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Lou-ann Neel wins the Fulmer Award in First Nations Art – Saanich News – Saanich News

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Lou-ann Neel has been making art since high school, creating textiles, carving wood, engraving jewelry, painting and eventually getting into digital illustrations. She has a fine art degree from Emily Carr, and sells her designs online.

But it took receiving the Fulmer Award in Indigenous Art this November for Neel to see herself as an artist.

“I just didn’t think anything I did was anything special because I’ve been surrounded by artists my whole life, and my whole thing was, I want to be as good as them. I’ve never seen myself so much as an artist,” she said.

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Her family is rich with artistic talent — Charlie James, Mungo Martin, Ellen Neel and Kevin Cranmer, to name a few.

“When I was learning to design, that’s when I realized it’s not just a great privilege to learn but it’s kind of a family obligation to continue our own family tradition.”

Art is something she’s compelled to do, but she never considered it a career – just a full-time passion outside of her day jobs in public administration, and currently as a curator for the Royal B.C. Museum. But receiving this award, along with five other Indigenous artists in B.C. — Cole Speck (also from Alert Bay), Jaalen Edenshaw, Kelly Robinson, Nathan Wilson and Evelyn Vanderhoop — caused Neel to take a second look at her own body of work.

Neel was born in Alert Bay, and returns as often as she can to participate in ceremonies and potlatches, spend time with family, and get in time on the land and sea.

Her art education began in high school where she was taught Kwakiutl art in an immersive Indigenous art, social studies and language program. Though living in Victoria by then, she was learning Kwak’wala language and being mentored by artists like George Hunt Jr., her brother Kevin Cranmer.

She pursued a career in public administration, but kept making art on the side, becoming a full-fledged as a multi-disciplinary artist in textiles, silversmithing, painting and carving.

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In 2011, she discovered a laser engraving technique for jewelry. Other traditional artists scoffed at the laser work, but for Neel, whose enthusiasm for carving earned her carpal tunnel syndrome that stopped her from engraving, the laser was a natural adoption of technology.

“I’m still the one making the design, I’m just not hand-cutting each piece because I physically can’t. But that shouldn’t stop me from being able to create the kind of jewelry I’d love to put out there.”

She went to Emily Carr around that time, graduating four years later with a degree in fine arts focused on digital graphic design. It was while researching for a project that Neel learned about her grandmother, Ellen Neel, an artistic legend in Vancouver.

A rare female totem pole carver — she was one of a group who gave the UBC Thunderbirds their name by gifting a thunderbird totem in 1948 — Ellen was also among the first to put designs on everyday things like clothes and in architecture in the 1940s and ’50s.

A quick scroll through Neel’s online stores shows her design printed on all manner of things, from tote bags to chairs to classic art prints to silk neckties.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: First Nations carver making all the right cuts

READ MORE on Lou-ann Neel’s day job: Indigenous repatriation projects get new funding from BC government

Neel will often take her laptop to a beach with wifi access and work on digital designs, inspired by the landscape.

The winter weather has pushed her back inside to experiment with old-fashioned paint on canvas. True to her artist’s spirit, she’s come up with a new project of creating abstract paintings about how it feels to be in the big house. She wants to communicate the sense of life and fullness that comes from ceremonies and potlatches.

“I don’t care if I get locked up for the next four months here. I have all my supplies and goals that I’ve set for myself for oil painting.”

The B.C. Achievement Foundation recognizes accomplishments of British Columbians in community work, business, and art. It was founded in 2003. The Vancouver-based Fulmer Foundation is the title sponsor of the award.

Do you have something to add to this story or something else we should report on? Email: zoe.ducklow@blackpress.ca


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Supernatural Treasures. (Lou-ann Neel)

Supernatural Treasures. (Lou-ann Neel)

A sample of some of Lou-ann Neel’s jewelry.

A sample of some of Lou-ann Neel’s jewelry.

Westcoast Storm. (Lou-ann Neel)

Westcoast Storm. (Lou-ann Neel)

Missing You, My Sister. (Lou-ann Neel)

Missing You, My Sister. (Lou-ann Neel)

Balance. (Lou-ann Neel)

Balance. (Lou-ann Neel)

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Trump’s use of blood as image has deep Christian roots – The Washington Post

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LOS ANGELES — In March 2021, the art collective MSCHF and rapper Lil Nas X dropped a limited-edition set of sneakers called Satan Shoes. The modified Nike Air Max 97s included a bronze pentagram and were produced to coincide with the release of “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” which included a video in which the singer gave the Devil a lap dance before usurping his crown.

