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That is mas
By Nicholas Laughlin
First published in the catalogue for
Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut;
14 November, 2009, to 14 March, 2010
1
Over a thirty-year period beginning in the mid 1970s, the Trinidadian
artist Peter Minshall created a series of nearly three dozen
extravagant large-scale performance works, whose influence on
contemporary Trinidadian and Caribbean art is not yet fully reckoned.
Incorporating kinetic sculpture, dance, theatre, and music, realised in
collaboration with scores of craftsmen and technicians and thousands of
performers, requiring months of meticulous preparation, each of these
works was performed a single time under unrepeatable circumstances, and
for a massive public audience of tens of thousands.
Drawing equally on Caribbean folk tradition and ritual, global popular
culture, and “high art” forms like opera and avant-garde theatre,
Minshall’s works unleashed epic narratives in the streets of Port of
Spain. Papillon (1982) and Rat Race (1987) were allegorical
swarms of butterflies and rodents. Paradise
Lost (1976) and The Odyssey
(1994) re-imagined the literary narratives of Milton and Homer, and The Lost Tribe (1999) alluded to
Biblical stories of a people wandering in the desert. Hallelujah (1995) was a band of
angels celebrating creation; This Is
Hell (2001) brought a visitation from the underworld. The
fantastic army of Red (1998)
was an eruption of pure, glistening colour in the heart of the city,
symbolising love and hate and heat and blood all at once.
The artist Christopher Cozier, writing about Red soon after its appearance,
remarked: “If something like this were to happen in one of the alleged
power locations for art theory, there would be miles of text.” This
observation points to the crux of the dilemma Minshall’s work poses for
Caribbean art history. His spectacles did not unfold within the chaste
precincts of a museum or gallery, and were not shepherded or shaped by
curators and catalogue essays. They were Carnival bands, created for
Trinidad’s annual pre-Lenten festival and presented in the unruly
company of hordes of costumed revellers and trucks bearing amplified
music.
Both a form of state-sanctioned cultural display and a commercial
enterprise, Carnival was designated Trinidad and Tobago’s “national
festival” in the mid twentieth century, the era of Independence, and
has come to embody a tangle of ideals, assertions, and debates about
Trinidad’s cultural identity, heritage, and social change. But Trinidad
Carnival is still not widely considered a location for serious art
practice. As Cozier writes, “it is perceived to be a mere folk or
street festival, the subject for more renderings of culture by local
artists and foreign anthropologists.” The curator Claire Tancons adds:
“the few books about so-called Carnival arts favour an anthropological
perspective and tend to acknowledge tradition over creativity, and
general Caribbean art books make little, if any, room for Carnival.”
Minshall’s body of work was and is a problem for Carnival itself,
clashing with official culture guardians and their ideas of the
festival’s nature and purpose. And, as Trinidad’s major contemporary
artist, working in a medium largely unrecognised outside his home
country, he is also a problem for the Caribbean’s contemporary art
narratives. The scale, scope, and ambition of his work are
unprecedented and remain unrivalled. To astute observers, this was
obvious as early as his first full-scale band, Paradise Lost, in 1976. Writing
then, the photographer Roy Boyke suggested: “It is doubtful that the
work of any single individual has had so instantaneous and so searing
an impact on the consciousness of an entire country.” For Christopher
Cozier, almost a generation younger than Minshall, the decisive moment
came in 1983, when Mancrab,
the king of the band River,
made its first public appearance. This giant bionic crab with pincers
thrashing and spouting jets of blood emerged on the Carnival stage
before an audience accustomed to sequined and plumed fantasias. Mancrab was an allegory of social
and political violence that many in the audience took for a violent act
in itself, an attack on Carnival and its traditions. It provoked anger
and confusion, which only intensified when the full spectacle of River — a visual fable about the
collapse of creole nostalgias and ideals — was revealed on Carnival
Monday and Tuesday. At that moment, Cozier later wrote, “to be an
artist began to mean something again in this society. . . . Since this
period it has been difficult for our art to settle down. There was a
turning point in our sensibility and in the demands that we made on our
art.”
Other “fine” artists had designed Carnival costumes and bands before
Minshall. But he was the first to approach Carnival masquerade not as a
diversion but as his primary medium — and to theorise a version of
Trinidadian art history that places the “folk” visual and performance
traditions of Carnival at the core of indigenous art practice.
