Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Critical Caribbean Studies

Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Carter Mathes, and Kathleen López

Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Caribbean Colonialities.

Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora

Frances R. Botkin, Thieving Three-Fingered Jack: Transatlantic Tales of a Jamaican Outlaw, 1780–2015

Carlos Garrido Castellano, Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art: Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel

Melissa A. Johnson, Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize

Alaí Reyes-Santos, Our Caribbean Kin: Race and Nation in the Neoliberal Antilles

Milagros Ricourt, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola

Katherine A. Zien, Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone

Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere

CARLOS GARRIDO CASTELLANO

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garrido Castellano, Carlos, author.

Title: Beyond representation in contemporary Caribbean art : space, politics, and the public sphere / Carlos Garrido Castellano.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018032218 | ISBN 9780813594811 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813594804 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Art, Caribbean—21st century.

Classification: LCC N6591 .G37 2019 | DDC 709.729/0905—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032218

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2019 by Carlos Garrido Castellano

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my parents & Leonor, with archipelagic admiration

Any social existence aspiring or claiming to be real, but failing to produce its own space, would be a strange entity, a very peculiar kind of abstraction unable to escape from the ideological or even the cultural realm. It would fall to the level of folklore and sooner or later disappear altogether, thereby immediately losing its identity, its denomination and its feeble degree of reality.

—Henry Lefebvre (1991, 53)

Géographie impure et combien séculière!

—Aimé Césaire (1962, 29)

Contents

Introduction: Art, Space, and Agency in the Contemporary Caribbean

1 Being Here and There: Curatorial-Specific Approaches to Caribbean Reality

2 Caribbean Art Institutions, Critique, and the Public Sphere

3 Art Melting in Site-Specificity: Performance Art and Public Space in the Dominican Republic

4 Toward a Diasporic Counterstreaming Caribbean Imagination

5 Subversive Alliances: Collaborative Agency beyond Representation

Coda: Artistic Agency, Space, and the Praxis of Caribbean Studies

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art

Introduction

Art, Space, and Agency in the Contemporary Caribbean

What you might call the burden of context. The burden of history. The burden of being from a place—it’s tiresome to keep saying this, but even more tiresome that it’s true—from a small, peripheral place where individual sensibility is trapped on all sides: by ideologies, by national culture narratives, by stereotypes—by that whole tangle of expectations about what it means to be an artist from and in the Caribbean.

—Nicholas Laughlin (2007b, 10)

Some histories can only be written from another place.

—Mimi Sheller (2004, 43)

This book investigates the ways in which Caribbean cultural practitioners deal with concerns of space and location through contemporary visual creativity. It examines the maneuvers that Caribbean visual practice carries out in order to secure spaces of empowerment and freedom. It deals with how Caribbean art has channeled a critical rationality, in other words, the everyday ways in which societies explain and think through the problems they confront (Chabal 2012, 13). Through this study I propose to explore how Caribbean individuals and collectivities move beyond pre-established mappings and expectations, showing the complex ways in which art and agency overlap. These encounters give rise to a reconfiguration of art spaces—including audiences, spectatorship, curatorship, institutional framework, discursiveness and strategic rooting, and networking—that challenge the restrictions of nationalism but also the pessimism of some readings of globalization. Ultimately, this book is about the imaginative ways in which Caribbean subjects and communities rearrange the sociocultural framework(s) they share.

My contention is that contemporary Caribbean visual practice is strongly linked to an exercise of spatial imagination in which alternative lives, encounters, and futures are experienced and made possible. Art practice is identified here with a knowledge of emancipative mappings, an arena from which new social configurations can be envisaged and ultimately constructed. The transformative dimension of Caribbean visual creativity exercise is not limited to answering back the expectations about what the Caribbean is or how it is conceived was constructed; rather, it involves the active production of alternative strategies and spaces of enunciation. Delving into Caribbean artistic practices from the 1980s to the present day, this book considers how far some cultural initiatives arising in the Caribbean region can go to empower Caribbean agents. Its main concern is with agency: agency within space, agency through space, agency as space, space’s agency.

