Artist Nick Cave on police violence and history repeating

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Artist Nick Cave on police violence and history repeating’

Lilah Raptopoulos
The artist Nick Cave’s work is kind of a contradiction. On the one hand, he’s known for bright colours and celebration. One time he did a performance in New York where Alvin Ailey dancers dressed up like giant horses and galloped around Grand Central Station in the middle of rush hour. Just whimsical stuff. But on the other hand, Nick’s work is also deeply introspective. He’s black and queer, and he’s been making art about being black in America for more than 30 years. Nick is best known for these giant costumes. They’re called soundsuits.

Nick Cave
A soundsuit is a wearable object that is made of surplus. And it’s really making a sort of second skin, something that you put on that shields and hides gender, race, class, forcing you to look at something without judgment.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nick made his first soundsuit after police beat Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991. And since then, a lot of his work has explored abuses of power like this and history repeating itself like this from King to Trayvon Martin to George Floyd. Nick currently has a retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and I went to see it. It made me want to ask him all kinds of questions. And then police beat and killed another black man, Tyre Nichols, in Memphis last month. And that made me want to talk to him even more. Nick feels like this has been his kind of calling to create objects that help people process painful things.

Nick Cave
You know, I am fortunate to be the messenger to deliver these deeds. And that’s really how I sort of see it, is that, you know, I’m on assignment.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But what I learned from Nick is that he’s also tired of being defined by violence.

Nick Cave
I can no longer allow society to dictate how I am going to exist in the world. I’ve got so much more to say. I don’t really know who I am, really, because I’ve always been in the fight.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos [
Today I speak with Nick about his work and its evolution and what advice he’d give anyone making art today. Then my colleague Nilanjana Roy joins us to talk about what makes a great book club and rules for starting your own. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. Nick’s show at the Guggenheim is called Forothermore. And there are three sections. One about the past, the present and the future. They’re called “What It Was”, “What It Is” and “What It Shall Be”. Two of the rooms have his more recent work, and the third features the soundsuits in all their wacky glory displayed on mannequins. It’s like a bunch of magnificent muppets are frozen mid-party. They’re made of human hair and bright flowers and sequins and old toys and Mardi Gras beads and embroidery. It’s just colourful excess.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Nick, welcome to the show. It’s such a pleasure to have you here.

Nick Cave
Thank you. Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So my team has been excited to have you on for a while because your art has been showing up in our lives in many places. And it’s the kind of art that you, when you see it, you can’t forget it. You know, your work is at the Guggenheim right now. I saw it in the subway station afterwards in Times Square. It’s in Chicago. It’s in Rotterdam. And I’m curious, you know, it’s very public work that draws people in. I’m curious about how you think about the work that you do and the way that it is engaging people and new audiences all the time.

Nick Cave
Well, again, thanks for having me. You know, for me, it’s you know, the practice has always been sort of structured around others. You know, I have a job to do and to know that, you know, I may be the voice for someone. You know, those are those moments that are important, the moments where the art becomes part of the school curricula. You know, that’s the, those are those moments where, you know, it’s getting out there. It’s getting filtered into places that are important and really that people see themselves in the work.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I am grateful to have you on now also because your work does so many things. A lot of it is colourful and vibrant and known for celebration and a lot of it is not. And in the US right now, people are mourning the death of Tyre Nichols, whom police beat and killed in Memphis. First, I’m curious how you’ve been thinking and feeling about that news over the past few weeks.

