"There are all these moments you have to negotiate," he said. "I'd love to be here by myself, and just be consumed by the presence of it - deciding whether to be in the cloud, or in the landscape, or upstairs." "Not only is this a space for social gathering, but it's also a space to come independently, to become sort of engulfed in this experience," he said. But he is also clear that he aims to create an immersive experience for individual visitors as well. Cave said he hopes it will be something of a "community space," a nod to the performative aspect of much of his previous work. The entire gallery, along with two other works in separate rooms, is designed to be a living space. Cave said the entire work began when he was thinking about the enduring pattern of gun violence and racism, and the simple question, "is there racism in heaven?" The work's title is a play on the notion of "innocent until proven guilty," hanging on that liminal moment between deciding what we think about how we relate to one another.Īt the far end of the gallery are vast curtains of beads, which Cave said were designed to suggest the view of distant mountains, covered with graffiti as if "nature was tattooed." Which gets straight to the heart of the issue. Painstakingly crafted over the course of the summer in a basement at MoCA, the installation is a dense landscape of found objects - porcelain animals, artificial flowers, butterfly nets, chandeliers, and an assortment of black-face lawn jockeys. The center of the work is a space Cave calls the "cloudscape," a fantastic realm elevated high above the floor and accessible by stairs. "That becomes another kind of outreach, of getting the word out." "I want people to come into this space and pull out their phones and take an image and text it," he said. There's more than a little element of shock and awe in that first moment, and Cave is clear from the start that he doesn't simply want to inspire a moment of quiet contemplation. Many are cut into shapes and geometric patterns, and in the first hint that something more serious is afoot, many are shaped into handguns, targets, and bullets. "Until" opens with a forest of reflective wind spinners - about 20,000 of them - hanging from the rafters, some attached to motors. Richard Nonas' "The Man in the Empty Space" was there most recently and was a quiet, minimalist meditation of wood and stone that included empty space as an important element.īut Cave is pushing the space to its limit. Xu Bing's acclaimed Phoenixes - as large and elaborate as they were - were still singular objects in a vast space. This is the first work at Building 5 in a few years that has filled it in quite this way. ![]() "It's all about excess, surplus, breaking things apart, renegotiating how things are used, and how they function," Cave said in an interview as he and his large team of assistants were busy unpacking, hanging, and tying the objects into the vast space. For an artist whose most iconic work has been kinetic, body-sized costume sculptures, it is at once a departure and a continuation. The kinds of items you find in antique stores, flea markets, and craft shops, all gathered and concentrated as they've been tied, twisted, and hung together. He has filled Building 5, the football field-sized gallery that is one of the largest sites for contemporary art in the world, with a dizzying amount of - well, stuff. From the moment you enter the space, you are asked more of yourself."Ĭave pulls out all the stops to pull you there. We want to turn our backs on issues, say they don't pertain to us, and that's what this moment is about. ![]() "We want to embrace it, but we can't avoid the political undertones there It's just sort of messing with people. "We want to like it, but we shouldn't like it," Cave said about what is his biggest and most elaborate work to date. It's a challenge disguised as an invitation. ![]() In "Until," which opens this weekend at Mass MoCA, as in much of his work, the point is to lure you into engaging with realities about how we get along that we may wish to avoid. When it works, it invites you into a world familiar but strange, but certainly a place you've never seen before and probably won't again. NORTH ADAMS - Nick Cave's work is going to get your attention.
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