Meeting History With Art: "The Myriad of Myself"
ISSN 1462-0426
Catalogue essay from Lips, Sticks and Marks, curated by Annalee
Davis, Alida Martinez & Irénée Shaw, shown at The Art
Foundry, The Heritage Park, Foursquare, St Phillip, Barbados. August 23-
October 25 1998 and Carribean Contemporary Arts, Museum of Port of Spain,
Fort San Andres, South Quay, Port of Spain, Trinidad November 24th-December
5th 1998.
Annie Paul
"Where you going" they said, "This road not
yours to walk. Go home to yuh big yard. That's where yuh belong"
"Tell History for me," I said, "I not
playing his game."
They pulled off my disguise then, laughing so hard they could hardly
stand up. But they only scratched my throat with the ratchet blade. Blood
dulled the knife's silver- edged glint.
''History say yuh can take yuh chances, but yuh can't hide,"
one said. "Your skin glitters bright in the dark. We can sight
yuh anyweh huh go."
"I'll zip out of it," I said. "There's an
opening between my legs." They only laughed more.
Well I did. Unzipped, I rose up flapping high and cool as a kite. But I
had no form. Unnamed, nameless, invisible, I floated over the landscape of
burnt cane, over the all- inclusives and their swimming pools, over the
markets and the stalls of jerk chicken. I looked down on everything. I was
hungry but I couldn't eat. I was tired but I couldn't sleep. I was vulgar
abstract. No context at all. It was like being trapped in a dreaded dream.
"History,'' I thought, "you win this first round.''
"History's Posse" from My Mother's Last Dance by
Honor Ford-Smith
For someone from the peripheral quote unquote old world - India to be
precise - where modernity is often in pitched battle with tradition, one
of the great advantages of the Caribbean would appear to be its lack of
suffocating "tradition". A profoundly modern enterprise
such as visual art could thus be free to take root and flourish in new and
unexpected ways or so I thought (Irénée puts it particularly
well: "People deprived of their history can make up their own and
what better job can there be for an artist?"). But in the absence
of agonistic tradition there appears the vexed issue of identity and
race.Who is entitled to make history in this "unique contemporary
space"? To re- present it? To be the subject of it? Benitez-Rojo
is right in saying that in the Caribbean skin colour "is a colour
neither of the self nor of the Other, but rather a kind of no man's land
where the permanent battle for the Caribbean Self's fragmented identity is
fought." As this show makes its debut in Barbados where only
recently there was tension about who was eligible to be national hero, I
have no doubt that similar questions will be raised again.
Lips,
Sticks and Marks is a representation of Carbbean realities by "seven
women working individually but thinking collectively" to quote
Susie Dayal's tidy phrase. The distinction made by Chris Cozier is
important here. These women are not claiming to represent
Caribbeanness but to re-present facets of it emerging from their
own highly personal examinations of their inner and outer realities.
Moreover this is a show whose scant regard for boundares, borders, rules
and other people's traditions or innovations marks a significant break in
many ways with what has gone before in the name of art in these islands.
This is work that proudly wears its heart on its sleeve and is unafraid to
proclaim the art of craft and the craft of art. Some of these women
immerse themselves in "female culture" and produce in
and out of it, others like Roberta Stoddart and Irénée Shaw
seem to occupy their gender without being preoccupied by it. Annalee
Davis's Work energetically explores the consequences of forms of
Womanhood-- mother, wife, individual--while Susie Dayal interrogates and
challenges notions of fashion, beauty and ''art'. On a more exclusively
spiritual level Osaira Muyae talks of "feeling clean" while
Alida Martnez speaks of "searching in knowing clean water, Eternal
transparency". Joscelyn Gardner's complex installation evokes Nina
Simone's powerful song about identity, "Four Women",
with its plaintive line"Whose little girl am I?"