Nick Cave
You know, it’s you know, I sort of went right to the Guggenheim and just thought, you know, I’m glad that the show is up right now . . . there. You know, it’s just disheartening to sort of think about this sort of continuous sort of assault on black and brown bodies. And again, now I’m thinking about police reform. I’m thinking about excessive force to kill. That’s how I’m sort of coming to it, you know, because that’s what is happening. We’re forced to reckon with this. And yet we’re looking for ways to forgive, to accept. And so it’s a lot to wrap your head around. But, you know, I’ve always had, you know, my work as this saviour. It is that place that I go to to reckon with these thoughts, with the pain, with the sort of anger. I mean, it’s it saddens me, you know, each and every time that it happens. But we have to keep doing the work.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Let me take you back to the beginning of Nick’s story. Nick was born in Fulton, Missouri, to a huge family. He was one of eight brothers. He learned to sew from his mother and aunts who were incredible seamstresses. And he used it to upgrade his hand-me-downs from his siblings. He studied fibre arts in college and then started teaching it at the Art Institute of Chicago. But when he learned about the beating of Rodney King, it changed the course of his art. In March of ’91, Rodney King was arrested by the LA police department for drunk driving. Shortly afterwards, a group of almost entirely white police officers brutally beat him. They struck him at least 56 times with batons, and it left his body horrifyingly fractured and bruised. The attack was caught on tape from someone on a nearby balcony, and the video reverberated around the world. It was one of the first times this kind of police violence was caught on tape. When Nick saw the footage, like many, he grieved. He says it made him feel that black people are discarded, viewed less than and devalued. One day he found himself sitting on a park bench thinking about it and looking down at some twigs on the ground. Looking back now, he thinks that moment changed his life.

Nick Cave
And I look down on the ground and there was a twig. And for some reason I saw that as its discarded, viewed less then devalued. That twig signified everything that I was feeling. But for some reason I started to collect all of this material and went home and started to build this sculpture using these twigs, but didn’t really think about that I could bring it to the body.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The object that Nick was assembling was the very first soundsuit. It’s this big, hulking thing where the twigs Nick was sewing together almost look like giant, inflexible dreads. And when you put it on, it makes sound, kind of like this.

[AUDIO CLIP OF TWIGS BUMPING AGAINST SOMETHING SOLID]

It took Nick some time to realise that, though, because he thought he was making a sculpture, not a costume.

Nick Cave
And so when I brought it to the body, I felt protected. I felt that I was sort of engulfed in this sort of armour of sorts. But then at the same time, when I looked at myself in the mirror, it looked scary. It was something up there. And then the moment that I moved, it made sound. And so which allowed me to think about the ideas of protest in order to be heard, you got to speak louder. So that was the beginning of the first soundsuit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
How did that feel, Nick, when you once you made that first one? Yeah.

Nick Cave
When I made, when I finished that first piece, I knew that my life would never be the same. For some reason, I could feel it. It was something that I had never seen before. And yet I saw it as a form of protest, and yet I saw it as a figurative sculptural form. But I knew that it was an art form that has yet to be revealed.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think of the soundsuits as kind of the opposite of an invisibility cloak. Instead of making you disappear, they make you take up more space, but they also hide your identity. So they do kind of provide an armour for the person inside. The first one already had all these elements, but Nick wasn’t ready to show the world yet. He hid it in a closet for ten years, and in that time he made about 11 more.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I mean, I’m quite struck by the fact that you made so many and weren’t ready to bring them out for ten years. At what point did you feel comfortable bringing that out? What made that happen?

Nick Cave
You know, the reason why I did not sort of expose the work right away, because I physically I was able to make it. Mentally, I hadn’t caught up with what I was making into. So I needed time to process and to come to an understanding of what have I just been introduced to. And so that’s what I was doing. I was really just sort of trying to bring the language around the work that, you know, all of a sudden it’s static, it’s a sculpture, but then it’s performative. And what does that mean? And where did these moments of art expression take place? And so it’s really me just sort of really trying to understand its role.

Lilah Raptopoulos
When Nick did take the soundsuits out in the early 2010s, he brought them on to the street. It was a whole new medium and he was ready to see what they could do.