The critical interpretation of contemporary Caribbean art has been conditioned by the adscription of Caribbean visual landscapes to particular, pre-established geopolitical configurations (see Mohammed 2010). In this sense, artistic discourses have been understood as standing for and/or challenging regional categories such as West Indies, Départements d’Outre-Mer, Latin American Art, Black British Art, Black Art, or even Caribbean Art.¹ Although necessary, recognizing these ascriptions as incomplete and ineffective reveals to be insufficient if we fail to explain the mechanisms generating and dissimulating this naturalization. The relation between Caribbean artistic practices and already defined or predetermined contexts or global configurations does more than condition where art is shown and viewed; it also determines the whole process of artmaking.² The focus on the active role Caribbean agents have developed in sketching out a context allows us to go a step further. Our task is to allocate and examine how Caribbean visual practices produce spatial configurations that operate from below as well as from within those systems. It is therefore essential to understand not just how contemporary visual artwork reflects the complex and contested aspects of perceiving, signifying, and defining the Caribbean self in relation to others (Kempadoo 2013, 144) but also how artistic agency actively constructs that Caribbean self in multiple, heterogeneous ways.

The Caribbean has been traditionally associated with externally devised mappings and categories, thus appearing as a passive entity to be consumed and categorized. There is no doubt that the Caribbean has played a central role in the definition of a Western zeitgeist, where the region was (and is) associated with a tropical, exuberant landscape. More than that, it is undeniable that the Caribbean has been historically shaped according to external cultural and politico-economic configurations. Acknowledging the weight of these forces (on this question, see De Maeseneer and Van Hecke 2004), I argue that something else must be added in order to address contemporary Caribbean visual creativity. The creative processes of spatial reconfiguration examined in this book involve multiple actors and span a vast range of contexts, including museums and art galleries throughout and beyond the Caribbean region, but also activist and socially-engaged initiatives, urban reconfigurations, artistic interventions, or educational practices. Scrutinizing this diversity of practices, this book draws on the active and constructive side of visual creativity, conceived here as a contextual practice transcending the medium of visual art and operating within an expanded social terrain.

When dealing with geographical theory, Tariq Jazeel warns about the importance of not forgetting the ways that established conceptual orthodoxies within the discipline [of geography] work in fact to ideologically constitute the geographical imagination in particular kinds of ways (Jazeel 2014, 89). In a similar way, the artists analyzed in this book are not just striving to answer back orthodox interpretations of Caribbean reality; rather, acting as determined inhabitants of space as Foucault would put it (1986, 22), they are actively developing a resilient, productive, and alternative geographical imagination in which discourse is just one part of a more complex set of creative strategies that speak to the grounded geographical contextuality of ‘real politics’ (Jazeel 2014, 89). Hence this book’s interest in embedding the critique of specific artistic discourses and artworks within a broader discussion of the whole set of cultural politics and social dynamics surrounding them.³

This discussion is tied into a very specific chronological framework, that of the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first. The period between the 1990s and the 2010s is marked by the creation and consolidation of art institutions and biennials, the creation of artist-managed spaces and workshops, the consolidation of the exhibition format and its challenge, and the interest of mainstream contexts in Caribbean art. The period under scrutiny is also characterized by the final demise of revolutionary futures, which culminates in the series of processes and events that marked the 1980s: the murder of Walter Rodney, the collapse of the Grenada Revolution, the dispersal of the Caribbean Left from the cause of regional emancipation, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the establishment of neoliberal policies in the different Caribbean states. The choice of this temporal framework responds to specific reasons: these decades constitutes a decisive moment in the histories of Caribbean artistic practice, one defined by the expansion of Caribbean artistic discourses, the rupture with national histories of artistic modernity, the development of long-lasting creative bonds between different Caribbean territories, the impact of globalization and neoliberalism. It is true that all of these processes took place within a framework of capitalist commoditization and cultural marketization; at the same time, however, the fluidity deriving from this process permitted a radical redefinition of artistic agency and, more specifically, of the space of art and artists within Caribbean societies.

