward from the head of the figure, with homely porcelain figures of birds, such as owls, ducks and roosters, entangled in the matter. In another, the costume stretches open to reveal a dense bouquet of intricately beaded flowers, a densely colourful riposte to the neutral tone of the suit. Mr Cave’s Soundsuits allude to folkloric costume practices around the world, and the mystical and mythical stories that surround them, offering a hybridised version of these historical traditions by bringing them into a contemporary context.” To date, the artist’s Soundsuits have been collected and exhibited by institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.
But while dazzling to the eye as a result of their colourful intricacy and bold forms, Mr Cave’s Soundsuits, which can be worn for performance or exhibited as standalone sculptures, are used to communicate far more complex ideas about contemporary culture. “There is a very dark, political side to the work,” explains the artist. “For one thing, [the suit] can be used to hide gender, race, even class, so you’re forced to look at the work without any sort of judgement.” The suits, Mr Cave explains, came about in response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which transpired after a jury acquitted police officers of charges of using excessive force and beating Rodney King. The riots, lasting some six days, ended with the death of some 55 people, with over 2000 injured. For Mr Cave, the original creation of the suits as a comment on the sort of protective shield – both visual and physical – required for “black bodies to move through the world.” Subsequent bodies of works have been developed in response to the killings of black men and women in the United States, such as that of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and, more recently, the Charleston shootings of 2015.