End of carousel

The ensuing controversy was probably amplified by a curious addition to the shoes, the soles of which included a single drop of human blood, according to the artists. One of the 666 pairs of diabolical footware is now on view, along with its Satanic-themed presentation box, in a J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition called “Blood: Medieval/Modern,” which documents the symbolic power and meaning of blood from the Middle Ages to the current moment.

The Satan Shoes are not the oddest thing on view in this fascinating show, not even close. But they speak to the persistence of blood as a multipurpose and explosive symbol. The exhibition, which opened in late February, doesn’t take up the proliferating use of blood as political metaphor in the rhetoric of Donald Trump, but it explores the deep historical reservoirs of meaning that make the former president’s invocation of blood so disturbing.

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Inspiration for the exhibition, curator Larisa Grollemond says, came in part from the response to an online article she wrote about menstruation in the Middle Ages. But ideas about blood were fundamental to almost every aspect of medieval life, from the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, in which wine was transformed into the blood of Jesus, to medicine, in which blood (along with black and yellow bile and phlegm) was one of the four fundamental humors of the body. Political power was based on bloodlines, or consanguinity, and the definition of power was essentially the right to spill blood, or enlist others to spill it for you.

Christianity was a particularly blood-obsessed religion, with the Nile transformed to a river of blood in the Old Testament plagues of Egypt, and blood flowing freely from Jesus’ body during the flagellation and crucifixion of the New Testament. By the late Middle Ages, the wounds of Jesus took on an iconic power that floated free of the crucifixion narrative and became detached from his body. And so we see his body soaked in blood in an image from a 16th-century prayer book by the Flemish artist Simon Bening, and an even more disturbing image of the side wound of Jesus, from the late 15th century, in which the wound is presented disembodied, a kite- or vulvic-shaped object presented as if on a platter, with a text that confirms it is life-size: “This is the measure of the wound of our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

Throughout the exhibition, blood is a marker of authenticity and something that is both life affirming and disgusting. The corpse of someone who died by violence was thought to bleed in the presence of his or her killer, a kind of supernatural proof of crime. Saint Catherine, who fasted almost unto death, was said to be revived after drinking blood from the side wound of Jesus. “And there she slaked her thirst,” according to an early biography.

Yet women, because they bled during menstruation, were also thought to be fundamentally flawed, with an excess of blood that needed purging. “If they are constantly expelling blood,” Grollemond says, “then there must be something fundamentally wrong with them.” Moral stigma was attached to women’s blood, which was rarely represented. Images of childbirth, especially those associated with the fundamental figures of Christianity, including the Virgin Mary, were generally sanitized.

So, Christianity was a blood-soaked, even blood-obsessed, religion and may have become even more so during the late Middle Ages because of crises across Europe that made death terribly familiar, including plagues, religious and political strife, and even changes to the climate.

The resurgence of blood as political metaphor in the United States draws upon these deep wells of symbolic power, copiously though not consistently. When Trump in interviews and rallies last fall began saying that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, his remarks were compared to the frequent use of blood as a metaphor for race, nationality and disease in Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” But Trump, like Hitler before him, was animating toxic ideas far older than 20th-century fascism.

And this wasn’t his first foray into blood discourse. During his 2015 run for president, he seemed to reference menstruation after being pointedly questioned by Megyn Kelly during the first debate of the Republican primaries: She had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” In a 2017 tweet, he suggested that he was disgusted by Mika Brzezinski because “she was bleeding badly from a face-lift.” Women and blood were a recurring theme to his speeches during the 2020 campaign, when he mocked Sen. Elizabeth Warren for claiming Native American ancestry — or blood — an idea he returned to obsessively, and usually without segue or logical connection to anything else in his speech.

Trump is a rhetorical opportunist who uses imagery reflexively (patriots are always “red-blooded” and sacrifice “blood, sweat and tears”) and for its pure volatility rather than its cultural nuance or historic pedigree. And blood, as demonstrated by the explosive reaction to Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes, remains one of the most potent ideas in the Western arsenal of meaning.

