Understanding Aesthetics in Caribbean Art? Read ‘Caribbean Art in Dialogue: Connecting Narratives in Wrestling with the Image’ by Marta Fernandez Campa. Look through the ‘Wrestlin

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal Volume 9 Issue 1 New Work in Caribbean Literary and Cultural Studies

Article 12

April 2012

Caribbean Art in Dialogue: Connecting Narratives in Wrestling with the Image Marta Fernandez Campa University of Miami, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Fernandez Campa, Marta (2012) "Caribbean Art in Dialogue: Connecting Narratives in Wrestling with the Image ," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 12. Available at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol9/iss1/12

Caribbean Art in Dialogue: Connecting Narratives in Wrestling with the Image

Marta Fernández Campa, University of Miami

Christopher Cozier and Tatiana Flores, curators.

Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions.

Washington, D.C., Art Museum of the Americas; January 21 – March 10, 2011.

Marcel Pinas. Fragment from Kbi Wi Kani, 2007. Bottles and cloth, variable dimensions.

Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, hosted at the Art Museum of the

Americas in Washington, D.C., conveys an outstanding variety of artwork by thirty-six

contemporary artists from twelve Caribbean nations, both living in the region and abroad. The

body of work suggests a myriad of ways to look at issues like collective memory, history and

erasure, access and restrictions to transnational mobility, the complexities of cultures, and

colonial remnants today, to name a few. The art form ranges from photography, canvas,

lithography and mixed media to installation video and sculpture. Diversity fills the rooms across

the two floors of the museum, and it does so in nuanced ways, for despite any differences in

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Fernandez Campa: Caribbean Art in Dialogue: Connecting Narratives in Wrestling with the Image

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medium, tone or style, the artwork as a whole shares cadences, conceptual frameworks, and an

artistic vision unlikely to leave viewers indifferent.

By communicating the rich diversity, creativity and complexity shaping the work of

many Caribbean artists, Wrestling with the Image makes an important contribution to situating

contemporary Caribbean visual arts as very much engaged in personal, bold, and political

interventions, a contextualizing task already initiated by Infinite Island: Contemporary

Caribbean Art, curated by Tumelo Mosaka and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. The

curatorial effort of artist and independent curator Christopher Cozier and art historian Tatiana

Flores emphasizes the investigative concerns prevalent throughout the exhibit. The assembling

and arrangement of the artwork does not adhere to a single thematic criterion, but follows rather

an aesthetics that investigates visual and critical vocabularies around a multitude of issues that

inform Caribbean societies present and past, locally and globally. The exhibition gathers the

work of artists from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Dutch-speaking Caribbean, featuring

work from the Bahamas, Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, Haiti,

Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

However, within these locations other languages are also spoken, and this multilingualism is

incorporated in the show where a wide range of visual languages also coexist and interact.

Every piece is wrestling with images and fraught or imposed representational demands,

complicating and challenging the notion of a straightforward and transparent readability of

experience. Wrestling with the Image often reveals an aesthetics that, although varying from

piece to piece, always strategically resists categorizations and cultural reductionism. As viewers,

our ability to interpret or “read” the artwork is constantly being challenged, that is, we are

challenged to (re)consider our own preconceptions, mostly although not exclusively, in regard to

the Caribbean and its imagery. Wrestling against essentialist definitions becomes a common

factor in the exhibition. This is one of its most enticing aspects: the refusal to provide a fixed

impression of the region. As Christopher Cozier explains, a definition of the Caribbean, or who

the Caribbean artist represents, “often feels illogical or ill-fated, perhaps because it cannot fully

describe the expanse of ocean and the archipelago of islands, nation-states, colonial territories,

departments, and unions with diverse populations, languages, geography, cultures and histories.”

(7).

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The online catalog of the exhibition, published by Artzpub/Draconian Switch and

designed by Richard Rawlins offers an innovative graphic design, high quality pictures of the

artwork, and two essays by Cozier and Flores that situate the artwork and suggest interesting

reflections around it (http://www.artzpub.com/content/special-publications/wrestling-image).