Nick Cave
I gathered a group of performers. There was probably 12 dancers, and the first thing we did is that we paraded out into the streets in this 12 soundsuits. So again, not sort of knowing like what the outcome would be, but these invasions, these happenings, you know, the world was like my sketchpad. Like, well, if I just bring it out into the world, I will get immediate response and I’m just sort of taking pictures then just collecting all this data.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
There are hundreds of soundsuits now in museums around the world. Nick likes to talk about them as ritual objects. He calls them vestments, but they’re also inspired by tons of cultures who use ceremony and celebration to mourn. Second line’s in New Orleans, Dia de los Muertos in Mexico. The point is, they’re a little magical. A person in a soundsuit is totally transformed in ways that Nick can’t even fully control. And when they’re off the body, like on display in a museum, they still feel like they have that power.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Nick, so how do you think about the soundsuits in the end? Like, are they sculptures? Are they performance pieces? Are they both? It kind of feels like there are a lot of things at the same time.

Nick Cave
Oh, yeah. Defin . . . I think it’s important that, you know, I am that artist that doesn’t necessarily want to be categorised as this thing. If I am this thing, trust me, it’s going to shift so severely because there is, you know, there’s more to our to us. You know, we are made up of many things.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Nick’s work is many things at once. Performance, sculpture, installation. Actually, most of his most recent work, two-thirds of the exhibit isn’t soundsuits at all. His work uses a lot of found objects, like kitschy trinkets and spinning tops, things you might throw away as junk. He spends a lot of time going to flea markets and second-hand shops and layering those objects in his art. He’s also making bronze sculptures by casting parts of his own body. And a lot of that work is so tactile that people really want to interact with it. I was talking to a guard at the Guggenheim about one piece called Forbidden and Desire. It’s like a maze on the wall, and it’s surrounded by ornaments. They’re mostly bejewelled balls that look like Christmas baubles. And there’s one bright bejewelled banana. It’s very compelling. And I asked the guard what he’s noticed about how people interact with your work. And he said, I’m not very arty, but people are very touchy with the stuff in here. He said they love the banana. And he said it once I turned around and a lady was holding the banana.

Nick Cave
Stop. No way.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And he said, I told her ma’am, no touching, and she handed me the banana. And then I had the banana and I didn’t know what to do.

Nick Cave
Oh my god!

Lilah Raptopoulos
And I thought that was so funny. And I . . . yeah. So I’m wondering if you like what it’s like for you to watch people who don’t know your work.

Nick Cave
Well, hopefully I don’t ever see them touching it first and foremost. But, you know, there are some moments that I am in the museums. And you know what? I think the most exciting thing for me is that there is just conversation being held amongst one another and the fact that they are finding a way into the work by being able to identify with a particular object. Because there’s a lot of nostalgic, there’s a lot of sort of objects that hold sort of memory history. We can identify it. We’ve seen it in our household in some form or another.

Lilah Raptopoulos
But many of Nick’s pieces are, like that first soundsuit, much more solemn. They are focused on racism and mourning. Like “TM13”, a sculpture dedicated to Trayvon Martin. It’s a mannequin wearing a hoodie and jeans covered in toys from a childhood he’d never get to live. And the whole thing is wrapped in a beaded net. So all you can see clearly is the toe of his sneaker. It’s raised on a platform like a monument. Interestingly, in the Guggenheim exhibition, the soundsuits are actually the last room, not the room about the past or the present, but the room about the future. The signs will tell you that it’s because the soundsuits are about processing collective pain, about using celebration and beauty to move us toward joy. But of course, processing is a lot of work, and it’s work you don’t get to opt out of if you’re black. You said in the audio guide at the Guggenheim, the fact that I’ve been doing soundsuits for 30 years is sad to me. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Nick Cave
Well, I mean, it’s sad to me because, you know, we’ve got Tyre Nichols. So in, in reality I should be creating a soundsuit in response to that. But yet I’m in the studio trying to move forward in my practice in a whole new direction. But you know what I have come to terms with? What I sort of come to, came to realise through the George Floyd incident was that I can no longer allow society to dictate how I see myself in the world. I’ve never sort of really sort of exposed like my queerness in my, not directly in my practice. And I’m curious, what does that mean?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Nick Cave
What does that look like? And that when a Tyre Nichols incident happens, how do I fold? How do I now fold that into this discovery of self. As opposed to letting that be the catalyst that drives the work.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Nick Cave
So, you know, I have shifted my calls for action and only will respond when that is necessary. Because I need to drive the directive forward.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And as a teacher. You know, teaching students, you direct the graduate fashion program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I want to ask you, like, what would you tell yourself in 1992? But actually, what I really want to know is sort of what would you tell yourself if you were a young artist today?