Right: Joscelyn Gardner In the Chamber of My Birth (a repeating
voyage to my Self) (1998) Multi-media installation,
dimensions variable. Photo: Ronnie Carrington
Joscelyn's "In the Chamber of My Birth" is an artful
re-production of the rape of the Caribbean Basin. It is hard not to think
of Benitez-Rojo's "repeating island"..."the
painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched
between continental clamps"... "because Europe in its
mercantilist laboratory conceived the project of inseminating the
Caribbean womb with the blood of Africa." Roberta's "Black
Pearls" is part of the same history "crisscrossing
waters of rage blackened seeds shackled in suffocating tomb" as
Joscelyn puts it adrift in the sea amputated black penis, torn vaginal
lips - the strange fruit of slavery. The Middle Passage as still life, a
portrait of the beginning of modernity which is synonymous with the birth
of the Caribbean archipelago.
Roberta Stoddart Learning How to Glide (1998) Ten
Panels, each panel 10" H x 12" W. Photo: Donette
Zacca.
Roberta Stoddart's work is remorselessly and unrepentantly descriptive
but what is she describing? Is this landscape or mindscape? Or treacherous
land-mined scape? What we do know is that this is Roberta's
reality/realism. A realism that is embodied in anthropomorphic
anthropological detail in which vulnerability and metamorphosis are
personified and look you in the eye. Her work subjectifies emotion.The
recurring black subject in her paintings has exposed her to criticism for
she is racially speaking by and large, white. The intensely human faces in
her mindscapes are the kind of face you would encounter in the streets of
Kingston. Roberta is a true painter in the old style! her heroes are
Caravaggio, Velazquez, and the more contemporary Lucian Freud.
Her lyrically epigrammatic "It must be a duppy or a gunman"
foregrounds the church and its graveyard first encountered in "God's
Bride" a few years ago.The decrepit grillwork fencing the
graveyard also fences the painting. Stray animals, dogs, goats, rats and
bats encroach. The gravestones are dominos--a link to the popular-- with
pendant teardrops of blood oozing from the black holes which suggest
bullet wounds. No one paints blood as exquisitely as Roberta and the
bejewelled church and gravestones seem to emit an unholy glow. In the very
centre of the graveyard and painting is a coffin with a small male body in
it."This is it this is it this is it I've been hit" he
seems to be saying, immediately creating a hyperlink to David Rudder's
Madman's Rant and its visual version exhibited by Chris Cozier in early
'98 in Port-of Spain. As in other parts of the Caribbean gun violence has
become a central figure stalking the Jamaican landscape. Blacks dominate
this nightscape and the inside of the coffin/cradle encasing the dead man
is a rich warm uterine red suggesting pulsating life and rebirth rather
than death. An allegorical story about the nation states of the Caribbean?
Taken
all together; Joscelyn's and Roberta's work in this show represents a
visual anthem, linking the past which haunts the Caribbean into its
violent present. Wholeness and completion is to be attained by a repeating
voyage to myself. In a way this is the thread that unites the work of
these seven women. One senses the care and deliberate self-love with which
they examine their interior spaces and turn these inside out for us,
inviting us to participate in their explorations.
Osaira's "Chance and Change" is a deep meditation on
the power of water to cleanse and purify. On one level her work seems to
be very personal, dealing with self knowledge and conscious amendment of
the self after ritual cleansing. But her body is also a metaphor for the
body politic and there is more than a suggestion that her "letter
to myself" so reminiscent of Joscelyn's repeated "voyage
to myself" is a message to wider society to purify and remake
itself to heal to opt for health over sickness.
Osaira Muyale Chance & Change (1998) Multi-media
installation, dimensions variable. Photo:Jose M.Fernandez
Alida's cocoon-like image and the repeated wax-images of her face are
intriguing as is the title of her piece "Beyond the Image".
