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Caribbean art has attracted increasing
attention as evidenced by sizable museum exhibitions devoted to
it in the past few years. The art’s aesthetic underpinning is
the product of multiple, stratified societies that are still
more or less negotiating, in diverse ways, their political and
socio-cultural identities, so it’s hard to capture in a single
show. Furthermore, some of the work is produced by expatriate
artists who still maintain strong ties to their birthplace. Yet,
“Caribbean Cream: What You See Is What You Do,” an
exhibition at a new Jersey City gallery, BrutEdge, directed by
Gail Granowitz and Reynald Lally, offers a satisfying take on a
fundamental concern of the region’s artists.
Curated by Lally with the
assistance of Jorge Alberto Perez, who also handsomely designed
the show, “Caribbean Cream” includes 14 artists from
Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. It’s not intended as a
survey. The impetus for it, we’re told, is based on the Haitian
saying sa ou fè, se li ou wè (“what you do is what you
see”). The objective certitude implied in this saying points to
the fact that, contextually, the locus of identity can be found
in the transformative act of conceptualizing the past as it
relates to the present. Yet, we are further informed that the
show is an attempt simply to explore the “tensions” between a
Caribbean that is empirically defined versus one that is
historically complex, hybridized, and, it would seem,
indeterminate.
Fortunately, the
works presented in the show do justice to the pithy Haitian
saying, superseding the would-be aesthetic and historical
indeterminacy of Caribbean art. For instance, Lally, who for
years ran the Bourbon-Lally Gallery in Haiti and then in Canada,
doesn’t altogether set aside the raw, fantastical aspects of the
types of art he has long championed in order to shoehorn the
show into the hip contemporariness associated with such
object-free mediums as film and video, deadpan ironic
photographs, and puzzling over-the-top installations. This was,
to a considerable extent, the case with the Brooklyn Museum’s
exposition “Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art.”
Tellingly, BrutEdge gives prime
wall space to Myrlande Constant’s “Anacaona,” a large,
arrestingly colorful sequined piece replete with flowery vines,
figures in grass skirts with spear or scepter in hand, and
feathers in their hair. The work flaunts its (faux) primitif
lineage. And unlike the three-museum survey, “Caribbean:
Crossroads of the World,” the BrutEdge exhibition does not
deploy its energy deep into the meandering recesses of the past
only to conjure up an art that’s aesthetically diffuse and
unassertive or a Caribbean that’s tethered to the all so nuanced
interpretations of the forces of history. Shunning postmodern
irony altogether, the works Lally has gathered posit a bracingly
affirmative identity with (as well as a self-directed
transformation of) the local and the regional.
The assertion of a locus for a
Caribbean identity that’s in the process of transformation and
construction is foregrounded in various ways in most of the
works in the show. One would expect, for instance, Mario
Benjamin’s “Cannibal Flowers,” a large painting predating
Haiti’s 2010 earthquake that shows an assortment of leaves
seemingly stenciled in an all-over format on a neon-like
chartreuse background, to be merely an evocation of lush
tropical foliage or of an exotically charged paradise. Instead,
the wafting, dusky leaves come across as if they had been
X-rayed and, in the process, incinerated. To complicate
matters, here and there the artist messily, listlessly smears
certain passages, suggesting in a couple of spots vestiges of
owlish eyes. So the painting is tantamount to a vision in which
Benjamin attempts to will a balancing out of the abjectness as
well as the potentialities of his subject. Here, the identity of
self and object together with the symbolic possibility of
transforming this fusion points to the dynamics of a Caribbean
identity in the making.
 A number of other artists
project this transformative potential in their contribution,
including Vladimir Cybil Charlier, whose elliptical works
combine images, ink drawing, and beaded passages on background
photographs of cracked or leveled buildings from Haiti’s
earthquake.
Ebony Patterson’s “Disciple
VI,” from her “Gangstas for Life” series, transforms
a skin-bleached, androgynous portrait of a presumed Jamaican
hipster into an iconic saint. The artist achieves this
transformation by infusing signs of social deviance or otherness
in her subject: there’s the sitter’s rakishly turned,
glitter-covered baseball cap, the flame-like jungle brush or
mountain range behind his shoulders, the red-loud lipstick on
prominent lips that contrast sharply with a ghostly, mask-like
face, the stylish bandana which could have doubled as
concealment for the face. Patterson then conflates all of this
with old-world tropes of salvation in the forms of a lacy,
heavenly halo and a dangling cross.
If Patterson integrates the
ostensibly fraught composite aspects of her subject into a new
model of (Jamaican) blackness, Olivia McGilchrist takes a
somewhat different tack. As stated on a wall label, she is a
white-complexioned, Jamaican-born artist who grew up and was
educated in France and England but now resides in her birthplace
since her “sudden return” there. She insists on presenting the
personas in her small video stills as unambiguously racialized.