In a paper discussed at a symposium held at the Getty in early March, Heather Blurton, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, asked: “How did [blood] come to be … a metaphor for familiar, ethnic and racial affiliation?” And she turned to an idea by French historian Michel Foucault, who argued that the fundamental social organizing idea of the medieval period covered in this exhibition was “a symbolics of blood.”

Whether or not Trump intended to suggest a literal “bloodbath” when he threatened economic chaos if he isn’t reelected, the reference to blood was part of a more thoroughgoing effort to tap into the violent energies of the pre-scientific and pre-modern symbolics of blood that is evident throughout this show. He is disgusted by women’s blood; he has good genes or blood running through his veins; he is defending the “blood” of pure Americans against infection and immigration; and the power he seeks is deeply connected to blood and violence. His inaugural address is remembered for a particularly blood-soaked image, American carnage, which is etymologically derived from butchery, flesh and slaughter. All of this gives some of his Christian supporters permission to reembrace the darkest aspects of the symbolics of blood that saturated their religion for centuries.

These are old ideas. They are deeply and historically Christian ideas. And they are terrifying. To see them coursing again is even more surreal and bizarre than a pair of sneakers with a drop of blood in them.

Blood: Medieval/Modern is on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through May 19. www.getty.edu.

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At Tiffany's Flagship, Luxe Art Helps Sell the Jewels – The New York Times

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Now that tickets to the Museum of Modern Art are priced at an astonishing $30 apiece, you could be forgiven for timing your visits carefully, making sure that they count.

So, let’s say you find yourself in Midtown Manhattan with an hour or two to spare, and you are yearning for some culture. Perhaps you have already seen MoMA’s latest exhibitions, or perhaps you are not quite in the mood to fork over that kind of money. May I instead suggest stopping by Tiffany & Co.’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue?

No, there are no “Demoiselles d’Avignon” there, and no “Starry Night,” but what The Landmark (as it is called) does offer is a heady fusion of contemporary art and luxury retailing that is as relevant, and discomfiting, as anything you could hope to find in a museum.

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After a renovation by the leather-clad architect Peter Marino that debuted last April, 58 pieces that he selected by major artists — many of them blue, or silver, or both — now fill the 84-year-old building. A color-shifting James Turrell oval is embedded in a wall near one set of elevator doors. Hanging by another is a shiny Damien Hirst cabinet filled with rows of cubic zirconia. Hovering next to the engagement rings is one of Anish Kapoor’s eye-bending mirrored discs. On the ground floor, 14 arched window frames glow with a state of the art animation by Oyoram Visual Composer, of the Manhattan skyline and Central Park — the city is immaculate, with no people, just birds.

And that giant-size, faux-deteriorated Venus of Arles with a Tiffany Blue patina? That comes from the mind of Daniel Arsham, who has devoted his career to such banal corporate collaborations. He has designed a limited-edition bracelet and sculpture for the brand, as well as, I quote, “exclusive Pokémon-inspired jewelry.”

The key work here is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Equals Pi,” from 1982, his milestone year. (MoMA, for the record, does not own a Basquiat painting.) It is high up on a wall on the ground floor, covered by a translucent shield, looking a little forlorn. It has Basquiat’s classic crowns and handwritten text, and its turquoise ground is awfully close to Tiffany’s trademarked color. When the Tiffany executive Alexandre Arnault used it in an ad campaign with Beyoncé and Jay-Z back in 2021, he proposed that the artist may have been making a “homage” to the brand. Some who actually knew Basquiat were quick to reject that.

But let’s not dwell on conflict. Just about everything in this 10-story palace is bright, polished, antiseptic and exactly where it should be. There are stunning flower arrangements, stacks of art books, and capacious public restrooms. The salespeople are unfailingly polite. “I’m just poking around,” I told one who asked to help. “Poke away,” he replied. The atmosphere is subtly disorienting, a bit unnerving, as in a casino or an elite art fair during its early hours. There is money at stake here.

Buyers sip sparkling wine or ice water as they try on jewelry. Two are being led to a private room, where pastel-colored macarons might await. Behind one discreet blue velvet rope is a hallway with paintings by Hans Hartung and Jules de Balincourt (blue and blue).

