Body & Soul

On a foggy Chicago morning I find myself sweating atop an elliptical in a hotel gym, preparing my questions for Nick Cave. I push and pull the machine’s handles as fast as works from Cave’s vast repertoire march through my mind. His impossibly intricate Soundsuit sculptures dance in full ecstasy, their fringes twirling; the dance party he organized around a mammoth rotating streamer curtain for The Let Go, an immersive exhibition that debuted at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, reappears in epic radiance.

My visit to the gym before our meeting stems from an urge to project deftness—intellectually and physically—in front of a man whose art has allured, provoked and moved the public for nearly three decades.

At first sight, Cave, 61, radiates controlled dynamism through his sculpted physique and magnetic eye contact. Standing beside him in a room populated with items he has gathered to create new Soundsuits—the first in years, he says—I notice a pile of colorful sweaters on an ironing board. Two male mannequins are stationed by a cassette player Cave still uses to switch between tunes according to his mood. He wears an all-black ensemble of sports jersey and skirt, finished with chunky high-top sneakers. We proceed to wander through Facility, a multipurpose studio, gallery and private space he shares with his personal and professional partner, graphic designer Bob Faust, and their dog, Bam Bam.

Cave’s biggest upcoming project is a restaging of his solo exhibition Until at the Momentary, a satellite of Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, in July. (This follows its debut at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts in the fall of 2016 and adaptations in Sydney and Glasgow.) The show, whose title is an allusion to the legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” is one of the artist’s most direct responses to the country’s current ills—in particular its gun policies and racial profiling by law enforcement. Ingrained in Cave’s flamboyant visual lexicon is piercing commentary on the urgency of taking a stand, as well as the irreversibility of harm.

He recalls his initial reaction when he heard about Freddie Gray’s death in 2015. “I am an artist with civic responsibility, so how do I use the voice I am fortunate to have?” he remembers thinking. Furious, he wondered if racism exists in heaven, a rumination that served as catalyst for Until’s installation of acrylic pieces blended with domestic icons of Americana and consumption.

Until consists of a tent stitched out of shoelaces next to acrylic and glass ornaments suspended from the ceiling—a colorful rain of pony beads, dream catchers and drop-shaped decorative pieces the artist collected from shops around the country. Immersing the audience in a kaleidoscopic forest, the arrangement is studded with such alarming details as bullets embedded in wind spinners. From above hangs a mammoth crystal cloud made of 14 layers of materials, including crocheted blankets on the cloud’s bottom, hiding beneath its surface like a sea of colors and serving as a reminder of safety. On the outside, lawn jockeys poke their heads among an array of gramophones, porcelain birds and metal lamps.

“The vulnerability is always exposed within the work, one way or the other,” says Cave, who spent more than four weeks hand-embellishing the cloud’s outer surface for its initial hang at MASS MoCA. Ladders allow the audience to face, up close, details both horrific and mundane. Hy-Dyve, an immersive video projection Cave created as part of Until, fills a room with images of water rushing beneath viewers’ feet while avian and human eyes stare from above the flow. The artist’s signature use of movement and gesture through the body echoes in the room-enveloping projection—a hallucinatory commentary on the slave trade and contemporary policing, on American racism then and now. Bound by Until’s sheer physicality, the clashing motifs raise a question: What is this focus on the body that runs so viscerally through Cave’s work? The installations darkly beckon, and the Soundsuits noisily dance—but where are they leading us?

Sea Sick, a piece from his 2014 Made by Whites for Whites exhibition that pairs a racist tchotchke with an architectural composition of seascape paintings, now sits in Cave’s living room, where he also displays paintings by contemporary American artists Barkley L. Hendricks and Titus Kaphar. One floor down, six assistants weave beads and sew threads, adjacent to a gallery where Cave and Faust rotate works by established artists such as Jeffrey Gibson and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, as well as works by emerging names and thrift-store finds that spark their interest.

“Nick is a collector at his core, both through sourcing materials for his works and also in his incredibly impressive art collection,” says Jack Shainman, who has been showing Cave at his eponymous New York gallery for nearly 15 years. “His dedication to supporting young and emerging artists spans Nick’s creative practice, from burgeoning artists, musicians and dancers in his performance pieces to the founding mission behind Facility.”

Among his peers, Cave is unique in combining art and other disciplines on a grand scale, weaving together fashion, dance, theater, music and performance while remaining true to his vision as a sculptor. (He even works with text: Made by Whites for Whites included a take-home brochure featuring essays by Henry Louis Gates Jr., David Breslin and more—a rare example of the artist feeling his visual language wasn’t enough to express the meaning of his work.)

“I’m creating works that open themselves up to dance or theater, which can function from one extreme to the other, with space always allowing room for it to happen,” he explains. His passion for expression through movement entered his system early and never left. After working until the early hours of the day, a college-age Cave would dance away his frustrations at gay clubs close to his studio at the Kansas City Art Institute, where he received his bachelor of fine arts degree in 1982. He would make himself a new piece of clothing each night. “Cruising wasn’t really my thing; dancing was how I worked through everything,” he says of his early forays into gay life in the late 1970s.