Is there a flirtation here with the notion of "Imago",
the "final and perfect form of an insect after it has been
through its metamorphoses"? The perfect insect that emerges from
chrysalis goes through a stage of being cocooned. What is being hatched in
the securely bound cocoon of Alida's body? Warmed by human heat and
secured by nourishing fuid this seems to be another rift on the theme of
rebirth and new life in a new world. As Alida says this work is all about
identity and invites viewers to enter "in our own inner body that
screams for understanding".
Alida Martinez Beyond The Image (1998) Mixed
Media Installation Photo: Jose M.Fernandez
Right : Irénée ShawQueen of Grande
Riviere (1998) oil on board 3'H x 6'W.Photo: Abigail
Hadeed
Irénée Shaw's "visual dramas" resonate
with vigour and excitement. Her depiction of the 104-year old subject of
the Queen of Grand Riviere as a commanding figure in the colours of life
rather than death, threatening to "disrupt her supporting
architecture" as she asserts her presence is a good example of an
artist choosing to invest an ordinary subject with great significance in
the same way that some years ago she painted the great Eric Williams as
she saw him - a diminutive brown figure. It is exciting to encounter
intuitive vibrations and echoes between work by Caribbean artists writers
and singers across generations national boundaries and aesthetic
practices. In his celebrated History of the Voice Kamau Brathwaite says "I
shall end with the violet and red extremes of the spectrum" and
goes on to describe 'the beauty and power of Miss Queenie's language: she
is after all, priestess, prophet and symbolist:'. Miss Queenie. a kumina
queen is imaged in remarkably similar terms to Irénée's
Grand Riviere, though one is a verbal portrait and the other visual.
Irénée's creations refuse to tamely occupy a wall space
and Adam and Eve thrust themselves into our midst life-size figures
challenging us to recognise them, members of "the community of
the painted". Adam astride an island hillscape, his own
(forbidden?) fruit flanked by snake and scythe against an undergrowth of
banana leaves is a welcome re-vision of the species' dominant creation
myth.The unexpected tilts and angles signal Irénée's
presence and you can almost see her peering back out of her Work at you
caught in the act of manipulation, arms stretching out towards the viewer,
pushing you, pulling you--now she's in your face, now she isn't.
Annalee Davis An Alliteration, A Soliloquy and a Sonnet (1998)
Multi-Media Installation, Dimensions Variable, Photo:
Walter Bailey
.
Annalee Davis' extraordinary installation is a raw and visceral
depiction of the wounds of modernity from the point of view of the female
of the species. It is clear that what we are invited to partake of is a
woman's attempt to come to terms with the "splikity-
splakity-split" with her mate; the realisation that her "spiralling
separateness" toward her "singular self" and
their son's resulting "split sense of self" is a "screaming
sacrilege". Modernity has meant a kind of liberation for many
women, but it is a bittersweet freeing far it entails seemingly
sacrilegious disruptions and distortions with blame for- this "unholy"
state of affairs often laid at the feet of women. The exhibition of the
couple's wedding clothes, their son's baby clothes and the suspended
'houses", thrusts before our eyes these symbols of domestic harmony
while at the same time inviting us to sit down and listen to the
circumstances of their disintegration and violation. For the many of us
who have been confronted with the consequences of modernity this could be
a catharsis, an invitation to "suture the shame and select the
survival game" to paraphrase Annalee. Once again Annalee's
smoking alliterative text recalls Brathwaite and his lamentations during
HIS "time of salt", "that time of alarm"
when he lost his wife, Zea Mexican. She displays the same ''nakedness
of soul that is at once startling and illuminating." The
difference is that as Gordon Rohlehr so perceptively noted Brathwaite was
writing from "within the silent howl and scream of the straitened
man". Annalee however is not silent, although she too is
articulating the howl and scream of the wounded. Whereas Irénée's
constructions seem on the very verge of speech, Annalee's installations
wilfully breach the realm of the visual to convey the "Antillean
drama of anguish" which Rohlehr talked about in reference to
Brathwaite's Work.