Nick Cave
Let me tell you, I think about, like, I’m still as hungry today as I was then. Be fearless. Work. Work. Work. Fail. Learn. Fail. Learn. Fail. Learn. But be fearless. You won’t know purpose of why you’re doing what you’re doing right away. And that is OK. Just be productive.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nick, this was an honour. Thank you so much.

Nick Cave
And it was great. I’m so glad we were able to have this moment together.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
There are many reasons to start or join a book club. It’s a good way to make friends. It’s a good way to build in reading as a habit. I’ve been in book clubs for those reasons, but now I want a book club for a different reason. I want to use it to help me read the classics. Not buzzy bestsellers, but Middlemarch by George Eliot. I want to read Middlemarch, but I’m a grown up and I don’t have a class to do it with, and I just don’t want to do it alone.

Nilanjana Roy
I think as humans, we are extremely sociable in all that we do. And over and over again, every generation from the early literary societies to today’s Instagram book clubs seem to have discovered that we deepen the pleasure of reading or deepen the experience of reading when we share it, when we discuss it, talk about it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s my colleague, Nilanjana Roy. Recently, she wrote a column for the FT called ‘In praise of book clubs and how to do them well,’ which feels well-timed because there are so many types of book clubs now that it can be really hard to choose. There’s the old school one few friends around a fire, maybe a bottle of wine. And then there’s Reese Witherspoon and her powerful army of 2.5mn book club members. Nilanjana says there are others, too.

Nilanjana Roy
There’s a silent book club movement that seems to have, you know, largely for introverts, where you meet at a specific time with your book and you spend the hour in silence just reading together, but without intruding on each other. And that seems to spread all around the world. And there’s a lovely concept called the BYOB Club that was started in Delhi sometime back and has spread to Mumbai and other cities where you don’t have to read the same book. You can just bring along a book of your choosing and read it for a while together, and then everybody gets up and discusses the book they brought along and explains why.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, wow.

Nilanjana Roy
Yeah. And people seem to love it because, you know, then they get a sense of recommendations.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nilanjana joins me on the show today from Delhi, India to talk about what makes a good book club and how to start one yourself. Before we start, I feel like the people should know that beyond being a beloved book critic and a writer, you’re a voracious book person. You even wrote a collection of essays about loving reading called The Girl Who Ate Books. Can you tell me what it means to eat books?

Nilanjana Roy
I’m so glad you asked and so embarrassed you asked. Yeah, that came from a childhood habit if I really liked book, especially if it was poetry or something rousing and dramatic, I would finish a chapter and eat a page or eat nibbled at the edges more accurately. And I can’t do that now because a) paper has changed and it doesn’t taste that good. It used to taste like biscuits. And now it tastes like paper. Don’t ask how I know that. And the other is that I’m grown up and adults apparently don’t eat books. But I think all of us who love books, you know, what starts as a hobby or as just curiosity rapidly turns into this passion. And of course, even if you read alone, you want to share books with people. And that’s basically where the idea of reading in a community comes from.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm. I love this image of eating a book because it just, it perfectly encapsulates when you love something so much, whether it’s reading or you meet a person and you’re excited about them or what you do, just kind of want to ingest the thing.

Nilanjana Roy
That’s true. You want it to be a part of you, you know?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, you want it to be part of you. There are so many different types of book clubs. There’s ones that you start with your friends or more official ones like a library, one or big online ones or celebrity ones. But I’m curious in your mind, kind of in the broadest sense, what makes a good one good?

