Sometimes it feels like we’ve become a nation squatting in the ruins of our past. Living off scrounged philosophy and canned food discovered in wrecked basements, warming ourselves over the flickering fires of liberties ignited long ago and not quite extinguished. There’s so much stuff scattered everywhere, garish and contradictory, trash pushed up into enormous cliffs and walls. It takes focused attention to make any sense of it, and an act of rare genius to render the rubble into art.
I almost missed the Nick Cave show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Why go? Well, I’d seen one of the artist’s quirky Soundsuits — a sequined costume topped with a kind of exaggerated pope’s mitre — at the Whitney in New York a couple years back. He’s a Chicago artist, and while I only recently realized he is a different person than the Australian singer of the same name, I try to keep track of Chicago artists. I also noticed friends on Facebook posting photos of hundreds of delicate foil spinners when the show opened in mid-May.
