The second roundtable discussion was held in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in April 2007 at the Center for Contemporary Arts and focused on the English-speaking Caribbean. El Museo invited 20 scholars to attend. These more focused dialogues allowed participants to examine issues pertaining to the project in-depth, including the importance of intersections in the arts, such as the relationship of popular arts to the fine arts in Caribbean culture. Through studio visits, one museum visit, musical and literary events, as well as over the fellowship of meals and travel, participants built connections and established bridges to allow for the free exchange of information, in addition to conducting a preliminary survey of Trinidad’s cultural capital.
CARIBBEAN: CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD
CONFERENCE HELD AT CCA, PORT OF SPAIN, TRINIDAD APRIL 17 TO 19, 2007
Roundtable:
DAY 1 SESSION 1
Jane Gregory Rubin
…the emphasis that first Asia, however that’s defined moves him and to some extent, Europe and Africa. But nobody really knows when all those filters first started happening but it is quite clear that every place else will keep erupting as they start coming into the space and they are healed because they are basically born in the New World and the notion of hybridity which he basically tackled and really does come out of Stuart Hall and it just kind of ignores the excitement of what happens when whole populations through one layer of time encounter and encounter each other and you get all involved to really explore these places and when the canvas is actually huge but the space is just very small and you escalate exponentially and if you make the space big enough then you can have a chance to have all sorts of conversations which I find with contemporary artists is very much the case. You always have to give people that space. The reason why the Caribbean is so incredibly mixed is this is where everything gets mixed and the canvas is very small and if left to its wonderful devices it might actually come out as, certainly a paradigm for a new world function… But you really have to keep spreading and spreading…and I hadn’t remembered that it was really Stuart Hall.
Steve Ouditt
I don’t know if he coined it – but out of The Birmingham School of thought and I think the person who wrote about it in the modern period or late modern period would have been, who everyone else will know of is Homi Bhaba. I don’t think that when he’s using this term he’s using it as an explanation, I think its probably just a strategy for enquire. It’s not trying to explain anything, its not trying to suggest that I’m a bit of this, I’m a bit of that, I’m a bit of the other. It’s probably just a question: What if.
Female Spanish voice:
Well you have to remember that in the 15th and 16th century was the first time that the really major, I don’t know whether to call it races -- I think we all belong to the human race-- came together and intermingled and we are ‘mestizo’ in terms of our ethnic or racial background, or whatever you want to call it and we have been dealing with these questions ever since. Now with the Internet and with the flights arriving, you know it’s easy to go from one country to another, this is happening all over the world – this meeting of races, of cultures. I think we have something to say about that because we have been dealing with this and one of the reasons that fundamentalism is around the corner is that people realise that their culture, their ancient, inventive culture is changing so in some places in the world they don’t let people have access to Internet or to television because they want to preserve the veil and what have you. This is one way of reacting to that. Another way is what we have done in the Caribbean, we have sought of assimilated so many things and I think we are a paradigm, as you say, for what is happening in the globalised world because you can either fight this, and our artists have done everything with it, they fought it, they assumed it, they write out against it, so I think we have things to say to the world on this whole issue of identity and globalization.
Florence Alexis
Actually Edouard Glissant made a very interesting statement a few months ago. You probably heard of the riots, the racial riots that France had to face a couple of years ago and it’s a very hard matter but we suspect the majority of the kids that were on the streets in the suburb of France were black kids so the racial issue and the fact that France has now to deal with its own diversity has a lot to do with all this. Edouard Glissant made this very interesting, very stimulating statement with some of the creolist writers as a message to France, saying that as soon as France will be ready to deal its own diversity and multi cultural challenges, the French Caribbean is ready to teach them how to do this and this is to continue what you are just saying and I definitely think this is the field where the project should really find its centre. This is what the Caribbean is supposed to share with the rest of the world. Our history being built in probably among the darkest eras of the history of mankind but being a civilizing experience, is something we can share, as something which civilized us and can civilize the world if the world can take advantage of this experience, so this is why the reference to Glissant. I appreciate that very much and I think this is the way that we could really shape the project, taking into account the way you started it and I want to thank you for that because this is also in the spirit of what the Caribbean, if allowed, or is enable to deliver to the rest of the world, so I wish really that we are able to contribute to that and make it a very concrete and very effective project that address those future issues, of course, taking into account our history, this hybridity debate which is very problematic in France because we don’t use the word hybridity which has a very difficult connotation because of mechanic, actually, we as you know, we speak more Métis age than hybridity, Métis age which has much more to do with the human experience than just the mechanical experience. I would say about this hybridity or Métis age, about this experience of the Caribbean being a cultural space, I see it more as a potential thing even probably in the mind of the writers who have been trying to define it as a possibility and I would like to quote quickly a very interesting French linguist who has studied very largely the creoles and especially the French Creoles, he’s a leading linguist today and his name doesn’t come to mind but he made a very interesting statement explaining how the creoles of the Caribbean were probably the most interesting language to study today as a laboratory of languages – and we know that the Caribbean is a kind of laboratory and not only for languages but a laboratory for languages for linguists to study how language it is built and in the past for how languages have built themselves and I take it as an image of what probably a show like this could bring, you know? Yes, for the moment I think I will stop there. I would like to deal with this airport art, but I will get back to that later.
Veerle Poupeye
Can I just comment on this? Because I think you paint a very idealistic picture of Caribbean culture, and I think its important to be idealistic but as you spoke I had to wonder what the relevance of that would be if you lived in Cite Soleil or if you lived in Birmingham City in Jamaica so there is another kind of reality there that we need to take into consideration here. But, I would like to comment on the airport art issue also – to some extent it goes with what Nicholas said earlier on about what is this anti-Caribbean? What is this Caribbean that we argue against? And to some extent the tourist Caribbean could qualify as that and it has functioned as that but a lot of my recent work has been on tourism and culture and the Caribbean. I think there is another side to that, that tourism also needs to be understood as a consecutive part of Caribbean culture, it has been here since the 19th century. It’s not something that also happens to Caribbean culture or that is completely in a polar or in a completely opposite position. So I think we need to look at it. And I certainly have fallen in love with airport art every perverse way. Because it is part of the culture and it’s not only an internal projection of the Caribbean it also projects back inside in negative ways but also sometimes in positive ways and I’m thinking of how, for instance, Jamaican families use tourist art as tokens of Jamaicaness in their homes because they can’t afford that and it makes a very clear and simple statements about Jamaicaness – so there is something there and we should not discredit this completely as something which is external or necessarily a completely negative factor but nonetheless it has been a sort of anti-Caribbean position in a sense if you wish to put it that way.
Sarah Clunis
I just want to respond to what you are saying about language. Diaspora is also a word that is rooted in bonding – you know seed dispersal and I think that that’s something that I think a lot about too – the etymology of words and where they come from. It is no accident that we also have this history of botanical representations of the Caribbean and landscapes and sort of a kind of fusing with people: you know where you get people represented, and landscape represented in the same type of iconography and I think that kind of leads me to what I think our challenge will be with this project is how do we talk about all of these things and also talk about art, because we can talk about cricket, we can talk about baseball, we can talk about the different elements that tie the Caribbean together but how do we communicate this in a cohesive and precise way without limiting ourselves, or without pigeonholing ourselves. For me, I feel compelled to start the story to talk about a continuous tradition of art practice in the Caribbean, and I feel like part of that is iconography. I mean that how do I know that this artist is Caribbean, I may pigeonhole him yes, but there are elements that I see that are, that have to do with that iconography. The ? on his arms, the crown also the hibiscus. Now, these may be stereotypes but at the same time we’re sitting here trying to define Caribbean art. We’re going to have to communicate what is Caribbean art and I think that if we want to talk about art, iconography, and even through performance, even through ritual, even through shrine aesthetics, whatever the different elements that come into play, iconography is one way I feel that we can start to focus I guess, over here I heard something about the experience of things. I just feel like sometimes for me, even to make sense of things, I look at the different objects or icons or rituals that I see playing out in the Caribbean contemporary art world, whether reactionary or actionary, whether retentive or inventive.
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
I think that something that we have to consider is the way that artists from the regions like the Caribbean, or Central America or even Latin America are considered internationally, or we could talk about Africans for that part. There’s been a transfer of individual creativity through influence of research in art, towards an obligation of the collective consciousness, the Caribbean artist has to be Caribbean, he has to have a certain kind of worries and concerns. He has his obligations. Nobody asks a French artist to do something French. Nobody is looking to see if something that is done by a French artist looks French. There is a much greater liberty I would say in being a European artist I would say than being a Central American or Caribbean, because you have to respond to the community’s expectations, you’re like a voice of the people, you’re like a caricature. It pains to say but I think that there is a transfer of this individual research to the obligations of being like a voice and I think that it’s a very, very serious issue because it does condition the interpretation, I’m sure that... was not thinking about these things when he was painting, I mean he was doing his own personal research in the painting tradition and he wasn’t concerned with being or not being Caribbean or being identified. So I think that that is one way that we have in our area, having to be earmarked with that kind of thing so I think that we kind of have to go beyond that.
Marimar Benítez
But you know rather than it be a limitation, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a limitation because it springs from the whole idea that art has a significant identity value for a community versus art for art sake. Those are two poles of the artistic creation and it may not pose such a limitation to the artist but it can be spur to make the person do work that stops you in your tracks. I can think of Francisco Oller from San Juan. He was making a statement on many things in Puerto Rico. It’s really a masterpiece of paintings [The Wake ]and of doing work that has a communal sense, a very strong communal sense.
Virginia Pérez Ratton
No, I’m not talking against that kind of art, against being committed. With all the curatorial projects that I’ve done, I’ve included many, many works that deal with the Central American countries and their reality, its not that I don’t get it, its just that I think that it’s conditioned particularly in the sense that when you say you discover your West Indianness, when you go away because you just see yourself as Trinidadian and that’s it and then you discover it’s like ... After [Carlos Alfonso?] discovered he was Afro-Cuban when he got to Miami, you know, because in the U.S. you need to have some kind of label each other to interact or to be able to put through a project. You are always labelled, so that’s the type of thing I’m against, not the production itself but the sort of label. The artists that do get out and start working in the U.S. or Europe, so that they are easily or convenient to find with a certain label and that takes care of that conscience in relation to … and that takes care of the idea of what the Caribbean, or Central American or Latin American art should be. So that’s what I’m talking about, its not the art itself but the way it is conveyed, the way that it is analysed in a very, very short-sighted manner.
Female
I think that maybe and there will come a time when we need to consider artwork and look at what the artist is talking about and then we say that is a foundation for maybe further discussion. One of the things that I think that has been usual in a very small way for me to consider in terms of the Caribbeanness, is similar to what Nicholas has been suggesting is to consider what the artists that I have come across, are not dealing with and there are actually some significant omissions if you compare it with artistic style in other regions, and one of them is something like science or technology which is practically, in what I’ve found absent. The other thing is until very recently Caribbean to reflect on itself or on history on the island, there continues to be this investigation of this Caribbeanness.
Male voice:
I think I just want to build again a little on what we are saying is: that insofar that the art does speak first for its own qualities and then eventually for an underlying theme that we are touching upon here. But what is very different is when you see the art coming from other regions, you never look at that as a representation of a Thomas Struth or as a representative of Germany or he embodies Germany or he embodies Europe. We would never do an exhibition based on those concepts so what we want to attempt is to consider also this territory in that same category – the artist that is why they will come later and we don’t want to say which artists are representative of in the same way that we’re not thinking of doing that or also we’re not thinking of addressing Europe, it would not even be worth it to do the same thing for European artists in Europe
What is that…………..perhaps not having been on the forefront that we need to put many tags, again the notion in the world, information is a tag, for instance, ….you put Google tags. In today’s article it mentions this conf which has nothing to do with anything first of all because the art that is represented here is accidentally from Spain, but I am sure that Google….Caribbean cultural conference and three of these works brought the first image…must have been…it must have been just a Google mistake.
Chris Cozier:
The Caribbean is an overly defined space. What more people know what the Caribbean is about like we do. We just happen to live here and living in the Caribbean is a funny kind of place, because you know, you sit in the subway in New York and you see a person sitting in a hammock, a beach, the water has to be just so. The thing is the two coconut trees but you know the coconut tree really comes from Polynesia, it was brought here during the colonial period. It either washed ashore or somebody like Captain Bligh brought it – Blake or somebody you know, it’s completely wild this situation. So it’s a kind of thing where look just on the weekend I borrowed a couple of videos from this video club and I brought them to the house and my wife sat down and said, Chris don’t bring anymore of those European old fashioned art movies to the house. So it means that these things that are allegedly international and this is where we are located right now. We can see all these things from this particular…..
I am a person who was born here. I went t the US and lived a couple of years, like Steve and a lot of other people and when I was in the US everybody used to say to me I feel so sorry for you, you come from this little island, you know, and you are going to want to stay and live in America and you are going to have to learn about international art so to survive in the US I became a kind of eloquent voyeur, you know I read Heart of Darkness and I read a whole lot of different things…postmodern … and so on and then I went from there, from a person ….who could make art here and then I became an ordinary native again and somebody comes to visit you and they stand in my studio and say: ‘I’ve come from New York and there’s Kentucky Fried Chicken in Port of Spain and postmodernist art in the studio, I mean, I said to them, how can I produce something authentic to make you comfortable – I don’t know but what did you come looking for? You know I think we live in this weird world…. And I’d like to know how you get that permission? Who has the permission to be local? Who has the permission to be international? I’m going to be heading back to the … but I think my basic thought is something my colleague from Venezuela who started saying that it is really a certain objectification of the subject…which I started by asking the question. It’s the conditionalities under which we operate that often, somehow, defines you…. I think when the Caribbean has a community …which has various coloured relationships and this revolves and as in the case of some of the Anglo-Caribbean islands then questions of hegemony, whose ahead of the race which began with the notion of the Afro-Caribbean… with a fake or too easily summarized notion of what constitutes hybridity and unification. Now thirty or forty years later, in many Caribbean territories we do question our.. but what’s at stake? Are we setting up a template of how everybody should live or are we trying to figure out what the conditions under which and we are small islands which characterize… by not turning into another Yugoslavia or what happened in Haiti….What happens to indigenous peoples for example? I mean it’s a kind of slow motion genocide that happens in the Caribbean, coming out of that plantation economy where some people get to have their dreams. I remember on one of my first visits to Venezuela, for example, and I saw the favelas in Caracas, my mouth just opened because I hadn’t seen anything like that growing up in Trinidad and then the person said to me why be so sorry, why can’t the people in the favelas…. The people living in Caracas have a more colonial point of view but it’s a weird thing, a different person might have had a more intelligent response. These are the ironies coming from a place like this to negotiate. I’ll just stop there.
Male American
I can certainly accept that , how an international artist can shed identity and just becoming part of this and I was reading from this book by a psychologist called Ellen Langer and this whole question of racial tolerance and she says it’s not consistent with human psychology to get rid of…. To make distinctions. People make distinctions on basic human psychology. You know you look at people… and here attitude towards racial tolerance… is that more distinction than less. It’s not just that everybody is a member of the human race but to think of ….to Chris. There are East Asians in my life, I got to know Koreans as different from Japanese as different from Chinese and within Korea, you begin to tell the difference between North and South Korea and the East West divide in Korea and Christian and Buddhist, Easterner etc so that the world is smaller than that and for the artist its normal to think that everybody is the same right? So, it’s a question of identity. The more different times I come here the more distinctions I make so it’s just a different approach.
Female American
… a lot of social anthropological history, ways of looking towards defining what’s Caribbean and what’s not Caribbean and recording artists are really good at that. I’ll get round to that eventually, but as someone …..historically, in particular… is two different things and as you mentioned just now…. and it did more through all those territories and by the time any of us realised we see things that are obviously Morrocan and Indian – the way before this enlightened period and this social…first you might be able to come up with some analogies that will help you with that because it has happened in other places and it has happened with various economic and geographic so I don’t know what these analogies could be but …… one of which would seem to me to be about what’s missing because when you look at the Mediterranean and the way people speak…there’s only a few places in the world that study Mediterranean culture as Mediterranean culture – everybody just divides it down into communities so that tension is also everywhere - because if you live in a world where nations… so that’s how we define our languages, economies, currencies, so there’s nothing… and it’s us back to the arts …. And it’s like defining ourselves in our own lived life and … especially about identity and so far what’s said about identity is that there’s some… that certain things are specific, I’m not sure which….. but you know that there are positive ways to express things certainly artists do it. In terms of yearning – how can anybody say this in terms of what you are yearning for – something and within that historical analogy you would be clearly geographically defined – so it’s kind of funny about it like palm trees, but, you know, it’s also a place that lots of small islands and those are not imported from somewhere else. There are beaches on the small islands creating human habitations and those have an effect of spreading out and feeding small communities and these communities out there now… the best art which had outside art, folk art and so on and in the American context would be the American North and South. I mean, that would be …The American South had a long hard time integrating into the national sync in the US. It took a civil war and it took the civil rights movement so long, I mean we do have an overlay of media and politics pretty much … in Detroit so some awareness also is missing in this discussion, I mean… about where is the cosmopolitan… that you have described? People interacting and having.. it’s almost like it takes the place of the civilizing experience that you mentioned, so this is habit. People had ….shoulders. They fought and from being outside their folk art there’s an education outside but somehow this cosmopolitan aspect ..has not quite gelled quite right because…
Male American:
I think that I have to compliment you because you couldn’t have put it better for what’s going to the position for this afternoon. I think some of this conversation…..Where do we locate the …from? From an international perspective or local perspective? Being an outsider art or insider art – is it folk art – is that part of this…it has been so interesting and I think, we’re going to Charlotte so she can tell us exactly what …
Day 1 Session 2: Intersection in the Arts:
Valerie Smith (Moderator) Christopher Cozier, Virginia Perez-Ratton
Introductions:
Valerie Smith:
In this section we are supposed to be talking about “Intersections in the Arts” and by that we mean ? choreographs...talking about autodidacts as opposed to artists who are university trained, high, low …very big primitive…
These kinds of issues which, in so many ways, are a combination of what we spoke about this morning, these ideas of ‘hybridity’ but with materials and I was thinking about this, and I was thinking this is almost not an issue in a way because ideas are freer and we know that artists have been taking from here, there and everywhere ..…and it isn’t artists who have had an education who are taking from whatever is around them or outside them but also artists who may not have had an education but who come across ideas from life and they bring it to their work. So I think this is something we can’t deny, it is there, but I think a question we might investigate is perhaps in communities that are very tightly knit; the idea of the performing arts, music, dance, food, religion, is so close to them that I am wondering whether this is special to the Caribbean.
I think we have lost it….what I am trying to say is I think that this has been lost in America…and to a certain extent, that is how in a way we distinguish a place like the Caribbean from a place like America or Europe where religion, dance, Carnival is so much a part of their life that it becomes something which is a subject that is very integrated as well as food, architecture, all of these things.
If we talk about how ideas are free and yes of course it is because everyone takes from everywhere, no matter what social or economical then where is the issue here? Where religion is not separate from the performing arts, from what you put on your table, what you eat and so on and so forth; categorization. So I am just throwing this out and the authorities can take it from there and we can open it up.
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
Maybe we can change the word because I mean, something like Carnival, that’s very specific to the Caribbean and very specific to certain parts of the Caribbean and Carnival doesn’t really exist in Central America as it does here. I want to speak about festivities because I think there is a capacity, a festive capacity that all of us have, in a way, ………our relationship with music, the way we meet and need to have music around us, it is something that you live with whether you are an intellectual, a curator, an artist or an engineer, there is a relationship to music in your life and a festive aspect to anybody’s birthday in some kind of way…not even religions, because I would say that the religion itself has been diverted or diluted in Central America particularly and that’s the place I know best, and you celebrate these religions in a very different way, it is very different to go to church and that kind of celebration and then the food…then the party. So there is something about this festive attitude one could say, I believe it is real there.
