Fun, Provocative Art in a Fabulously Retrofitted Cheese Factory

Nick Cave’s immersive, sparkling Until inaugurates a hip new gallery space, the Momentary, in Arkansas.

E arlier this week, I wrote about Crystal Bridges, the museum in Bentonville in northwestern Arkansas. It’s now ten years old, and I’m still mortified to say I’d never visited until last month. So this temple of American art will observe its tenth birthday later this year and the first anniversary of the Momentary, its new and exciting contemporary space in an old cheese factory near the center of Bentonville. Wheeler Kearns Architects, a Chicago firm, retrofitted the factory into an arts space, keeping most of the industrial fittings, including catwalks, brick walls, and concrete floors.

The Momentary is a few miles from Crystal Bridges. I don’t know whether Alice Walton, Crystal Bridges’ founder and patron, was involved, but the two museums are connected by joint programming and marketing. Walton’s nephews and niece spearheaded the factory’s conversion.

Galleries are various. There’s room for a traditional exhibition in small spaces as well as vast galleries with high ceilings. It’s a watering hole for young people, with a restaurant, performance space, and cinema. Families will like it, too, since it’s more immersive than a museum with Eakinses, Whistlers, and Homers on the wall. It’s modeled on Mass MoCA, which I love. I think it’s going to be a big success. A billboard-size “You belong here” sign in lipstick-pink neon lights tells us it’s inviting and fun. I know I wanted to be there as I walked through the space.

Its premiere show, Until, was just ending its run when I visited. It’s a massive installation, about 15,000 square feet, by Nick Cave. Cave’s a good artist and, I think, an American original. That doesn’t mean he’s unique. He’s quintessentially American in his materials — he’ll use anything, in a good way — and his approach. He makes very serious points using a nuts-and-bolts, quotidian vocabulary. Gravity sometimes hides in a pile of bright, cheap baubles.

He’s known for his Soundsuits, a series he started in the early 1990s. He’s made hundreds of them. They’re costumes — Cave is a fiber artist, and he’s still a fashion designer — decorated with feathers, sequins, brass dangles, sisal, and basically anything that looks fun, flashy, and evocative of his themes. I saw one years ago with plastic songbirds, pompoms, pipe cleaners, balloons, buttons, miles of strung beads, and a gramophone mask.

The title of the series comes from the swishes and jingles the body makes while wearing one. He sometimes stages performance-art dances with multiple Soundsuit models set to music.

His Soundsuits cover the body, hiding race, sex, and age, and their decoration subverts all three. They’re very clever to see, but, for the wearer, they’re liberating. They’re protest pieces against unfairness, too. Cave once said, “In order to protest, you have to make noise.” Each one has a message delivered through an iconography that masquerades as fun, sometimes silly decoration. The message, loud and clear, is “look at me.”

Cave is inspired by many threads: ball culture, drag, African ceremonial dress, armor, couture, movies, and cartoons, among them. He’s got an “anything that works” approach that’s very American. He’s ecumenical and entrepreneurial. Having grown up in a big family, Cave is a master of using hand-me-downs to glittering effect. His work sometimes feels like burlesque, B-movies, or comic books. There’s a strong camp mood in it. It’s happy and sad at the same time.

The introductory panel for Until tells us the show is about police shootings of African Americans. I think it could mean a lot more. It’s strong, exuberant, provocative, and persuasive for a while and then, unfortunately, edges toward the incontinent and incoherent.

Until starts with thousands of bright metal spinning disks cut in patterns, amid bead strings, hanging from the ceiling to about a foot from the floor and creating a forest of sparkle, color, and disorientation since there are lots of moving parts. Mixed in are chandeliers. It’s like a gaudy Christmas-tree forest, but upside down. I walked slowly. I felt like Dorothy when she landed in Munchkin Land and took those first, disbelieving, and bewildered steps. After a few seconds, the maze beguiles, then delights.

A second later, I spotted spinning disks shaped like guns, bullets, and teardrops. Has Al Capone moved to town?

Visitors walk through the thicket to the tinkling of brass and endless glints before reaching a round platform mounted on poles and rising about 20 feet from the floor. Climbing a ladder, the visitor sees arranged on the platform a seemingly random bosquet of plastic toys, cut-glass flowers, blackface lawn jockeys, cheap metal trumpets, and lots of tchotchkes. The space is packed and dense. Objects look strewn but not chaotic. It looks like we’re in Santa Land, and everyone has just taken a nap.

