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One can dismiss fashion as being trite. One can dismiss costume as being mere entertainment. One can do this, just as one can dismiss architecture and design as a mere means to keep out the elements, ignoring all the ways that the human mind is shaped by spaces and designs—even the designs and adaptations hanging on one's very body. One can do all of this, but one would be overlooking a path by which we can explore key dilemmas in identity—individual and racial—and the ways in which the human tribe has grown apart even as populations grow denser. And if you are the sort to dismiss all of this, then you probably won't get much enjoyment out of Nick Cave's premier exhibition, Meet Me At The Center Of The Earth now showing at the Seattle Art Museum. And that would be too bad.

To be sure, Cave knows that fashion is not the enemy. Otherwise, he would not be the director of the graduate fashion program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The culprit in this is the spirit of division as a whole, and he fights fire with fire. His forms are so unique and unaccountable that viewers must find what is even vaguely familiar in these creations. They are all designed to be worn, and so they are of distorted anthropomorphic forms and—when in motion—exhibit uniquely human movement. From there, the viewer's natural tendency to assign personalities and roles to things based on appearance, viz. the pathetic fallacy, allows the imagination to run (or dance) wild. The emotions inspired range from dread to delight depending on the viewer. This is the very essence of costume.

Cave's exhibit at SAM is a happy marriage indeed, for Cave has been inspired by tribal costume and the SAM has in its permanent collection a wonderful selection of tribal masks and costumes from Africa. Sadly, I think that they are often overlooked by patrons. The SAM's masks and costumes have their home just by the hall where Cave's exhibit is showing, creating a perfect complement by adding to the interpretation of one exhibit and bringing much needed attention to the other. In addition, some exquisite wire sculptures by Walter Ottman, working in a similar idiom, guard the entrance.

Cave's work creates a mythology of its own, but it is not contrived. It succeeds because it taps into the essential, creative reservoirs that have inspired humans to create costume since time immemorial. There are archetypes that appear in every culture throughout the world: tricksters and destroyers, creators and guardians, spirits of love and fertility. These gods and goddesses are with us today in a million diminished forms. In tribal cultures, still intimately connected with natural cycles (e.g. the changing of season or the coming of age) these archetypes retain their potency and defined forms connected to the wilderness around them. As cities grew and pushed the wilderness out, the gods of the wilderness diminished in importance while agrarian and civic gods became chief. Eventually, these gods also diminished, but we still had costume. Wilderness made way for civilization and the primeval archetypes made way for prototypes of human behavior. We find these figures in the Commedia Dell'arte of Italy, the Kyougen of Japan, the Morality Plays in Northern Europe, to name a few, all imprinted with the distinct values of their cultures. We also find monsters whose sole purpose is to terrorize children and condition them against wrongdoing and laziness in Krampus and the Namahage Oni. Today, we have the kinder gentler monsters of Sesame Street to teach our young ones kindness, sharing, and the ABCs. These new monsters (along with animals of Warner Bros and Disney) are without defined race or age, or even gender in some cases. They are products of a culture still seeking what is universal in humanity through abstracted, inhuman forms.

Of course, there is always a dark side, and the stock characters of a culture will often include a caricatured minority figure. In America, this took a particularly nasty form in Minstrel Shows, where whites exclusively portrayed blacks in humiliating ways. As always, it was the product of a crisis of identity, but one that turned on its head the examples listed before. Rather than showing universality through inhuman archetypes, or exploring common experiences through human prototypes, a dominant culture was asserting its supremacy through dehumanized stereotypes. In time, even blacks would come to perform in these Minstrel Shows. It may at first seem odd to some that they wore blackface makeup like the white cast, but it makes sense; they had to be consciously aware that they were portraying a vicious caricature, and to do so without makeup, as if it were a true reflection of their identity, would have been the greatest insult of all.

Cave's soundsuits had their genesis in his confrontation with racial tension, but the works themselves do not so much confront racism as dissolve it. The defining incident for Cave was the Rodney King beatings. The footage of six white men beating one black man senseless had the whole country gasping, but none were more emotionally affected than other young black men. Cave was overwhelmed and crestfallen by the beating, like so many others, but his response was extraordinary; he went out gathered fallen sticks and branches and assembled them into the first soundsuit. Even he was surprised by the effect that it had on him. Contained in this chrysalis, his race was erased from the outside world, and the sound of the sticks beating together around him as he moved was surreal. This is a revelation, for Cave had accomplished three things at once. First, he created a novel form that is at first imposing, but when animated by dance becomes a thing of delight, a humane beast without ethnicity. Second, he had used materials that were sympathetic to the cause of distress, i.e. sticks, reflective of the beating of King and countless others over years of oppression, now reduced and made part of a barrier against oppression. Third, the materials were otherwise worthless natural discard that reflected the materials of primitive tribal costume and old world craft, especially that of minority and oppressed cultures

To expound on this last point: Oppressed cultures throughout history have created novel forms of expression from the scraps allowed them by the dominant culture. This is not cultural exchange or assimilation; it is the reclaiming of sovereignty and pride in the face of humiliation and subjugation. Decades and decades after the Great Emancipation, the black population in America was essentially captive, and out of that grief and sorrow came artistic innovations that have defined America, particularly in music and dance. Gospel, blues, jazz, rock and roll are the artistic issue of community with no avenues for performance of the classical, European styles with which the dominant culture had been content.