American Female:
…there is a really common and popular essay by Alice Walker called “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” and of course I deal with African American studies, so that’s something I know about and in this essay she makes this case, this really simple point: that black people in America, their grandparents couldn’t make art or write great novels… But these gardens, quilt-making and all these other sorts of vernacular forms none the less constitute some sort of expression modes so it really makes me think not to create some distinct separation between life, music and Carnival ritual and on the other side visual arts and culture because there is a possibility these are the critical engagement.
Valerie Smith:
….it is certain, like…..European Modernism….and how they use all other cultures very critically so I don’t think we are separating them here at all…
Chris Cozier:
In some of my earlier thinking when I was more directly interested in Carnival what I was looking at that time and I still have some thoughts about it, had to do with differences….you are right the Carnival is not something that happens in the same way or is relevant to all aspects of Caribbean society and recently a new word has come up in Trinidad called “Festival culture” and what festival culture alleviates is in a sense the central status of Carnival in relation to say, how we tell a story about ourselves. There are other festivals in the country in a place like Trinidad, like Ramleela, coming from the rural communities but there is something else at stake in terms of how these festivals function. The carnival that we think about in the context of Trinidad is an urban rite, it has its roots in a series of confrontations; what they call the Canboulay riots and the whole notion of the jamette culture, the Jamette Riots of the 1860’s and so on. To simplify that what you have is a culture of free coloured living in the city, a kind of contest between the occupiers, the free British and the French people that were living here and one can see that this festival was used to terrorize the Brits and to shake up the order of society… In my own thinking I was very curious about Carnival’s process, I was only interested in Carnival as a subject. You know the national painters that preceded us, the dynamics of having a culture and not having a culture was very significant to them coming out of a colonial experience, so the conversation then was to have an iconography. So you know you got these paintings...you have a Carnival scene painted in a Cubist style, this comes up as “international” rather than “local” and, I am not speaking about that disparagingly, I am really talking about the concerns of another generation. I think people of my generation what is more interesting are the processes of Carnival which has to do with an interdisciplinary meeting point between performance, between the building of things, notions of the public space and some of these processes easily translate into other festival cultures, whether it is the religious processions in different parts of the country or the islands perhaps which we haven’t really studied carefully but certainly it is the case with the Ramleela thing which is one of the Hindu religious festivals which has turned into this really weird kind of theatrical thing…I have seen it as a kid growing up, I don’t come from that kind of background so I don’t have a full understanding of it, but it is very clear to me that similar processes and also Steve who has a background in…..both of us who grew up in the sort of periphery of Port of Spain…the Islamic Shiite festival of Hosay which is practised in Port of Spain and, I think, Cedros …there is a yard out of which these things come and there is this sort of strange way and how people collectively assemble these things, and there is a strange way in which it intersects with the broader community so that the processes of manufacture, of the building of objects translates into the Carnival and back and forth in ways which are not always narrated because of the way we imagine these things and are essentially Afro-Creole or something, so there is a way, even in the processes of Trinidad we haven’t really figured these things out fully.
Now for me as a visual artist what struck me is the way in which one can save them if we had these urban satirical performative gestures taking place here…maybe our cabaret happened here in 1960 that these street processions and these satirical reactions to authority so in a way the Carnivalesque in our context and it is related to the other festival cultures. Obviously Ramleela is increasing in significance in Trinidad as the Indian community asserts its political place and then begins to question the stature of carnival as a central motif in terms of understanding Trinidad Society and so forth. There is also the culture of the informal and institutional practices and so on. Everybody knows who C.L.R James is, a Caribbean intellectual coming out of Trinidad that got involved in international movements and so on. A lot of these guys like James didn’t go to university, they basically learnt through reading, through informal systems or information exchange and there is a tradition of that, in the Caribbean….of terms of understanding what constitutes institution, and institution sometimes comes in the form of social collectives. In many islands there were debating societies, very similar to what one would have had during the Harlem Renaissance. They were things that happened. You see all these photographs in these halls where guys met, all in suits, their hair brushed down and they have debates about Stalin in Russia but nobody’s been to university but out of that come literature, ideas, conversations. People like James come out of that tradition and they stimulated other intellectuals who did have formal degrees who were able to use research or dispose of some of their creative speculations so there is a way in which the boundary which constitutes, for example, trained or untrained artists we have to understand in terms of not so much, let’s say, some natural mystic type of guy or person through different processes. In Jamaica, for example, you have Rastafarianism and its own kind of processes and information sharing, language and all that kind of thing and all the different religions and practices here in Trinidad…
There was another thing I wanted to think about in terms of communities and how we define communities having and not having…it is an interesting question because “communities’ they transgress borders. There is a weird way because of migrating patterns information moves and people move and certain kind of ways of occupying
space has been moving as well. I am always curious about that, that way in which people move and occupy space and one can say that all migrants do that in different locations but there is a way in which as it is with my experience of like going to London and sitting down in a living room and seeing a little brass Indian shoe and saying, “Oh my God, this looks just like my grandmother’s house” and you know, people transfer their processes and consumption and taste and what constitutes home – whether you leave plastic on the furniture or not, or on the lampshade and whether those things are distinctively indicators of common experiences..
The last point, these are more questions….one of the things that I think could be accomplished in this process, it is not so much about people living here in the Caribbean or working here in the Caribbean sort of rationalizing ourselves in terms of what aspects of our being is credible, it is more, I think, to figure out what is our point, how is our point of view registered because we talk about Venezuela and Central America; there may be certain critical perspectives or critical dispensations that exist here that may frame the way look back towards those locations? That might also be interesting that we can then bring to the table alongside of say, some of the things that are coming from people like yourselves, so from the outside, but I am not sure if there is an inside or outside feeling as one of the questions..
People like myself often think because even though there is this burden to be distinctive and to have some unique or particular vocabulary, nobody really wants, in a society where you have been overly scrutinized you are really trying to find out what you have in common with others and what can create this platform for exchange, so I would say that the questions come from how we look out and what do we see? What are our critical perspectives and also putting an axis on it as well, because the Caribbean was part of a Commonwealth not simply a society that lives on the outside of the United States for example. We share many experiences with people coming from, say, South America, Australia, India, parts of Asia where the British were. I am talking exclusively from the position of being an Anglophone Caribbean person and there are certain parallels in terms of when we embark on the process of sovereignty and what are the challenges in that negotiation as well so it means that an interaction with us is not exclusively an interaction with a specific location and I’m going to stop here, I don’t know if there is any catchment for this sort of thing.
Yolanda Wood:
I speak in Spanish, excuse me, I don’t know if you want to translate; Is there an interpreter?
Julian Zugazagoitia: (Interpreting for Yolanda Wood)
I first want to thank you for the invitation and I feel that this theme, the performative theme, is essential for contemporary art. I think it is very important that we take a look at the notion of performance and performativity in contemporary art and from the notion that this is a collective and popular art form and a different art experience altogether. And it is not only in the carnival but also in the religious ceremonies that we can encounter this aspect because the Carnival has a date, a very specific time but the aspects of it being very public, being in the street, being something that happens on a regular basis is something that artists have been taking on. So that is why I think that it is even more important the notion of a popular religiousity, one that is not fixed in the calendar but one that is very important in today’s contemporary performative art, Especially this is true in Cuba where the artists have integrated what used to be pervasive in all forms of expression like Santeria and all forms of popular religion. She is answering what our colleague from Costa Rica was talking about with celebration or festivity, of celebration and it is not just about the party, or festividad, but it is also that this festivity can be embarking on the dramatic side, it is not about the party but it is about the notion of celebrations in all its dimensions, going from the Carnival in the region, but embracing very complex notions that go even into the notion of death as in Haiti or Mexico. And that celebration of death and those celebrations understood in that way, it is really about the representation of the world, it is not about how performative of what is being performed but what lies below or within that supports that interpretation of the world. That other point which is very important to be made and should perhaps be touched on this morning was the notion of migratory of inter Caribbean processes, not the process of immigration into or out of the Caribbean but between the Caribbean itself. Aspects of how that is transformation of its cosmos or its notions of representing the world that is seldom spoken of. The notion of Haitians going to Cuba, or Jamaicans going to Dominican Republic, or Dominicans going to Puerto Rico and in that process the assimilation and what each of them bring to the cultures. Those processes of interchange have been very important and very interesting especially as they have been taking place in modernity, in the early part of the twentieth century when also capitalism was taking hold in all the coastal areas where bananas were being planted and produced, especially in relation to Cuba where some sort of migration was taking place. So this is very important, so this is another sort of fusion to be thought and spoken about because all of those processes have enriched how it is today especially also like the rumba with a French accent or Coca-Cola from the Dominicana.
VOICE
I think you can see, I know for me with tourist art in Jamaica, for example, about 6 years ago I began to see like these, Baron Samedis, these skeletal images which I had never seen before in Jamaican art and La serene, the mermaid, so especially like on the North West coast and a lot of times I would speak to people like, why are you making these images? Where are they coming from or whatever and a lot of it was Haitian artists who were living in Jamaica and Cuban artists who were living in Jamaica so you have a lot of this Yoruba ort Santeria aesthetic iconography. Like I got a La Serene in Negril and I got a Baron Samedi in Negril. These are not what I would consider typically Jamaican iconography. I would consider it more influenced from Haiti or Cuba so for me that’s where I see the influence really strong, in the tourist arts.
Veerle Poupeye:
That comes from a lot of the art dealers who cater to the tourists in Jamaica who have brought in art from Haiti and Cuba and that really serves as a model of what is produced locally, so it is not necessary direct interaction with the artists but one thing I would like to look at, is this question of ‘Intersection of the Arts’ which is the theme of this session, and we also need to look at the question of canonization. What is canonized nationally, what is canonized regionally and who decides and how are they contested and I am thinking that the carnival has been canonized as part of the national culture here in Trinidad and how does that feed back to the practice of Carnival, but also into the other festival practices here. I am thinking of the very ambiguous situation with the intuitives in Jamaica whereby a group of self-taught artists is canonized and brought to the centre of the national canons so the defining national artists who are exempt, who are also the group of artists who are most policed in terms as to what is and isn’t legitimate, and the most dependent in terms of patronage and how that group is defined. So I think that kind of interplay in between canon and outside canon and I think it is really important and I talk about canonization, I don’t mean only in art, I mean in cuisine when something accepted as part of the national cuisine, there is a moment of canonization there.
Female
I think there is another division there, first of all you’ve got what is generally perceived as elitist art and so called festival based or participant based forms of expression that are so much easier and more visible. I think there is a danger of overemphasizing their importance , certainly in the more secular territories and I think the downfall of fine art is the lack of institutions and some of the intuitives would fall into that category rather than into the festival arts. So I mean there are so many different segments to take care of, but I think it is quite important to acknowledge that there is so much more going on than festival arts here.
Valerie Smith:
You bring up an interesting point here because Charlotte was telling me the other day that there are no music schools, but nevertheless music and dance somehow come up to the fore so…
Chris Cozier:
It has to do with how we define institutions, because, I mean pan yards are educational spaces, because I mean thousands of people all over the country are practicing, playing by ear. There is something else I was thinking about…there is this Carnival in Trinidad but actually Carnival in Trinidad is very small, because the Carnival in London which is derived from the Carnival in Trinidad, the population which takes part in it is about fives times larger than the population of Trinidad. Then there is the one in Brooklyn, and then there is the one in Canada, and then there are little ones popping up everywhere. What is interesting about the relationship to the diaspora is that there are schools of thinking that sees the diaspora as a kind of threat to the prospects of the locals, both in terms of the hierarchy that are canonized and in terms of individuals who are looking for opportunities. But there is another interesting factor which has to do with the spatial dynamic in the sense that it is not just people that travel, it is a certain kind of ethics, certain kinds of conversations.
The carnival space as it existed here in the past had a whole series of community implications and interdisciplinary implications that are now manifesting themselves in London, New York and Canada that are long gone here. The carnival here has become much more industrialized and also in the diaspora there are artists who see themselves as Caribbean, in particular I am talking about Trinidad, who are able to use these processes and when I talk about Carnival, I am not talking about carnival exclusively, I am talking about contemporary art in which elements from Carnival are produced and mechanisms being applied to express themselves as individuals in ways which may not be allowed with the contested domains we have here because often art is a measure of the nature of a democracy. For example, issues of sexual preference, issues that get more support in Toronto or New York that can be expressed here for let’s say, for example, Jamaica, where you know……so there is a kind of way in which one can attune to it….these places being cosmopolitan or metropolitan but there is also a way in which certain processes and ways of being here get transplanted there. They are applying to very different things. I will give you a quick example. I just got a new video from a young artist in Canada, one parent is Chinese from China, one parent in Chinese from Trinidad. She came here to participate in Carnival but didn’t know quite what the agenda for doing this would be. So what she did was she connected the camera to herself, and she moves around the carnival space and then edited it and projected it out. So when you see it you’re seeing feet, you’re seeing buildings and then she layers that with a text in which an aunt of hers is telling her ‘If you’re coming into this space be careful. Choose the band you’re going into more carefully, this band have too much black people, this band have too much, this, that and the other”. So what is interesting about this text where Trinidad is advocated as a place where people exist together, whether everything is ethnic and wonderful mixing and so on and you’re seeing this thing that implies festivity with disorientation. It is almost like, a spirit embodiment that kind of thing but at the same time the text is telling you that everybody doesn’t trust each other and there is all kind of dynamics but is also about the girl immersing herself into this space and trying to understand how to define this energy and what happens when it goes to Canada. It is never shown here at all, we don’t have access to it, so we have to build a bridge now to bring this work back here so that we can see it. The interesting thing about these new exchanges between artists living here and artists living there is that it bridges the distance. Suddenly the Caribbean space manifests itself with a sensibility and action between the persons here and the persons there, so there is a kind of way in which these people are inscribing new stories and expanding on the given story outside of the local confusion if you want to call it that. Sometimes it gets too hot, you can’t take the bacchanal, so sometimes going abroad gives you….and this is not new because the writers had to get out of here to become the kind of writers they became. We started talking about Naipaul; I mean Naipaul had nightmares – in one of his earliest stories about leaving the heater on and getting up and thinking “Oh my God” that he was back in Trinidad…so I think there is some kind of thing in which a current shift around this notion of local….in other words, nation created the limitation and we are living in a post culturalist, post nation space in which we can further interaction through the internet, through travel with people in the diaspora and create new ways of understanding, helps us on both sides of the conversation. This is what has been interesting to me in terms of how I interact how I move, you know….
Jane Rubin:
Chris, could you do a little note on your use of the word ‘yard’ so everyone understand that in terms of carnival culture and how institutionalized that terms is and the same with ‘band”, everybody is talking about Carnival but I don’t think they understand.
Chris Cozier:
Band is a word that is used to define the mechanisms of groups, 2,000, 4,000 moving through the street are called a ‘band’ but a ‘band’ sometimes comes out of a community. In the traditional setting it came out of a yard. A yard would be a barrackyard where, say, people lived in a space, almost like a roman courtyard. In fact many of the communities around Port of Spain have their roots in the yard spaces.
American Female: Is that equivalent to the ward? In the south ….
Chris Cozier:
This is about settlement, in other words I have been into yards….
But the yard space I am thinking of…Okay if I go right now to Sea Lots which is a kind of disenfranchised, low income area on the outskirts of Port of Spain, basically squatters, there is a kind of pattern to the way they do it. They literally would put galvanize around the space and then they will have little units and then everybody living in the unit is kin, you know, mother, brother, cousin and then there is a central courtyard where they hang
Clothes and I have seen the same space in Johannesburg in the townships, especially th3e squatter settlements. I have seen it in the Dominican Republic, I have seen it in Venezuela , I have seen it in Brazil. In the context of Trinidad, I have been into space in Jamaica, I have not had access as yet, but, basically, in Trinidad all these yards are interconnected but you can’t get in until you knock on the galvanize and somebody opens for you and you clear yourself and if you don’t know anybody in there, well, tough you know. But even when people move to New York , I remember when I first went up to New York in the mid 80’s I went up into the Bronx , into 136th, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, people from Central America were creating spaces like that in abandoned buildings or in empty lots behind buildings…you know, where it is blocked off and you have to come with somebody and then let you in and there is music playing and guys smoking joints and then they let you back out. But they were recreating a kind of settlement – so the carnival bands traditionally came out of these yards but, today, ‘yard’ is more of a metaphorical terms, because it is committees, it is investors, it’s become industrialized in a way. But the Hosay space, there are little yards where they build the taj, the thing that they move through the street and then people will practise the drumming in the steelband context. Most of the steelband performance spaces were once yards, then they went into performance centres and so on, so there is still that tradition in terms of ‘settle’. I know in Mexico and Venezuela as well they talk about this urban plannings, kinds of settlements and what implications are and how to design in favour of these things of in contention of them and so on.
Tom Finkelpearl:
One of the ways I start a lecture is by playing the live version of Bob Marley’s No Woman No Cry…we’re sitting in a government yard in Trench Town” and it is about public space and the curative nature of public space and it is supposedly a song which he wrote for his then wife who was dying and it was also an act of charity because he ended up donating the proceeds of that song to the soup kitchen that kept him alive. And then of course they song is a communal experience, where everybody gets up and sings in this very public way but the traditions of sociality and social interactions we are talking about are in some way what may differentiate something like carnival from the very abstracted, separate individual of the modern international artist.
Chris Cozier:
There is an interesting thing there because we have a major practitioner here, an artist called Peter Minshall, for example and there has been a weird kind of duality in how he theorizes himself. In other words, one side of him says “I am not an artist in the European sense, I’m a “mass man” but the mass man is really a kind of instigator of a series of other mass men, the funders, the fabricators, the person who agrees to perform in the work of art; but he is the instigator and he has mobilized these resources in his favour. He has never been able to clearly sort of rationalize the contradiction of himself as sole producer with that of being one instigator to approve parallel participants. So mass man is a word that never seems to quite sit comfortably in a singular form because the work cannot happen unless a series of participants comply with his wishes. So he is always in a push and pull especially when the moment comes to him to cross the border into the kind of conventional European notion of sole artist producer but then of course, as that history begins to unravel we begin to realize that all these artists have assistants so they are not necessarily sole producers either and that is probably a nineteenth century authority.
Female American:
I want to pick up on what you said earlier about the advance of the community. I was wondering if it was possible to use the term ‘community’ as something more, I mean there is a community, or how these events create a community which is not permanent it’s more dormant, and creates a community for a time based period and then it disappears. So I was wondering if we could speak about this, in terms of experiences of communities created by events, by the manifestations because I don’t think we have a community with baseball, but baseball creates a community ..…I hate sports by the way…..but with baseball I have seen how it creates communities, it does make sense.
Valerie Smith:
I think in North America, I may be wrong, but I remember as I was growing up in New York in the art world, this ‘community’ that they would talk about, we would meet at bars and we would discuss things that we thought mattered and then they produced journals like yours and there was a kind of movement, almost a manifesto, maybe I have gotten old but I don’t see that happening now, but maybe it does and I am just not part of it or may be there are multiple….but something has been lost and when we talk about carnival and what is happening here I am wondering if that has been lost. I think it hasn’t and I’m envious.
