Nick Cave is now widely recognized as a songwriter, musician, novelist,
screenwriter, curator, critic, actor and performer. From the band, The
Boys Next Door (1976-1980), to the spoken-word recording, The Secret
Life of the Love Song (1998), to the recently acclaimed screenplay of
The Proposition (2005) and the Grinderman project (2008), Cave's career
spans thirty years and has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes
controversial) body of work that has shaped contemporary alternative
culture. Despite intense media interest in Cave, there have been
remarkably few comprehensive appraisals of his work, its significance
and its impact on understandings of popular culture. In addressing this
absence, the present volume is both timely and necessary. Cultural
Seeds brings together an international range of scholars and
practitioners, each of whom is uniquely placed to comment on an aspect
of Cave's career. The essays collected here not only generate new ways
of seeing and understanding Cave's contributions to contemporary
culture, but set up a dialogue between fields all-too-often separated in
the academy and in the media. Topics include Cave and the Presley myth;
the aberrant masculinity projected by The Birthday Party; the
postcolonial Australian-ness of his humour; his interventions in film
and his erotics of the sacred.
These essays offer compelling insights
and provocative arguments about the fluidity of contemporary artistic
practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment