Lit, 2023
A Facility Artwork by Nick Cave and Bob Faust
Dates
Venue
Introduction
The excerpt from Cavafy’s “Hidden Things” viscerally connects to human insecurities as well as to potential progress and empowerment. Each is simply attached to a certain time, place or situation, but all are reminders of the walls we build to keep ourselves safe, which without hard work, perseverance, and vision for a greater future, can eventually become walls to keep us from truly living.
An excerpt from the C. P. Cavafy poem “Hidden Things” serves as the landscape for Lit, 2023, a newly commissioned mural co-created by Nick Cave & Bob Faust for an exterior wall of Brooklyn’s National Sawdust. The quote resonated with Cave & Faust as a visceral connection to human insecurities as well as the potential for human progress and communal empowerment. A billboard-scale expression of radical joy intended to refuel us on our way toward that more perfect society, the mural will make use of the cumulative powers of its visual components: Cavafy’s prescient words, an image of a Nick Cave soundsuit, and the facade of National Sawdust itself. Cave originally developed his now famous soundsuits to create a camouflage for the wearer’s shape, creating a second skin that hides gender, race, and class, and compelling the audience to observe without judgment, operating less as an armor and more as a key to unlock one’s own full expression. Faust worked with Cave to select an image of a soundsuit from 2003 for use in this large scale public artwork to integrate as an anthropomorphic representation of how an individual body may be bound to a certain time and place, but that with perseverance and hard work, will eventually be released from the walls which contain it.
National Sawdust is a state-of-the-art home for music innovation and performance based in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, co-founded and led by composer Paola Prestini and attorney Kevin Dolan. National Sawdust believes that artistic expression empowers us all to create a more joyful and just world. Its mission is to curate, commission, and produce music and artistic works rooted in curiosity, experimentation, innovation, and inclusivity by engaging communities of artists and audiences at its Williamsburg home and on its digital stage.