Susan Dayal She-Web (1998) Photo: Susan Dayal
It is only appropriate that the youngest artist in this show should
introduce the theme of playful sexuality. Susie Dayal's tantalizingly
titled "She Web" posits woman as aggressive temptress.
Her use of wire as she says is cultural meaning that being firm Trinidad
she is naturally drawn to the methodology of carnival costume, and she
doesn't give a damn about a prevalent obsession with avoiding being
mistaken for "kitsch". My personal view on this is that
one woman's "kitsch'' is another woman's la- di-da "quiche"
in other words these are questions of taste, not art. Susie makes "body
masks" in which the wearer can pose and play different roles and
discover heretofore hidden personas.This is another way of making
acquaintance with oneself in the sense that Osaira Muyale talks of. Isn't
this the essence of playing Mas?
"In an ocean of veiling, wailing words" as Joscelyn's
text goes. The move to accompany the show with texts by the artists is one
I genuinely welcome.This is what art can be in the Caribee. What is
remarkable about this show is the reaching out of these artists to one
another and to a Caribbean audience. It is not at all surprising to me
that it's a group of women artists that has decided to overcome the "separatist
situation" seemingly imposed on us by our colonial histories to
give us a visual feast of the kind one would expect to find from a region
with a culture of carnival. In literature one talks of the West Indian
novel rather than the Barbadian novel, or the Grenadian novel or the St.
Lucian novel, but in art one is confronted with Jamaican art for instance
or Trinidadian art. At what point does an island become too small a dot to
have an art of its own? It is profoundly odd that while something like the
Faber Carribean Series is trying to break down the linguistic barriers
that separate our literatures, art can still be corralled by language and
nation.
What makes this work Carribean is not that it conforms to any
stereotypes about how art from this region should or should not look.
These women are not willing to play History's game and they refuse to be
trapped in a dream. I keep quoting Braithwaite in relation to their work
because he is the supreme practitioner of history as art (history as art
is ART not art history) and has largely been responsible for "the
relocation of the archipelago in history; the redefinition of New World
identities through the recognition and clarification of the seminal images
and rhythms through which Carribean peoples may now revision themselves,
beyond the limitations of received stereotypes." Just like
Braithwaites work, Lips, Sticks and Marks offers " corridors
through which stereotypes are revisited and experiences anew, modes of
descent into self and into the formative historical experiences of a
civilisation" (Rohlehr). And what's best, it scorns the uptight
severity and reticence of high modern abstraction.
This is work fashioned in and by the Carribean, work that offers 'viable
options for viewing ourselves'. This work is not meant for viewing, or
hanging on the wall; these are not semi-religious objects for visual
contemplation but carefully orchestrated "experiences". Some
playful, some contemplative, some more urgent and some cathartic. But they
are all, thank goddess as Annaleee would say, expressions of the "myriad
of myself".
Annie Paul 5/8/98
Artists : Alida Martinez, Aruba - Beyond the Image 1988
mixed media installation Photography Jose M. Fernandez
Osaira Muyale, Aruba - Chance & Change, 1988.
multi-media installation Photography Jose M. Fernandez
Annalee Davis, Barbados - An Alliteration, A Solilioquy, and A
Somewhat Sonnet 1998 multi-media installation Photography: Walter
Bailey
Jocelyn Gardner, Barbados - In the Chamber of My Birth (A
Repeating Voyage to my Self) 1998 multi-media installation
Photography: Ronnie Carrington
Roberta Stoddart, Jamaica - Learning How to Glide1998 oil
on linen Photography : Donette Zacca Susan Dayal, Trinidad & Tobago
She-Web 1998 galvanised wire Photography :
Susan Dayal
Irénée Shaw, Trinidad & Tobago - Queen of
Grande Riviere oil on board 1998.
Copyright © :Annie Paul, August, 1998.
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 8, 1998
