The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde

Postmodernism as Post-nationalism

Therese Kaspersen Hadchity

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780822362944
• eBook ISBN: 9781557539366
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde describes the rise and gradual consolidation of the visual arts avant-garde, which came to local and international attention in the 1990s. The book is centered on the critical and aesthetic strategies employed by this avant-garde to repudiate the previous generation's commitment to modernism and anti-colonialism. In three sections, it highlights the many converging factors, which have pushed this avant-garde to the forefront of the region's contemporary scene, and places it all in the context of growing dissatisfaction with the post-colonial state and its cultural policies.

This generational transition has manifested itself not only in a departure from "traditional" in favor of "new" media (i.e., installation, performance, and video rather than painting and sculpture), but also in the advancement of a "postnationalist postmodernism," which reaches for diasporic and cosmopolitan frames of reference.

Section one outlines the features of a preceding "Creole modernism" and explains the different guises of postnationalism in the region's contemporary art. In section two, its momentum is connected to the proliferation of independent art spaces and transnational networks, which connect artists across and beyond the region and open up possibilities unavailable to earlier generations. Section three demonstrates the impact of this conceptual and organizational evolution on the selection and exhibition of Caribbean art in the metropole.

SECTION 1

Discourse

CHAPTER 1

Shaping Up the Past
The Critique of Cultural Nationalism

THE VEINS OF THE wood have become the pulsating veins of a man. With an upward gaze, his head is thrown back, touching on the shoulder. From here to the elbow, the right arm is aligned with the torso, but then pushes forward, muscles tightening under the skin. The left arm, in turn, arches down towards the plinth, where the two hands meet. Between that arm and the body is a hollow, protected space, suggestive of an upward arrow, or a house. The man’s angular, uncomfortable pose and bulging muscles indicate mounting pressure, perhaps an imminent move. Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused from 1935 (see plate 1) is a symbol of black empowerment and a new nation in the making. The sculpture was first executed in wood and, with slight modifications, later enlarged and cast in bronze for a public monument. Though the final version only was completed (posthumously) in 1991, it has become an emblem of the Independence movement, of Jamaican national identity and of early modernist endeavors in Caribbean art.¹ It is a work, which appears to lean towards synthetic cubism’s condensation of form, but Negro Aroused is no detached attempt at form analysis. It is the evocation of a historical subject and this time, cubism’s liberal gestures towards African form is replaced with the unmistakable presence of a black man.

To establish a background for the more far-reaching argument developed in this book, the present chapter examines the frequent association between modernism and anti-colonial nationalism in Caribbean visual art. The emphasis is on the skepticism towards the former, which, since the early 1990s, has followed from the critique of the latter: as the false promises and outright failures of postcoloniality began to inform the region’s critical climate, modernism came to be seen as the aesthetic handmaiden of an increasingly suspect nationalist agenda. However, following on from Benita Parry’s observation of the prevalent tendency to “scant the disruptive energies of all anti-colonialist opposition, whether moderate or radical” and Neil Lazarus’ contention that “Contemporary theorists seem increasingly given to suggesting that the national liberation movements never were what they were—that is that they were always more concerned with the consolidation of elite power than with the empowering of the powerless, with the extension of privilege than with its overthrow”,² I want to argue for a less reductive perception of the anti-colonial generation, and, especially, of the many and varied efforts here collectively referred to as ‘Creole modernism’³ and its current-day heirs. This leads up to a portrayal, in the remainder of section 1, of the contemporary movement, which has offered itself up as a successor to that generation and its aesthetic strategies.

An Emphatic Departure

One of the most influential voices in the discursive and exhibitionary trajectory, which connects the RA-moment (discussed in the introduction) with the present, has been that of Christopher Cozier. Since the early 1990s, Cozier has perhaps become the Anglophone Caribbean’s most frequently shown, cited and consulted artist, critic and curator. He is moreover a co-founder of the acclaimed project-and exhibition-space Alice Yard in Port-of-Spain and, in 2013, Cozier could, as one of very few artists based in the Anglophone Caribbean, add a solo-exhibition at a New York-gallery to an already impressive CV. Later that year, he received a Prince Claus Award for outstanding achievement in the field of culture and development. The official citation acknowledges his importance for “the evolution of contemporary art discourse in the Caribbean” and his “commitment to research and critical enquiry”, which has “expanded the dialogue between traditional academic disciplines and the visual, and helped to liberate local discourse from predictable tropes and stereotypes”.⁴

Crucial to Cozier’s success has been the perception that his work represented a decisive break with previous tendencies in Trinidadian art—a perception actively corroborated Cozier himself and his early supporter, the German collector Ulrich Fiedler. In the essay “Between Narratives and Other Spaces” Cozier thus proclaims a generational rupture between contemporary artists and what he describes as the nationalist agenda of their predecessors: “The new enemy of the nationalist has shifted from the colonizer to the perpetual ‘next generation’, whose allegedly ambiguous relationship to the national space is not understood”.⁵ The fact that Cozier (along with Che Lovelace and Peter Minshall) in the same year was selected to represent Trinidad in the prestigious exhibition Caribe Insular in Madrid and to write the essay contextualizing the Trinidadian submission did, however, indicate that a change of guard was in progress, even if this breakthrough largely was mediated by metropolitan collectors and curators.