One of six brothers, Cave was born in Fulton, Missouri in an environment that quickly made him aware of the forces he would spend much of his life fighting. “Racism and homophobia come in all shapes and forms, but it’s about muscling up,” he says.

Cave remembers his mother’s reaction when he dyed his hair blue in high school. Decades later, color and dance are still big parts of his identity—so much so that in April he’s bringing The Let Go to Chicago’s Navy Pier for a weeklong condensed program with local performers and musicians, free to the public.

His plans for this year also include an exhibition, curated by Faust, in Facility’s front windows. It will feature mainly local artists and designers and focus on “voting and voice,” two months before the November election. “We have to be positive and keep doing what we can do!” he says. With a laugh, he admits he’s disappointed with 2020, which so far does not resemble the space saga he imagined when he was a teenager.

But Cave could change that.

Another plan for this year is a “next-level Soundsuit”—cast in bronze, 18 feet high and displayed as an outdoor monument.

In 1992 he made his first suit for what would become an army of genderless and nationless aliens invading museums and streets across the globe. The otherworldly sculptures, some of which can be activated by dancers, have become the signature works of Cave’s oeuvre, combining all key elements of his practice. They’re masterfully beaded and woven textile sculptures, representing the inclusive and celebratory roots of his vision through color, texture and dance. Sounds emanate from the materials, whether they’re whirling buttons or the twigs that adorned his very first creation. They give the dancers agency and let them intervene in the space with unapologetic flamboyance. The performers’ voiceless anonymity is supplemented by the materials’ kinetic sounds, which Cave uses as metaphors for seeing beyond the surface and understanding the essence that constitutes our identities.

When I note the correlation between the Soundsuits and drag, he’s quick to respond: “It’s all fucking drag, honey.” Cave sees a clear parallel between performance and our day-to-day rituals of self-expression. “We’re all in drag. Every day, we put it on depending on what’s coming,” he says. He smiles with the wisdom of an artist who remembers wearing a Fiorucci skirt to school and bravely passing a group of teenagers on the street. “I just gained this inner power, keeping it moving and being fabulous.”

Today, the same mischievous glee is evident: “I could be in blue jeans from a thrift store, a fabulous little T-shirt and some running sneakers, but I may have on a leather jockstrap!”

Cave is one of the most community-driven, collaborative artists working today, sharing his platform with everyone from legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones to a local musician in search of a broader audience. He’s happy to get out of his own way and allow other experiences to fold into his practice.

Here Hear, a major celebration of Cave’s work at suburban Detroit’s Cranbrook Art Museum in 2015, manifested his commitment to speech and giving voice to the silent. Returning to the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he received his master of fine arts degree in 1989, Cave invited hundreds of locals, including LGBTQ youths and students from various art programs, to participate. Over seven months, they collaborated in performances, photo shoots and dance workshops.

“The ingenuity of Nick’s practice extends to his strategies for how the artwork operates in the world,” says Laura Mott, the museum’s senior curator of contemporary art and design. “The resonance of this project has been astounding, from dinner tables to foundation board meetings. It’s often cited as the primary example of an artist ‘getting it right’ in Detroit.”

Cave describes his collaborative instinct in typically vivid terms: “You could drop me out of a plane anywhere in the world, and I can make an amazing project. Everybody wants to be acknowledged for what they can bring to the table. How do you give them that permission to stand in the light?”

It’s hard to imagine, but at one point Cave himself was not standing in the light. Back in the 1990s he was a creative nomad, launching shows, packing up and moving on to the next venue with no further plans. He was a structured free spirit who trained his voice by remaining steady and consistent. But around 1996 he woke up one day and said, “Now or never.” He left an amazing relationship behind and let everything go.

“My life changed overnight,” he says. He was “stepping up to fear, to the unknown.” During his emerging years, his work had been about following his nose. Once he’d stepped up, his mission became clear: “to remain on the outside, always ready to jump into the center—not the outer edge but into the center.” When he jumps back out again, “what I’ve delivered in the center has to take care of itself.”

These days Cave sits in silence for two hours every night; he says it brings him closer to the truth. Mondays and Thursdays are reserved for his 24 graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is a professor of fashion, body and garment.

“Fashion is a form of advertisement that I can make a political statement with,” he says, sharing his idea to produce a 10-look collection to follow each of his solo exhibitions, which he would debut during fashion weeks.

Fashion and garment are manifest in a given Nick Cave piece, but what about what lies beneath them? The body means everything to Cave: It’s a tool to experience pain and glory, the good and the bad. It’s both a target—as Until sharply declares—and an instrument for seduction and sexual desire, most apparent in his wild, balletic Soundsuits. But it’s more than that.

“The body is the mechanism that grounds us to humanity,” he says. He finds drive sexy; motivation turns him on. He sees himself as a messenger delivering deeds to ambassadors, who ensure their urgency is maintained. Once again, he speaks through the body, its power to connect.

“I am able to use art as a vehicle for change,” he says, “but this is bigger than me.”