“Is there racism in Heaven?” Cave asks. That’s why the lawn jockeys are there, turned upside down, buried in happy trinkets, as if their belittling meaning on Earth is finally, after death, scuttled. Cave’s Heaven is a wonderland of sweet things that’ll remind lots of us of our grandmother’s parlor, or a child’s dream of her attic, a mystery world packed with old stuff, except it’s an extreme, psychedelic version.

Until doesn’t end there. After descending the ladder, after experiencing Heaven, I watched a video of Cave in a Soundsuit that looks like a big yellow chicken. He’s dancing frantically. The video’s shown on a small TV, so he looks trapped. Walls outside the video room are blasted with red and yellow lights. It’s a moment meant to jar, to leave us anxious. Until then ends with a big sculpture — Flow/Blow. It’s a 10-foot-high, 20-foot-long fan faced with scaffolding covered in silver, blue, and black Mylar tinsel that blows into the space. I think, after reading the very good catalogue essay by Denise Markonish, that Cave is suggesting a cleansing, cathartic waterfall.

I saw Until at Mass MoCA. When I saw it there, I thought that it was a good show for Berkshire County’s big cohort of trust-fund hippies, Williams College students and faculty, and limousine liberal transplants from Manhattan. They’re a big chunk of MoCA’s audience, though by no means the only chunk, but they’re most of its donors.

Context means a lot. I see all of Mass MoCA’s shows, went to Williams, worked and lived in crunchy, preppy Williamstown for years, and live near there now. I thought Until was yet another white-guilt show, concentrating exclusively on police shootings where victim and oppressor are neatly defined by race and news headlines, making the oppressor a cop. That’s a standard loony-left storyline imbedded in the local culture. It’s like reading a Paul Krugman piece in the New York Times. After the first line, it’s all rote, predictable, and redundant.

I like Until. It’s ambitious and complex. It looks great in the Momentary, but the catalogue, the interpretation in the gallery, and Cave himself do Until a disservice. They’re selling it as art about police violence. In doing this, they’re indulging an intellectual omission and moral blind spot. Rampant, heartbreaking violence occurs not in single digits but in the thousands, each year, where victim and oppressor, or shooter, are both black.

It happens in every American city. The dead aren’t always young teenage men but babies in their cribs, young mothers with their kids, playing in a park, and old people sitting on their front porch. This is a heartbreaking tragedy. In 2020, America’s murder rate was 30 percent higher than in 2019, the biggest one-year jump in our history. It’s all black-on-black, big-city murder, and all of it happened after the BLM-inspired protests and riots starting in late May.

Until doesn’t touch this, focusing on police violence, skipping gang and drug violence in, say, Chicago, where Cave lives. Maybe that kind of violence is too hard, too intractable, and too embarrassing. It’s not neat. It’s an appalling failure of black leadership, government, families, and individuals, since I never discount individual agency. And it’s not a headline story. It’s a numbers story — “ten dead this weekend” or “new yearly record for shootings” kind of thing. Here, black lives don’t seem to matter.

I’m not saying that Cave is barking up the wrong tree. He’s just picked the most familiar, most obvious tree, and the closest one at that. Cave’s not Goya, who’s at his best in drawing every nuance, contradiction, and culprit from the thicket of civil violence. But Goya’s not American.

Having spent the previous day at Crystal Bridges, with its first-rate collection of American art, I naturally thought about what’s “American” about its art, aside from simple citizenship. I’m an American art scholar, so that’s not surprising. Crystal Bridges is thinking about it, too, and struggling with it.

What’s “American” about Until is its deployment of cheap, glittery bits of material culture — a Walmart aesthetic — and a honky-tonk mood. It’s got a baby-talk Heaven, too. It feels like a movie, and I keep thinking about The Wizard of Oz, or an old TV variety show. It’s got a dose of revival-style religion, with allusions to Jacob’s Ladder and the trials of Job and Daniel. I thought about Reginald Marsh burlesque pictures and John Sloan’s and George Bellows’s city crowd scenes. Its serious story is presented in an ice-cream sundae, with extra sprinkles.

I’m not sure Until works, though. At both Mass MoCA and the Momentary, the end of the show — the video component and Flow/Blow — seemed unrelated to everything before it. Flow/Blow suggests erasure or cleansing or a blowing away of bad feeling, but where does that leave us as we end this immersive, sensually rich, and jarring show? Would Until have been more coherent had the video and the fan-and-tinsel piece gone between the glittering forest and the Technicolor Heaven? I’m not sure.

Had Cave closed simply with his version of Heaven, he’d have a Hollywood happy ending, and that’s certainly American, but Cave is dealing with a weightier subject than boys meeting, losing, and getting girls. Americans are addicted to happy endings. Cave struggles to deal with that cultural expectation, especially when it comes to big-city drug and gang violence. That’s a nut to crack, and a happy ending doesn’t seem available. Positing one won’t work.