Nilanjana Roy
One of the few rules that’s absolutely set in stone is we suggest that book clubs set out their goals and what they’re going to read and how they’re going to read it right from the start. Clarity is really important. You know, are you going to read across genres? Are you going to read the best non-fiction of the year? Do you want to read science fiction? Do you want to go back to the world’s classics? You know, do you want to spend a year reading romance or do you want to flip between 12 different books? Whatever it is, the more focused that community is, the more clear people are about what they want out of the experience.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Say, it’s a small book club and with a group of people whose minds you respect and you’re meeting up, say, in person, how do you run it well? You know, how do you make sure there’s a balance of conversation? How do you make sure everyone’s happy with the book selection? Everyone feels like they’re heard. Should there be one leader? Should it be open?

Nilanjana Roy
A lot of that depends on the size of the club. If it’s anything over about five people or six people, I strongly suggest using a timer for the discussion, at least for the first round, so that everybody has a say and the people who are more reticent or more shy don’t get left behind. It does help to have a moderator. Part of the deal with the book club is that the selection, sometimes as readers, you should allow yourself to be brought out of your comfort zone. You know, so if you’ve never read books about business, so you’ve never read spy fiction, be a little open to that experience and don’t drop out. A good moderator encourages discussion. The challenge is to, you know, get it to the point where you can let people be enthusiastic, but not just let the good talkers dominate. You know, a lot of us, particularly when we come out of publishing and writing, we’re very articulate. And that means . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
And we have a lot to say.

Nilanjana Roy
Yes we do (laughter). And that means that, you know, people who are sitting in the shadows, you never know what their perspective is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nilanjana says that another thing that’s a known best practice for book clubs is the following question. And she says it works specifically well for novels. How does this book relate or not relate to your life?

Nilanjana Roy
The moment that you ask them where they connect or where this book is helpful to them, or where it opens up something that they haven’t considered before, the discussion becomes richer when they can relate whatever they are reading to a part of their lives, or they can move sideways into, you know, the history of ideas in the 16th century and how much our view of God has changed. That’s juicy. You see, that’s something that you can take with you across several meetings.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. Nila, one question I have for you is like, where do you start? Like, say, no one’s coming to you and saying, “Do you want to join my book club?” And you don’t want to make your own. You just want to try one out for the first time. Maybe not commit. What would you recommend?

Nilanjana Roy
What I would suggest is it’s easy to join one of the online book clubs. You know, they’re big on Instagram, but it’s always wonderful if you look around in your own community and if you can find a group at the local library or, you know, a group that’s connected, that’s reading books on the subject that you find interesting. Sometimes it’s best to start face to face if you’ve never been part of a book community. Right. And try out two or three. You know, if you’re not comfortable, go to a few meetings, settle in and otherwise, feel free to leave and take a look at a few others that might suit you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nilanjana is part of a book club herself. An international group of eight to 10 writers. They live in six different countries and they meet online on a video call. And in it, they’ve learned a lot.

Nilanjana Roy
You know, something that still touches me in a way that’s hard to explain: every now and then, we discovered more common ground than we discovered differences. Of course, we had different ways of looking at the same book. Of course, we brought our life experiences to it, but we discovered how much story moves around you and how much something that happened in an epic that comes out of Qana has a resonance in a myth from China. And then repeats back two centuries later in folktales from India.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Nila, this was so helpful. Thank you so much. I am very excited for my new book club.

Nilanjana Roy
Oh, thank you for such a wonderful discussion, which was a pleasure.

[MUSIC PLAYING}

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the podcast from the Financial Times. I’ve put links to everything mentioned today in the show notes alongside a link to a special discount for an FT subscription. It’s a really good deal. I’ve also put a bunch of photos of the Nick Cave exhibit on my Instagram. If you want to see the soundsuits and the other art that we mentioned, I’m there and on Twitter @LilahRap. If you’d like to email us we’re at FTweekendpodcast@FT.com and the show is on Twitter at @FTWeekendPod. If you have a minute, we would love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify that really helps us out. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smith is our producer. Special shoutout to the two of them this week. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz has is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.