Exterior: a street in Belmont, east Port of Spain. Late
afternoon, Carnival Tuesday. The booming of music trucks at
the Queen’s Park Savannah a few blocks away is like a rumble
of continuous thunder in the air.
On the pavement outside a nondescript building, a crew of
three men, working in a kind of calm haste, are assembling a
tall structure of metal and plexiglass — a narrow ramp on
wheels, a ladder-like mobile platform.
Nearby, a door opens to a narrow flight of stairs and the
upper floor of the old building. It is some kind of workshop:
quiet assistants stand beside tables strewn with black fabric,
arrays of tools, white containers of talcum powder.
As the afternoon light fades, new people begin to arrive, some
in ordinary casual clothes, others in various kinds and
conditions of Carnival costume. They begin to disrobe, and the
assistants help them re-attire in black skirts, cropped
jackets with exaggerated shoulders, and netted masks. Wearing
these new costumes, they bare their throats and chests to be
stenciled with elaborate patterns of white powder.
Now it is dark outside. The black-clad, powder-daubed figures
— fifteen or so of them, ranging in age from twenty to perhaps
sixty — descend to the street. A young woman joins them, lithe
as a dancer. On her head is a black motorcycle helmet set with
a pair of saucer-size lamps: at the flick of a switch, she
becomes an uncanny insect-like apparition, her gaze
transformed into a searching beam of light. She ascends the
ladder of the mobile platform, now erect as a triangle and
bearing the sharp profile of a blade. A young man crouches
below on all fours, wearing a spiked collar and a visage of
canine jaws, a video image set in the visor of his own black
helmet.
Suddenly the street fills with the sound of amplified
breathing, a throb like the pounding of an agitated heart. The
neighbourhood dogs start to howl. The black masqueraders draw
close, grasp the metal structure, begin to push. Now there are
cameras everywhere, and clusters of gawking bystanders, and an
ominous sense that some event which can’t entirely be
controlled is under way.
The procession pauses at an intersection, makes a laborious
left turn, and slices slowly into a city in the throes of
chaos.
•
The Trinidad Carnival season begins the hour Christmas can
decently be said to be over. But Carnival itself, the climax
of increasingly frenzied weeks, lasts for a duration of merely
two days. It begins and ends in darkness, stretching from the
potent predawn of J’Ouvert on Monday morning to the final
pre-midnight Tuesday hours that Trinidadians call las’ lap.
It sounds nearly quaint: a last lap around some tidy circuit,
a farewell turn and wave. It is nothing of the sort. By
Tuesday night, Port of Spain has sustained a massive
forty-eight-hour invasion. Hundreds of thousands of
masqueraders and spectators have overwhelmed the city’s
nineteenth-century street grid, drawing squads of roadside
vendors, garbage sweepers, security officers. Squares and
pavements are littered with empty plastic bottles, shreds of
discarded costumes. The air carries the scent of Savannah
dust, spilled alcohol, sweat and sunblock, urine and orange
peel.
On Tuesday night, every man, woman, and child knows the end
has come. Final inhibitions fall aside. Suppressed euphoria
erupts, and suppressed rage. A little bit more abruptly
becomes too much. This was the seething moment chosen by
Marlon Griffith to launch his POSITIONS + POWER.
When I look now at the photographs, from a safe distance of
nine months, what first comes back is that sense of the
uncontrollable, of a relentless progressing chaos. That
Carnival Tuesday night, I enjoyed no safe distance: pressed
into service in the hour before sunset, I was one of the
masked, black-garbed, be-powdered processioners escorting the
mobile “surveillance” platform at the center of Griffith’s
collaborative performance. The photographs document almost
every metre we traversed between the art spaces Granderson Lab
in Belmont and Alice Yard in Woodbrook — a journey not just
between neighbourhoods, but across social strata, skirting the
main Carnival stage at the Savannah and cutting across the
time-hallowed parade route followed by hundreds of masquerade
bands.