Many of the artists and collectives whose projects are analyzed in this book envisage active ways of engaging Caribbean societies in a more effective way.⁴ They are concerned with inventing a different art world, often adopting a philistine approach (to borrow Gregory Sholette’s [2017a, 21] apt conceptualization) to creativity, something that in many cases kept them beneath the radar of international experts and flaneurs. Working from such a position entails several risks, among them precarity, economic dependence, and institutional isolation. Coping with this situation then becomes a central concern in the artistic and creative practices of many Caribbeans, and it takes precedence over the preoccupation with defining and labeling what is distinctive about Caribbean creativity. Many of the artists interviewed for this book were forced to combine their creativity with educational or more commercial jobs; many share the role of contemporary artist and cultural entrepreneur; for others, finally, studying abroad and getting loans represents both an opportunity and an economic path with no guaranteed results. This unstable situation has shifted the landscape of visual creativity across the region, redefining how art is produced from a Caribbean perspective.

My interpretation of the creative practices arising within this period is not a pessimistic one, however. The last two decades are marked by the increasing social relevance of artistic practice in the configuration of Caribbean societies and the establishment of platforms for civic engagement and negotiation. During these decades, Caribbean artists have challenged external gazes upon the region and, more importantly, have questioned what it means to make art and to be an artist, attempting to identify the sphere of influence and the public relevance of cultural practices. The agency of these individuals and platforms is determined by its subversiveness in respect of cultural identity as understood in national, territorial terms, by its capacity to translate and connect causes and differences (Mbembe 2001), awaking the interest of people with no previous record of engagement with contemporary artistic practice. In this respect, transformation and subversiveness are identified as a driving force in the processes of cultural mappings analyzed here.

When confronting Caribbean visual creativity, then, the following questions must be addressed: Who are the subjects of Caribbean art? What is the role of canonical demarcations in the configuration of Caribbean artistic practices? Whose forces and interests are contending in the configuration of a Caribbean art medium? How do such forces propose alternative cultural, emotive, and cognitive mappings? In what ways, and under what conditions, does art promote an alternative performance of race, gender, and identity? To what extent do contextual efforts challenge pre-existing symbolic and normative artistic orders and which art defies? How are concepts such as innovation, engagement, responsibility, participation, and resistance to be measured if we translate the focus from discourse to contextualized agency? Does visual creativity allow the emancipation of citizenship for Caribbean populations? In which ways does this creativity develop contextual strategies of enunciation and affirmation?

Contextual stands here for something other than recognizing that cultural agency is always spatially located. The assumption that art occurs within a postcolonial, geopolitical configuration marked by the consequences of imperialism not only falls short in explaining the singularities, and ultimately the possibilities, of practice and action;⁵ it also owes much to an imperialistic logic, in accordance with Said’s seminal thinking.⁶ The artworks and creative processes analyzed here challenge and reformulate the whole spatial logic in which creative and social experiences unfold. By focusing on their productions, we shall be in a stronger position to measure how Caribbean Art relates to a configuration of an ever-shifting, ever-negotiated context that overlaps and subsumes local and global spatial formations. Furthermore, the reading of visual creativity offered here takes account of the multiple agents involved in visual creativity, who are actively reconfiguring, expanding, and constantly generating their identities and places of enunciation. In recognizing the active role of Caribbean creators, this book tries to provide a clear view of the energies, aspirations, and consequences of the efforts made by Caribbean people, who despite being occasionally silenced or misrepresented have not lost their capacity to remake the medium in which the action takes place. Ultimately, this book aims to destabilize the understanding of context as a framework in which artists operate and with which artworks deal.

Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of the production of space offers valuable insights into how to undertake this task. The potential of Lefebvrian-produced space in the understanding of Caribbean cultural and political practices has already been discussed (Crichlow and Northover 2009, 47–49); for our purposes here, the notion of a differential space, a space embedded in power dynamics, holds special interest (Lefebvre 1991, 52). This reality is shaped by class struggles—as well as racial and gender ones, we must add—which materialize in spatial terms. Lefebvre contrasts this kind of space with an abstract one, marked by the reproduction of the homogenizing forces of world capitalism. If the second one is constructed from consensus and conventions, which gives it the image of being trouble-free, the first is open to the fluctuations and the negotiations of a spatial economy. Space emerges not only as a produced, materialized reality but also as one that can gather and embrace the possibility of emancipation. It would be subjected to a process of making places, in Crichlow’s and Northover’s (2009, 19) words. What is striking in Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space for the purposes of this book is that that it makes thinking on divergent fluxes of action—violent and otherwise—susceptible to molding reality from potentially competing perspectives. For Lefebvre, power codifies space, but at the same time any sanctioning of spatial configurations is not exonerated from the possibility of being defied and transformed. This eventual transformation comes from action, since a spatial code is not simply a means of reading or interpreting space: rather it is a means of living in that space, of understanding it, and of producing it (Lefebvre 1991, 47–48). Dealing with curatorial, participatory, and collective practices that extend beyond representation and discourse, this book tries to read Caribbean visual culture as an example of the capacity of cultural practices to transform Lefebvre’s spatial aspirations into reality.

Space and Contemporary Caribbean Art Criticism

In his monograph on the Grenada Revolution, David Scott (2013) recalls his idea of problem-space in the context of a discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of temporality. After pointing out how Agamben rejects the time that is made equivalent to historical folding, Scott points out how Agamben’s interest in Benjamin is more a philosophical borrowing than a contextualized grounding in Benjamin’s troubled experience. Scott (9) warns against understanding context as a muted background, conceding greater relevance to critical engagement with space and context. Here he is seeking to grasp the specificities of thinking through space and time, simultaneously operating in a particular and unrepeatable set of coordinates and being translatable to other situations, simultaneously affecting and locating history and challenging its primacy over space and time. This book discusses a set of creative practices that share this radical interest. These case studies do not just relate to Caribbean space and history and time; they also challenge the reductive adscription and one-sidedness to which many postcolonial creative practices have been historically confined. However, at the same time, the practices examined here point unerringly to the determination with which Caribbean individuals as well as collectives have striven to make other temporalities and spacings possible.⁷

There have been many attempts to define what Caribbean art is, what constitutes Caribbean contemporaneity in terms of space. The invaluable contributions of Veerle Poupeye, Annie Paul, Krista Thompson, Patricia Mohammed, Claire Tancons, Leon Wainwright, Gerardo Mosquera, Tatiana Flores, Yolanda Wood, and Michelle Stephens have consolidated a sharp and vibrant critical thinking on artistic practice, one attentive (yet from a multiplicity of points of view) to the exchanges that Caribbean creators are developing within a global arena. The abovementioned authors have, in any case, represented a sort of virtual yet constant group of interlocutors throughout the process of writing this book. This book discusses their body of writing in some detail, borrowing concepts and discussing ideas as the different concerns of the text unfold, while at the same time developing a distinctive reading of contemporary Caribbean visual creativity based on the relevance of visual practices in articulating active processes of space and context production. Before outlining this approach, a discussion of the most relevant literature is in order.