In “Bay,” from her Whitey series, we see a white-masked
female standing on the stern of a boat that’s anchored to a
beach. She looms as if she were a bugbear in her viewers’
imagination. So race is something that’s performed, McGilchrist
suggests. It’s a category that’s imposed. Among her other six
exquisite film stills (from her Native Girl series), we get the
reverse of “Whitey.” Here, the artist confronts us with
the theatrically staged presence of a primordially masked female
in presumably African garb who, from mostly pitch-black
surroundings, seems to insist on the viewer seeing and accepting
her as an alluring powerful other.
It would seem that the locus of
Caribbean identity thus far is to be found somewhere in the
vicinity of the racialized (as well as gendered) poles
established at least since colonial slavery days, although it’s
not specifically determined or mapped out. This is born out by
other works in the show, including those of Dionne Simpson and
Florine Démosthène. It’s especially evident in the crisply
delineated lithographs of Jocelyne Gardner, who is known for her
depictions of meticulously coiffed black heads of hair seen from
the back. But in a sense, her prints are not about heads of hair
at all. With their schematic artificiality, the braids and
strands of hair are tantamount to metaphorical encodings that
Gardner gropes through so as to fathom the topography of
colonial oppression and racism. Like the stills of McGilchrist,
Gardner’s headless hair styles, along with the instruments of
restraint and torture that complements them, are woven tales —
tropes that cry with burning desire to reconcile disquieting,
painful feelings and memories with the neocolonial present.
Though shorn of the politics of
colonial memory, the works of two other artists in the
exhibition, Carlos Estevez and Pavel Acosta, are quite pertinent
here. They suggest that the aesthetic means of reconciliation
itself—that is, the conceptual exploration of the tension
between the present and the past, mind and memory, or what is
versus what we think exists — is at the root of Caribbean
identity. With their backgrounds prettily dabbed with warm
washes of paint, Estevez’s two paintings come across as fluffy
as well as quirky and quaint in that they smack of some familiar
dada pieces by Francis Picabia or of the cartoony visions
of Paul Klee. Yet, somewhat like the technical rigamarole or
aesthetic rituals of Dionne Simpson, Estevez introduces into his
paintings countless obsessively interconnected details worthy of
a maniacal outsider artist. Such details project symbolically
the rational mechanics of the sexual attraction and transaction
unfolding between the male-female couple in his two paintings.
Through the act of elucidating the heterosexual pull between his
figures, Estevez exemplifies the identity of his rational
approach to his memory or subjective visions. The past is thus
subsumed into the act of painting—which stands for the present.
Ultimately, that Caribbean
identity is not so indeterminate and freighted by the sheer
multiplicity of past historical truths and possibilities that
are in turn compounded by present memory is succinctly
exemplified in the contribution of Pavel Acosta. His approach
perfectly suits and affirms the notion of a definite locus for
Caribbean identity. The artist uses in his art a “recycled
paint” technique, wherein he cuts up discrete layers of paint
and then collages them like bits and strips of paper onto
canvas, to create his patchy representational images.
If his technique in “Marina”
seems a bit flat-footed, it’s perhaps partly because Acosta is
suggesting in the work that, like his horizontally split sailing
ship whose two halves simultaneously occupy the upper and bottom
edges of the picture, he is trying to constrict the span of time
into the spatial dimension of his canvas. And if the artist
transforms time into space, of course he can no longer return to
or revisit the past. So just as his technique makes his works
look as if he applies his paint clippings strictly from the
picture plane outward, Acosta draws the past into the present
and ultimately toward the viewer or himself.
This is exceedingly clear in
his solidly implemented “Target.” Here, Acosta’s
deceptively banal, pop art-like image of a man aiming a rifle
across the field of the canvas is metaphorically an exercise in
self-identification, not so much marksmanship or violence. For
the barrel of the shotgun, given the piecemeal technique, is
misaligned, and the target that the shooter is aiming at is not
objectified. Nevertheless, the image’s heavy shadow intimates
that the shooter’s target might be himself—his own identity.
Indeed, the gun’s muzzle rests on the picture’s right edge,
suggesting that its discharge would hit the shooter himself in
his upper right arm, which, cleverly, Acosta conspicuously
extends beyond the picture’s left edge. All in all, through his
pictures’ symbolic space, the artist dispenses with the
dimension of time by transposing the present and the past into
himself—an act that parallels the self-object fusion and
potential transformation that Benjamin attains in his “Cannibal
Flowers.”
So if it’s not exactly
demarcated, the locus of Caribbean identity is not to be found
solely in the historical past or even in memory. It’s also an
aesthetic and conceptual identity reached through the
transformative acts that the region’s scattered artists elicit
from themselves in a definite present.
“Caribbean Cream”
September 29th- November 23rd
, 2013
BrutEdge Gallery, Space # 574
Mana Contemporary
888 Newark Ave., Jersey City, NJ 07306
Tel: 646 233-1260
Info@brutedge.com |