In many of the photos, we appear detached from the las’ lap
anarchy around us: an impassive scouting party in an alien
landscape. But I remember our journey as a series of
confrontations: with amused or angry spectators, irate drivers
of cars, police officers trying to control the passage of
traffic, a fire engine with flashing lights. Drunken shouts
and heckles. Half-naked masqueraders in bedraggled spandex and
plumes, refugees from pretty mas bands, staring derisively. A
woman who threw a tantrum at the corner of Victoria Avenue,
screaming curses, accusing us of black magic. I remember
feeling exhausted, nervous, and exposed. And I remember my
relief when we arrived at our destination, when we squeezed
into the driveway at Alice Yard, and I could finally take off
my mask.
•
The title POSITIONS + POWER is more than a hint at
Griffith’s intentions for his bold public intervention in the
final hours of Carnival 2014 — or at the social dynamics of
Carnival itself, and the wider society that fosters it. Mas is
a medium of art, yes, a medium for imaginative expression,
drawing on visual spectacle, movement, sound. At the same time
it is also a state-sanctioned cultural phenomenon, propped up
by “creative industries” policy and tourism campaigns. It is a
vehicle of commerce, wildly profitable for entrepreneurs.
Before and behind all these, mas is a means of affirming,
questioning, inventing, and projecting the identity of an
individual, a community.
Position and power are at the common crux of
all these competing manifestations — and central to Griffith’s
longstanding preoccupation with how mas as a creative process
can engage with contemporary art practice. Not just at home in
Trinidad: over the past decade, Griffith’s performative public
“mas works” have confronted audiences at South Korea’s Gwangju
Biennale and South Africa’s CAPE 09, at the year-end Junkanoo
festival in the Bahamas and at London’s Tate Modern. The
artist is fascinated by the idea and form of the mask, by the
power of ritual role-play to interrogate social and historical
traumas.
“My work is about relationships,” Griffith says. All art forms
require an audience for fulfilment, but in the medium of mas,
the audience is an element of the work. The artwork is not the
costume, nor the objects we wear or carry: it is the sensation
or emotion created in the encounter with those looking on. And
that moment of encounter is almost by rule a confrontation, a
challenge to the selves we wish to claim and the selves we
wish to assign to others. It is always a territorial
negotiation, whether that territory is the hot asphalt of the
road, the range of a camera, or a conceptual space in which we
play out assertions of identity and belonging.
So if I recall that Tuesday night as an anxious, uncertain
progress through a city on the verge of drunken hostility — if
POSITIONS + POWER seems in memory’s retrospect a kind
of ordeal — I can’t say these difficult emotions were
unexpected or inappropriate. The artist issued a series of
provocations, knowingly embodied by his masqueraders. As every
Midnight Robber or Black Indian knows, the simple gesture of a
black costume already raises anxieties in an audience for
whom, conventionally, Carnival is colour. Our stencilled
throats recalled the “powder-neck” look sometimes sported by
black working-class Trinidadian women to suggest the freshness
of their toilette, an affront to middle-class taste. And we
penetrated the chaos of Carnival Tuesday night with an
apparatus that returned the attention of the people on the
streets with a dazzling gaze and a profound silence — a sober
silence so deep you could hear the pounding of a giant heart.
Our progress was slow and unsteady, interrupted by obstacles
on the street, police barriers, and the dense impediments of
other bodies confronting our own.
Our experience was unpredictable, despite the careful
preparations of Griffith and his collaborators. Whatever the
artist’s intentions or plans, once underway, the fate of POSITIONS
+ POWER depended on hundreds of individual interactions
between the masqueraders and the people we encountered: amused
or angry, perplexed or moved. These engagements were
unrepeatable and properly undocumentable. It is hard for me to
say if we realised or defeated Griffith’s original vision. But
in its two hours on the streets, POSITIONS + POWER
pushed the city into a confrontation with uncomfortable
questions about what Carnival is and what it is becoming, and
pushed its masqueraders into their own uncomfortable
contentions, not least with the question of how and why we
were there. +