Veerle Poupeye’s Caribbean Art emerged in 1998 as the first major survey of contemporary Caribbean artistic practice. It undertook the titanic task of mapping Caribbean visual practices from an era prior to the European colonization until the end of the twentieth century. Developing a thematic approach that privileges the last decades of that century, Poupeye perceived a shift between the artists working in the 1960s or 1970s and those who appeared from the 1980s onward. This last generation, Poupeye argued, has come of age in an era characterized by disillusionment with the social and political ideals of the previous generation (Poupeye 1998, 184). Furthermore, they are more interested in creating culture than in representing it (183). Poupeye’s book has been already widely discussed (see, for example, Paul 1998, 1999). Caribbean Art advanced the idea that a new generation of artists and creative practices was emerging out of disenchantment with nation-based political ideals, strengthening the bonds between the different Caribbean territories. Chapter 1 will explore this notion in greater depth.

In Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, Leon Wainwright characterizes the region’s creative production in terms of its reception as anachronistic and out-of-date (2012, 4–14), coping with the demands of ‘catching up’ with a heritage that was not theirs (5). Wainwright’s Caribbean is one shaped by transnational fluxes (especially those linking the West Indies with its former metropolises) and coexisting yet uneven time periods, in which artists struggle to undermine the legacy of former imperial centers and how they temporally displace their former colonial peripheries (2012, 13). Sharing with Wainwright the interest in exploring the practical consequences of the temporal disconnections caused by globalization and neoliberalism,⁸ the present work complements this idea by suggesting that Caribbean histories of contemporaneity are much more shaped by mo(ve)ments of shaping and instituting than of catching up. On the one hand, extemporaneity is not by force linked to diasporic movements, as it is already present and at work in Caribbean cultural landscapes (two chapters of this book are dedicated precisely to asserting the existence and the weight of a Caribbean institutional reality, one which cannot be subsumed under such binary categories of province-metropolis, center-periphery, and so on). On the other hand, many of the fluxes discussed here are not concerned with reversing influences and transmission across colonized and metropolitan territories; although engaged on several historical fronts (13), Caribbean creators are transcending the colony-metropolitan binaries, grounding artistic practice on the shared, circum-Caribbean, lived experience of contextual temporality.⁹

More recently, Michelle Stephens has argued that Caribbean art is strongly linked to the notions of space and, more specifically, to the idea of an archipelagic reality, which renders compulsory discussing her insights here. In a recent article, Stephens emphasizes the need to conceive Caribbean artistic creativity from a position transcending insularity, attempting to determine new spatial configurations of a Caribbean contemporaneity (2013, 25). This maritime-based endeavor is set against the predominance of continentality in postcolonial approximations to the Atlantic space, including that of Gilroy (1993). With this in mind, she presses for a theoretical approach that takes account of the modernity and cosmopolitism of the creole subjects whose lived space is framed through the Caribbean insular territory. One of the major hindrances to this conceptual exercise of spatial imagination, she argues, is represented by the way that area studies and an external gaze have applied a fragmenting lens to the Caribbean, singularizing each island and reterritorializing the region through this restrictive movement (Stephens 2013, 12). Dealing with visual representation, she suggests that it is geography that could now provide some useful, complementary frames for resituating the status of culture as a category of knowledge about the Caribbean (9). Finally, the consequences of that critical reterritorialization would affect the idea of an academic discipline focused on Caribbean studies: A contemporary Caribbean Studies might think of itself as engaged in the project of connecting, drawing, and mapping the relations that emerge and evolve from the repeating patterns and tropes that have come to constitute Caribbean surfaces and places. In this kind of topology, contemporary Caribbean studies also needs to move back and forth across both space and time, in a crisscrossing, decentralized motion not unlike the ones imaged by rhumb lines on old portolan maps (25). This book shares Stephens’s interest in geography as the main path for the future of Caribbean studies. Her idea of Caribbean contemporaneity defined through space, not as a secluded privilege of diasporic, cosmopolitan subjects but also shaping the lives of (equally modern and cosmopolitan) Caribbean creoles is relevant throughout this study. Pursuing this line of enquiry further, the main focus in this book is on the multiple ways in which artistic agency is spatially materialized. Although this would necessarily involve an exercise in regional imagination, throughout these pages imagination is linked to the active production of an