Nicholas Laughlin:
Everything changes, that’s carnival. Carnival is changing every year, everything is very industrialised. There was a time when costumes and bands were built largely by members of the band. You would go to the mass camps which is the house where the band is head quartered and you would go there at night and help to make your costume, now it is all done by assembly lines. Now we have actually got costumes that have been fabricated in Asia and imported by the thousands. There used to be all kinds of rituals connected with playing in a band. You had to make your costume, each band traditionally has a king and a queen who are the leaders of the band and wear much more elaborate costumes. There was a time when the band had to go the meet the king and queen at their houses, and the band would leave the mass camp and go the king’s house and he joined the band and then they would go to meet the queen and then they actually started parading properly on the road …
Chris Cozier:
But there is something else that is at stake in Trinidad in the context of Carnival which is the occupying of public space so that even with the people, I am of a generation where I can say I formally saw when carnival died, I can trace myself getting older by when it died. Whatever people write about it in quality context, it was disappearing in the 60’s and I saw it go and now it is almost gone. It has become now something that is put on by the government; it is an invented mechanism romanticizing something that once was. But there is a way in which something is still left… the part of different interest groups in the society asserting themselves in the public space and right now we have a new class of people with all this oil money, they have credit cards, they go to the gym, they watch TV and they put on bikinis and beads and take over the city in their thousands. And even though some people may say “Oh my god this is horrible” because carnival is traditionally seen as a working class transcendental thing, or a kind of space where people of different classes contested the public domain, here we have a carnival of consumers asserting their consumer rights to occupy the space. They are not arguing their right to be in the space but they are arguing to be in the space exclusively so if you don’t pay you can’t stand next to them. So in a way it is commensurate with the way that the society is expanding, to pass judgment on that is mother matter. I come from a generation who may think this is the collapse of the social project but that’s my problem, not theirs.
Julián Zugazagoitía:
When you say exclusive…why can you say exclusive?
Chris Cozier:
Because what we are losing is that context. Okay, the carnival of my childhood talked about the confluence of classes, races and so on …
Nicholas Laughlin:
There was a famous calypso by Lord Kitchener…..everything is for everyone…now big carnival bands have security guards and bouncers…
Chris Cozier:
…and that to be is frightening.
Julián Zugazagoitía:
The consequence is the Brazil carnival, what you do if you are a tourist is you buy a whole package whether you are in Paris or Berlin and the package includes the costumes but you will be there participating, but it is amazing how this definitely changes the nature of what it is and at the same time globalization ….
Chris Cozier:
It’s happening here.
Steve Ouditt:
I would like to contend that the carnival is just a live performance…because it is a mediated event and that is what I think. It is like the whole joke about one woman seeing another and saying “your grandson is so beautiful” and she says, “You should see his pictures!” and that is exactly what is going on because this stuff is going to be on You Tube, on postcards, on t-shirts. It is a mediated thing. And to talk about bras and bikinis and stuff is really to talk about what I think, the body has become the costume and this is a body you feed, a body you go to the gym with so this is the thing that is performed more than a version of performance as some kind of real, primal thing.
Chris Cozier
..And there are more women now in the carnival than in the past. In the past it was very much dominated by the male presence and so forth
Julián Zugazagoitía:
But isn’t that the role for the artist to take? The artist has always been the mediator, so all of a sudden what we are seeing is a carnival that in itself becomes more meditative…
Chris Cozier:
It is like Hollywood you know. The artist’s individuality of it is gone. The bands are done by committee and it’s a different psychology. I am now learning about it myself.
Luis E. Pérez Oramas:
The question is how the artist responds that is lost, how the artist stands visibly that you are describing…by picking up your description Valerie, you said something very integrated against something lost in America. I would like to bring this notion of transition of forms and very schematically a transitional form is a form that links art with life. That is, very schematic and I think is more complex in BBB’s argument the transitional forms played a role vis à vis Greek ancient forms that were ideologically unreachable for the communities in the Quattrocento and only came to have a sense by having a link with festivities, pagan celebrations, carnival at that time. Street manifestations. Parades. And I have been thinking of the notion as a possible application to some forms of modern art being relocated in Latin America and particularly we are talking about carnival and I think that De Sica’s ? latest forms were exactly transitional forms in the same way as those described in the Quattrocento. Those forms that were ideologically unreachable coming from high modernism in Europe and then by a link with carnival and community….
Chris Cozier:
De Sica is an alarming thing when you read him…
Luis E. Pérez Oramas:
But Chris, the question would be what is the role of transitional forms in artistic practices that are not conceived with an ideology of self, a formal self determination – and what is the role of transitional forms from the point of view of a kind of contemporary art that by deconstructing that ideology of self determination is becoming transitional in a different way. We have these two questions, and then zillions of artistic practices in the Caribbean that we can link to religion, carnival whatever. I am not satisfied with transitional forms connecting art and life. I think there is a third field. It is not simply art and life. It is a third field that becomes a generative source for forms that eventually are new represented forms not necessarily linked to Carnival but how those transitional forms operate an openness to that third field and that maybe is the point where we should look at it…
Chris Cozier:
I understand, if we distance ourselves from the immediate requirement of material form and we can stay with it in the domain of the live performance which, I think, then takes us to the next level which has to do with conflict between oral and literary traditions, then you are entering a domain of a kind of visual vernacular; a language in the process of formation in which there is a kind of transnational exchange as I talked about the video, because in that work she is not representing carnival. I talked about the difference between rendering and representing, cutting because there is a way in which if you focus on the object and forget about the process. The process is the space through which you can get to positionality or this prospect that you may be suggesting. I think De Sica is a fairly strong, ideal example, because I think for a lot of people like myself, De Sica was a very obscure figure, unknown and over the last couple of years with translations being made available to us in the Anglophone Caribbean, because we live in the English prism, getting access to his writing and thinking and seeing his work opens up possibilities in terms of how we can read our projects and artists like Minshall or many other things we have seen. I think there is a remarkable critical possibility or prospect…??? Writings and speculations in terms of what issues are at stake here.
Luis E. Pérez Oramas:
Then we have a case like Reverón… De Sica gives, producing in a state of mind that is not at all determined inside by modern, formal self determination but a prodigy makes it possible to see Reveron in a high modernist scene like MoMA. All cases couldn’t be shown there, we know that.
Like De Sica himself ….
Chris Cozier:
We seem to be less rigid now
Yolanda Wood:
Can I make a point? That does not have to be carnival. There is a little thing in P S and I know only one artist in Puerto Rico, Antonio Martorell who ever participated in the carnival and he did his installations and he walked with his installations. At least in Puerto Rico there is no Carnival. De Sica has been dead -- how many years?-- and there are very special to us because they are unique, so I don’t think the carnival experience is something that is defining, probably it is in Brazil and in Trinidad but nowhere else.
Virginia Pérez Ratton
My interventions in relation to carnival are in Limón. Limón is the province on the Caribbean coastal side of Costa Rica and the African population there came already from Jamaica, it is English speaking and protestant. It was not the same kind of black population that arrived in Cuba, or in the Caribbean and the Santeria was quite absent. They had Queen Victoria on the wall of their homes because they were British subjects. They came to Costa Rica as British people and when I grew up there was no carnival. I mean there was some kind of festivity, for the 12th of October it was at the time of Día del Raza and they changed it, so there was some kind of little carnival for the 12th of October which had nothing to do with Ash Wednesday and all the Caribbean things. Now this carnival has grown and grown – it is the other way round. Why? Because it is a tourist attraction on the one hand and on the other hand the afro-Costa Rican population had been getting all these kind of things – and then the memory of Marcus Garvey who lived in Costa Rica for four years and sold the shares for the Black Star Line in Costa Rica and people still have these shares. He has become some kind of hero there and still there are an awful lot of old people there who still remember when their mother told them that Marcus Garvey came with the boat to pick them up. So all this has been built up very recently. So the carnival I would say is 25 years old and now the costumes are completely copied from the Río Carnival, so it is the feathers ….
Chris Cozier:
I think it is a mistake to get fixated on Carnival…what we are talking about is festival culture and the way these people use these opportunities and position themselves in the social space. It is a completely different dynamic.
Virgina Pérez Ratton:
It is a construction, I am interested in that only because it is a construction. It is fascinating that there is no relation to the visual arts and Carnival in Limón… well there are things that are real or practices that are religious or political that have to do with contemporary art and the question is what do they bring to contemporary art? There are aspects of these celebrations that have to do with contemporary art because they are fundamentally spaces of liberty for people who have no liberty and then in this celebration there is clandestine behaviour, transvestites and contemporary artists appropriate these elements of social rebellion and use it in their art. …through material recycling, through colour. Through the symbolic use of color, like by the Rastafarians and santerias. Like a large forest, the manifestation of energy. It is a mystical way of thinking….individual is absolutely essential to the artist because they are spaces of freedom.
DAY 1 SESSION 3
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
I would like to go back to the flux or movement of artists in the region or in and out of the region because I think it is one of the main issues regarding the Caribbean, is the movement, and the flux that has always characterized it, the founding principle of the Caribbean is flux. I think that we should think about the artists who are living here and move and come back, who call the Caribbean home. They know they can always leave, but they can always come back. Others that have left, that have chosen exile and have established themselves, whether it is in Europe or the United States and those who get out and the relations between all these different kinds of practices and all the practices organized through this movement…what does it mean for an artist to leave the Caribbean or Central America, let’s say Trinidad, to participate in a specific show or Biennale or important event, or residency and then come back? What does the coming back mean? How does he deal with the reality once he has been away and then come back, because sometimes, and I only have questions, I don’t really have he answers but it is something
that I have been thinking for a long time working as a curator who tries to disseminate the work of the region and tries to get the artists out and participating in things. [As a curator] you are passing the artist over that border, you are taking them into that sphere because you move about and you have more chances of travelling, of contact. You have more chances of being near the circles of power, you can’t deny this, this is true.
So then when you finally get to represent a place, or have somebody who can represent himself, or have somebody who can represent him, what do they do after that? You can’t get them the green card, I mean they have exactly the same chances as any American or European artist in their own country. I mean people think just by being in New York you’ve made it but how many thousands of artists are there living in New York that are American, or are living in Arkansas or living Iowa or I don’t know where, have a chance to be near these structures? So I ask myself how should we act, how should we deal with this and how does that effect this Caribbean identity, this movement, this constant movement because as people leave and they leave and stay for a long time outside, in a way many artists, I don’t say everybody, end up representing something that they really didn’t want to represent.
Valerie Smith:
I was just in Kansas City and I saw a lot of artists there, because the market is so strong
in America that there is room for everyone and of course that is good and bad and I’m wondering if this movement you talk about and going back and forth….and unfortunately Chris is the only artist now here among us to be able to say anything about it but I think coming home somehow keeps you honest.
Chris Cozier:
I don’t know, I think this politics of home and abroad comes and goes in different times and different societies. I mean at the time Picasso had to leave Spain for France to become a serious artist and to make bucks and De Kooning had to leave and go to New York, so there are always these journeys back and forth. In the Caribbean the conversation around migration had different meanings at different times in our development. In the pre-Independence period people got on boats and went out of the Caribbean to the U.S., to England and so on, simply because the social conditions of the day didn’t make it possible for everyone to achieve their goals and objectives, just in terms of education, dignity around labour. I mean my parents came to Trinidad from Barbados after the war simply because my dad was an exhibition boy, he passed his exams, but he was only boy or 1 of 2 boys at that time in the whole island in that period who was allowed to the secondary school the white children went to and then, when he finished school and his ‘A’ levels that would entitle him to go to England or go to University he didn’t have the money or scholarship. So the indignity of having to go and work in a store or company…So he says. “okay I want to come to Trinidad, maybe there is a chance for me here”. So people migrate based on different situations and so on. Now the situation is a little different from then. There are institutions and prospects within the territories but I think the migration process now has to do with an economy around contemporary practices, a critical dispensation and community. The critical community that drives contemporary art, at least in the Anglophone Caribbean as far as I know it, it is trans-national.
It began in a trans-national way because I think a generation of people in the 80’s left the region and came back at the end of the 80’s. At least in Trinidad, Barbados, especially the Southern Caribbean and realized that there was no support base for them from the nationalists. I mean, I was accused when I returned home from studying in the United States at the end of the 80’s of being a conduit for US imperialism ..,.so, I mean, it’s kind of interesting these dynamics by the nationalists. So there is a kind of way in which migration now really has to do with people moving…at least, let me personalize it. I mean I travel now for one reason; economics and critical conversation. I’m very curious about the way, say, a particular idea in my work conceptually is understood in South Africa, Denmark, Brazil, Cuba, Toronto…it informs the work, it challenges me, so I don’t have to just plonk myself down here in Trinidad in some small fortress and look at people and say “You don’t get it because you not from here” or “I own this piece of information ‘cos I special”. I kind of want to know what is the possible reach for my thoughts, my ideas…Do they have relevance? How does a person from India see it, how does a person from Germany see it? And I am curious about that, because I want to understand what is similar and different. At the same time I’m interested in the intellectual debate, the intersection with other cultures because even on our working class level…say for example, ….okay I studied at institutions…I’m part of a certain kind of culture of people who have read Janson … And whatever, …let’s say a panman in Port of Spain or a dancehall performer in Jamaica he has to get out there and get the dollars….so he is going to Sweden, he’s going to go to London and he is going to interact with those circumstances and he’s not going to say I’m not taking……? If I’m a Rasta and I’m singing they should burn down Babylon, The Queen, Pope Paul and all gay men however, I would not refuse a dollar with the queen face on it to perform in Birmingham.
There is a kind of strange irony to all these negotiations that are going on in the space…….On a personal level I find myself interested in that sort of exchange and negotiation about placing myself in other contexts and understanding what kind of reaction, what it tells me about me and where I’m from.
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
But, Chris you are more of an exception than a rule, the fact that you can ignore these different audiences and many Caribbean artists as far as I can see define themselves, if there is any defining things it is the sense of being peripheral and being people of lesser choices than other people in bigger countries, and what I fear is happening……
Voices interrupt….
Chris Cozier
But how are we different?
Virginia Pérez Ratton
No they are different in the sense that they are not mobile in the sense that I am mobile, a lot of people around this table are mobile…
Chris Cozier
When I was in Chicago I had a driver who was from Kenya….(interrupted)
Virginia Pérez Ratton
Sorry Chris, I think we have to talk about the difference between migration and mobility. They are 2 different things. You can find a taxi driver from Kenya in Chicago because he has migrated to the U S to make a living but then you can find artists who are mobile and not mobile, so that’s s different thing….
Chris Cozier
But I don’t…
Virginia Pérez Ratton
I don’t know if you can compare a taxi driver from Kenya in Chicago with an artist who is showing in Chicago and then coming back home, I mean, I think they are two different things….
Chris Cozier
What is the objective….for trying to prove that…that is what I am trying to say because everybody is moving under different auspices
Tom Finkelpearl
We did a project at the Queens Museum which spoke directly to this which I participated in, which was a Mexican artist analyzed how many times people had crossed the border between Mexico and the United States and the people without papers or money crossed once or twice and, Julian didn’t set the record, he was there, crossed the border 29 times. There were people who had legal status in both countries, people with money, international people who were globetrotting etc.
Virginia Pérez Ratton
I think it is not only a question of people understanding your work, I think there is a question of estimation which is really important…how a space legitimates….if you don’t have a legitimating space…you want to be, so I think the whole thing is about creation of space..
Chris Cozier
The point I really wanted to make was not just that but that I think there is now a sentiment in the region which very much resents or rejects this desire that has prevailed for sometime for outside validation and that there is a need and desire to strengthen internal links here and I think this is something that this project should be very sensitive to. You would be seen as a catalyst for this but it is a sort of contentious kind of a catalyst…
Valerie Smith
What you are identifying is the need to have more institutions in the Caribbean basin that support their artists ….
Female
... and as Veerle touched on briefly which creates our own canons …that these canons should not necessarily be established somewhere else I can assure you that next week the talk of the region will be who was here and which artists’ names were mentioned….
That’s why we’ve been mentioning the names…(Laughter)
Chris Cozier
I don’t see that dichotomy in that way ...I think that in a way everybody….sort of inside outside validation …I’m not sure if, that such a relevance, I mean I haven’t really faced it …Well, what I mean by that is there are artists and I speak specifically about Trinidad, that there are artists living in Trinidad right now who have never shown internationally who may be interested in it but they are buying ……ESTATES
Female
They are buying what??
Chris Cozier
Estates??
NOISE
Chris Cozier
What I mean is that there is an economy here that supports a kind of practice and even though I might get a few plane tickets now and again…
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
No, that exists in every single country including France and Italy..
….the art economy in Costa Rica or El Salvador or Panama is gigantic, it’s much larger than the contemporary art market in Costa Rica, I mean people are selling….I mean you take that painting out of Costa Rica and you cross into Salvador and it doesn’t sell for 5 cents, but people are selling it for thousands of dollars….but this is a different thing. I think the question of self-legitimization we are talking about certain kinds of legitimization….of course, we are not talking about just about economic and social climbing kind of things; of course, some of these artists are building gigantic houses in Costa Rica as well , I mean they are buying farms as well. I think that is a different thing…It is a question of the creation of space. I am going to give you an example of what I am talking about. Ten years ago if you asked an artist from Costa Rica or Panama if he wanted to show in Nicaragua or New York, guess what the answer would be? Of course, New York. The whole region, a whole lot of people have been working, this very, very strong network and we have been working, all of us, to build this space and now people go up and down the region; from Panama to Nicaragua, from Nicaragua to Costa Rica and all the time it’s moving and little by little there is a new legitimate space, a new space where people want to show, want to work, want to write, want to publish. That is what we have to work at. That kind of thing, not always looking to other people, because otherwise people they start producing, nobody buys anything, nobody recognizes it, but then he gets to Sotheby’s and all of a sudden you see everybody in town wants to have a piece but they want to buy it in New York not buy it in San Jose.
Female voice:
But that is true Virginia, but they want to be in Teor/ética, they want to be seen by an international curator …
Virginia Pérez Ratton
But Teor/ética is one of the spaces, there is Espora in Nicaragua, there are the murals in the streets in Nicaragua, there are the public spaces in Guatemala,, there is the Adobe in Salvador…
Chris Cozier
I’m sorry but I think each island is different…from my point of view and I travel to these islands… You have these very tightly scripted narratives in each little nationalistic territory, this is in the Caribbean, and each island has a list of five heroes and these five heroes are supported and five generations have passed and the same five heroes exist, so the consequence of that is that you have generations of people that either didn’t come back or started to travel. As I said when I came back here in 1989 I was accused of being a conduit for American imperialism and, ironically, my first international show, my American imperialist body of work was in the Havana Biennale in 1994. So there is a kind of irony…. so long before I entered the market, long before anybody here was writing about my work …and I don’t think my situation is that unique in terms of what has happened to maybe the last three generations of practitioners working in the Anglophone Caribbean specifically.
Jamaica is a little different because it has certain institutional structures that support artists and so on, but out in the wild west, Trinidad, Barbados, Guyana is a little more free flowing and there is a way in which, for example, artists are not doing it because they are trying to prove something by securing outside validation; it is more just the necessary place that you found yourself because of circumstances. Remember, I was away, I chose to come back, I could have easily stayed in New York but something about the place I was from was curious to me and I wanted to give it a go. Other friends of mine said “You’re crazy” in fact one New York artist who was supporting me at the time offered me a check, “Here’s $3,000, stay in New York for another year… and think about it you’re committing suicide”. That was actually said to me in 1988 by someone, I won’t say who it is. It’s amazing, the dynamics of the world and how it’s changed. Now we live in a different dispensation, that we live in the post-colonial era to some degree in which after that Biennale in 1997 a whole series of negotiations across the planet started between artists in the Caribbean, artists in India, artists in Africa, where we can actually get to see and see each other, we know their names, we know something of their discourses and in a way the Caribbean is also linked to that. It’s not necessarily just a society moving, knocking on the door in North America any more.
Charlotte Elias
Well, actually I can say also during that time what we’ve seen a lot of is more and more artists that went abroad to study that thought they would stay there, want to come home. And they write to us and say “You know what, we need an opportunity to make work in these islands. Not just artists but curators...Melanie mentioned earlier that she’s just come back. There is this interest suddenly in wanting to return and now more than ever before. Not just the emerging artists who didn’t find what they were looking for in the metropolitan cities but also the more established ones, some of them very successful saying ‘You know what, I need to get out of here’. In fact we’ve had many of them come on the Residency programme…and they don’t leave because the conversations in their lives here are just so far removed. There is a whole reverse in that conversation, they’re just so excited.
Julián Zugazagoitía
I think we have to leave this theme but it is actually what we are going to be discussing on Thursday morning…creating a space, establishing networks, so I think it is a good way to wrap.
