Becoming (Un)Masked: Semiotics of Identification in Nick Cave’s Hye-Dyve (2017)

Primarily known for his carnivalesque Soundsuits, Nick Cave has extensively explored the performativity of identity. The costumes he designs usually cover the entire body and face of performers or mannequins, concealing all physical cues of race or gender. Embracing an extreme form of alterity as a means of suspending the binaries that usually inform identity recognition, Cave privileges a fluid conception of selfhood. His Hye-Dyve installation, recently displayed in the dilapidated space of a former church in Kansas City, perpetuates this notion but conveys a darker picture of the artist’s personal experience as a queer black man who carries the burden of multiple generations of African-Americans subjected to unfair judgment, supervision, and abuse. In this 14-channel video work, Cave himself makes an appearance, looking sideways from behind a chicken mask which symbolizes both sacrifice and resilience.

Decoding the artist’s references to surveillance, visual pleasure, and violent acts of blinding, I offer a semiotic analysis of Hye-Dyve in terms of its critique of scopic regimes that perpetuate identity bias. I build on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of close-up operations in order to show how Cave suspends processes of individuation and undermines binary oppositions between the subject and object of perception. By encompassing figurative and abstract motifs shown at different scales, Hye-Dyve offers a multi-dimensional perspective on the experience of blackness and evokes more or less distant histories of racial prejudice. Ultimately, the installation asks viewers to consider whether a racial subject can elude discriminatory supervision in the absence of a mask.