An island is a world
By Nicholas Laughlin
First
published in The Caribbean Review of Books, November 2007
Not even the US Census Bureau knows the exact
Caribbean population of New York City, I’m sure, but I’d be surprised
if the numerous Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Haitians, Cubans, Jamaicans,
Trinidadians, Guyanese, etc etc etc, who live in the city legally or
illegally didn’t add up to a cool million. You could concoct a clever
sort of post-colonial (or post-national?) argument that not just sheer
numbers but density of diversity — that is, the fact that so many men
and women with roots in such a variety of Caribbean territories now
live and work in a space the size of Barbados — makes New York the
capital city of the twenty-first-century Caribbean world. So it seems
entirely apt that the most important survey exhibition of Caribbean art
in over two decades is currently showing at the Brooklyn Museum, and
even more apt that Infinite Island:
Contemporary Caribbean Art opened on the last Friday in
August,
just three days before the West Indian American Day Carnival — better
known as Labour Day Carnival — the biggest and most public
manifestation of the Caribbean presence in New York.
Reviewers in the New York press have felt obliged to point out that Infinite Island is lacking in
clichéd images of the Caribbean, like palm trees and colourful
market scenes; it also, for the most part, lacks paintings on canvas,
still the gold standard for most art galleries and collectors within
the Caribbean. Instead, curator Tumelo Mosaka has focused on sculpture,
photography, video, and installation. He includes eighty works by
forty-five individual artists (plus a collective of architects and
designers from the Dominican Republic) with roots in fourteen Caribbean
territories, home- and foreign-based and from the diaspora, and all the
region’s linguistic groups represented. Simply to see works by such a
breadth of Caribbean and Caribbean-descended artists in one place, in a
single frame, is revelatory. They sprawl across two floors of
galleries, and it took me two visits and a total of perhaps six hours
before I felt I’d given everything in the densely packed space its due
attention. Yet this represents only a narrow slice of what is currently
being produced by contemporary Caribbean artists, and Mosaka has
deliberately restricted the show to works from the last six years
(including pieces specially commissioned by the museum).
Actually, this is one of the most exciting aspects of Infinite Island:
realising that you could assemble a survey of contemporary Caribbean
art of equal size, scope, and quality without duplicating a single
artist here. This testifies to the growing variety and vitality of the
work of today’s Caribbean artists, even in the relative absence, in
many islands, of supportive institutions and markets. But, making my
way slowly through the galleries, where there was almost too much to
take in, I also found myself reflecting that an exhibition like this
couldn’t be staged in the Caribbean itself. In the first place, there
is probably no institution in the region with the wherewithal to
organise a show on this scale, and few with the physical space. And
even if there were, a survey of recent Caribbean art organised in the
region would look very different, even allowing for differences in
individual curatorial intent. Our “master artist” fixation would all
but demand the inclusion of key elder figures who have managed to
capture secure places in our separate national art-historical
narratives, at the expense of younger artists whose work collides
uncomfortably with the expectations of local art markets, local
cultural histories, and notions of cultural authenticity. (Only two
artists in this show are over fifty, many are under forty, a few are
still in their twenties.)
Refreshingly, Mosaka — a South African, and an associate curator at the
Brooklyn Museum — need pay no attention to such expectations. He comes
to Caribbean art as a smart, sharp, and sharp-eyed outsider, and it’s
just possible that Infinite Island
can offer us a new vantage point
from which to consider the work being made by the artists in our midst.
*
Few works in Infinite Island
fail to repay sustained attention.
Unsurprisingly for a show this size, the works that immediately stand
out are the biggest, loudest, strangest, funniest — like the
Jamaican-British artist Satch Hoyt’s Say
It Loud! (2004), positioned
near the entrance to the first gallery. Five hundred books — volumes of
art history, African history, modern philosophy, novels by black
writers — are heaped up around a set of tall portable steps, such as
you might find in a library; at the top of the steps is a microphone.
On a wall overhead, a speaker plays a snippet of James Brown’s
eponymous 1968 song, overlaid by the artist’s voice, intoning, “I’m ...
and I’m proud,” with a gap for the viewer to fill in the adjective of
his or her choice, where Brown’s lyric specifies “black.” Half-joke,
half-serious, this jaunty comment on the ambiguities of race seems to
speak both to the centuries-old ethnic fluidity of the Caribbean and to
a very twenty-first-century notion of constantly shifting identity.