Cozier’s image and artistic profile has thus been tied to his assessment of peers and precursors as being too close to the nationalist agenda or particular claims over the national space. Early works by pioneer-artists, who “painted Trinidad’s landscape in an impressionistic style”,⁶ are denounced as rhetorical or naively uncritical, while those by modernists like Leroy Clarke, Carlisle Harris and Kenwyn Crichlow are associated with overarching national narratives. Functioning merely as “postcards of national sites” or “icons of anti-imperialism”, such works, it is argued, serve to stabilize the national project, rather than uncover its inherent biases.⁷ Whereas early Caribbean pioneers participated in the production of what Krista Thompson refers to as ‘the picturesque’, later artists, we may infer, have thus modeled themselves a little too closely on Western modernism, and yet been unreceptive to the postmodernist critique of that modernism—indeed, what Cozier advocated was ostensibly a second round of the selective adaptation Brathwaite refers to as ‘interculturation’. The radical break ascribed to him and his circle (Irenee Shaw, Steve Ouditt and Edward Bowen) in the early 1990s therefore did not lie in a complete departure from earlier practices, but in the aesthetic and philosophical paradigm to which they attached themselves, and in the redirection of scope from nation building to nation critique.⁸ Cozier has thus sought to separate himself from the previous generation’s self-imposed commitment to the postcolonial nation state of which he has been unequivocally dismissive: “To me the concept of nation in the Anglophone Caribbean context is the smallest moment of our larger history since the alleged ‘discovery’ by Columbus in 1493. Trinidad, for example, became independent from the UK in 1962. Also, the island state is the smallest location on the Caribbean map, physically and mentally—perhaps an immature and very aggressive guarded territory that belongs to politicians and their funders”.⁹

In contradistinction to the nation building generation, Cozier has therefore (as will be discussed in chapter 2) been dedicated to the idea of visual art as a persistently critical and investigative activity. This ambition and (perhaps not least) the need to create distance to a previous generation, has contributed to a broad-based movement from traditional to new media, from an emphasis on collective identity claims to the highlighting of individual experience, from suggestions of binary or dialectical relationships to the foregrounding of difference, hybridity and rhizomatic structures, from a focus on narrative, representation and product to a focus on concept, ambiguity and process.

Cozier’s dissident position found an early supporter in the Jamaican critic Annie Paul. The latter’s contribution to the discourse on visual art has to a large extent manifested itself in a persistent critique of the Jamaican art establishment, which she—in a Bourdieusian irony that also applies to Cozier—increasingly has come to personify. Her contention (indeed under reference to Bourdieu’s perception of the art world as a product and guarantor of social elitism) has been that the canon and national narrative created by the National Gallery of Jamaica (starting with the endorsement of Edna Manley as the founder of modern Jamaican art) reflects the adoption of Eurocentric values by an Afro-Creole middle class. The Manleys and the Drumblair-government, Paul contends, were determined to “singlehandedly sculpt a better nation, to impose order on the unassimilable and inchoate”. In reference to the work of Petrona Morrison, she speculates “Perhaps there is also an urge to rescue and rehabilitate, to bestow the old, broken and obsolete, the mantle of dignity”. These ‘misdeeds’ are committed “in the name of a normalized essential Caribbean psyche, which is visualized as black (…)”.¹⁰ According to Paul, the bourgeois nationalist aesthetic fell into the complementary categories of ‘intuitive’ and ‘modernist’. While the former (loosely defined as un-academic works by self-taught artists) was relatively contained, modernism gradually came to dominate national canons in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean. In Jamaica, she argues, this trajectory, which represents “a move that maximizes artistic autonomy by privileging the mode of representation over that which is represented, or presentation over representation”,¹¹ describes the progression from Edna Manley to artists like David Boxer, Petrona Morrison and Hope Brooks. Uncritically adopted from a Western matrix, Paul maintains, this modernism demands the cultivation of a Bourdieusian ‘pure gaze’—the increasingly self-referential aesthetic codes of the educated elite.

