Flowers Around a Grave

            On page 33, in “Citizen” by Claudia Rankine, she includes art by Nick Cave titled Soundsuits. These costumes were made to completely cover the individual’s body, creating a second skin that hides, gender, race, and class and urge the audience to watch without judgment. Relating to this type of artwork, I visited “Nick Cave: Forothermore” at the Guggenheim Museum. These morals were from a survey exhibition that covered Cave’s entire collection of the artist’s career, featured sculptures, and rarely seen early works.

            The art piece that caught my eye the most was Nick Cave’s piece called “Unarmed”, made in 2016, which addresses contemporary societal ills including racism, gun violence, and climate change. All the flowers are made from tiny beads and wire which is an ongoing theme throughout Nick Cave’s work. “Unarmed” looks like a weak hand reaching up to say something or defend its point. The surrounding flowers and leaves represent emotions, ideas, and actions, but also can resemble climate change. When looking at this piece in person I think the use of flowers is to distract and hide the suffering that this hand or “person” is feeling because of racial discrimination and police brutality. I think specifically Cave wanted to resemble the black fist in the air used in the Black Lives Matter movement while emphasizing the continues to fight for rights with the wrinkles and half-curled finger.

            A way I connected this artwork to the novel “Citizen” was when Rankine says, “Whatever the reason for the rots, images of the looters’, continued rampage eventually displaced the fact that an unarmed man was shot to death” (116). The ongoing problem with racial acts and police brutality is the repetition of unarmed victims having no way to defend themselves. This defenseless hand is surrounded by flowers almost like a newly covered grave bordered by flowers when another person has been taken from us.