Similarly, four digital prints from a 2005 series by the young
Barbadian Ewan Atkinson — in which he slyly inserts himself into
doll’s-house montages that echo phrases from a colonial-era schoolbook
— use visual jokes to question what the exhibition catalogue calls
“‘high’ morals, respectability, and reputation.” And Haitian
Jean-Ulrick Désert’s Negerhosen
2000, an ongoing public
performance work begun seven years ago and documented in photographs,
takes artistic picong to outrageous lengths. Désert, who lives
in Germany, dons Bavarian lederhosen and strolls around public spaces
in Munich and elsewhere, interacting with shoppers, schoolchildren,
tourists, and sunbathers, who become supporting players in his
performance. Some of them look delighted, most of them puzzled, by the
spectacle of this black man whose leather shorts and suspenders might
be a parody or a twisted homage to his adopted country; but they pose
gamely. Who is laughing with — or at — whom?
The most quietly disturbing work in the show may be Mambrú
(2006), a sculptural installation by Jorge Pineda of the Dominican
Republic. A cluster of life-size figures made from cedar wood and
sheets of lead depict children bearing assault rifles almost as long as
they are tall; they all wear colourful fabric masks like those sported
by Mexican wrestlers. You don’t need to catch the reference in the
title — to a folksong starting with the line “Mambrú went to
war” — to sense the sinister frisson between the cold grey of the lead
and the soft pinks and yellows of the masks, or to notice the stiff
awkwardness of the sculptures’ skinny little limbs and bare feet
against the ugly angles of the firearms. Immediately adjacent is
Levitando (2003), an
installation by another Dominican, Raquel
Paiewonsky. Dozens of feet cast in wax and cut off at the ankles are
suspended in gauzy brown fabric slings that on closer inspection turn
out to be women’s stockings. In their circular formation the feet sway
gently, barely touching, like the weird fruit of a tree in a bad dream.
A couple of Infinite Island’s
video works are really short
documentaries that might be better served by conventional cinema-style
screening. But some of the most indelible images in the show are
offered by Waterboot (2003),
a piece by the young Jamaican filmmaker
Storm Saulter, and Under Discussion
(2005), by the Puerto Rico-based
duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. In the former, a
daredevil motorcycle rider chatting on his mobile phone reclines on the
seat of his bike, with his feet cocked up on the handlebars, as he
zooms down a country road and into a small town, in a performance as
exhilarating as a tightrope walker’s or a knife-thrower’s. The latter
is an extended visual metaphor: a man walks down to the sea at dawn,
installs an outboard motor on a boat, and navigates around an island —
except his boat is a large upturned table. A conference table, as it
happens — hence the title — once used in negotiations over the status
of Vieques, the site of a former US military testing ground.
An even more wrenching synthesis of politics and poetry is the video
work Zona afectada (2006) by
the young Cuban Alex Hernández
Dueñas. Set in a blighted Havana neighbourhood, devoid of
dialogue, it depicts a man making repeated trips from his apartment
high in a crumbling building to a communal standpipe in the street
below, lugging buckets of water. As he tires and struggles under the
weight of his load, his muscles giving out and water spilling
everywhere, the camera mercilessly follows. Just under nine minutes, it
feels much longer, and by the end of this Sisyphean sequence my heart
was racing and my teeth were set.
Among works like these, and among flashy
sculptural assemblages by
Dzine (aka Carlos Rolón, from the US, with Puerto Rican roots)
and Marcel Pinas (Suriname), a huge cartoon mural by Steve Ouditt
(Trinidad), and near-room-size installations by Annalee Davis
(Barbados), Veronica Ryan (Montserrat), and Remy Jungerman (Suriname),
some smaller works on paper are uncomfortably eclipsed. Photographs by
Polibio Díaz, Fausto Ortiz (both from the Dominican Republic),
and Deborah Jack (Sint Maarten), recording, respectively, the interiors
of working-class Dominican houses, undocumented Haitian immigrants, and
the artist’s travels, might hold their own in a quieter space. Here
they provide little more than background hum.
By contrast, Trinidadian Nicole Awai’s two large Local Ephemera
drawings (2004 and 2005) stand out for the brashness of their scale and
imagery. Cuban Ibrahim Miranda’s Noche
insular: Metamorfosis (2004–6),
a series of mixed-media works on paper, covers an entire wall of one of
the back galleries with what looked like the tatters of a dream map
populated by flora, fauna, and the island of Cuba transformed into an
amoeba-like creature. It offers an unexpected parallel to Trinidadian
Christopher Cozier’s Tropical Night
drawings (2006–present), glowing in
a softly lit space between two larger galleries. Dozens of small
notebook-size sheets, on which a lexicon of metaphors is obsessively
worked out, are hung in a careful grid. They look like a monumental
storyboard, compelling the viewer to stop, gaze, and discern a
narrative.
