Christmas came early to Chelsea when two galleries, Mary Boone and Jack Shainman, put Nick Cave’s Soundsuits on display.  Cave, as his website explains, is a “trans-artist” who crafts costumes for dancers.  I didn’t know anything about him, and after seeing the suits guessed that he came from a dance background.  The costumes are majestic as displayed on mannequins in both galleries, evoking both shamanic effigies and life-size Muppets.  But they really come to life in the videos at Jack Shainman.  They’re joyous and crazy-colored, in dramatic, eccentric profiles that disguise the bodies of the dancers.  In the videos, the dancers have the freedom of animated figures.

Cave trained as a dancer at Alvin Ailey, went on to study fine arts, and now chairs the fashion department at the Art Institute in Chicago.  That fashion connection makes sense when one observes how immaculately crafted the garments are.  Some suits are covered from hood to foot with a shimmering sea of white buttons, each one set in place and stitched with scientific precision.  Other suits are covered in twigs laid in carefully staggered lengths to throw dramatic, shifting shadows.  Even a suit covered entirely in old toys and board games is assembled with an unerring sense of composition.  Each of the suits is strange and also absolutely correct.

Terence Koh is at the Mary Boone Gallery right now performing a piece called “nothingtodoterencekoh,” in which he wears a white suit and crawls on his knees in endless clockwise circles around a giant pile of rock salt.  When I visited last week the artist’s clothes were worn from wear and he was focused but tired.  His tiny shuffling motions seemed penitential and weirdly pointless.  The monkish purity of the spectacle bothered me.

I wish that Koh had filled the gallery with salt and left it at that.  The large, low mound obstructs views and movement through the gallery, and highlights its stark geometry.  I visited late in the afternoon, when light from the roof lantern gave the mineral a shifting, glittery presence.  The physicality of this simple material put the performance to shame.