We are still trying to devise a conceptual vocabulary for work like
Minshall’s. For much of his career, Minshall has been described,
inadequately, as a costume designer. Some critics define his work as a
kind of theatre, but that label too seems incapacious. Minshall himself
has consistently and insistently referred to his medium as mas, the
popular abbreviation of “masquerade”, and calls himself a masman.
Cozier invented the term “roadworks” to emphasise the public and
unpredictable nature of Minshall’s productions, unfolding on the
street. With the help of his team of engineers and artisans, Minshall
creates objects that are themselves extraordinary sculptural works, but
they are never intended for singular or static display. Rather, they
are mechanisms for the creation of events and experiences; “means for
the human body to express its energy”, as Minshall says. And he has not
hesitated to claim this as Trinidad’s quintessential creative form.
Or, as Cozier has more modestly expressed it, after Minshall “it became
clear that objects and actions could function with equal agency in the
social and cultural space, and that the arena for creative expression
was inherently much wider.”
2
No other contemporary artist in Trinidad has embraced mas with
Minshall’s existential fervour, or worked on a scale to match his, but
his oeuvre — operating within
the context of older masquerade traditions familiar to most
Trinidadians — has deeply influenced visual practice in Trinidad in the
past quarter century. Minshall’s work gave other artists a sense of
license to explore Carnival’s visual traditions, and furthermore
demonstrated that mas as an artform is capable of engaging any idea or
ambition, of any degree of sophistication or complexity. For some
painters and photographers, mas remains merely a subject to be depicted
in two dimensions, but a number of younger artists have adopted and
adapted its aesthetic of collaborative and improvisatory public
performance.
The annual Carnival celebration itself remains a viable space for
provocative art-making (with a guaranteed mass audience). For well over
a decade, Robert Young, the fashion designer behind the label The
Cloth, has led a small band called the Vulgar Fractions. Fully masked,
and borrowing the music of “left-behind sounds from other bands,” the
Vulgar Fractions physically and conceptually disrupt the flow of
security-patrolled, “all-inclusive” commercial bands, in explicit
confrontation with contemporary Carnival’s capitalist mode. In 2009,
the artists Richard “Ashraph” Ramsaran and Shalini Seereeram made their
own Carnival intervention with T’in
Cow Fat Cow, a band of about thirty masqueraders, taking
inspiration from a protest song by the rapso trio 3Canal. Minimalist
black and white cow costumes — basically, cardboard sculptures worn on
the masqueraders’ heads — and hand-lettered placards made a strong
contrast with the general revelry on the streets of Port of Spain, as
the band portrayed a range of political and social messages, under the
punning motto “The people must be herd.” The sequel for Carnival 2010
was Cobo Town, a flock of
vultures in billowing black capes behind a flag blazoned “Let us prey.”
One vulture wore an effigy of the Red House — the seat of the national
parliament — as a crown. This commentary on government rapacity and
official corruption referred to old traditions of protest and satire
within Carnival masquerade, while the visual spectacle of a veil of
black cloth swooping along the public roadway suggested a ritual of
mourning and rage.
Individual artists also create playful actions within the bounds of the
festival. In recent years Adele Todd has created sly public
performances for J’Ouvert, Carnival’s raunchy opening act, when
revellers covered in mud and paint and tattered clothing dance in the
pre-dawn streets. In 2009, inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic
drawing The Examination of the Herald
(1896), she sported an enormous phallus, emerging from under a white
gown, an inversion of traditional masquerades like the Dame Lorraine,
in which men dress as and parody women. “Men were stunned and women
giggled,” she recalled afterwards. “The brave asked to touch.” Her
performance a year later was a kind of companion-piece. Dressed in
black tights and high heels, draped in black tulle, she carried a small
sign asking, “What caused the destruction of man?” In her other hand
was a small box with peepholes. She dared passersby to look inside, and
documented their — sometimes stunned — reactions on her website.