Cave's idiom, however peculiar it may be, can be viewed as part of that tradition. His substrate is the discard of the dominant consumer culture (gewgaws, toys, outdated clothes), which are in some cases all that poorer classes can afford. As one of seven brothers raised by a single mother, Cave himself was well accustomed to wearing hand-me-downs of hand-me-downs. But in his skilled hands and through his individual vision, these weathered, misfit materials are arranged into sculptures imbued with a palpable presence. On that note, allow me to rhapsodize for a moment and describe some of suits and give some impressions of the presence that they create:

A colorful body suit is topped by a hood from which stares the face of a large cat. It is entirely encased in a terraced cage that forms a flowering bush, dripping with vines with beads, and populated by dozens of blithe porcelain songbirds. The cardinals, robins, jays, chickadees, sparrows are frozen in flight, in song, in tending their eggs, immune to the paralyzed predator in their midst.

Most are without faces, but even those that are may not be without "eyes." There are Argus-eyed masses of buttons, crocheted circles. Many forms are of stark, glittering obelisks, whose somehow mystical surfaces bear sequined patterns like stylized erosions of water and wind. Another form is of repeating triangles and rhombi, interrupted near the heart by a swath of smaller hexagons in black, white and blue, creating the impression of a wound, whose scarring at the edges has even sapped the color from the surrounding sequins.

Still others seem to be lares. A mass of matronly bucket hats, the disembodied canopy of an old garden party, is unified in one being, the homely patron spirit of some beloved plot of earth. Not far from this figure one finds a geometric dryad. The slender anthropomorph bears a terrace aburst with gigantic dogwood and iris blossoms.

Elsewhere, towering masses of fur standing on distinctly human legs look like something from Sesame Street if Sesame Street were near Chernobyl. Candy-coloured, fuzzy, but faceless, they resist being called animalian. The stripes and spots of color provide something more sympathetic than aposematic. That is, if one spends time with them, one may begin to imagine dispositions based on appearances, perhaps even roles and functions in the alien culture of these creatures. Taken to this degree, one may be reminded that humans' natural dispositions once effected a certain destiny, a specific role or function for individuals within communities, and these dispositions are not often indulged in a trade or profession, but in the small bit of leisure that one may afford.

These furred figures really only show their full power and potential in motion. The far room displays video footage of dances in these costumes. Footage of these figures on pogo sticks in slow motion is truly engrossing. There is the natural beauty of the movement itself, but once again, for me at least, the beauty and power of the human body was explored in completely covering it. That is, one becomes aware of the dynamic energy directed through and out of the body in every movement when one sees these strands moving so fluently as extensions of the body beneath as it bounces or somersaults or simply opens its arms.

One of the most iconic figures in the show bears around itself an assemblage of toys and trinkets. The worn, vintage objects are painted in primary colors, those deep and dusty reds and blues and yellows of childhood, with clowns and caricatures and lithe harlequins that resemble the central figure, whose motley figure is topped by impish horns of crochet. It is a god of play, an archetypal trickster surrounded by, or even budding, its clownish emanations. In another room, a somehow sadder figure is also covered with toys: a mass of stuffed animals. One might have thought that a heap of plush, cuddly critters would have been something charming or beautiful. Perhaps if they had been arranged in some orderly way, such an effect could have been achieved, but this arrangement was one of disarray, an amalgam of faces and bodies stitched together in a bit of grotesquerie that I might find commonplace in Japan, but here was ominous and melancholy. Many of the tiny totems still dangled tags marked Ty. These dolls are often imbued by their young owners with an identity of sorts, a unique soul. In time, they are discarded. If, therefore, I were to give a name to the spirit of this plush chimera, it would be Disenchantment, a realization that gave me pause in the deepest room of the exhibition where it stood with another figure, which wore a large, soiled face of Raggedy Ann like an apron.

This disembodied face was one of the few that one will see in the exhibition. In two chambers near the end, guests circle a dais where the figures stand, approaching from behind and curious what might be the face of these lumbering stick figures and gigantic, albino gila monsters scaled with buttons. We know that these faces will be inscrutable—an empty basket, a narrow aperture bearing a beard of bristles, a hypnotic ripple of particolored fibers—but still we instinctively seek them. One hulk has a window into the interior, revealing the shadowy face of a mannequin within, but before this interior face is a battered abacus that will clatter with math as it moves. Something doesn't add up within us: Our instinct to seek the face and draw conclusions based on appearance may be sound on some levels, but its darker side creates the oppression that became the genesis of the show. Cave confronts this faceless spectre with an army all his own.

At the center of the earth, where there is no east or west or north or south, where it is too dark to see the color of one's skin, one feels safe and moved by these chthonic creatures, but one does begin to miss people. This is just as well, because one can't stay there; one must go back into the noise and haste, to a world full of difference and indifference, but hopefully with a renewed vision of what is centrally human, the grace of the creature beneath its clothes and costume, and the power that those clothes have to transform, to tell a story. One must leave the faceless denizens and rise to the surface, perhaps still hiding one's own face, clinging to a mask...or many masks for that matter.

Hopefully, one will not lament this awareness, for we cannot be naive or dismissive without inviting sorrow upon ourselves and others. C.S. Lewis put the following question in the pen of his character Orual as she meditated on how humans can hope to encounter the divine, the gods: "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" With Nick Cave as psychopomp, we are indeed meeting the gods face to no-face, these manifestations of playfulness and sobriety, wilderness and order, and as long as people have cause to hide their own faces, then so shall these creatures. This, too, is for the best. The few faces one will find will be those of a leering jester, a glaring predator, or a clump of catatonic orphans heaped in an obscure corner. In short, the faces will be our own at their worst.