Hew Locke’s El Dorado (2007)
is similarly arresting. It is Infinite
Island’s signature piece, reproduced on the cover of the
catalogue. Ten
feet tall, composed from thousands of gimcrack dime-store made-in-China
objects — gilded plastic beads and baubles, artificial flowers, tinsel,
plastic lizards and insects — and bristling, porcupine-style, with
dozens of plastic swords, it depicts the head of Queen Elizabeth II, in
a pose familiar from postage stamps and banknotes still used in much of
the Anglophone Caribbean. At once cheeky and eerie, it raises all sorts
of questions about the thriving legacy of the colonial enterprise. It
reminded me simultaneously of C.L.R. James’s description of Columbus
landing in the New World and enquiring “urgently” for gold, of the
Trinidadian Carnival bands whose costumes are now fabricated cheaply in
Asia, and of all our Independence-era public figures who are only too
pleased late in their careers to visit Her Majesty and have medals and
ribbons pinned to their breasts and letters like “OBE” appended to
their names.
I’d seen photographs of similar works by the artist (British-born with
Guyanese roots), and had high hopes for El Dorado, but I was dismayed
by the way it was installed. Just outside the final gallery, in a long,
tall room with a bank of elevators at the far end, it ought to act as
an exclamation point to the rest of the show. Instead, it seems
awkwardly
dwarfed by the space, its volume reduced. Weeks later, this
still bothered me.
*
What, then, is Infinite Island’s big picture? What
does or can this
various and sometimes unruly assembly of objects tell us about our
various and unruly corner of the world? Shrewdly, Mosaka says his aim
is not to define the Caribbean, but to engage with it. He makes no
attempt to tick cultural or ethnic boxes; wide as Infinite Island’s
range is, there are obvious exclusions and missing constituencies, and
no claims to completeness. Mosaka’s catalogue essay demonstrates his
grasp of the region’s complexities:
In a big museum production, there is always a temptation to offer
organisational “themes”. In Infinite
Island, there are four: history
and memory; politics and identity; myth, ritual, and belief; and
popular culture. Mosaka notes that these all overlap. But the overlaps
seem so broad — almost every work in the show has something to say to
each theme — that they don’t make very helpful organisational
principles. They don’t help us see anything new. And many of the
artists I spoke to at the opening reception expressed uneasiness with
having their work lumped into these passé-sounding categories.
Perhaps that’s inevitable.
But Mosaka also suggests a more interesting
thematic lens:
He also comments on the “tension between what might be termed place
(connoting boundaries, insularity, containment) and space (suggestive
of interconnection, flux, and transformation)” — terms often used by
Christopher Cozier. Many of the works in Infinite Island raise
questions about movement, mobility, migration. Reading the biographical
notes on the artists, I am struck by how many of them have studied or
lived outside the Caribbean; fully one third are currently based
outside the region, usually in North America or Europe. They know and
respond to the latest aesthetic and political developments and trends.
Furthermore, almost all of these forty-five artists — the Cubans are
the main exceptions — depend in large part on the international
marketplace of galleries, museums, biennials, residencies, and grants
to support their careers. Engaging in critical and financial
conversations with the outside world is not a choice. In some cases
their work may be better known abroad than it is at “home.”
This is simply the state of the twenty-first-century art world, you
might say; artists everywhere are drawn into the gravitational fields
of major art cities like New York, London, and Paris, and the most
successful artists learn to manoeuvre through those fields to their
advantage. But for Caribbean artists, the possibilities (and problems)
of these international (and transnational?) arrangements are compounded
by far older patterns of migration and exchange, of home and away,
inside and outside, local and foreign — of place and space. Our most
astute thinkers have long argued that the Caribbean is not a zone that
can be described on a map, but a way of thinking, knowing, and being
that evolved in very specific historical circumstances and has now been
spread across the world by our various diasporas, where it continues to
evolve, unpredictably, compelling us to endlessly re-imagine what a
word like “Caribbean” can mean.
Which returns us to the title of the show. “The metaphor of the
‘infinite island’ was invoked to suggest a Caribbean space defined by
its possibilities rather than its boundaries,” Mosaka writes. The
actual phrase is borrowed from an influential essay published by the
Cuban critic Gerardo Mosquera in 1996. It also summons up, to my mind
at least, Wilson Harris’s novel The
Infinite Rehearsal and Antonio
Benítez-Rojo’s cultural study The
Repeating Island. What both
books have in common with Mosquera’s phrase is a sense of the Caribbean
as unbound by geography or time, an idea defined, as Mosaka says, by
possibilities, not limits. More than any other thematic construct, what
I carried away from Infinite Island
was a renewed sense of an energised
Caribbean space which is (and has always been) simultaneously a global
space, expanding through the work of these and dozens more artists. As
I left the museum, Brooklyn felt not too far from home. +