The large-scale public processions Marlon Griffith has staged in
Gwangju (Spring, 2008), Cape
Town (A Walk into the Night,
2009), and other places are not simple replicas or recreations of
Trinidad mas, though they are shaped and informed by the knowledge of
structure, scale, movement, and timing that the artist acquired during
his years of designing and building masquerade bands in Port of Spain
and Notting Hill. Rather, these recent works investigate the ways that
public spectacle can deal with questions of memory, history, and space
— both specific to a location and more universally. Mas, Griffith says,
is “public, participatory, and interdisciplinary.” These works are
carefully planned but subject to the vagaries of circumstance, and they
rely on teams of collaborators including curators, other artists,
musicians, and (sometimes untrained) performers. Their success
ultimately depends on their ability to arrest their street audiences,
engage their imaginations, and change their sense of the physical space
where the encounter occurs.
Akuzuru is another contemporary artist whose work is inspired
(obliquely) by the mas artform. Born in Trinidad and trained in fashion
and textile design in Britain and Nigeria, she creates large
site-specific installations that “costume” or disguise a physical
environment. Her sculptural arrangements of fabric and natural
materials make a room, a garden, or a grove of trees into a kind of
masquerade. Semi-scripted, semi-improvised performances presented in
these transformed spaces then subtly allude to mas as a means of
claiming, charging, or even destabilising a physical space. Vein, a performance work Akuzuru
created in Port of Spain in 2009, began with a nighttime gathering of
costumed women in a small public park, which then turned into a street
procession. Under a light rain and the haze of streetlamps, moving at a
funereal pace, the artist led her audience into the driveway and back
courtyard of the art space Alice Yard. As she silently completed a
series of rituals, the other performers looped ceaselessly from the
courtyard out into the street and back, setting up a circulatory system
linking the city’s interior and exterior, private and public zones. As
puzzling as it was eerily beautiful, Vein
gradually revealed itself as an allegory of injury and recuperation,
incomplete until the entire procession, escorted by its audience (now
huddled under umbrellas), returned to the public space where it began.
Trinidad’s Carnival masquerade tradition offers a context and opens a
creative territory for this kind of performance work. It seems to equip
both artist and audience with certain ways of looking at and
understanding the human form moving in a given space, and with certain
attitudes to and expectations of public performance and ritual. (So
that, to give two personal examples, my instinctive reaction to the
baroquely choreographed and costumed films of Matthew Barney is a
phrase of admiration often heard on the streets of Port of Spain during
Carnival: “That is mas!” And when I first saw the bizarre sculptural
figures from Hew Locke’s Kingdom of
the Blind series, assembled from thousands of cheap plastic
objects, I wondered how these stiff humanoids could be made to move
into and through the streets outside the gallery.)
Mas also bequeaths Trinidadian artists with a repertoire of techniques
and forms, a visual lexicon, and a model for collaborative process. An
enterprise like Alice Yard, for instance — which is both a physical
space for making and showing work, and a network of collaborators in
visual, musical, and literary media — is informed by the model of the
traditional mas camp, the site where costumes are designed and built. A
mas camp is at once a workshop, a design laboratory, and a master class
where skills and ideas evolve. Sean Leonard, the founder of Alice Yard,
has studied the ways that particular spaces shape social interactions,
and vice versa. His architectural practice, and his work in theatre and
as a Carnival designer, have shaped the evolution of the urban back
yard where since 2006 he has quietly instigated a series of events and
exchanges among dozens of creative practitioners, among them Cozier,
Griffith, and myself.
Through its website, aliceyard.org,
the collective is also a central node in a growing network of artists’
blogs, small magazines, and online galleries and screening-rooms. In
the past two or three years, these have shifted the Trinidadian
contemporary art world’s centre of gravity towards a virtual,
hyperlinked, and inherently international space. Alice Yard is now a
portal for artists in Trinidad and their contemporaries elsewhere to
work and imagine collaboratively, and to extend their particular
Caribbean-inflected ways of seeing into a global economy of attention.
It is perhaps not too far-fetched to recognise these interactions also
as a process with roots in Carnival masquerade. Traditional forms and
characters culturally sanctified by the passage of decades were often
influenced by the global visual culture of their moment of origin.
Indian mas and the midnight robber were inspired by images of,
respectively, Native Americans and Mexican bandits from very early
cinema; sailor mas parodies early twentieth-century American
imperialism; and many “golden age” pretty-mas bands of the 1950s and
60s derived their themes and decorative details from Hollywood epics.
Mas has always been a medium in which to imagine relations with the
world outside Trinidad, to creatively negotiate the worries, dreams,
and aspirations arising from our awareness of our place in global
narratives. In this way too it is a resource for our contemporary
artists as they play themselves on the international art stage. +