Also, the fact that anyone with Internet access can read the catalog speaks of the reach and

transnational conversation that the project welcomes. After visiting Wrestling with the Image it

becomes clear that its critical space is one shaped by playful constructions of different “ways of

seeing.” It demonstrates the resonance today of George Lamming’s (1960) claim that a “way of

seeing” entails a way of engaging critically with the world around us. The idea of “seeing” as

critical perspective and practice is also embedded in the notion of “wrestling,” which the artwork

re-defines in interesting and productive ways.

Rather than founded solely upon experiences of anxiety and conflict, wrestling is

presented as an act of investigation, and is therefore in this sense cathartic, for it opens a space of

expressive and interpretive possibilities. This premise allows the exhibit to take on a new level

by demonstrating that in order to engage with the artwork, the viewer also needs to confront

questions and establish connections between the various narratives that the exhibition

foregrounds. Through a detailed viewing of all the rooms in the exhibition, dialogical relations

between works start to take form. Critical conversations exist within and across different rooms

and viewers are invited to appreciate each artwork on its own and to simultaneously make

connections between the different pieces.

One of the first artworks encountered when stepping into the exhibition is the painting I

am not afraid to fight a perfect stranger (2009) by Bahamian artist John Cox which epitomizes

the idea of “wrestling” mentioned earlier. Cozier explains in the catalog how Cox’s painting and

conceptual framework inspired the title of the exhibition (7). This diptych self-portrait shows an

image of Cox standing next to his double; an image that, read in conjunction with the title of the

painting, reveals the irony of considering oneself a stranger. This canvas challenges the viewer

by suggesting a series of questions that encourage us to “wrestle” with, and interrogate, both the

familiar and the unfamiliar. Who is the stranger in oneself? Is this stranger sometimes formed by

the identities socially imposed on us?

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Fernandez Campa: Caribbean Art in Dialogue: Connecting Narratives in Wrestling with the Image

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John Cox. I am Not Afraid to Fight a Perfect Stranger, 2009. Acrylic on canvas 167.6 x 274.3 cm.

Sharing the room with Cox’s painting is Charles Campbell’s Bagasse Cycle 1 (2009). Its

rectangular shape and lines are reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. Campbell’s painting, through the

image of the bagasse (crushed remains of the sugar cane) points to the history of oppression

during slavery and afterward. Also, the ironic resemblance between Pollock’s abstract work and

the literal image of the bagasse in Campbell’s painting confronts the viewer with how,

historically, figurative art has been privileged in the region over abstract or conceptual artwork.

This also puts the history of both art styles, figurative and abstract, in relation to Caribbean art in

conversation. The bagasse ultimately brings in the notion and reality of what remains, further

pointing to issues of inequality in the contemporary Caribbean and in this way connecting the

past to the present.

Charles Campbell. Bagasse Cycle 1 (Bagasse), 2009. Acrylic on canvas, 550 x 220 cm. Photo by Rafa Hierro.

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Like Cox’s painting, Nicole Awai’s Specimen from Local Ephemera: Mix More Media!

(2009), also offers the image of a doubling self that points at the experience of being

simultaneously linked to two locations: Trinidad and the United States. The artist’s statement in

the exhibition catalog reveals a comfortable negotiation of her identity in both places and

playfully dares the viewer to avoid “quick readings” of her experience (31). This purpose seems

humorously depicted in a map legend of bright nail polish located in the bottom left corner of the

piece that obstructs a straightforward “navigation” of the work, encouraging us to share the sense

of suspense.

This feeling of suspense and expectation is also conveyed in Temporary Horizons (2010),

Heino Schmid’s installation video shows the repeated balance and fall of two bottles after the

artist arranges them on top of each other in a supportive, yet fragile equilibrium. The sound of

the fall every five minutes reminds the viewer of the dizzying repetition suggested in Philip

Thomas’ painting Carousel (2008), and adds to the notion of a paradoxical coexistence of stasis

and mobility, embedded in repetition, that relates both to Caribbean societies across the

archipelago as well as geographies worldwide.