DAY 2 SESSION 1
CHARLOTTE ELIAS:
This week we’re really celebrating the fact that these discussions are going on within the region. There will be other meetings going on within the region and as much as this is an exhibition project, as important, if not more so than that, we’ve all really seen that it’s the conversation that will come out of it and will continue long after the exhibition is up and running and down. It’s one of these infinite conversations but we are really pleased that we’ve been able to bring together all of the participants and many of them have visited Trinidad for the first time this week. Some of them, have already left I’m afraid but I do want to introduce you to the three women who are going to be talking and introducing their affiliated organizations. So, we have Deborah Cullen who is Director of Curatorial Projects at El Museo del Barrio and we have Valerie Smith who works at the Queens Museum, she’s the Director of Exhibitions and a curator and Romy Crawford who is at the Studio Museum in Harlem and is the Director and Curator of Education and Public Programmes. So they are going to introduce the conversation for the morning then we will see how much time we can make up later on, but please take your time and tell us how we can be of help with the projector.
ROMI CRAWFORD
As Charlotte said I’m from the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in my capacity there as the Curator/Director of Education and Public Programmes and I guess I want to start by saying that as Charlotte was saying that this project has been evolving for the past 5 years so I’m very new to it – only in the last 2 months or so, so there’s been a changing of the guard in terms of who is directly involved and committed to this project and the person is me and probably also Lowery and Christine Kim perhaps also. With that said, we continue to be very excited, committed, and enthusiastic about this project even though there’s been this changing of the guard.
The Studio Museum is basically sited in Harlem, that’s at 125th St and Lennox Avenue and that’s actually the first rendering of the Studio Museum which was on 5th Avenue and in a renovated loft space at 5th Ave and 125th Street that was in 1968 and so we are fast approaching our 40th anniversary and we’re really excited about that. This is the original space and the original space was meant to serve as exhibition space to give opportunity for artists of African descent to show and exhibit work. It also had this built in studio component, which is why it is called the Studio Museum in Harlem which is that artists were making work in their studios in a type of residency format and once in a while folks were able to come to the museum and visit the studio, and that’s really important part of the Studio’s engagement with the community, the Harlem community and also the New York community and the sort of larger global arts community. This artist in residence programme is now formally established; it’s called our A I R Programme, I think we meet in four weeks to select the next round of artists for this. This is sort of another establishing photo of the founders of the Studio in that 1968 moment, so 40 years ago at the 5th Avenue loft space. Tom Lloyd was the first artist to show at the Studio Museum in Harlem, that’s Tom Lloyd on the left and part of what is really fascinating about this institution is that, Tom Lloyd, who I think was not one of the artists that one would expect to normatively represent African American visual art practice in 1968. The work was not figurative and not based in figuration but was more indebted to an installation practice and light effects. This is the first opening at that Tom Lloyd exhibit in 1968. This is an image of our new site, which is at 125th and Lennox Avenue as I mentioned earlier so we moved from that older space to this space. That’s a bad cropped image of the Africa Comic Show, that’s little bit better, and I am actually starting with a show that just closed. Most recently there was this project, which was a compilation of comic book and art from the continent of Africa. The show was called Africa Comics, that’s another shot of that, the upstairs space of the gallery; it’s basically two floors. We own the buildings at 125th St and Lennox, so the building has about 6 or 7 floors. Two of those are used for exhibition, one is for offices, and we have other people leasing space from us. The other show that we had and this short actually goes further, we had Stan Douglas and this is a Stan Douglas installation called Inconsolable Memories. This one is also cut off, sorry about this, this was a representation of Harlem postcards which is something that we do regularly, every season. Four artists are selected who take images in Harlem and those become a set of objects of postcards and we also display the images during the show. This is a fairly significant show, The Frequency Show from, I think, 2004, and this was really considered the second version of Freestyle and of course, Freestyle, was the Museum show that introduced or codified this notion of post Black. So that’s one of the major trends that we’ve been dealing with in the realm of African American visual arts practice – it’s a way to embrace and deflect and deny an absolute racial presence in our work and so, The Frequency Show, was made by popular demand because the Freestyle Show had such an impact on young makers. And so to the side here this is Nick Cave installations, he’s actually a fashion artist who I know from The Art Institute of Chicago, he also teaches there. Another example of work from the Frequency Show it was a group show, more from the Frequency Show, Hank Willis Thomas, that image in the back with the Nike sign on the bald head. Hank Willis Thomas is a young artist who has been gaining prominence in recent years and this is what happens a lot from the Freestyle and the Frequency shows, they sort of establish an emerging generation of African American makers. This chair is by Robbie McMillian who is part of a collaborative group who is exhibiting at the museum right now in a show that is called ‘The Philosophy of Time Travel’ which imagines Brancusi’s famous column travelling through time and space and impaling itself in the Studio Museum of Harlem of all places. Rodney’s painting is this one which sort of drags off the wall and that chair is his also and he is an artist and he has been working with us. This is Lester Julian Merriweather, sort of stencilling, that’s actually photographic tape which he has covered the front entrance at 125 St. Then more of the Frequency Show. And then we had a fairly popular show, running out of time here. And Chris Ofili, we had a show of his called ‘African Muses’ and these are the watercolours and tons of images. The watercolours of Chris Ofili. And I wanted to say something about the education programmes. We have public education programmes, again this Artist in Residency Programme which is very competitive at this point and this happens annually and artist gets an opportunity to have studio space at the museum and also show at the museum at the end of that year and we try to connect them with the New York arts community during that tenure. I think that’s it for my presentation of the Studio.
Now we are going to hand over to our colleague Valerie Smith at the Queens Museum.
VALERIE SMITH
I just wanted to give a brief history of the museum. The building, the New York City building has gone through several phases and it was built for the 39-40 World’s Fair and then it turned into the site of the first U.N., here’s a picture of the U.N., from 46 to 50-51. It went to Manhattan then it reverted back to 64-65 World’s Fair as a New York City building as showing, promoting things about New York City and at that point, Robert Moses who was commissioner of the Fair, commissioned an enormous map which is 9,355 feet of the five boroughs of New York City. We use it as an educational tool, we use it for artists who play off of it, rip off of it often. We’ve just updated it, not the actual buildings itself but it has gone through an update 1992-1994. So, that’s where it’s dated. It went through an update in terms of a kind of multimedia, a ‘son et lumière’ kind of narrative about the entire history from the very beginning of time to the present time. So as a kid going there for an educational programme, you will be able to get a really great history of New York City and as I said the educational department uses it quite a bit. Now we do a lot of different kinds of programming. We do basically, I think 3 or 4 types and what I wanted to show was we do a number of historical shows that relate to the site. This image of Rolf Bunchen, Martin Luther and his wife, we did a show dealing with Ralph Bunch, who was the Secretary General for the U.N. when the U.N. was sited in the New York City building. At that point, 1946-50 that is when Palestine was divided, when Korea was divided into North and South so there are these historical moments that happened in this building and we use that in the kind of programming that we do. We have done, let’s see, have identified, we received the estate of William Sharp who was a consummate court illustrator and left Nazi Berlin Germany in the 30’s and lived in Queens for the rest of his life until the 1960’s. He did a lot of anti-Nazi propaganda so this is because of that 30’s to the present time we have concentrated on these kinds of shows that concentrated on these kinds of shows that deal with what happened at that time and Sharpe is a perfect example of the kind of work that we’ve been interested in. So, we start around the 1930’s and then move on up – we’ve done New York Noir, an exhibition of images from the Daily News archives – another kind of historical type of show. So, we have a whole range of a kind of historical shows that we do. We also have another kind of historical show we’ll do an exhibition, for instance, Gordon Matta-Clark, one piece he did had to do with these missing, well, they’re not missing, but these abandoned lots actually all over New York City, but he focused on Queens and he bought or leased them….He did pieces, videos and a whole project on these absurd little strips of land, little plots of land between buildings and so we focused, on that aspect of his work and again it’s kind of Queens-based, but it’s a one-person show of a prominent artist. Wendy Ewald, that was another one-person show and we did a specific project where she spent time with a community of Arab American High School children. She worked with them, which was actually quite difficult to get access to these kids, and she worked on an alphabet and what you just saw in that slide was the result of their animating the alphabet. There was a series of flags that showed up in her large triangle. The last slide you saw, in any case it shows the vastness of our space – our space is about 50,000 square feet – we are about to acquire the other 50,000 square feet, which is now a skating rink – so we will have a huge space. As you saw from the historical image, it’s a huge, huge building. It’s all open and this is what we call the large triangle and we do a lot of exhibitions and special projects in this. We’ve done a big Joan Jonas show, we done a Pedro Lash show, a Mexican artist and we focus on exhibitions of artists; group exhibitions and single artist projects that are geared towards working with different communities in Queens and when we move into our new space we hope to open a residency not quite the model of Studio Museum but with artists who are Queens.. This is a shot of our new building, the other half; where the green is happening is the skating rink, what the other half will look like. We do a lot of collaborations with other museums; Asia Society: we did a huge exhibition. Let’s see if we can take a look at here, this was called Edge of Desire with Asia Society – they had one half – of established Indian artists at the Asia Society at the Queens Museum, however, we found the interesting model is to always have a local element and so we did an exhibition called Fatal Love at the same time as we had Chitra Ganesh who was fairly unknown when we showed her in 2000 and here she is being shown again, Chitra Ganesh of Indian origin living in New York and was raised in New York, wonderful artist. So this is kind of a local projects along with artists that are living in New York and also a larger show of more established artists from India. We did a big show from Mexico called: AB,CD E F – wonderful show of photography from Mexico as well as objects. We have a whole educating project around it and while we were doing that we did two different shows: we broke up We did two shows on the second floor Pedro Lasch who teaches at Duke but is often part of a collective called Beaver 13 in New York City. OK, Pedro Lasch here and then he showed several of his works. It was kind of like a mini retrospective, this piece had to do with various people from different classes crossing the border, and then we also had a show, very very local called Propia Visión, a photography exhibition with artists from Mano y Mano another loose collective and novice, young emerging photographers and we do a whole bunch of stuff in the community.
Tom Finkelpearl
We have a community advisor on our staff. Yeah, we get out of the Museum and into the public spaces surrounding them. This is a festival that brought together Dominican, African-American and Ecuador and Mexico.
Valerie Smith
And there’s maybe one thing-I’ll just mention, well we just finished this year is our 3rd biennial of artists living and working in Queens which has proved to be an incredible success. We are trying to organize a community in Queens which is starting as rents are rising in Brooklyn more and more of the young artists are coming to Queens and finding a place to live and work so we are trying to build these communities but, as you know, Queens is huge and there are these different pockets, so it’s hard to bring them together, but through these biennials we do – Isidro Blasco, a Spanish artist living in Jackson Heights he was in the 2nd Biennial. I think maybe that’s it
Tom Finkelpearl:
Guys, I just want to say one more thing, I just can’t help myself, Queens where we are has twice as many people as Trinidad and Tobago. It’s the most diverse place in America. There are 138 different languages spoken in Queens. Fifty percent of our senior staff and staff in general are people of colour. So that’s the everyday life in Queens, you walk down the street and you hear language, after language after language. There is no majority. Our community is 90% minority, the 10% is the majority which is ridiculous.
Deborah Cullen
Ok so that was The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Queens Museum and we’re going to wrap up with El Barrio. The mission of El Barrio is to preserve and present the art and culture of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the US. We were founded in 1969 -- that’s all on our website -- by a Puerto Rican artist called Rafael Montañez Ortíz, this is a clip from the New York Times which I just love because El Museo was founded basically as a project of the Education Department in New York and did not have a home so it functioned out of a classroom for the first four years. that’s Montañez Ortiz with his cardboard boxes moving around. Basically, the Board of Eucation asked Montañez Ortiz to create an educational programme to serve the predominant Puerto Rican community living in El Barrio at that time and Montañez Ortiz came back with this incredible visionary project for a museum for multimedia community project, pre-Colombian to contemporary which I believe we are working still to attain his vision. These are some early shots, we eventually moved to several sites, a brownstone on Lexington Avenue in El Barrio, this is one of our first logos which, some of you may know is Atabey from the goddess from a petroglyph in Puerto Rico. Some images from our collection: so our collection then ranges from pre-Colombian to contemporary which is a gigantic mission to accomplish so we focus primarily on the Taíno cultures in the Caribbean, for our pre-Colombian holdings objects from the cultures which you can see leads to a book by Bartolomeo de las Casas; a contemporary work which looks at what we might loosely call the Taíno legacy or influence, it’s a work called Alfredo Jaar which is quoting from Columbus’ diaries. Here are some images of some Taíno exhibitions over the period that we have done so far with loans from the various islands. We also have a wonderful print collection, actually our first collection object was in 1971 and it was this on the left here, you see, Rafael Tufiño, a master artist from Puerto Rico and Cortador de Caña, a cane cutter, a very important iconic image from a very important portfolio of work from 1951. So, we’ve grown our graphics collection to some very contemporary works. As you see on the bottom right hand side a work by Adál, a Puerto Rican artist living in New York, The Spanglish Sandwich which is the plate with the screened image of the plate with the image of arroyos and bread and The Bodega Bag which has a trilingual translation sort of a pun on Nuyorrican culture in New York which many of you know, the Puerto Rican population is extremely split between the island and Manhattan so we have this bifurcated culture. Some other images, more contemporary images from our print collection, by Chicano, Venezuelan, Cuban artists . We also have popular traditions in our collective, predominantly Santos de Palo and masks we have some Haitian voodoo flags. We have some related to Día de los Muertos and we celebrate that as one of our annual celebrations with the community. We also have been the 30th anniversary of our Three Kings’ Day Parade which is also a huge community celebration. Here are some of the puppets made by artists and we also have a community members acting as the three kings, we have animals which is a wonderful thing in New York on January 06 thousands of kids in the snow. This is our building now which we moved into which is ,not our building unfortunately, The Hecksher Building for Children , we moved into in 1977 our first exhibition there was a contemporary show that sort of broadly defined the future of the museum. There was work from all the various Caribbean and Latin American artists living in New York at that time, very contemporary work but even though the mission of the museum was originally founded by and for the Puerto Rican community, pretty much from the beginning it was more broadly inclusive of Latino and Latin American cultures and Caribbean cultures we’re in a mixed use building. This is what it looks like at the moment and we’re also undertaking a renovation project. We have space on the first floor and third floor and we share with children services, other programmes and educational programmes and Central Park, so it’s a very active dynamic building which is challenging to be in and we have about 7,500 square feet of gallery space so we have space challenges. These are some of the objects of our contemporary holdings, we have installations, paintings, multimedia, this is a neon sign by a Dominican artist, various types of objects in the post war holdings. We’re building a strong photographic collection also by contemporary Caribbean and Latin American artists. We also do a biennial of contemporary work and we’re about to open our 5th edited version of this we call it the S Files, the Selected Files. We have a very large resource of artists’ archives. People can send us their materials that we keep open to the public and serves as a resource for other curators, scholars and students. From those files we draw on artists living and working in the greater New York region, Caribbean and Latin American descent and we feature a guest country every year. This year we decided to feature Ecuador, it’s always very exciting, cutting edge projects. These are some images from our last S Files, we do a lot of Youth Programmes, tours, symposiums, interactive projects. Here’s just some shots of one of our S Files artists and educators. She did an outside project on the doors of our theatre. Here she is leading tours in the gallery, just so you get a sense of what’s going on. Here are some young artists from Argentina Caraballo Fermin.They were doing a project on cemeteries so we asked them to take part in our Dia de Los Muertos celebration with the children. Here’s some other artists’ projects, a family day in our various spaces in the building.
Here’s another Dominican performance artist doing a project with fried plátanos – a look alike contest with another artist based on the Juan de Pareja image by Diego Velázquez. We have a 600 seat theatre, it’s wonderfully beautiful. That’s a poor shot of it. That is anoher one of our spaces. We are about to undertake this renovation of our facility. I think I have a couple of views of that. We are making the front more transparent and more welcoming, making the patio a more usable space and while our galleries are around, what you see is the left hand side inside of that wing of the building. Then we have the lobby and the theatre beyond where the green is. On the right hand side of the building we have that space that will be a café- with a multi-purpose programme room and we look to be programming that space too with videos and temporal exhibitions and a lot of smaller public programmes.
So, what we really want to talk about, what we thought was very important for you to see is who we are. Our institutions, if you haven’t visited us, we want to set that up but we really want to talk about is the project that we’re working on and that is, as you know, tentatively titled Caribbean: Crossroads of the World and it’s a collaborative project of El Museo, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Queens Museum. We’re tentatively scheduled to open the exhibition in New York in late summer 2009. Well, I’ll read it to you: Caribbean: Crossroads of the World is a multi-year project led by an international team, created for Caribbean visual artists works of the 20th and 21st centuries. The initial white paper proposes to focus on three broad moments that offer a rough schematic or chronological organizing structure: Modernity approximately 1920-1950; Independence and Identity 1950-1980 and the contemporary period roughly 1980 – to the present. The project will consider artworks by artists from the Dutch, English, Spanish and French Caribbean and will engage scholars working both inside the region and internationally. The reason that we wanted you to know who we are is because of the very relevance of these diverse Caribbean constituencies to our institutions as well as the recognized scholarly and artistic need for such an examination that has led El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum and the Queens Museum to embark on this multi-year process which encompasses research and discussion, public programming and ultimately, a touring exhibition and resource publication. A website also, these are the aspirations of the project.
So that you know a little of the background, although the three museums have been roughly talking about this project with other people such as Charlotte Elias here in the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Centre, and I just want to thank them very much for hosting us and presenting this talk today. But in May 2005 the three organizations produced a white paper which was a sort of proposal and of three breakdowns and the fact that we wanted to do the project and some of the aspirations of the project. In June 2006 we held our first conference at El Museo del Barrio in New York. We had no funding but we invited people to attend of their own will. It was a one day conference and we were very pleased that about 60 scholars, art historians and curators came. The entire conference was audio taped and transcribed. Now we have this wonderful three day conference here in Trinidad which has been attended by approximately 30 scholars. Our conversations have also been audio taped and will be transcribed. And we are grateful for funding from The Reed Foundation, Jane Gregory Rubin who is here to make this possible.
El Museo as you probably realize is very strongly focused towards the Spanish speaking Caribbean, so I’ll show a few slides just to get the conversation started from my own resources; of what we might mean by modernity, by independence, by identity or by contemporary. This is not decided – we’re nowhere near a checklist. We haven’t even started thinking of that. We’re discussing if these are good breakdowns for the project. But such a thing might range from something like this: this is a Ramón Frade, a Puerto Rican painter, from 1905 called “Our Daily Bread”. This kind of iconography building nationalism, building images of national identity to something like a Wifredo Lam from Cuba who’s more engaged in interaction with School of Perez, Cubism and also issues of spirituality, another language of modernism, independence and identity if we want to look at that period roughly 1950 to 1980, we can look at things such as the work of Alfredo Senier from the Dominican Republic. This is a work from 1944 that we recently had on loan from the Dominican Republic. I love the image, it is painted from a photograph of the celebration of the independence of the Dominican Republic from Haiti which is actually sort of a very loaded and interesting image, all the way up to an image like perhaps, Arnaldo Roche Rabell, also a Puerto Rican artist, called “You Have to Dream in Blue” and, again, this is another image that for Puerto Rico there’s not independence yet but discuss about identity, reconciling racial differences etc. Contemporary 1980 to the present, we run into this huge range of practices that we have to consider. Ana Mendieta, a performative project from 1977 – Alma Sol a piece from our own galleries, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado another Puerto Rican artist, Canal de la Mona. It’s a piece that he created that talks about the passage of the Dominicans between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico when they came illegally and the turbulences and dangers of that passage. So, again, these are my very focused perspective from El Museo looking towards the Spanish speaking Caribbean. But we are very, very excited to be looking towards the rest of the Caribbean for the first time. So I think now we should go back to the front and open up the conversation.
