Gallery Review: Nick Cave, Sculptor POMO-Kitsch

Fowler Museum of Anthropology's exhibit,"Nick Cave - From the Center of the Earth:

SoundSuits", closing May 30: had to see this because of my kitsch conflicts. How I marvel at the vibrancy, the clutter, the obsessive magnitude of its details, then a kind of car/art sickness comes over me. It's visual gluttony, it's shrieking void fear. Yes, it's edited, by genre prescriptives that sour, then imprison, whatever was charming about innocent cuteness. Then, beguiled again, I want to join in joyous crazy dancing, move to utter chthonic revelry, no matter the end.

"Aw, come on, progden, can't you just enjoy it?" says those critics who've passed over to the 21st century, at easy peace with material objects. Yes, I do, actually, just that there's this rift, see, I need to talk about that.

This sound suit, mute it stands, is knitted in my mother's Midwestern afghan style, with painted-tin musical tops and rattles springing wildly from the head. Old toy nostalgia bites; I hurry to buy choral tops, lest my grandchildren be cheated of my childhood memories.

The button-suit! Magic! Surely there are no buttons

worth noting in the world after the making of this. Oh, those hours playing on the floor with my mother's

buttons on a rainy day. I only swallowed a few. The abacus face mask: locked behind counting functions, peeking out after the deal is done.

The bird soundsuit. I go crazy, wanting audio headphones and video of the dance and music that coulda been. How claustrophobic to have those birds flying in one's face, a farcical version of Hitchcock's film. Coming to mind in an arching connection, most poignant and painful, Annette Messager's 1990's grandma-knit shrouds for dead birds, laid out in rows like corpses of a huge disaster. Lost is lost recalled, cultivated, but then still more lost.

The Sunday Style section supplies another connection: one could go for decorator irony to sustain the frissons of nice-nausea, useful art like the Compana Brothers stuffed animal chairs.

Perhaps the panda bear chair? Endangered, aren't they? I like the shark dolphin chair, however. Shall I sit with dolphins or swim with them? Oops, that was supposed to be sink or swim. 

Other influences: African, Caribbean, Carnival, Native American, Northwest Coast, and Maori dance costumes, Justin Sampson, Yinka Shonibare, and Lisa Lou.

These are surely anthropological and fine art connections that expand the kitsch/art consanguinity. I know! Perhaps I'll soften now and let my love of decoration carry me to a balanced resolution.

PLAY: Lieutenant of Inishmore

Poem: Saying Goodnight Grace

Wind’s blowing keenly down rock-littered hillsides

Birch trees whip sharply and lash down very low.

Plain skies of steel gray so cold and so wide

Storm billows and flutters the curtain of snow.

Something’s not clear though I’m grieving to know

A truth that’s been coming I just want to hide

Coming up short now

With time and with tide.

Take with me nothing I ever did love

Even no footprints will I leave behind

Loved ones you’ll know my love keeps you forever

Like sky holds the moon and stars up above.

A little time left to set everything right

A list of regrets trail the life I have lived

Need some time to clear roadblocks away

And then I will turn and bid loving good night.

POEM: Prairie Sky

Dark clouds hang low in a prairie sky

Rolling land waves beneath them lie

Journey so long journeying far

Course is unset by the far distant stars

Ships gone before me sailed out of sight

Passed over the dark horizon to night

Don’t know for sure heaven is waiting

So many dreams and hopes slowly fading

Still transfixed with wonder each precious short day

Everything becomes nothing, no one can stay.

PHOTO ESSAY: Joshua Tree, Mojave Desert

 Spring in the California desert is a rare and miraculous time.  The bosom of the earth is fresh and open, fragrant and soft.  The surprise of desert bloom will make a believer out of crusty old cynics, and gift an open heart and soul with a memorable epiphany.

 The Joshua Tree Inn

All the folk-rockers stayed here:  The Byrds, Emmylou Harris, The Eagles, and Gram Parsons famously OD’d in Room 8 - you can still stay in it if you choose.

 

 Spring in the California desert is a rare and miraculous time.  The bosom of the earth is fresh and open, fragrant and soft, and the surprise of desert bloom will make a believer out of crusty old cynics, and gift an open heart and soul with a memorable epiphany.

The 77th Marine Regiment can deploy in 48 hours to anyplace on the globe from 29 Palms, and has fought in Desert Storm, Kuwait, Afganhistan, and many past conflicts.  Mojave Viper is based here, the most realistic live-fire exercise Marines undergo in training.

Support Squadron 374 is the largest expeditionary airfieldoperated by the Marines, and the Communications Electronics School trains for vital operations support for air and ground troups.

At the motel pool, in the restaurants, you see the families sitting around, waiting.  There’s a young man, in uniform or not, looking military.  Sometimes its a wedding, but you can bet it’s their goodbye weekend before he’s deployed far away.  Children jump joyfully into the pool, and we pack our picnic, binoculars, and sunscreen for our leisure excursion, feeling vaguely guilty until the sheer beauty of the desert day enters our hearts.

PHOTO ESSAY: Alice's House

The Proclamation from the Porch

Along a narrow road tucked beside the inlets of Tomales Bay live Alice and Rob, longtime friends of my husband even before we married. Their daughter, too quickly grown and gone, now lives a life distant from cities back East.  A hidden driveway conceals the old house, set on a small hill overlooking an oyster farm.  Mostly I remember the skies, gray and muted with fog and cloud when we go out there.

 When we visited Alice’s house for the first time, I was enchanted with the interiors.  My love of assemblage, old houses, and poignant memories of my grandparents’ farmhouse all rose up to smite me with delight and wonder as I wandered through the rooms.

The house is  a functioning cocoon of beloved objects, some no doubt past the using, some awaiting the moment of need or want,  some required every day.

Artists I love came to mind: Joseph Cornell, Edward Kienholz, Michael C. McMillen, and my friend Kathi Flood, among others. Working with assemblage, they seem to ask:

How do we hold the past? Dear and close? Casually experienced and then disposed? Purged by forgetfulness? Struggling with recall, or plagued with it?

And the objects themselves: how they do command memory, how marvelous and bemusing a power we give them.

Do we discard, renovate, or cherish, making painful choices, acutely aware that once they’re gone, no recovery is possible.

 But those artists don’t actually live in the attics of memory they have created; Alice’s house is at once life and assemblage fused, a wonderland of exchange between utility and decoration.

Alice's daughter, Isis, studied very seriously as child and young woman.

 There’s a roughened starkness that shades and compresses the nostalgic quality: raw wood waiting for paint, wallpaper half stripped, plumbing renovations underway.  Changes complete when they will.

How I loved seeing all the layers of living, wondering about the objects’ history.  Why that bowl? That teacup?  Was that your grandmother’s portrait? And all the toys: some rest, their use completed, while others wait to resume play should a determined child appear, a Toy Story only privately told.

Oh, Alice, did you let anything go?  You stayed in one place and let the years of living accrue gently, each year’s acquisitions mulching the high ceilinged rooms. You are reluctant to edit the memories, I think

  Did you intend display at all?  Or is the loosely webbed order I sense only mine, imposed upon the objects chosen first by need and want, then configured and arranged to speak for themselves?

It’s a marvel, your memory garden of intimate possessions, sheltered by the dark old home, and nurtured richly by long keeping. 

How pleased I am that I was allowed to make these photographs and write about them. See you soon, Alice and Rob!