The combination and predominance of vivid colors in many of the works provokes a

powerful effect on the retina that is never superfluous. Often color highlights multilayered ways

to access the artwork. Hew Locke’s colorful drawings of Carnivalesque characters (on

documents from old and new commercial companies) illustrate the articulation of political

resistance embedded in Carnival and indigenous mythic imagery across the Americas. This

juxtaposition of markers of colonial oppression and symbols of its resistance enables

contrapuntal readings, an analytical approach that, as Edward Said suggests in Culture and

Imperialism (1993), entails an incorporation of what was silenced, marginalized and excluded so

that new narratives can emerge.

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Hew Locke. Western Union International, 2009. Acrylic paint and felt pen on paper 30.4 x 24.4 cm.

Similarly, the bright colors and patterns in Marcel Pinas’ installation, an extract from Kwi

Wi Kani (2007), expresses more than what is first suggested to the eye. The thousand bottles

covered by colorful pieces of cloth, repeat and alternate throughout the piece. As Tatiana Flores

notes, “[t]he patterns identify specific Maroon villages—historically, the communities of

runaway slaves in Suriname—and thereby celebrate local traditions,” establishing an intimate

reflection on collective memory and the heritage of maroon communities in Surinam and the

wider Caribbean (23). Form and languages of remembrance are equally present in Sri

Irodikromo’s Frekti Kon Na Wan (2010), a multi-media batik piece. Through the Indonesian

technique of “batik” (which also incorporates Irodikromo’s Indonesian heritage) Winti symbols

from an Afro-Surinamese maroon culture are printed on a large piece of red cloth, creating

interplay between both legacies.

Visual and audio stimuli are very much present throughout the exhibition. These stimuli

overwhelm the senses and the intellect, but their effect fits a purpose since it provides a sense of

the multidimensionality of the artwork. Ebony Patterson’s mesmeric photograph Entourage

reflects the carefully negotiated self-fashioning around dancehall culture in Jamaica, where

elements of (hyper) masculinity are questioned and interrogated. The use of light in the

photograph The Quiet Fight (2006) by Nadia Huggins creates a powerful image and chiaroscuro

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effect where boundaries between fight and intimacy seem blurred. In the same room as

Entourage is Oneika Rusell’s Porthole (2008), a video of striking lyrical qualities. On the screen,

two parallel portholes show an image of the sea in Japan, where Rusell currently resides. A

drawing of a whale resembling Moby Dick is submerged into the sea before a colorful

illustration of the artist, dancing dancehall style. In the meantime, a blend of siren-like drumming

fills the space. The sound of this video, constantly playing, can be heard from most rooms,

setting up an intriguing tone and adding to the bridging of spaces in the show.

Nadia Huggins. The Quiet Fight, 2006. Digital print, 29.8 x 39.4 cm.

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Ebony G. Patterson. Entourage, 2010. Digital print, 204.5 x 306 cm.

Some of the artwork in the exhibition highlights the expectations created by the rhetoric

of tourism and its construction of the Caribbean as a space for (self)discovery, thus reproducing

the epistemic violence of (neo)colonialist discourses. Blue Curry’s Discovery of the Palm tree:

Phone Mast (2008) unveils the tourist industry’s disguise of the Caribbean, and the subsequent

commodification of landscape and cultures marketed as “tropical playground.” Curry’s

installation video shows a natural landscape of palms located somewhere in the Bahamas. The

focal point of the camera is a palm tree; however when the camera zooms in, the viewer

gradually discovers that what initially looked like a palm tree is really a phone mast that has been

disguised in order to conform to the demands of the touristic eye/I.

Opposite Curry’s video is Richard Fung’s Islands (2000), which also problematizes

notions of visibility, the readability of locations as constructed by images and associations, and

how these can become dangerously naturalized in one’s mind. Fung’s installation video is based

on John Huston’s film Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, which, although set in the Pacific during the

Second World War, was actually shot in Tobago in 1957. This disguising of a Caribbean island

as another in the South Pacific renders both locations interchangeable as tropical landscapes

(Flores 19). Fung’s video embarks on a search for his uncle Clive who worked as an extra in the

film alongside a number of other Chinese Trinidadians whose role was to portray Japanese

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soldiers in the Pacific. Islands brings the background of cinematic representations of exoticized

places to the forefront in an attempt to un/(ad)dress what Krista Thompson (2008) identifies as a

commodification of experience through the configuration of picturesque narratives.