Valerie Smith:
We thought that some of you who have not been attending the conference would like to know who are our advisory committee and who the invited people are and perhaps we should just ream off the names.
Deborah Cullen:
I’m really going to just jump right in, especially as we are pressed for time. We want to solicit as much feedback as possible. We talked about this last night and as you can tell, this project is at a certain stage in the conversation. Nothing is set in stone. There’s not a final or realized thesis at this point. There’s no set determination of who is going to curate etc., so we’re at a certain stage in the conversation which allows us to be really receptive and open to feedback and response. So to that end I want to ask a very broad and general question of soliciting some information from you. Again, how would you imagine or envisage the articulation of the project or the articulation of a project of this sort? Just that. That broad. Yes. We’ll leave it at that right now.
Valerie Smith:
Deborah has made three models and some people have said it has to have one clear curatorial vision, a curatorial vision. Other people have said, No it should be erected from multiple curatorial visions because of the complexity of the region. Maybe it should be curated by an artist. We’re totally open to ideas. Someone in the background had their hand raised?
Deborah Cullen
Maybe in other ways since we’re not getting any immediate response…does the chronological narrative make sense? Is this the most logical way to pursue this? It doesn’t need to be.
Gabriela Rangel
I think the chronological makes sense for organizing internally, probably the narrative of the exhibition but I think it will simplify some topics that are important for the region, meaning by that if we all agree that our history doesn’t make sense. Why, too, are we following a chronological structure? I think it’s very productive in terms of the methodology but I don’t think it will cover the issues that we have discussed over the past two days.
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
I also think that there’s one aspect that has to be considered: is the amount of risk that you want to would like to engage in because dividing an exhibition into historical periods can entail a lot of different opinions on that – or inclusiveness depending on whether you’ve been working in the region for a long time and what you would consider to be a major figure of a certain period, and what an external curator could consider in relation to his own experience so I’m always kind of afraid of these large, wide scope exhibitions because it’s difficult to have a clear project. I find it complicated. I don’t have any answers but I’m just questioning.
I don’t know whether something that would be more oriented towards a thematic structure could be interesting because you could establish some kind of transversal relations between periods, between islands, between the continental Caribbean to see where there are certain links and certain common ground. I think it would be interesting because you could put into perspective the historical development because if you compare the continental Caribbean, Belize was the last country to attain independence. Central America was independent since 1821, Panama since 1903 – well, independent in a way of speaking, of course. The Caribbean has a different story, so I think the questions about identity have been posed in Central America long before they were posed in the Caribbean, so I think maybe we could think about how to mix
these models.
Annalee Davis:
I’m just coming in at the tail end because I wasn’t here for the last couple of days but maybe a question that could be asked is why we are having the exhibition? What’s the point of it, because if you don’t want to do a survey show which will, I suppose suggest a kind of linear approach to it, then what’s the purpose of it? Why are you doing this and if you have answer to this, then this might assist in selecting what kinds of work you wish to show.
Julián Zugazagoitía:
So this project really springs and as it was said it has been already been 5 years in the making. It really stems from the need to have an exhibition that would establish somehow the differences and texture of what is happening in the Caribbean for the last 100 years. We are trying also through this collaboration to spark a lot of dialogue with the islands. Many of the projects that we’ve seen that have existed only focused on one island, other projects in the region in ways that have not been all encompassing or from perspectives that are very fragmented, very limited. So the attempt of doing this project is very ambitious because it wants to cast a wide net and the complexity of it is that as we move forward in the discovery process of engagement there are more questions that are opened than clear answers. We’re playing with the ideas of how to integrate as much information as possible; very quickly it became clear that no one institution would have enough space so the notion of space is addressed by the fact that we are three institutions hosting and also planning. Just to add to the complexity, we don’t know how it’s going to be divided, but one of the things putting out from the outset is that a subset of this exhibition can travel with institutions within the Caribbean that perhaps do not have the same climate control and everything, so from the onset what we have been trying to do is an exhibition which would accomplish a lot. The catalogue would be even wider and more far reaching than the actual exhibition. Then this exhibition could also travel in the Caribbean and in other cities.
So the ambition is to do a stepping stone into the scholarship and appreciation of Caribbean art, the Caribbean seen as the largest common denominator right now, because we feel there is a lack of that, or would this be like the ultimate show? We hope not. We hope it would be more like a beginning – a beginning that would be so documented and so rich that it will allow for other things and the last thing that I point out is that we discussed early on, is this mechanism of engagement. Normally exhibitions are planned by a small committee and then presented to the public and that’s when public programmes engage a larger committee of scholars and it’s debated. What we wanted to do is reverse a bit this mechanism - by having a lot of conversations in the islands, in the diaspora, engaging in this kind of reflection to engage a large number of artists, scholars and thinkers to enrich our perception as we go along. It is a participatory process insofar that we are very open to hearing lots of ideas and little by little narrowing and casting one light and then re-engaging this dialogue so I think it’s a two way process.
Tom Finkelpearl:
The other thing is that there are kinds of institutional motivations which are, you know, part of it is that we live in a very Caribbean environ in Queens. If you walk down the street you’re in a place that, you know, there’s a local audience issue, which is an issue of trying to figure out how to engage different local Caribbean audiences. Then there is the opposite of that, which is that a lot of local Caribbean audiences and audiences here are much more interested in the non-Caribbean audience educating the audience, not teaching people what they already know but teaching about what they don’t know. So, whenever, we’ve done a show like A B C D F from Mexico City we engage our Mexican neighbours extensively. One of the slides that Valerie showed was actually a local group called Mexicos Unidos de Queens who are one of our partner organizations, but the motivation on the part of the Mexican artists and curators was to reach the non-Mexican audiences in New York. So, there are institutional motivations which are tied to where we are in the world and then there are audience motivations and curatorial motivations. But I have a question to ask. So we kind of want to know why we want to do it, but what could be a valuable outcome to the folks living currently in the Caribbean and not New York. So I just wanted to see if, look, I was working at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Centre when we when a big show called Short Century – it was Okwui Enwezor’s big African show and it took an African modernism - a broad show and I felt it was an incredible contribution especially the catalogue to the understanding of African modern art and if we can even approach something like that, I think it would be very valuable for me, but the question is I don’t know what’s valuable to you.
Anyway, I don’t know if anybody wants to answer that question. My motivation for coming here was to hear from folks—you know, we’ve talked. Charlotte and I have talked a little bit. I would like to hear from the artists here—your interest in this project, what brought you here today, as opposed to . . . I know what brought me here. Because there’s the intellectual underpinning and then there’s the kind of institutional site—what is a sort of organizational underpinning.
Yolanda Wood:
First, I think it is very important, this exhibition, because it will be the first Caribbean one in this new century about the Caribbean and the world. In the 90s we had four very big, important exhibitions about the Caribbean and the world. I think it is very important to study those other exhibitions in the 90s—because for us it’s very important to know what was the focus of those exhibits to know what we want now in the first big exhibition in the new century. It’s a very important responsibility for us—it’s the first Caribbean cultural exhibition in the new century but the 20th century was a very important century for the Caribbean in general. All of the islands: Spanish, English . . . all—is this century of the problem of identity in our countries. I think that the word, “identity,” is not identified—that we showed in the project with the independence. I think independence is the result of the problem of identity and I think it’s not necessary to relate independence with identity because for us the identity is the “base” for all processes in the 20th century. The other problem, I think, is Modernity, Independence, Identity, Contemporary are not the same concepts—the same words. When I speak of Modernity, we speak about a philosophical, aesthetic, artistic concept, but it’s not the same of independence. I think the chronological concept is important to study and to have ideas about what is the show that we need to show in each moment about evolution in the 20th century. But Independence is not an artist’s expression. It is a political expression. It is an ideological expression but it’s not the same, I find, between Modernity and Contemporary. I think we need to think about, what is the word that can express the problem of the 50s to 80s. It’s an international moment of the arts in the Caribbean. I think, maybe in the 20s, 50s, it’s very important the concept in our expression in art to explain our reality to relate with the people, with the landscape, with the religions but after the 2nd war the change is very important for the Caribbean. It’s a new moment, not only for the independence process, but because new influences come into the Caribbean and the Abstraction movement is very important for the Caribbean art—this Abstraction movement coming from the U.S., not Europe, this change is very important—it’s the moment of the internationalization of the arts and is the moment, at the same time, when the influence of the internationalist expression of art—that art in New York, not in Paris, now coming to the Caribbean and to Latin America expressions. I don’t know what the word is—but I think it’s very important to think about—that it is not the same as Modernity, Contemporary, Independence. This is a very big word for us. Thank You.
Voice: Jennifer Smit?
Well, I do agree with Yolanda that the Dutch Caribbean has a completely different perspective. That we are not independent, we will never be independent, we are part of the Dutch Kingdom—that will remain like this forever, I think. So that’s one first point and I also agree to have a reflection on the 20th century like the 1st show of all the regions was in Curaçao in ’93—nobody knows that. But it’s so important and it starts the process of intercommuniciation of the islands. I remember Yolanda was teaching in Havana, Cuba and she didn’t even know what artists were in Curaçao. I mean, all these different aspects—it’s also important to have them documented to see how this process is living up to the 21st century, so that now, three major or mid-sized museums in New York are seeing the necessity and responsibility of bringing this big exhibition not outside the periphery, but within the periphery.
American Female:
I think also the idea of the title—you chose the title for a specific reason. Working title.
unrecognizable:
Okay, working title and the idea that it’s a crossroads and then talks about intersections. If you keep the title and you keep that idea, then I feel that that will need to be addressed. Somehow, in how the show is pulled together and I think in seeing the presentation on the various museums, I think that was very interesting because I think it really incorporates intersections of culture—the idea that this would be seen as a necessity shows exactly this intersection and this crossroad that you need to be bringing the ideas and concept of Caribbean art to these areas precisely because there have been these intersections and these crossroads, so they exist within the Caribbean, they exist within the neighbourhoods that we work in, so these are some of the ideas that you might want to start to follow because these initial ideas come to our mind. Sometimes they are there because of the intuition, the urgency, the necessity.
New Voice:
I’m also interested in the institutional perspectives that you bring to the subject. I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the sort of “Three Moments” concept but I realize you are all struggling with how to divide the work between the three of you. Each of the institutions has a history with Caribbean artists, has with Caribbean stakeholders and that relationship has changed over time. For instance, The Studio Museum, El Museo del Barrio have been redefining themselves in recent years. What I would like to see is an exhibition that considers what that relationship has been and brings those perspectives to the table. You need a kind of didactic framework, to some extent because you have new audiences to consider. I think each museum does sort of bring its own lens to the subject and that, for me, make it most interesting.
Deborah Cullen:
I would like to respond to that. I think it’s a really great point to say something along those lines to respond to your question about the why. For us, the why is that it’s a continuation of what we already do—it’s not like this is a move into a foreign sphere or concern and appreciation and also knowledge. It’s what we already do so, in some ways, it’s just continuing that. We do work with, I agree, there’s a history already of our working with artists who, you know, do the same.
Am voice female:
As an outsider to the museum, what occurs to me is that you have several kinds of crossroads—it isn’t just the geographic, it isn’t just the one that’s temporally defined by a chronology. And the way to grasp this occurs to after listening to you or one way to do it is to think of the strength that you have. Museums are in their Golden Age, right now. There are more of them than there ever have been. They are wonderfully staffed, there are careers that lead to them—it’s an intellectual concept—people know what they do when they go to them. They know they’re going to see something, and museums know how to reach the community. So you should take full advantage of that and not shy away from things that you are trained to do, so I would certainly not drop chronology but you need to recognize how it interacts with the richness of cultures as they come to a museum. So one way to do this is to make use of analogy. The brain works on analogies—compare and contrast—so take a kind of static show that was recently in New York at the Guggenheim where you have Old Masters and New Masters, you probably all saw that one, Spanish art, and you realize that what you can do is take any theme you want, it could be the one about identity; it could be about gender—which haven’t talked about that—I don’t know why, but we haven’t. It could be about class, about place, the movement of people and cultural ideas and then bring it to that point—recognize it is a museum and make use of this richness of your collections to give a contrast. In that analogy, you will find that either there’s such a direct overlap that it’s amazing that what you have discovered—that somebody in 1820 or in the pre-Columbian, because if this is the 1st exhibit of the century, then it’s the first exhibit of the millennia and if you go back to the year if you think in terms of a millennia along [4] you are actually able to encompass the pre-Colombian as well so you can contrast things from your collection with current and you know there are going to be overlaps with all of that and you know it will begin to be quite revealing and you will begin to see what’s missing—well, what the gaps are, in the lacuna?
Rex Dixon:
Can I make a plea for the individual artist? I’m a painter, British by birth. I came to the Caribbean in 1985, taught at the Edna Manley School for fifteen years, been in Trinidad for seven years…I came because of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in Britain. Art schools were closing down; I had to find a job. The Caribbean happened to be the first place that I found a job. What happens if you sort of come the other way? Instead the West Indies went that way; I came back this way. This reverse of immigration thing—what tends to happen, especially in a place like Trinidad, if you are not under the two categories—either African or East Indian—you tend to get overlooked. I’ve not categorized it, but art tends to get categorized under those racial headings. So I’d just like to make a plea— not to forget that people went the other way. Thank you.
Deborah Cullen:
Can I just say . . . I just want to respond to that if it wasn’t clear—I hope it was, but I just want to say it again if it wasn’t clear—that one of the main purposes of having these meetings in the Caribbean, as well as sites in the U.S. or wherever else we are able to have them, is to engage the broadest possible group of people. We need people working in the field—some of our wonderful collaborators here with us and artists—to cast the broadest possible net of people working in the islands, as well as its various diasporas. So, we are looking to cast the broadest net in whichever direction people have gone in, and sometimes they have gone to multiple sites more and more frequently. So sometimes, that’s definitely on the table so we definitely want to—absolutely want to do that. I’m glad you brought that up.
Christopher Cozier:
I just had a very small point. I think the Kevin Powers show—the one that was in Brazil and then made it around Latin America—it was called, Politics of Identity. No, it was, I think, called The Politics of Difference, and the point is that it was the 1st show at the beginning of the millennium that placed the work of Caribbean artists and Latin American artists into one kind of critical platform. I think it moved around the region but it never went to the U.S. Didn’t it go to Brazil and then on to Argentina?
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
I was one of the curators and that exhibition was organized by the Generalidad Valenciana and it was a very, very, controversial exhibition in the working because we were invited as curators for particular regions and it was inaugurated in Valencia and then it was supposed to move to several places in Latin America and the Caribbean and it only went to Brazil, particularly because funding was cut and because they hadn’t planned it well enough. But that was a big problem and I don’t think this would be a good example to talk about because we were invited as curators but we were not invited to the installation of the show. So, in Valencia, each one of our curatorial projects was put together the way local curators decided to put it up, which is completely unheard of. I mean, if you curate a show, you have to put it up. And then, when it was put up in Brazil, the head curator of the show decided to divide the curatorial projects so you would find a work selected by me beside a work selected by Cuauhtémoc Medina and they just jumbled up everything. So, I think this is the model we have to avoid.
Female:
What I meant—that our history doesn’t fit into the whole discussion—I mean what Yolanda explained in a very clear manner—mainly that there is a gap between our lack of synchronicity and what is happening in the Caribbean and what you consider about Modernity. For example: The Studio Museum presented its new face to the millennium and to the century in a post-Black manner. I wonder if the notion of post-Black could fit into the Caribbean or into the continental Caribbean?
American Female:
That’s one of the questions I came in wondering—given its sort of the matrix in which we work in the studio. One of my questions would be: Is that one of those ideals that you would imagine what a post-Caribbean looks like? I know Krista had a comment.
Krista Thompson:
I just wanted to address the issue of these kind of three time periods that we’re just touching as a possible organizational framework and just play Devil’s Advocate. I just want to wonder if they are not only appropriate, but actually just the opposite of what a kind of Caribbean history indicates. So even this notion of Modernity—a lot of Caribbean scholars talk about Modernity—the Caribbean is complicating larger narratives of modernity. The plantation system as it was set up here was a precursor to a kind of European Modernity as it’s written about. And, of course, Paul Gilroy talks about this[experience as being a kind of counterculture of Modernity, but I’m just saying that whole experience of the forming of the Caribbean complicates the notion of nationalism and identity. The fact that the populations that were brought within this space complicates any kind of national notion of identity and affiliation. The Diasporas that leave the Caribbean and go elsewhere kind of complicate the notion of national boundaries again. Even the notion of Independence—I mean, what does that mean in a Caribbean region that is so dependent? Can we use the show to talk about the way “Caribbean-ness” really complicates all of these issues? It’s precisely about the kind of destabilizing these notions or categories, or that a show can be both speaks about the uniqueness of this particular space. But also how this particular space complicates all of these wider notions that are essential for artists and for scholars working all over the world and I think we have the unique opportunity to do that. Even the notion of temporality, if you read Jamaica Kincaid’s work, or someone like Toni Morrison, they talk about the Diasporic experience, and the experience of “Caribbean-ness” as complicating this whole notion of time, and as kind of repeating same sets of Colonial relations. You know, this is kind of a primitivist notion of time being the same, but a certain set of relations that complicate the notion of temporality.
Day 2 Session 2
Charlotte Elias
I’m going to make a bold suggestion. First of all we started late and this is obviously just the beginning of the conversation. We had another panel that was planned after the coffee break. But what I’m going to suggest is that we actually not have that panel and all the participants who were involved in that panel, which is really just an extension of the conversation, can make contributions throughout this conversation this morning and that we take this session for another ten minutes and then have a quick refreshing break hopefully and then come back and continue it, because I think that there’s just so much that can be said and this is really a time all of these ideas can be recorded and considered in the longer term. So its really the vital, vital time in these few days.
One quick thing if I may. I’m listening to this and this is something that has come up a lot in the way that we work. There is enormous fragmentation within the region and in the Diaspora and constantly those of us that work in a way as facilitators and bridge builders, over time from within or without the region, its something that we face in working with artists, in working with the lack of institutionalisation or the art schools or the museums, or the things that don’t exist in the Caribbean, we’ve all heard about that. But there are many things that are existing and have existed, and there are amazing new projects that are coming up there, and for someone who over the last ten years has given a lot of my time in the area, often hosting curators who are flying through for very short periods of time where I have to make these awkward phone calls to an artist, saying do you have twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, so that this person can up and engage in your work, and consider it and then put it into a show that you might not ever see or have the honour of installing and collaborating with that curator in a far more profound and meaningful way to you as an artist. That’s happened a lot and one of the things to look at, is not just the fragmentation we talk about between the Diaspora and here, but also how do we do that engage in artist practice in the Diaspora, in these places, in this case in New York and actually maybe invite curatorial practice to almost host collaborations with curators who are working on this show from outside to actually come and be resident within the region and maybe do curatorial exchanges and residencies, where that conversation starts to happen from within the region and maybe even brining artists from the Diaspora out, and finding ways in which artists from the Caribbean and also come and spend time within that city, so in away it’s a far more fluid exchange of conversations, that doesn’t just happen from time to time between us as we try to do this, so in a way we’re building a new framework to go forward with, because there are so many important points were raised. But we are here now and how do we actually ensure that the framework creates the foundation for the future to really narrow that divide, all those divides, which are so considerable in this conversation.
Valerie Smith.
I just want to make a brief comment on Krista. I’m finding a need since I know absolutely nothing to do, I mean I envisage this incredible timeline and I wish I had it in front of me, on the wall. I’m thinking about the exhibition of the entire Caribbean, on these points that you say are so complicated, that are different for everyone, on the point of independence, on the point of modernity, on the point of nationalism, how someway we can start, right now or when we get back to put together that timeline, though I would imagine it would have been published, some parts of it must have been published before so that we can have that to refer to and its sort of a visual bit of information that we can use. I know that would be tremendously helpful for all of us. Because we don’t really know in terms of dates when any of this happened and it would be nice to have that. Maybe I could start it, I don’t know.