I always read the catalogues for shows I review. Until’s is mostly glossy, full-page details from the installation, but the main essay by Markonish is thorough and persuasive. It’s followed by a group of free-verse poems and one-page essays by Claudia Rankine. I’m immediately placed in a skeptical frame of mind when I see atmospheric poetry in a scholarly art catalogue. Sometimes it’s palate cleansing. Sometimes it disguises a shortage of heft. There are poetic tributes to Trayvon Martin and to the Jena Six and Mark Duggan. I hadn’t heard of the Jena Six or Duggan. There’s a poem about the stop-and-frisk policy in New York.

It ends with a Rankine poem called “The Justice System.” Its first line is “In Memory of Jordan Russell Davis,” and each successive line reads “in memory of” someone else as the type on the page fades more and more, suggesting infinity, until it ends, in bold white type set against the black page, with “because white men can’t police their imagination, black people are dying.”

Cave says he ends Until on a hopeful note, but what is it? Where’s this dilemma heading? Jordan Russell Davis isn’t Cave, I know. Still, the poem is part of the printed record of the show, and it’s grim. “Because white men can’t police their imagination.” Is that true? Yes, our world’s filled with nuts of all kind, but is there any hope to be found if that’s a proposition we believe? Thinking about Rankine’s imagination, I’d call it overwrought and toxic.

There’s a short essay by David Byrne on guns that follows Rankine’s poems. I know Byrne from Talking Heads, but evidently, he’s become an expert on gun control. Then, there’s a fascinating essay on police violence and the importance of the police by Lori Lightfoot before she became mayor of Chicago. She makes a lot of sense, and the operative phrase she uses over and over is “gray area.” The book was published in 2017, which seems like a million years ago. Lightfoot’s now been mayor for less than two years. Her mayorship has been a crucible.

I don’t mind art that’s cryptic or unresolved or, as Lightfoot would say, that leaves us wandering in a “gray area.” So much of human existence is cryptic and unresolved, but Until doesn’t so much end as exit through an escape hatch. Since Cave is an artist of substance drawing from popular culture, I thought about the end of the Bobby Ewing murder saga in Dallas. Hey, I went to Bentonville from Texas. Cave ends Until in an abrupt, unsatisfying way, as if it were all a dream.

Cave is not a doom-and-gloom artist, and racism and police violence are doom-and-gloom subjects. He’s a fiber artist. The knots he knows best are in his Soundsuits. He’s never worked on so massive a scale before, either, and that might be the problem. He has made Soundsuits, which are human-scale, fun, playful, colorful, and, while they’re at it, serious but lightly so. When you go Ben-Hur or Exodus-scale, though, light and playful don’t work, and neither do big fans blowing tinsel, a little video, spinners with cutouts, plastic toys, and disco lights.

Last week, I wrote about the Rothko chapel in Houston, which I’d seen a few days before I saw Until. Rothko’s chapel paintings are nothing if not grave, serious, heavy, and momentous, of the Old Testament variety. In comparison, Cave’s Until is a matinee with the Rockettes.

Overall, Until is a great opener for the Momentary. It’s hip, immersive, topical, and colorful. It brought lots of people into a new space that needed an introduction. This winter and spring, the gallery is showing work by Derrick Adams and Diana Al-Hadid. I saw Adams’s show, Sanctuary, at the Museum of Arts and Design a few years ago. It’s going to the Momentary. I thought it was very good.

I loved the Momentary for its savvy reuse of an old industrial building for culture. There are vintage, closed factories all over the country just like it. I used to think it would be impossible to duplicate Mass MoCA’s success. The Momentary showed me I’m wrong.

Mass MoCA benefits from its location in two ways. It’s on the very edge of the New York art-media market, so it gets New York attention and New York talent. It’s in Berkshire County, home of Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow, a dozen theaters, and lots of museums. There’s a legion of rich New Yorkers who are either retired and living there or summer people. Mass MoCA also, decisively, has Williams and the Clark Art Institute in the next town. Both are rich, and both are invested in Mass MoCA’s success. So, Mass MoCA was always in a sea of money, with a serious arts culture already primed and a ready, cultivated audience.

The Momentary has Walmart money, and it always helps to have some billionaires in town. Bentonville doesn’t have much else, aside from a good business climate, and it’s the county seat. Still, there’s a hunger for art throughout the country, in every out-of-the-way place. I think the Momentary proves that the Mass MoCA model has broad application, so I hope there are Momentary clones all over America.