Arnold Zwicky's Blog

From Pinterest on 3/5, on the Business Insider site, “Frist Center [in Nashville TN] Presents Visual Artist Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, Installations, Video, and More in Dynamic Survey Exhibition”, in a 9/6/17 story, beginning “Chicago-based artist Nick Cave (b. 1959) creates works at the intersection of sculpture, dance, and fashion”:

(#1) From the Nashville show, a soundsuit with phallic components

And then, from the Juxtapoz: Art & Culture site, “Nick Cave’s Soundsuits”, in a 11/26/13 story:

(#2) A crocheted soundsuit, phallic as a whole

These figures are highly stylized, not penis-like in any detail, but it would be hard to miss their abstract phallicity (which almost all reviewers have responded to).

The nature of the soundsuits. From Wikipedia on the artist:

he wants his work to be seen without the artist in mind. With the Soundsuits series you don’t know who is inside, you don’t know their gender, their race, or anything about their identity.

… Cave’s work outside of his soundsuits is predominantly mixed media sculptures and large-scale installations. Maintaining his signature style utilizing found objects and brightly colored fabrics, Cave creates sculptural art that discusses current racial tensions, especially gun violence and its impact on Black men.

… Cave’s husband is fellow designer Bob Faust.

More specifically, from the Art in America site, “Nick Cave Hears Detroit”, by Wendy Vogel on 7/20/15:

The artist describes the “Soundsuits” as a covering for vulnerable bodies — namely his own as a gay black man — and connects the sounds they make to the noise of public protest.

Background on this blog:

— from 10/17/16, “Nick Cave and the Soundsuits”

— from 11/4/16,  “Into the Cave world”, on a Cave show at Stanford

This entry was posted on March 7, 2021 at 7:20 am and is filed under Art, Phallicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.