Jane Rubin
I’m working on a timeline now just in Caribbean Social Science and its quite remarkable how almost nothing is known, either about the subject matters explored or the people who explored them and we’ve actually got one on the wall, just kind of working away almost on newsprint and when you get it up as a visual imagery, all sorts of extraordinary interesting intersections start to happen, especially when you drill into some of the timelines of some of the individuals and their careers. So I’m delighted to help you with that one but I can tell you as far as I know, the only way we got the relative dates of independence, however charged that term is this morning, is that we basically went into the Internet, country by country, using the Association of Caribbean States lexicon of territories and countries. I also wanted to speak briefly to the issue of millennium because I think it’s a kind of false chronology because time really isn’t linear, especially here for a whole number of reasons and that some part of it, whether it’s a publication or whether its an installation, should really deal with the place. And the quickest, easiest way to do that is to lets say take 1000 and just take a look at the populations that were the autonomous populations that were here and see how they handled this whole range of issues that gets us into the whole arena that Yolanda was speaking about. A lot of that does carry forward, certainly in the subconscious and in many ways as a positive conscious. The last thing I have is a kind of mea culpa because I’ve spent the last fifteen years talking about Caribbean as a sate of mind and it really didn’t make any difference if somebody was here or there or anywhere, as long as they called themselves Caribbean I was prepared to have that discussion, but this last several days, I really have begun to realise, and to the point that was made earlier, that there is this extraordinary group of artists, who whether they have returned, never left, come in and out, really look at what Caribbean is to inform , inspire and energise their work, and as you would look to the historical you would, and as Naipaul said last night, and it actually makes a real difference, if you just look at the now and project the future, the now would really show you a range of artists and practices that are really quite unknown elsewhere and if you pick a niche or just a parenthesis that you want to emphasise, I think that would be really helpful and really new news.
Yolanda Wood
I think that this question about the chronological or not or the other possibilities, I think that it is very easy for us to work with this chronological structure because its really this structure. The problem is the name that we have for this structure because modernity: naïve paintings in Haiti are modernity? What is? Santos de Palo in Puerto Rico is modernity? What is? I think in this first moment between the 20’s to the 50’s is the moment to go to the traditions of each country. Our history is a history of fragmentation; it’s a history of dispersion, it’s a history of individual vulcanisation of the Caribbean. What was the problem between the 20’s to the 50’s? Recognition that we are. I think that in the 20th century the key word for us was connection. The first connection was with us. We needed to know that in our visual art, in our literature, in our artistic expressions, what we and different expressions born in the Caribbean, popular expressions and more professional expressions, in the visual arts. I think the key word is connections. I think between the 20’s to the 50’s the connections was with us. Between the 50’s to the 80’s the connection was with the others, that is inter-connections, and we began to work together with the formulas of different expressions of art. And in this contemporary expressions we are connecting, connecting different aspects of our history, our problems. I propose to think together about the key word, connections. Connection, I think will be the possibility to find the common aspect for our discussion. The first connection was with our culture, who are we? Where we explain that in our visual art. In this case it is possible to have all the possibilities through expressions of art because the same level of art does not exist in all the islands. The problem in this moment is not if you are modern, the problem is how the visual art explains our personality, our identity in different forms, forms that are not the same in the Dutch Caribbean, the English Caribbean or in the Spanish Caribbean. But we need to find something, its not the development of art because the school of art is not the same in all the countries, the history is not the same in all the countries, and the fragmentation is the base of all these problems. I propose to think about what are the connections in this moment, what are the interconnections, not only between us but between other countries: the United States, Europe and others. And now we are connecting, we are in the moment where we exchange with each other, that was not how it was before.
Florence Alexis
I would like to contribute a little bit to those three periods, which have been mentioned as a way to start and maybe a pattern to help us to think together. Let me take it that way. I think if chronology can help us in this early moment of our reflection, the nature of the Caribbean and the space we are supposed to work on will oblige us to become creative and chronology won’t be enough. I totally agree with Yolanda on that. So we have to be creative and we have to make that effort and probably those different periods will ask us to operate or approach them in different ways, with different kinds of exhibitions or different kinds of events, which can be conceived from those different periods. As an example I would like to go back for a minute to the history of art in Haiti and I will speak under the control of Yolanda because she has a more global perspective on that. If we talk about identity and because of Haitian history, we know that probably Haiti has something very specific to offer us since popular culture burst in the reflection on identity at the very beginning of the 20th century, even in way before the modernity will express itself in the painting in Haiti so Haiti can bring us something very peculiar in the sense that at the very beginning of the 20th century popular artists, so called self taught, illiterate people, naïve, which is a word I wish we’ll never use, primitive, whatever the term you will use, the identity issue is definitely very strongly addressed by popular artists at the beginning of the 20th century. So that really informs our project in a very different way. Then modernity comes after and modernity comes with internalisation and also I still like the idea of crossroads, because this crossroads is of course the place where the Caribbean people are meeting but also the crossroads allows us to go and meet the others so the crossroads functions on the two movements and those two movements are parallels of course, but it is absolutely important to probably mix the chronological approach with the geographical approach and the historical one, in the sense that, as you say, the way that the different schools of art emerged in the Caribbean are not totally parallel and can bring something totally different from the different perspective they come so this is extremely important. I’ve produced a show in 1992, which was called Haiti 500 years; I had the occasion to mention it very quickly the other day. Haiti: 500 years, that was in 1992 when Europe decided to celebrate Christopher Columbus’ landing. As we know, many people in Central America and Latin America really challenged this celebration. I was at that working with some people involved in Haitian art form since almost after the Second World War and we thought that that was a great opportunity to ask Haitian painters to tell us their version of that history: this is why the title, Haiti: 500 years. 1492 Christopher Columbus lands in Haiti, 1992 Spain celebrates the great figure of Christopher Columbus. And why Haiti had something very specific to address to this issue is because as you probably know, in this so-called popular paintings in Haiti you have this extremely strong historical movement in the paintings that means that many of those popular painters, as soon as they start to paint, people like the father of Haitian art, Philomé Obin and all his sons, because he created a whole dynasty of painters, as soon as they start they address historical issues and as you look at the work, and I wish I had the time to show you a few pictures I have with me, you will see that from the very beginning they will tell you the story of the peasants’ revolt during the beginning of the 20th century, during the American occupation in Haiti and they will show you portraits of the leaders of the peasants’ revolt, and they were living with them, they were friends so it’s a kind of chronicle of Haitian political life. Through that project we were able to commission work from young artists to the present time and the show became like a kind of historical book, which can still evolve, we can still add a few chapters to what we originally conceived in 1990. So we ended the show with the coup that obliged Aristide to go into exile in the United States, that’s how the show was ending and since then that show has been touring all over the world, including in the US: Chicago and Detroit, in Canada, in the Hague, in the Caribbean: in Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, in Mexico for a whole year, in Europe: in France in twelve museums. The show has been on the road for ten years and artists have been adding more paintings, still developing that historical chronicle and it would be extraordinarily interesting to see how we can include that in the whole project. Probably Haiti is one of the rare countries that have developed that kind of thinking about their own history through paintings and done by people who are supposed to be illiterate. So this is a small contribution, you probably will have another.
Romi Crawford
I think that your point is well taken and I think that going back to Gabriela’s initial comment, we have to agree that if we were proposing this rough chronology, we’re doing it because we want to trouble it. As Krista was saying I think its really important for us to understand, I mean this history does exist, but its not in the western histories, its not part and parcel of what we understand in New York yet and that’s what part of the project is.
Tom Finkelpearl
I was just thinking about this idea that Valerie suggested or that Jane’s working on, some kind of a timeline, which is different from a chronology. I’m interested in the idea of social network mapping which has to do with creating this sort of spider web of interactions and I think if you built this it would become increasingly complex: you start talking about language, there’s time, chronology, national origin, political boundaries, you’d have to draw areas between Cuba and the United States and Moscow, to create a kind of political boundary that makes it difficult fore us to visit you, there’s race issues, there’s religion issues. You’d be creating this map which could get so complex, you know the flows of migration back and forth to the States, back and forth to the mainland of South and Central America, the cold war playing into it, international politics. It would be some kind of bohemian exercise. The more you did it the less you’d know and you’d get completely, this is my experience here, is that its unbelievably complex what’s going on here and that we’re going to have to choose out some small sliver of that incredibly complex web and I’ve been travelling the world and never been here, never to Trinidad, and I think this is one of the most complex places I’ve ever visited. And that its complex because of a physical geography of islands, and a political history, and where everybody came from and where everybody’s at psychologically, politically and socially. So I think that we’re going to end up having to get rid of most of that map, to clear our heads to do one thing, because if you don’t have all those aspects to the map, its incomplete of chronology, it can’t just be social.
Romi Crawford
I see an artist’s hand up in the back. I would love to hear from you guys in the back instead of us talking to ourselves.
Artist – Comments from the Audience
I just wrote down some things, I think an exhibition should tell a story that breaks the myth of Caribbean that has stereotyped us as walking clichés of characters. The exhibition must tell this story of our intellect, of our geography, of our location within the international space as revolutionaries and our influence on the world of change, that we contributed to civil rights, culture and technology. The exhibition should reflect also artist power, our influence in either your space or our space. There are many other examples of artists led initiatives within the Caribbean and I think that should be one of the focuses of an exhibition that size.
Nicholas Laughlin.
I’d just like to think aloud a little bit. I don’t promise to be very coherent or to come to a conclusion. Listening to what everyone has been saying and of course complicating the chronology, I suppose that’s what I’ve been thinking about and to put various strands together, it seems clear that chronology is attempting and maybe the necessary place to start, because Caribbean art is this enormous phenomena and you’ve got to break it down somehow. It’s also clear that because there are three institutions you need a tripartite division of some kind, that’s just a practical matter of fact. As various people have suggested and given many examples of, the Caribbean has a shared historical experience, or historical evolution, but it hasn’t happened simultaneously. But the chronology is not linear; time is not linear, as Jane has said. So there are similar experiences but they have happened sometimes at very different times. It strikes me that one way to deal with that might be to strip things down to the very basics of what a chronology could be and for some reason three questions have been floating around, sought of popped into my head, questions that would be very familiar to all the art historians in the room, because they are in fact the title of a famous painting: the questions are where do we come from, who are we and where are we going. It seems to me that that’s one way that you could start thinking about the chronology of Caribbean art because those could correspond to three very basic historical trends: artists who are looking back at historical trends and how did we all get here, what does it mean that we’re all here together, roots, spelt with two o, routes spelt with ou. Then the question of what it means to be Caribbean, we found ourselves here, what are, who are we, how do we define the Caribbean, that whole question of definition, the first closed session two days ago was devoted to that. We came to no conclusions because in fact it is probably completely inconclusive. And then looking forward, as Jane said as the great man said last night (reference to VS Naipaul Lecture) you study the now and it tells you what the future holds. The future need not be a mystery if you’re able to look at the present with clear enough eyes and with few enough prejudices. I don’t know if that’s at all helpful. I guess basically what I’m suggesting is, specifically on the subject of chronology, that maybe absolute dates are not helpful. They maybe helpful from the point of view that you need to have a starting point and an ending point and there are other practical considerations that make dates crucial at some level in the planning process but maybe breaking it up into three historical periods that coincide so precisely with actual absolute dates is something that needs to be rethought.
Romi Crawford
I actually agree very much with that and have some problems with chronologies in general because they so often exist as a sort of evidentiary justification for existence for some peoples so yes, I’m also of that thinking from the outset, although I think that there has to be some sort of negotiation of that because they are very useful and there practical and didactic and all of that, but my gut is very similar. They’re wonderful as exercises but they sort of prove strange evidence.
Valerie Smith
There are some people who have a mind for chronology and who feel that there is a need for that and there are some people who like to keep things a little bit more open and ambiguous. I think its possible to do a chronology of lets say Cuba or Haiti but maybe its not possible to do a chronology of the entire Caribbean Basin. I just envision something large and seeing these threads and I find that very satisfying because I think that leaving it kind of vague and open is kind of tough but maybe that’s just the way my mind works. I’m wondering about that kind of Gaugin question, I mean he’s a Westerner, I mean are we going to use his model?
Nicholas Laughlin
No, I certainly wasn’t suggesting that you take those questions literally as some kind of theme or framework. But it was just an example to show that they do seem particularly apt to the Caribbean though because they do correspond to three kinds of broadly historical ways of thinking about ourselves and what we’re doing here; looking back, looking at the now and looking forward. Basically what I was trying to get at though was getting away from absolute dates. I’m not suggesting that you throw out chronology. There’s obviously been evolution, there’s been development, things have changed over time and we would hope the show would represent that. But what if the real historical parallel is a work from 1920, a work from another in 1960 and a work from now from another place. Those three things are in a sense in the same chronological space even though they are happening many decades apart. That was my point.
Valerie Smith
Absolutely. I think that’s absolutely on the mark. I think that’s great
Gabriela Rangel
I think the way to complicate this chronological approach, which is very productive in terms of the methodology for three institutions to put together an exhibition on the Caribbean is a multidisciplinary approach that would give little more room to think about how to move in a different direction: from the literary to the musical to audio visual etc. And also I disagree with Yolanda (Wood) in one thing which is should take into account the disconnectivity as well because during the discussions we came across a lot of disconnection between the region. I think that we have to be a little bit naïve to think that this is a compact, an absolutely connected region.
Romi Crawford
Yes, It would be a very misleading and celebratory picture I think to only have points of juncture. I think that’s a very good point Gabriela.
Comments from the Audience
Annalee Davis
In a lot of ways this whole notion of the Caribbean is a constructed myth as a map that we see in an atlas, because the divisions between the islands and territories are so enormous, and the only time that these shows are ever seen together, is outside of the region. They never happen here. So we’re not experiencing this Caribbean in the way that it’s being spoken and the question that was asked earlier by Tom (Finkelpearl) of what do the artists want, how can we become more involved in the process, how can that dialogue happen between the artists and the curators? And to pick up on what Charlotte said earlier, what happens after the exhibition? A lot of artists in the Caribbean are dealing with very real issues of sustainability: how do we continue to produce work? How do we afford to produce work? What happens after the show? Every time, you’re dropped like a hot potato. It happens, you don’t go to it, you don’t install it, you don’t see it, and nothing comes out of it. How does the artists become more involved in the process that you are having right now and why aren’t there more artists here?
Tirzo Martha
I want to add something to that because I believe that something that is very important that exhibitions like this must have an added value for the Caribbean and it sounds like people in the Caribbean themselves, are not aware of all this. It’s a very selective group in the Caribbean, most times, that are busy with the aegis of art and all that stuff and I believe that these types of exhibitions ought to have a kind of added value, because it is a necessity here in the Caribbean, that the people come to know much more about what they are and to be conscious about what their possibilities are. And it is not only a thing about art, but it’s something about the history, it’s something about the consciousness of the people, it’s something about the community, their daily social survival so I believe that having this type of exhibition is very important to be shown in New York yes, but its also very, very important to be brought back here to the Caribbean, and to have this kind of added value for the collaboration and the contact here in the Caribbean. Because I can say that right now in Curaçao, we started this Institute of Art and its based on a necessity of communication, its based on the necessity of making the people more conscious of what the reality of artists is in the Caribbean, not in Europe and the US, but in the Caribbean. Because I believe that there is much more happening, there is much more going on in the arts than, for example, my experience taught me in Europe, you can go to the foundations and get the necessary funds to do all kinds of projects, you can get all kinds of support for exhibitions. This is not the reality in the Caribbean. The artists here have to survive in a way that is not acceptable, not human. Sometimes they have to do things that are very weird for artists in Europe, just to survive. So I believe that the content and goal of this exhibition must be much more than just an exhibition. It must be like the glue to glue everything together, to bring the artists together, to bring all of the institutions that survive here in the Caribbean together. We are talking about the chronology and all that but one of our huge handicaps here in the Caribbean is documentation: the lack of documentation. I can take Curaçao as an example because we can talk about all the spirits, but they are not documented, so most of the time it is based on something that doesn’t exist, that has existed, but doesn’t exist in the world right now for the people. So I believe that that’s the reason we ought to think much more about just here, right now. Like what’s going to happen after the exhibition? What is the added value? What is the necessity of having this exhibition: is it just to show something? Or is it something to encourage, to start, to stimulate or to promote the situation of art in the Caribbean?
Florence Alexis
Can I add a short statement on the same subject and I would like to agree totally with Charlotte on the necessity and that really is a way of answering your points. On the fact that, that the show should allow a few residency experiences and you’re asking what’s going to happen after the show. I feel like asking what’s going to happen before the show. Because those residencies can naturally nurture the project itself and Charlotte has a natural vocation to be part of that project. And I know very few people all over the Caribbean who could really host a few residencies of Caribbean artists which could bring us, and feed the project itself in terms of exhibitions or any other pluri-disciplinary project as well. So what’s going to happen before in order to make that project happen and allow Caribbean artists to be part of it.
Romi Crawford
I think what is interesting about you all were saying, is that one way to take it to the extreme, is that the exhibition is great and wonderful but that there are other platforms and forms that might be even more productive and needed than an exhibition, I dare say. So that’s something that maybe we do need to hear: that people seem okay about the exhibition but are more excited about these other exchanges, residencies, a kind of really solid, thoughtful curatorial model, that means that people go and install shows, that artists are involved in their own installations, that artists might be involved in writing about their projects. This is the sought of thing that we wanted to hear. I know that in Chicago, it is popular right now for artists to, not only make their work, but to sought of provide the writing on their work. I think that this is useful for us to know: what are the new interventions into exhibition models that can be created form these conversations.
Gabriela Rangel
I would like to add to what Tirzo said. I think it is very important for the catalogue, after the exhibit, that the catalogue is more than what is reflected in the show. So everybody: the scholars, the artists, the foundations; have something tangible in hand, because that is always a problem. That we have nothing to refer to, especially in the Dutch Caribbean, there is so little documented and apart from that I have two questions, I’m throwing this out: Is the Caribbean a modern concept or is the Caribbean a post modern concept?
Valerie Smith
I’m wondering if this idea of website blogging, right now or when we get back or now, might be a way of beginning to make these connections that Yolanda was talking about and how it might serve the artists in the different parts of the Caribbean, as a way of being informed. What I’m hearing is you’re here in Trinidad but you don’t necessarily know what’s going on in Haiti or in Venezuela and so on.
Charlotte Elias
Tirzo is actually from Curaçao and has been involved in moving throughout the Southern Caribbean a lot and speaking to other artists. He is apart of the working group for the Watamula International Artists Workshop that CCA worked, with a group of artists a few years ago, and more recently, as a kind of spin off of these projects, they have set up a Residency programme Curaçao, which has been a big breakthrough, that Tirzo has been the driving force behind. So just to set the context for his comments.
Tirzo Martha
Let me tell you very briefly about it. About two years ago we started this investigation in Curaçao, me and David Bade another artist from Curaçao. Our idea was to do something, to do a project where we can do something with the Caribbean. And not only between the Caribbean, but the Caribbean outside the Caribbean itself. We wanted to start at first with some educational programmes and after discussing this for some time, we came to the conclusion that it was better to have this art institute, where you can do much more than just the educational part. The conclusion of our institute is that we have three different projects that we do: one is called the National Project, the next the International Project and the other one is called the Educational Project. The National Project is funded with Dutch funds and we invite artists living in Holland, not necessarily Dutch artists, but living in Holland, to come to the island for as period to work. The International Programme is where we invite people from around the world: artists, curators or critics, to come to the island to work for a period of a month and they can also do something like exhibit. The Education Project is where we have students between the ages of 16 to 24 years that are interested in studying art. Right now we are also working on a Post Graduate Programme for students that have studied art. They can come to the island for up to a year to work. The most important part of our institution right now is that we have an agreement with the University of Leiden we are also doing right now research. The research is based not only on art activities but also social activities. As I said, one thing that is very important in the Caribbean is that we need documentation. The problem is everybody is saying a lot but nothing is documented, so everybody can interpret things, as they want. There have been artists doing a lot and they died and they do not exist anymore, nobody knows about them or their work. That’s the reason why, for the last month, we have added this research part about art in our institute. From September of this year some people from the University of Leiden to start with the first investigations about art. So that’s a very short introduction to our art institute in Curaçao. For me I think it is very important to say that for a project like this, the added value of our institute like can be for example, is that we can invite people like curators and artists that are living in so that we can discuss and build up things that can be part of this exhibition. I believe it is very important to try as much as possible to connect with each other and to interact and to see what the possibilities are to add more to the exhibition than just an exhibition of artworks and periods etc.
