“This is all that’s going on right now in the world, all this chaos,” Nick Cave tells me during a visit to the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts this afternoon.
The Chicago artist was talking about his new installation there called “Augment,” developed in collaboration with the Boston independent public art curators Now + There led by Executive Director Kate Gilbert. It debuts with a free public reception from 6:30 to 9 tomorrow night, Aug. 8, at 539 Tremont St.
Cave says he has been thinking about the term “augment,” this notion to “enhance or making things better,” and thinking about “things that we need to feed our souls.”
The installation consists of five large sculptures assembled from store-bought inflatables—fabric sculptures of Santa and Uncle Sam and Frankenstein and the Easter Bunny, inflated by fans, that decorate people’s lawns during the holidays. But Cave and his team have stitched them together into bright, crazy jumbled clouds of cartoony American spiritual icons.
The project was inspired, in part, by the question “What brings you joy?” But there are also unsettling undercurrents. Looking around, Cave says, “It’s a nightmare. And, you know, we wake up out of it.”
Three of the inflatables hang suspended from the metal grid across the ceiling. Two sit on the floor. Two inflate and deflate and inflate again, breathing in a way. One is mostly flowers and Thanksgiving turkeys and haunted Halloween trees. Another is all spiders and rainbows, but on the back is a giant yellow Easter chick. You find sharks or dinosaurs chomping on the Easter Bunny or Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. In one spot, the Bumble abominable snowman’s face is stuck on the face of Frankenstein. You might see Captain America and a pink Easter Bunny locked in an embrace or the Bumble maybe doing something with his mouth to some elephant’s behind.
“There’s some cruel things happening,” Cave says. “There are some erotic things happening.”
On Saturday, Sept. 14, beginning at 11 a.m., the inflatables will be carried from the Cyclorama to Boston’s Upham’s Corner by flatbed truck in a procession accompanied by music and people carrying banners.
“I hope it’s festive,” Cave says. “One community moving to the other one in a sort of reconciliation manner. … I’m thinking of it as, it’s almost bridging this gap between two communities that have sort of never interfaced with each other.”
“We are highlighting that great economic and racial disparity that happens in Boston. And this work has to happen with a lot of care and intention,” Gilbert says. She says when she brought Cave to Uphams Corner, he said, “They need hope here. I can just feel it.”
“It’s an underserved neighborhood,” Cave tells me. “Hell, what can I do to help change the look of that, to help address these divisions?”
In Upham’s Corner, the inflatables will be displayed in a former bank at 555 Columbia Ave. from Sept. 20 to April 2020. “Coming out of these windows, from the top, will be these inflatables … as they appear to be bursting through,” Cave says.
“It’s change. It’s the urgency of an expressing an emotion that’s bursting at the seams. It’s a call out for enhancement, for attention in the neighborhood,” Cave says. “At some point, things can no longer be suppressed. They find their way through.”
Cave and Now + There partnered with Boston’s Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI) and four Boston artists—L’Merchie Frazier, Barrington Edwards, Destiny Polk, Wilton Tejeda—who lead some 30 community workshops. The artists invited community members to make collages using Cave’s prompt: “What gives you joy?” The collages will be displayed in storefront windows and as banners on lightpoles around Uphams Corner. Cave has also remixed them to create a photographic wrap that began going up today on the former Dorchester bank building.
“It’s a sort of call and response,” Gilbert says. “It’s a great experiment in how we can collectively create work together that’s not just one-sided.”
If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.
‘This place of happiness’
For Cave, “Augment” is a new direction after his exhibition “If a Tree Falls” at New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery last November.
Cave has been moving away from the “Sound Suits”—tall, fuzzy and furry costumes resembling Caribbean carnival masquerade—that made his name. Instead, over the past decade, he’s begun making what look like assemblages of antiques. For example, some of his early ones featured sculptures of dogs sitting on antique divans under briers of fake foliage with gold leaves and statues of birds.
For his “Until” project at Mass MoCA in North Adams in 2016 and ’17, Cave filled a hanger-sized gallery with metal ornaments dangling from the ceiling that shimmered as they spun with cut-out silhouettes of stars and water drops and guns. Then there were metal steps that led to the top of chandelier-clouds that held, on top, old racist stereotype Black lawn jockeys with nets in their hands chasing statues of birds and butterflies.
“I had been thinking about gun violence and racism colliding,” Cave has said. “And then I wondered: Is there racism in heaven? That’s how this piece came about.”
At Jack Shainman Gallery last fall, Cave’s exhibition included a carved wooden eagle snapping at a bunch of decapitated Black heads. It included heads and hands—many made from bronze casts of his own body—pressing into stacks of handkerchiefs. It included “Unarmed,” a U-shaped memorial wreath of beaded flowers framing a bronze hand with the fingers folded as if ready to shoot an invisible gun. Cave describes it as an exhibition about “gun volence and police brutality and black-on-black crime.”
“From some reason, I came to a conclusion with that work. I was able to shift my direction,” Cave says. Afterward, he decided to pursue “this place of happiness.”
“When you’ve been so driven by trying to take a position and do whatever you can do to bring awareness to something that is devastating and affecting us all as people, I think there’s just a moment where let me try a different way into, let me see if I approach it from a place of happiness. What can that bring? How can that shift in facilitating ourselves in changing the world? We need that to balance the horrific tragedies. For me to find a place to start, I need a counterpoint to that.”
What can I do to mobilize?
“Augment” is first time that Cave has worked with inflatables, but he continues to employ his technique of assembling new sculptures out of old materials. And these inflatables have, he says, the “whimsical humor that’s always on the surface.”
“I started to think about the holidays,” Cave says. “We go into the holidays with great intentions and for most people it becomes a kind of fuck up. We still have to find a way to coexist. So what are these devices we put in place to give us the agency to keep moving forward?”
“So that led me to outdoor holiday inflatables. I can’t stand them. But I’m interested in them as a material. I liked that I could gather these resources, cut them however I choose, in a way that spoke about that entanglement, that conflict, that angst, the pressure around celebratory anything.” That feeling after the holidays of “never again,” he says.
“I’m interested in what our desires are and yet what it takes to reach them can be hard or difficult and the results can be good or not.”
His composing of “Augment,” he says, was rather random, pulling things from piles and just sticking them together.
“There are a number of these that deflate. I like the feeling of that in terms of just feeling defeated and yet at the same time you’re encouraged. You know, how do you build that up? Is it the last breath? And how do we wrap our heads around that? Just the degree of tragedy that’s just constantly in our faces everyday.”
“I’m not looking forward to 2020. What are we going to do to help? How are we going to get through it? … I’m just more concerned with these obscene strategies he’s [Trump is] going to use to be reelected.”
Cave goes on, “How can I keep projects out in the world so we can collectively together, these emergency projects, where we can come to be enlightened, where we can be encouraged to be in the space of optimism and hope at the same time? This for me is going to become a creative art emergency kit.”
“It comes out of seeing this rhetoric and being exhausted and asking myself what can I do to mobilize and be an instigator in some sort of capacity? What is the role and responsibility for each and every one of us? I’m not interested in complaining without taking action.”
If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.