It is tempting to wring one’s hands about this instrumentalization of high art to sell high-end accessories, but many decades have passed since Mark Rothko canceled his commission for the lavish Four Seasons Restaurant, reportedly saying that “anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” Ideas about art’s purity, and the stigma of selling out, have less currency today.

In any case, Marino’s Tiffany project follows in a rich tradition. In the 1950s, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg collaborated on window displays for Bergdorf Goodman, across the intersection from Tiffany’s, and Bonwit Teller, a block south. They used a pseudonym, but Rauschenberg later had work on view at Bonwit Teller. (The pair also worked with Gene Moore at Tiffany; the designer’s displays are featured in exhibits at the Landmark.)

Andy Warhol showed in the Bonwit Teller windows, too, in 1963, just as he was becoming a star. The venturesome Robert Irwin produced a spectral sculpture for a California mall in 1970, and Takashi Murakami infamously incorporated a Louis Vuitton pop-up in his 2007—08 traveling museum retrospective. (Vuitton’s parent company, LVMH, which is controlled by France’s art-loving Arnault family, acquired Tiffany in 2021.)

The works at Tiffany are, alas, not for sale — they have been purchased, commissioned, or borrowed by the company — but there is a robust history of department stores hawking art. In the 1960s, the actor and art historian Vincent Price was involved with art sales at Sears, and in Minneapolis at that time, the Dayton’s department store (which created Target) had a gallery with material by leading artists, some via the famed New York dealer Leo Castelli.

In China, the developer Adrian Cheng has filled his K11 malls with trendy art, and in Seoul, where I lived until recently, a Frank Gehry-designed Vuitton store has hosted compact shows of Cindy Sherman, Alex Katz and Warhol from the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s holdings. (Marino handled the interiors.) Last year, the Shinsegae department store’s gallery, at a high-end clothing offshoot called Boon the Shop, had a Rirkrit Tiravanija show that included free T-shirts by the artist, just as his recent MoMA PS1 survey did.

In 1970, the Print Collector’s Newsletter quipped that “being a ‘department store gallery’ is a dubious distinction; it is not quite an insult, but surely not a compliment,” calling it a domain of “middlebrow art.” As it happens, much of the art at Tiffany is middling — the sort of adequate, professional things one could find in auction house day sales or uninspired booths at art fairs anywhere in the world. A brand this rich could have been far more ambitious and daring.

Anyway, for the next two months, you can take a closer look at Marino’s taste by booking a free ticket to “Culture of Creativity: An Exhibition from the Peter Marino Art Foundation,” which is on view in the Tiffany Gallery — an airy space high in the building that was designed by OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, with excellent views of Billionaires’ Row. You will find almost 70 more pieces, including intricate, witty 19th-century Tiffany silver, bronze sheep (by François-Xavier Lalanne) atop artificial grass, serviceable pieces by artists represented elsewhere in the store (Francesco Clemente, Vik Muniz, Sarah Sze), and many portraits of Marino: emblazoned on a Michelangelo Pistoletto mirror, in Roe Ethridge photos, and painted atop broken dishes in a Julian Schnabel.

There is one very dark moment that surprised me in the Marino show: a large 1980 Sarah Charlesworth photo, an appropriated image of a man falling from a building. It curiously echoes two grand wall pieces that Rashid Johnson created for the store, as part of his “Falling Man” series. Johnson’s depictions of pixelated, upside-down (Tiffany Blue) men recall 8-bit videogame characters. They are surrounded by mirrored panels that have been scratched and partially cracked, as if smashed by a hammer.

These works are meant to be “existential investigations, meaning the idea of man falling through space, finding himself,” Johnson told an interviewer last year. Fair enough. But you could also see them as portraits of a culture intent on self-destruction (or outlines of bodies at a crime scene); spend time with them, and you may find that their hints of violence stick with you.

You will want to relax after this dizzying experience. The $30 you have saved will not go too far at the Blue Box Café by Daniel Boulud, on the sixth floor, where the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” menu is $59 per person (before tax and tip), but you can at least enjoy a glass of Champagne as you reflect. Why not order a second, or a third? This moment will not last forever.

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Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

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Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

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We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

Liv smiles.

“I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

“A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

“Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

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