Romi Crawford
Thank you Tirzo for that. I want to add to that briefly, because it is what has been talked about for a few moments now, in the end if we’re talking about an exhibition, that’s a product and a catalogue is another kind of product that could be bigger. But for me, and I think for us, the process is what is really important, because it is putting us in dialogue with many more people and many more artists than perhaps we can ever include in an exhibition. But the process is really important because we’re starting to help build some of those bridges, some of which exist and some don’t. And I think that that’s an important thing.
Mariel Barrow – Member of the Audience
I try to do exactly that in my own little corner. We’re doing a website called
www.caribbeanartvillage.com. We have had dialogue with various directors of culture throughout the Caribbean. For the next Carifesta, they want to see if they could use us to register all the contingents etc. What we’re trying to do is to create that dialogue and help sustain that dialogue by creating a virtual community of artists online. We have had a lot of problems with our web developers as I understand that lots of people do. Despite this we have had over 9000 hits to the site despite the fact that we haven’t really marketed it except through very small word of mouth sessions. So far it is doing well and so far we are in contact with a certain number of institutions and artists from the various Caribbean islands. We have made contact with the Cultural Studies Institute in Cuba, The Centre for The Arts at the University of Technology in Jamaica and someone from the Chamber of Commerce in Martinique. And they are trying to partner with us in doing exactly that, creating this community and helping it to grow so that we can all be in touch and keep up to date with what’s going on and we can have ongoing dialogue. Of course all of this requires funding and that’s part of our biggest problem. I would love to collaborate with everyone present in trying to do that because our idea is if we can all come to one spot to do this it’s a lot easier than trying to do our own separate thing, and then one person has to go to ten different web sites to get a little bit of information, so centralisation in that sense is good.
Clarion Charles – Member of the Audience
I attended this here because I am curious to find out about why the North is interested in the Caribbean. I’m serious about that and I’m planning to come and talk to you personally about that. I’m Clarion Charles. I worked with an artist called David Moore. In 1976 we travelled throughout the Caribbean and did similarities and differences of Caribbean. We did Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Barbados, Antigua and Jamaica. When we went to each island, and I hear your problem, it is so complex but not for us who live here. When you look at me, you cannot tell my race because I am so mixed up. When we come into a space and we interact with people, there is a feeling that we have that you cannot feel for me because of my own vibrations. There is something that is Caribbean, distinctly Caribbean, and that is what you have to get. It’s hard for you coming here to understand what is happening here: you have to grow into this thing; you have to be born into this thing. It’s difficult for you to put the exhibition together unless you get Caribbean people to put it together.
Romi Crawford
An excellent point and that’s part of the reason we are here to start, to involve people that have been working here and elsewhere like Tirzo and all the other people that we brought here. This is a small group of people that we were fortunate to be able to bring here and there are many other people who are in contact with us in New York. Everyone who is here, all of you, should be giving us names, who we should be talking to. That’s part of this, part of the process, to engage. I mean I don’t know about Trinidad but that’s why we’re here, to find out.
Virginia Pérez Ratton
We are very interested in having relations with the Institute and with the website because that’s one of the ways that we have created a very strong network in Central America. First, nobody had a website, but at least we had an email address, so we started to distribute our information to colleagues in the other countries, who would in turn distribute them to the artists that they knew in their own countries. Little by little we started building up a database and then it became a network. In Teor/ética, we have a library that is open all day and we have a documentation centre, so every artist that comes and shows in the country, leaves a dossier or a DVD or something so we have a big archive that scholars, researchers or students or anyone can come and look at. That’s a way also of building documentation because; obviously we have the same problem. In relation to artists’ writings in Central America, I realized when Mari Carmen Ramirez started with the project in Houston, of the Inter Americas, sort of Information Centre or digital project that they have, they wanted source documents or artists’ writings, and we realised how few artists’ writings we had in the region. So now what we are doing is that every catalogue that we publish, every brochure, even if there is curatorial text, we always include an artist writing, whether it is a statement or something about his own work. Some are more verbal than others and more articulate than others, but the point is that we are trying to build a body of artists’ writings so we can have that other point of view. I would be really interested and be able to connect with all these other initiatives so that we can amplify our information and documentation centre. The last thing I wanted to say is in relation to Politics of Difference, in all justice to Chris who wanted to mention the show, I think it is important to mention the show because we had the same exact discussions that we’re having here: how to deal with this big, big show that they wanted to do about Latin America; How can you deal with that? It was not only about the Spanish Caribbean but also all of Latin America. So finally after many discussions and meetings it was decided that it was going to be several curatorial projects: some curators decided to do a historical project, other curators decided to work with emerging artists; others decided to try to try to encompass the whole region and do a more survey like thing. So it had different aspects. The catalogue is very good catalogue and the essays are extremely interesting and the catalogue is much better than what the show came to be, because of its articulation of the curatorial projects, that are completely broken up and nobody would understand what you were meaning to say. But the idea of having these different projects was interesting because one of the things that we hadn’t touched is that any curatorial project has to assume its partiality and having this big, big show implies, even if we don’t want it to, a certain totality, because everybody is asking who is going to be included, who is going to be excluded and that is always a terrible issue. I think that one of the things that have to be assumed is that any exhibition, any curatorial project, is exclusive, unfortunately, and it is partial, so that that has to be taken into consideration and not try to be really absolutely fair and absolutely democratic and absolutely inclusive, because art is not democratic, unfortunately.
Nicholas Laughlin
A small practical suggestion, because we have been talking about the importance of process, documentation and looking at previous shows like this one as precedence for what you’re trying to do. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever written a survey of attempts to represent Caribbean Art in international shows: whether in North America, Europe or wherever. Over the years there have been numerous big Caribbean shows and small Caribbean shows. My suggestion was, both because it could be absolutely valuable and because it could inform what you’re trying to do here, is to commission someone to look at the history of international shows of Caribbean art, the processes that led to them and how the Caribbean was portrayed and what the results were.
Romi Crawford
Veerle has already started to answer Nicholas’ questions with two papers that she has started recently on two Caribbean projects so I will let her tell you about them.
Veerle Poupeye
What I tried to do with that paper was to look at the anatomy of some of those exhibitions and exactly what you see but also to look at not the local reception but the lack of local reception, because of the lack of exposure and the sort of anxieties and pressures that have come from that. The whole spectrum of how these exhibitions function needs to be looked at: Why were they organised? Why were they organised at the moment they were organised? Who took the initiative? Who funded it? How were the decisions made? What was the sort of procedures that led to the selections? How did one set of selections inform the next set of selections for other exhibitions because that kind of self-perpetuating quality of a lot of these events, I think is a matter of concern, and how are these projects are viewed locally and I think making these connections locally is crucially important, because that is where they really acquire their ultimate meaning. I don’t know what else you wanted me to say about that but just to kind of describe what I tried to do with those two exhibitions. I looked at Caribbean Visions and Caribbean Solar. Caribbean Visions was toured in the United States and Caribbean Solar was toured in Europe in Spain and Germany and one came immediately after the other. One tried to provide a survey of sorts and the other was an exhibition of contemporary arts. That was sort of what I tried to do. I’ll happily circulate it if you think there is any use for it.
Virginia Pérez Ratton
I can also provide two catalogues that includes Caribbean artists. One is called Central America and the Caribbean: A Story In Black and White, which is the book I published in 1998 for the São Paulo Biennial. The other is called Iconofagia That was done for the Cuenca Biennial, also on Central America and the Caribbean.
Tom Finkelpearl
I think it’s an excellent suggestion. We sort of framed this as a debate so I wanted to take issue and actually I am not sure where I stand on this issue, just to be provocative, which is, one way that I can see New York more clearly is when somebody comes from outside and we walk around New York and I look at it from the outsider’s perspective. There’s a friend of ours from Queens who grew up in Bombay, left when he was fifteen and went back to Bombay recently and wrote a book called Maximum City about Bombay. Because he was an outsider he felt like he could see it. He was an insider and an outsider simultaneously. He speaks Hindi fluently, he could integrate into the neighbourhoods but he also had left and so one of the things that we’re thinking about is who should be the vision of this project as a whole. My ideal would not be to say it should be a Caribbean person, lives here their whole life, from one particular island and is enmeshed. But possibly someone who left and came back, or something like that, to have the insider and outsider perspective simultaneously. We did a show at the Queens Museum called Edge of Desire, which is about contemporary Indian art, and we didn’t choose the curator but the curator was chosen by the Asia Society, and was an Indian guy currently living in Australia. They felt that it was extremely important to find an Indian guy, who spoke Hindi and everything, who could travel around easily in India, but who wasn’t living there at this moment, both because there are all kinds of issues about who is included and who is not included, because if you’re sitting in a particular community there’s going to be all kinds of pressure because we know what it means to be in a show in New York etc. Its also so complex, so many different languages, maybe one person is not the answer. I just want to propose that as an alternative to saying it must be someone living here now.
Mariel Barrow- Member of the Audience
I think we have to look at the expanded view of the Caribbean and the Caribbean not being just a geographical location but a people that exist in so many different locations now and have grown their own Caribbean culture in those locations and so that diasporic community and that expanded community is very, very important in how we view things and how we put together our ideas of who we are. Not just from here but that person who is having the outside gaze so to speak. It’s the importance of the gaze and where it is coming from: is it coming from inside, and where is inside as compared to where is outside.
Clarion Charles
My question again, I’m still asking a question, what brought such a large number of persons here to discuss this matter? I would like to know.
Julián Zugazagoitía
I think first of all, why not? And the interest is that each of us in our institutional practices, deal with the Caribbean in one way or another. We are dealing with Caribbean people that are visitors, some of us engage with Latinos or people from the Caribbean on a regular basis. We are in a very Caribbean city, that is New York, and for us this is just an extension of our normal and current practices. The specificity of having dialogues in the region comes from the indispensable value for many of us who have one vision of the Caribbean, because of our own upbringing, one’s experience, and one of the things from the onset we recognise, is that as we’re talking of the notion of the Caribbean, it is not the same experience, vital experience from which each individual of us stand, whether as curators, art historians, artists and individuals, if you were born in Cuba, if you were born in New York from Cuban descent, if you were born in Jamaica or Trinidad. For many of us, it’s the first time in Trinidad, for many it has been regular visits to Trinidad. But to inform a project as complex and because of the many voices we want to hear and we want to engage, it is very important to experience, albeit for a short time, I mean we are here for five days and art curators will come back or continue the dialogue, but it is important to experience time. We believe, all of us, for instance to have roti yesterday, because it is part of the culture. It is telling you a lot of things and that is why we love the Internet and we will talk later on about the initiatives of what today’s technology to bring a virtual community, but there is nothing like being together, like answering this question. It is really important because it helps to even formulate what we’re doing. It is the human contact. There is nothing like that. And it is in this dialogue that we want just to bring layers of understanding to our project and layers of understanding to the complexity that we’re facing. So of course the being in the different regions informs and enriches our different perspectives and that’s the same reason we are here today. We might travel to different islands just because of the languages, the spices, the flavours, and the geography, has inflections in everything we do: in how we perceive the world. And that is what we want to be part of. We want to be part of a very extended dialogue in which we can have those experiences and also I think one of the very important things about a project like this, we do assume it is going to fragmentary, we do assume that any exhibition, any project begins and ends and has a catalogue. And the catalogue will have a cover and a counter cover and in between a lot of words and that will be it. But beyond that, we truly believe that this project can be a catalyst and we assume that just being together here, the people who also travelled and made time to come together are creating links. So it is just as important for the future project that this is a catalyst and that people start getting together, knowing each other in presence. The virtual community that can then also spring from this, the kind of blogging that can continue, are going to be part of the legacy of a project like this and I think the legacy of a project is individual involvement. We are surprised at the number of people who flocked to this opportunity today of having more artists engaged in this dialogue. But it is about asking those questions, of engaging in the conversation, so I think individually all of us will then continue these conversations with each of us that we have met. That is, I hope an attempt to clarify why we are all here and so happy to be also hosted by CCA7, which is also a very important thing to point out. We are here in large part also because there is also a structure and a structure that has been working for the last ten years in making sure that there is a presence of Trinidadian art and building bridges and communities, so that this is one more of the bridges that Charlotte and all her team would have seen happen over the years. So I think that something very important for the Caribbean is structures and what, from my own perspective, what I’ve always witnessed and I’m from Mexico, I became aware of Latin America as I lived in Paris. Sometimes you need a vantage point of view and I discovered that because of how a lot of systems have been in place, it is very difficult to know what the neighbour is doing, but it is always very easy to know what Paris, or what London or what New York is doing. So it is about also creating these networks of exchange of information and as many of us realize, it’s sometimes more difficult to come to an island from another island than coming form Houston or Atlanta or Miami. Those are the things that are the challenges of a project like this but at the same time, if it were not for those challenges, this project would not be as meaningful as it is starting to be.
Tom Finkelpearl
I had a question which Chris and I were talking about which is related to seeing the rather difficult lecture last night, of Vidia Naipaul, and it had to do with humour. I think that I was reminded of the fact that, an Indian filmmaker living in New York right now, did a film about laughing clubs in India, where there is not enough laughter according to some people. I mean critical of India. This is about Indian laughter issues. This has to do with the outsider view also. To me I’m very uneasy with calling people African and Indian. The idea that there is that division here makes me uneasy. That’s not the terminology I’m used to. My question is, is there a humour gap as well as a perceived racial gap between Trinidad? And I’m not asking for an answer to that kind of question. But even to have that question you had to have come here to understand political divisions and racial divisions and understand the political parties. We don’t know enough in New York to even begin to ask that question. That’s something I want to talk to people in private about. That’s one of my mini sub lessons of why we had to come and learn more even though we’re not the curators. I’m not going to be involved curatorially at all in this project but as a Director of the institution and Valerie and I and you guys, we’re the people who still have some responsibility of putting some kind of overall structure to the project.
Day 2 Session 3
Yolanda Wood
I think it’s very important to know that we can simplify this problem. This exhibition is really, very important. This exhibition is a challenge, but it’s impossible to simplify this problem because the Caribbean that you know in New York is not our Caribbean, it’s New York Caribbean. I have a book, I was imbursed in New York and the first problem that we find here is the fragmentation of the groups, race and citizens in New York. We have Haitian, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, hold on, Jamaicans as well. I remember when I was studying in New York, once you study the problematics of Caribbean people, Caribbean artists in New York and it was very difficult for me because in El Barrio Museum that has a very good work really I respect the work that the Museum does. You find a lot of information about the Hispanic Caribbean but it really was the vision of all the people in the Spanish Caribbean region but it is not the vision of all the region, and the same for the others. In Harlem I find some good information about black art about the people of Africa and Haiti but not really this concept. I think it’s very important, the reunion, the integration of three big and very important museums. I think it’s very, very important for this project. Is it possible to extend the concept of the Caribbean and it was really important for all. It is a possibility to expand the concept of the Caribbean, and it is important for all, for the US and the Caribbean. The challenge is, just what is the space of the Caribbean people? What is this region where we live, where we are? I think it is important to know that the Caribbean is a human concept. When you go to the geographical maps, you know the Caribbean Sea, but you don’t find the Caribbean region. You think that all the countries with coastlines facing towards the Caribbean Sea are Caribbean? In this case, all the islands and all the territories that are in the continent but this geography that the Caribbean is a human concept is built for us, this concept, for our history.When Columbus and others arrived, the Caribbean was only an ideological world and a world where the people who lived in one of the different territories of the Caribbean.With time the Caribbean is another thing and now it’s a cultural, human and historical concept if it is really a human concept. We need to accept that this concept changes with historical times. It’s not the same in the first years of the 20th centuries of the years today.Maybe before, maybe no.
When I think of the diaspora problem of the 20th century, its not the same problem of the first moments in the 20th century. At that moment the diaspora that formed in the Caribbean region was the people, the poor people who left to find work, to find better conditions and we have one very important immigration in Costa Rica, the Panama Canal. It’s very important to understand this complexity of this diaspora, the first diaspora of the Caribbean and now we have people in all of these territories; Marcus Garvey, El Corrido and many popular cultural things are very important in all these territories: Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Bahamians and Haitians – all. But, in this moment the most important diaspora before the U.S. was Cuba and Puerto Rico – why?
Because we are so near to the United States. I spoke about the map, we are so near and we were both occupied, Puerto Rico and Cuba in 1898. We were similar in many other ways. Other countries of the Caribbean don’t have a big diaspora at this moment until the U.S.. Before the 1950’s this situation changed because the economic situation in the region became worse. Many people come: Haitian, Jamaican, Cuban but this is a new diaspora after the Second World War. This diaspora is a problem not only for the US, but for England and France –‘las antiguas metropolis’.Is the recent diaspora different? We need to think about that, to understand why this process of the presence of the diaspora is different in a different moment of history. In this way, we are now in the moment of connecting these diasporas with the Caribbean because they are the recent diasporas and in the case of Cuba, it’s different, but this is not the time to speak about that. But, the situation in general in the Caribbean, these diasporas are connecting with countries of the Caribbean and some countries have more important incomes from money that arrives for the diaspora, and this diaspora supports many countries in the region. It’s difficult but we need to think about that in this way but the Caribbean is a large space, this space has changed in the history and situation of the diaspora.
Trinidadian female speaker:
I am a history/social studies teacher, born and raised here but I spent 13 years in New York City working. I know El Barrio because I visited there taking my Latino students there as a reward for good behaviour and also to let them stop quarrelling amongst themselves. They don’t want the Mexican girl sitting next to them, the ‘Dominicana’ girl saying she wants to go out with a Puerto Rican boy but her mother said no. I took them and I got out a video. I forget the name of the guy showing the whole Indian connection. The pre-Columbian connection. Everything we do is pre-Columbian. Isn’t that amazing? Always before or after Columbus in the Caribbean. Anyhow, there is a change, I agree with Yolanda in our Caribbean concept but I want to comment on what John said, is it John? No, Tom! I’m very distressed about this African and Indian business. Because, as I said, I stayed out of the country for 13 years and I came home every year and each year I would get a little more shocked – ‘What is this, what is this going on?’ Culturally, I think it’s OK, because both groups of people have become more aware of their roots. Roots. I am proud to be of African origin but this business about African and Indian is really stressing me out. It stressed me out so badly I bought a sari and I wear the sari and I don’t care who looks at me. It’s straight East Indian. I think we are really right but they wear something similar in the Sudan. It looks like a sari that I see those women coming out in, so yes, the change is here. Yes, but I wish it could be a positive change and I am not an artist but I like art and I wish that some of our local Trinidadian artists here could produce some work that would show that we are still united. We are still the same, we are more aware of our culture definitely and on August 1st that Emancipation Day parade is growing and growing and growing. More and more people are wearing African wear. People would say before, ‘not me and this African thing’, all classes and I know my Indian friends are playing more Indian music from India. I know that for sure. But, that wasn’t so before.(there’s an audience response but no audio)
I’m very happy to hear that, I’m dougla too, African and Indian. I want someone to bring that back to our consciousness.
