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.
 |
| My mother's chalk box - she used it for buttons and I played with them for so many hours. |
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.
 |
| Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa, 2009 |
Other influences: African, Caribbean, Carnival, Native American, Northwest Coast, and Maori dance costumes, Justin Sampson, Yinka Shonibare, and Lisa Lou.