It is, however, not so much the obedience to a Western script, to which Paul objects (in another essay she cautions that, unless artists take heed, “contemporary Jamaican art may be seen to be out of sync with what is known as ‘international contemporary art’”¹²) as it is the remoteness of this aesthetic from popular taste. Positioning herself inscrutably between populism and working-class solidarity, she thus concludes that “In relation to the ‘habitus’ of art legislated by the National Gallery the public whose money goes toward maintaining such an institution finds itself excluded by virtue of not possessing the ‘pure’ gaze required to decode the latest acquisitions of the national collection”.¹³ Through the course of Paul’s extended argument, however, a number of statements come into conflict with one another and undermine the impression of a coherent position on the relationship between aesthetics, national culture and the state. There is, for instance, her criticism of the Manley government’s investment in national culture, versus her approval of the post-revolutionary Cuban government’s success in forging a thriving (and internationally acknowledged) national art scene.¹⁴ The Jamaican problem, it thus appears, is not government intervention in culture per se, but its preference for a particular aesthetic direction, such as Edna Manley’s modernism. Likewise, Paul’s advocacy for artists with great commercial traction (like Ras Daniel Heartman and Judy Ann MacMillan), sits uncomfortably with her contention that “serious contemporary work” cannot be “exhibited within the walls of an institution such as the National Gallery that has been so much part of creating and maintaining an art market”.¹⁵ Her admiration for Heartman is, moreover, difficult to reconcile with her equal enthusiasm for conceptual artists like Nicholas Morris and Charles Campbell, whom she commends for refusing to be “co-opted into nation stories”, but whose appreciation arguably requires more ‘distinction’ than most things previously mounted on the walls of Jamaica’s National Gallery. Paul’s concern is therefore not, after all, with ‘nation stories’, but with the notion that the National Gallery advances a story with a middle-class bias. What is at work in her writing is, I think, a precarious effort to combine a deconstructive anti-essentialism with a postmodernist populism, nodding at once towards the masses and the intelligentsia in the conviction that postmodernism can serve them both. Indeed—while Cozier never (to my knowledge) directly refers to his own position as postmodern, Paul explicitly seconds Stuart Hall’s description of postmodernism as a broad-based anti-elitist momentum, which “built on and transformed (modernism) by taking it out into the world”.¹⁶

Over the last two decades, Paul and Cozier have become two of the Anglophone Caribbean’s most prominent critics¹⁷, often involved in the same projects and cited in the same context (these include some of the major international exhibitions discussed in chapter 8). My discussion so far should, however, have reflected several significant and, one would think, far-reaching differences. One notes a discrepancy between Paul’s contention that Caribbean modernism aims at autonomy versus Cozier’s perception that (being in the service of nationalism) it isn’t autonomous enough, between Cozier’s aversion to art, which is ‘representational’ and Paul’s aversion to art, which is not representational enough. Paul’s disparaging remarks about “the artist as Romantic hero and heroic individualism”¹⁸ implicitly sanctions the idea of collective aspirations, but clashes with Cozier’s converse advocacy for an art reflective of individual experience—and whereas Paul is fiercely critical of Jamaican modernism, Cozier is dismissive of its nationalist application, but maintains modernism’s original quest for critical independence. While both call for greater openness towards extra-regional currents and encourage skepticism towards the normalizing tendencies of nations and national canons, Cozier’s principal position can perhaps best be described as anti-nationalist and Paul’s as anti-elitist, if not altogether anti-nationalist. While Cozier’s rejection of identity narratives, needless to say, extends to those of national institutions, Paul’s critique of the National Gallery of Jamaica therefore does not preclude the possibility of a more representative future institution.¹⁹ These differences notwithstanding, Cozier and Paul have contributed hugely to the perception of the previous artistic generation as the instrument of a socially elitist Caribbean nationalism with an Afro-Creole bias.²⁰

Such views resonate with the more analytical and far-reaching critiques of the nationalist movement and the postcolonial establishment offered by scholars like David Scott and Percy Hintzen.²¹ The latter, for example, argues that “the nationalist discourse was not, however, a ‘narrative of liberation’. Historically, postcolonial political economies have failed to reflect the ideological promise of self-determination, development, and de facto democratic participation. The promise of liberation has failed to materialize in postcolonial social constructions. Instead, colonialism has been replaced by even more egregious forms of domination, super-exploitation, and dependency”. Hintzen, notably, does not merely imply a stalled or failed liberation movement, but one that was always (or immediately) corrupted: “Once in control of governmental institutions, state power was employed by these elites for the intensification...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Section 1: Discourse
• Section 2: Spaces
• Section 3: Encounters
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author