Other artists like Roshini Kempadoo and Holly Bynoe question the representational

nature originally associated to photography (especially ethnographic photography), and its

history and role within the imperial project as a means to simultaneously document and erase the

individual. Bynoe calls attention to this through the use of collage. In the four collages exhibited,

the superposition of images from official and family archives, and the painting and scraping of

their surface by obstructing the sight of the actual photographs, suggest the malleability of

identity within visual representation. Imperial (2010) is perhaps the collage that most poignantly

illustrates this; the superposed image of the British passport insignia over a person’s face evokes

the ways in which self and collectivity sometimes merge, obstruct or define each other.

Similarly, Kempadoo uses the superposition of archival material from official and family

archives and landscape pictures taken in Guyana in an attempt to explore her own relationship to

the Caribbean and England. The four photographs exhibited are part of the series Virtual Exiles

where the artist re-figures the colonial archive through the inclusion of personal visual narratives.

The artwork’s composition evokes the intersection of the individual and the collective, the past

and the present in the formation of collective memory. It demonstrates how the ways in which

society interprets and re-imagines the past is informed by history and memory at the individual

level. Both Kempadoo and Bynoe create counter-archives that respond to the gaps and absences

of colonial archiving by re-inserting other memories and gazes in which an autobiographical

practice plays an important part.

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Holly Bynoe. Imperial, 2010. Collage on archival

durotone newsprint aged, 84 x 106 cm.

Roshini Kempadoo. Virtual Exiles: Frontline, Backyards, 2000. Giclée print, 47.4 x 72 cm.

Kempadoo and Bynoe’s concern with the archive and the practice of archiving is shared

by Joscelyn Gardner, whose stone lithographs bring to light archival images of instruments for

the torture of female slaves. In the artwork these instruments are entangled with beautifully

braided hairstyles and colorful poisonous flowers. Botanical knowledge regarding plants used to

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induce abortions was passed on from generation to generation of slave women. Its inclusion in

the artwork, as well as the reproduction of the braided hair, point towards a female tradition of

(counter)memory and resistance strongly rooted in kinship.

Joscelyn Gardner. Convolvulus Jalapa (Yara), 2010.

Hand painted stone lithograph on frosted mylar, 91.4 x 61 cm.

Wrestling with the Image combines art from both established and emerging artists in the

region. Inclusive exhibitions like Wrestling facilitate in this way the kind of dialogue between

artists that is central to creative exchange, intellectual stimulation and to consolidating networks

that often play an important role in launching the work of artists. Since the opening of Wrestling

with the Image in 2011, the work of emerging artists like Sheena Rose and Marlon James has

been showcased in important art shows and pioneering art publications like ARC (Art.

Reconciliation. Culture). Through digital video and digital photography, respectively, Rose and

James incorporate a nuanced attention to the everyday, and the ways in which we engage with

those around us, in local and global contexts. Their personal engagement with the image creates

a contact zone between viewers and the people portrayed in the work that enriches reflections on

the issues of subjectivity and subject position. When looking at the visual story that narrates

Sheena Rose’s experiences in South Africa, or looking at the protagonists of Marlon James’

portraits, viewers are sharing a space in which, not only do they become engrossed in the visual

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narratives and acts of gazing, but they also become aware of their degree of participation in

engaging with the artwork. The daily routines deployed in Rose’s video evoke our own diurnal

routines, unveiling a sophisticated interplay between awareness and mechanization. In James’

photography the gaze of its models into the photographic lens creates a powerful effect that

renders viewers susceptible to an act of viewing in reverse.

Sheena Rose. Town, 2008. Digital Video, variable dimensions. 00:02:44.

Marlon James. Mark and Gisele, 2007. Digital Print.

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