Tirzo Martha:
I would like to comment on that very important point, for me because in Curaçao, for years, centuries, we’ve been known as the ‘children of Curaçao’. Why? Because we have been like this big pot where everybody mingled. Nobody is 100% Indian or 100% black – everybody is mixed, so at a certain point, right now we are being confronted with these groups on the islands that are trying to separate the people right now. So, in Curaçao there’s this phenomenon to separate people by calling them Afro-Curaçao and Indian and Dutch etc. so the problem is that this has consequences that go further than what the people are doing: e.g. at our institute people are tending now to say, these groups are saying, that it’s very dangerous to have an institution funded by Europeans because it will tend to go the European way and that’s not true, because I believe and we all believe in the institution it’s about your people, it’s about the commitment that you have with your land, with your land, with your island, with the people that have been developing themselves there. So I believe also that there is something very dangerous in the Caribbean, that people are very afraid to lose our traditional roots learnt from history. Roots telling us from where we come. So, it’s something we’ve been confronted with on the island and it’s something it’s very important that we must try as much as possible to remove from the Caribbean system. It’s always about that. It’s not like 4 or 5 generations ago my grandparents are white people and Indian, so for me, I’m still a child from the island. The most important thing is to be a human being: it’s not important to be an African or an Indian, it’s important to be a Caribbean person.
Valerie Smith:
We have time for one burning question and then we should really close up.
A new voice American female:
Sometimes we forget to say some things that are so obvious, like you know we are all breathing air in the room, but when you talk about the disjuncture between feeling good about your roots and then what politicians do to manipulate voters. We have to remember that we are all in a particular political moment and this inter-dependence and inter-connection that we are all talking about also relates to dependency, certainly in this region, to the bigger economic and political powers, the U.S. and Europe and so on and that in itself is feeling huge anxieties about big shifts that are happening because of where we are historically and with capitalism and with the environment. So, I mean we are all truly inter-dependent or intra-dependent and again that would be another topic that we haven’t talked about directly because it also relates to, if there’s going to be global climate change and you have rising sea levels, you know, you have huge issues that bear on what will be happening in the fairly near future. That’s about burning carbon……
(lots of laughter)
Valerie Smith:
I just want to thank everyone for their comments. They were noted copiously by us and we are grateful for everything that you’ve said and I hope that we can continue this conversation. I know we will continue this conversation outside this room and beyond for quite some time so we look forward to more feedback from you in the future, so thank you very much and thank you again to The Reed Foundation for making this possible.
Krista Thompson
I would just like to thank Charlotte and Melanie both for inviting me today but also more importantly, for setting up this kind of base and this important place where art being produced both here and throughout the Caribbean is being documented, so when I was working on this book, this became really an important kind of grounding place for me in terms of the work I was doing here, so I just appreciate and acknowledge their efforts and the importance of it in terms of writing Caribbean art histories. So, the book, I’d say I almost didn’t start out writing this book but I was interested in visual culture and art in the Caribbean. And, in thinking about images and how we even imagine the Caribbean and I kept coming up with a similar set of icons: the notion of the beach, the notion of the palm tree and I became fascinated with where some of these images of what I call ‘a Caribbean picturesque’ came from. I felt almost to do work as an art historian I needed to understand the history of those images and so this was really an attempt for me to try to go and to understand the historical production of these images and not only to understand them in their historical context but really to talk about their wider implications in continued notions of the Caribbean society and so in doing this work, my research took me to a crucial moment, in the late 19the century and this is when tourism industry started within the region and they started in three places: in The Bahamas, Jamaica and Cuba and of course, in the late 19th century with the kind of war for independence in Cuba, they dropped out of the initial race to establish themselves as a tourism destination. But there’s a constant awareness of each other’s campaigns their failures and successes and the images they are using. So, my book really focuses on The Bahamas and Jamaica as two of these places where these images first came from and they almost multiply and come to inform how other places started to kind of imagine and really to market themselves. So, in doing research on this period I went back and realised that the colonial government on both islands at that time set out very consciously to create an ideal of the Caribbean and they had to do it because there were these real fears about the Caribbean. They were seen as places of death and disease and there was a real imperative to change this representation and to change it actively and in a lot of instances they actually went out and contracted photographers, many of whom were British or American to create this new type of representation of the Caribbean. So the book is really looking primarily at the people who are actually contracted either by the colonial government by different hotel businesses e.g. The United Fruit Company becomes really central in tourism in Jamaica and they have a whole set of images that they start producing. And so I really went back to this place and started looking at these representations and if at this moment, they’re interested in creating this ideal of the Caribbean, what icons did they choose? How do we come to understand what they were trying to do with them? I should say too that these representations travelled in a few ways. I think it’s kind of appropriate to have a projector here because one of the primary means through which these representations circulated was through something called a lantern lamp lecture particularly a photographer by the name of James Johnston in Jamaica, literally travelled for almost 15 years around London, Canada and the U.S. and he is one of the most prominent of these lantern lecturers and what they would do is actually go in a hall and project these images that they had taken and really to spin this ideal of the Caribbean and I was able to find some of the lecture notes that they used to accompany different representations, to get a sense of how they were using the image at this historical moment. So what I found was that there was a real interest in this notion of tropical nature in the late 19th century and a part of that was really informed by naturalism and in the photograph from a traveller’s album in the collection by David Boxer in Jamaica we see a photograph by A Duprely and Sons of these coconut palms dated 1890 and what I want to point out is this kind of dual ‘taking’ of Jamaica: the interest in a naturalist collection of foliage that is seen to represent the tropic and then the ‘taking’ through the camera of another part of the landscape that’s seen to represent tropical nature. So at this time they start really marketing the place as these islands that you can come to observe and take away these forms of tropical foliage. This is just a type of example of the types of representations that were created in the Bahamas. This is a Silk Cotton tree and is probably the most frequently occurring icon in Nassau and then again it created this sense of the exotic, erotic tropical nature, not quite erotic, so we see like this child that’s used in there to emphasize the scale of nature in the Tropics. I should point out too, how rare this tree was within the landscape of Nassau, but it becomes really representative of what the island looked like. This is an image by James Johnston, the lantern lecturer that I was talking about and this is his scene ‘On the Rio Cobre’ from 1903 and this is one of the images he used in his lecture and then he created a book called ‘Jamaica, the New Riviera’ and he also produced a large amount of postcard representations and so they were various means through which these images circulated, but what I found and is interesting in particular. This was driven him by looking at this image and reading what Johnston wrote about the image is that he talked about the coconut trees and he mentioned that, wow doesn’t look like the foliage you see in Kew Gardens in the Botanical Gardens in England? And it’s such an apt description because it’s precisely where these forms of tropical vegetation that became such an important part of the landscaping system, the plantation system in the Caribbean, that these images precisely did come from these places, these centres within the metropolis, within the empire, and in fact in many parts of Jamaica and the Caribbean were indicative of this. Many parts of the landscape were completely grazed to the ground in order to start plantation systems and so there’s a way then that the landscape is filled with representations that come from these places and then the photographs. You know, looking at these photographs and saying, wow, isn’t this picturesque and beautiful? It’s like, well, you kind of created it. It’s this way of almost looking at the colonial authority’s own transformation of the landscape and then aesthetizing it and making it representative of the place. And so parts of the landscape that had been transplanted because important, as I said, United Fruit Company becomes really central in Jamaica’s tourism industry and so the photographs of banana plantations, even though they occupy a percentage that I talk about in the book. Something like less than 7% of the landscape because something like 50 or 75% of the images that start circulating about Jamaica.
Again, it’s this way of like saying, ‘Wow, look at this beautiful landscape of the Caribbean and we just happen to have created it’! These images have become interesting in all of these ways and this is another representation from Nassau created by William Henry Jackson, a photographer who was brought there by Henry Flagler to create representations of his hotel interests in The Bahamas. This is the Royal Victoria Gardens photograph which was created in 1900 and so in here we see another representation of a tropical landscape within the space of the islands, so the hotel landscapes themselves then become important photographic sites and so within a few years of being built, the Silk Cotton trees were put in – they boasted that they had over 100 different species of tropical vegetation and I don’t know if you can see the stand that kind of goes up into the Silk Cotton tree on the right side of the image, it was literally a viewing post, just to show how fascinated people were with observing tropical nature. You could go there and you could stand within the grounds that had been created and could view all of this nature from within the hotel grounds. But I should just stress that although there this kind of interest in representations of tropical nature – nature had to be ordered. It had to be tropical and kind of exotic, but it couldn’t be dangerous and so in a lot of these representations there’s a premium on photographs are tropical and kind of recognisable symbols of the Tropics, but a Tropics that’s ordered and tamed. So we’re looking at Victoria Avenue in Nassau which I think is an interesting representation of this ordered tropical nature and this is a postcard which was created in the 1920’s by a Bahamian photographer who was trained by a New York photographer originally hired by the colonial government in the late 19th century and in this image too, it’s interesting to think of the iconography of the plantation –the palm trees which were used in many contexts to serve as markers of the boundaries of the plantation, and, of course, the plantation is the symbol of taming nature – nature made productive. Just to give you a sense of how people figured in this. There was this sense of interest in order to demonstrate just how tropical the islands were. There was this premium on picturing the market woman and the market woman was this symbol of abundant nature and there was so many fruits, that these people were just lining the streets, but again the symbol of almost making the people come to stand in as a symbol of the abundant, tropical landscape that they wanted to promote as a means of tourism. The image that we are looking at here is an A. Dupley and Sons postcard which dates from 1905’Going to Market with Yams and Canes on Constance Spring Road’. What’s really interesting to me in terms of this interest in tropical nature is that there’s this imperative not only to make the Caribbean islands seem tropical but to make them seem unmodern and pre-modern and as I was discussing earlier, as many scholars have argued that the Caribbean was modern first. It was almost a precursor to industrialization that took place in European countries and so this kind of emphasis on rendering the Caribbean as an un-modern space is particularly ironic. So we’re looking at two postcards dating from 1907-1914, by Cleary and Elliot, a photographer firm from Jamaica.
DAY 2 SESSION 4
WRAP UP SESSION
Tom Finkelpearl:
The words that kept coming up over and over again: complexity, complicating notions of modernity, destabilization, fragmentation, complexity, complexity, complexity….You know what I was saying before about if you were to try to map the Caribbean in a complex way it would be an overwhelming, endless task so what we have to do is to try to isolate something that might be helpful both to audiences in New York, to the artists in the institutions here but also creating avenues of communication amongst…you know..I have the experience, the quintessential Caribbean experience…it is very hard to get between the islands…I want to go to the Dominican Republic on the way home and I have to fly through Miami which is a long way out of the way so that whatever can be done and the islands themselves which are already creating isolation because of the physical boundaries of the water and then further boundaries by the political boundaries, the linguistic boundaries and everything else so I think that something that can be done early on might be to try to unify things a little bit by working with existing structures, working through existing websites etc to create communication systems amongst the people who did or didn’t participate in this form. Then in the long run creating a project which can’t possibly mirror the complexity of this situation. The other thing I wanted to mention..I was sort of interested in the whole idea of humour…there were a couple of things that came up that people found funny which aren’t going to sound funny now because I am saying they are funny in advance….but Jamaica the new Riviera people laughed when you said it and someone said it has been said in France or in the Francophone Caribbean that if you want to understand how to get together, to work in a racially complex society look to the Caribbean for answers and people laughed. Why did people laugh to those instances and it had to do with a kind of discontinuity of it being possible to have a “Riviera” in Jamaica whatever the Riviera means in terms of luxury, or class etc and the idea that in fact the Caribbean does have stuff to teach to France which is completely true of course but it is still somehow…people find there is humour in it and there are different kinds of humour obviously….there’s abusive and negative humour, there’s the humour of the beautifully turned phrase, or just expressing a desire…..
Florence Alexis:
Let me say a few words…I just recalled the occasion – Edouard Glissant wrote an open letter to France 2 years ago during the riots in the suburbs of France with a large majority from my point of view of black kids were revolting and burning cars – things France had never experienced before. The sentence was more or less “Whenever France will be ready to deal with its own diversity we, as Caribbean people, we are ready to teach how how to deal with it” and it was more provocative than funny in spirit from my point of view. It was a collective letter, it was signed by Edouard Glissant but also by many of those creoliste writers and not only them but academics, teachers from Martinique and Guadeloupe and this is a very good way to go back because I wanted to make a point on the complexity issue which is I wish the institutions you are representing should not get lost too much because when Edouard Glissant and the French Caribbean writers and thinkers are making that point, it is a way of saying ‘Just give us a chance to tell you what’s going on and give us a chance just to show you how we are doing in these last centuries in order to survive’.
This question of complexity, as soon as we have acknowledged it and we know that it exists, it’s there, and there’s no way we will be able to simplify complexity…let’s be serious, we cannot do that because that might be more complex to simplify it. The idea, from my point of view, to take into account that complexity is at least not to ask you as institutions to take that complexity in charge. This is not the purpose of your project, the purpose of your project is to give space to artists, to show us that complexity which is something completely different… So if the projects in their diversity in the different disciplines they will present are open and flexible enough to allow certain types of artists of different times and places and styles, movements to express themselves then the diversity will be there – you don’t need to look for it and you don’t need to be frightened by it. You don’t have to carry that, we have been doing that for centuries, we know how to do it and if you allow us to bring it to you we will bring you that complexity and that diversity. You just have to show it in other words, I don’t know if I am clear enough so I don’t think we should spend a lot of time on it because that complexity is in every work we have around us, just let it come to you, let it joint the different projects you are going to develop.
Gabriela Rangel:
I agree with you. I would also like to propose something that for me is most important as someone from the Caribbean from outside the curatorial team but involved in this discussion. I think there is a lack of information in the several Caribbeans and the several cultural contexts that we are discussing here and the catalogue will be a crucial tool for everybody and that is what lasts and my proposal to you since you are very interested in the O and W methodology, it to create platforms according to topics in different sides of the Caribbean or to follow a cultural geography kind of division that depends on the needs of he three institutions involved in the project, but I think these platforms could create very important documents that will fulfill the catalogue. Thank you.
Julián Zugazagoitía:
I think that one of the many comments that I want to keep which was said to me almost in secret as I was trying to hide away to make some phone calls and an artist in residence here came to me …Embah….he came and said :You know what, I do not understand why in the questions and answers people did not acknowledge that we’re saying what will happen before the show, what will happen after the show? And why it was not acknowledged that this even of itself is a success of the project itself” and somehow it is like “Yes, of course” we have it as part of the project and the process. It’s in itself a success to be together, flying from so many different places, people able to spare the time and I know many of you have incredibly busy agendas and you made the effort to spare some time to be here to share in the generous way you have been doing…and that I think has to be recognized and I think this is the beginning. This could not have happened 10 years ago here, this place did not exist and there is a lot of things that, just the fact that we all are here together means that this is a success of the project that we have been discussing for five years. It has a lot of elements, it’s like a big puzzle that little by little comes together, it is a question of timing somehow. I think we leave today with more elements, I see a progression and transition from the first meeting in New York that was also very open forum, from today’s. I think we are zeroing on some ideas, some concepts. Some of the elements that were seen as very relevant in our last meeting all of a sudden have been dispelled. The notion of how we are going to deal with the chronologies, the themes and everything, I think, is still something that we are debating and I want to dispel one of the things, at least this is a working assumption, is that each institution will not have one section. It’s not like the English speaking Caribbean will go to Studio Museum in Harlem, Spanish speaking Caribbean will go to El Museo del Barrio and Tom will get whatever is left you know…But I just want to end on that, it’s just that…the next steps what are we going to be doing much as we did with the last one, take a step back now as we are flying back, a lot of these conversations will be transcribed and typed, we will share all of this, we will put a list of all the emails of everybody and send it again to everybody, so everybody will have the contacts and we are not swapping cards relentlessly as we go to the airport ..and feel free after going back home you write something, a paragraph, an idea, send it and we will send it again collectively. So that this can trigger ideas. So we are building bridges one step at a time and successfully.
Florence Alexis:
Can I add a few words? I would like to say that Yolanda’s contribution to the discussion has been absolutely precious and I really enjoyed listening to you and sharing those ideas with you. I was wondering if Yolanda could provide us with new themes that have not appeared yet and probably you could do that better than anyone else here to complete the chronology which you have developed for the moment which we know is a first pattern which can evolve. A list of themes which could probably for some of them could meet the chronology, some of them may challenge the chronology but it would be very helpful for us to start to really think about the project itself , the possibilities of exhibitions, dealing with the different periods of time, I think that would be absolutely helpful if we could all of us receive something like that.
Julián Zugazagotía:
Let me add something and Yolanda maybe you would want to answer whether you would take on …but this is what we have invited each and every one of you to do to react to this white paper and I think we would want to give each and every one of you the opportunity to react in the next month to that white paper again now that we have had this conversation because again it is a working process and out of this meeting there are a lot of ideas but why don’t we give ourselves the next month and it can be each and ever one of you after all this, it can be a paragraph, two ideas, something that you think would be meaningful so we can all...besides the transcripts that we will all be sharing…If you go back home with one or two ideas that you want to share, we will collect it and send it back so that it continues a dialogue.
Gabriela Rangel:
I agree with you but it would also be productive if we create a reader, each of us, a reader of the Caribbean of the references that we think are crucial to pool ideas to break this chronological approach and I think Yolanda will be fundamental for this but with specific readings, specific texts.
Valerie Smith: This is a practical question. I am wondering because usually what happens is everything goes to Deborah and she has to pull this whole thing together..is it that difficult that we establish some kind of website now. How expensive would it be, that we can put these things on, your comments, just so that Deborah doesn’t…it’s just too much and if we are really going to move forward…
Deborah Cullen: …a centralized place, we were talking about creating a bibliography..
Valerie Smith: It should be a place outside of our institutions that we can all go to..
Tom Finkelpearl: It can be done
Florence Alexis: We can host on our portal it if you are interested
Valerie Smith: Then maybe we should do that, this is a practical question, we have to make a decision but in a way we have to resolve this because if we leave here it won’t happen
Jane Rubin:
At the very least the two things that need to be on there, the textonomy, what we call things is very critical because of the language issues...A basic one just for texts, whether or not it gets transferred to an editor and then another basic one for names of artists, alphabetically, period. And I think you should eliminate the country of origin, just name dates if they are relevant and what you think is the country because I think if you try to do anything more elaborate for the moment...the texts issues is really fascinating because I had always known there was a big disconnect between different intellectual traditions but I hadn’t realized it was as serious as it is. And actually I would also like to thank Yolanda because in a way she has created a third textual, I mean a fourth textual tradition. I am not familiar at all with the Dutch literature but I think that the kind of work that she has done in syllabus building and defining the Caribbean from pre-Colombian materials is, as far as I know, it is unique. So one of the great privileges of my involvement with this area was Charlotte sending me a copy of your basic syllabus. What you teach as a curriculum which I am sure is much more developed at this point. But nobody else teaches I quite that way anywhere and I am not quite sure if there are actual literature essays that somebody could talk about the various texts that are relevant in the French intellectual, Spanish intellectual and English intellectual traditions and I was just stunned to get a text yesterday on the dialogue on the economic thought in the English speaking Caribbean just within the past 40 to 50 years. It is enormous but they have basically been talking to each other and they teach a course, because that was one of the things I checked yesterday, called Caribbean Civilisation at the University of the West Indies which is a required course and I have no idea what its content is. So quite apart from the names of the artists, the names of the kind of literary texts, I think a kind of directory of syllabus or curriculums that are going on that have the words that we have been working with would be really, really helpful. I was also really completely surprised about all these exhibitions that everybody knew about that nobody had ever seen or heard of…but it can’t be complicated. But every once in a while somebody has to come in and edit and that is a whole separate logistic.
Charlotte Elias:
Actually what you’re talking about is something we’ve been doing, that has been our main mission from the start and it is difficult to say that we are anywhere close to where we need to be after 10 years because I think we have been more programme driven but recently when we have re-thought our programmes and our existence within this context, this space and of course the challenges of running a space like this in a country like this one, one of the things we have recommitted ourselves to is the development of databases and resources that can be accessed which is actually how Melanie came to work with us and got tied into the organization of this meeting. But certainly all of the projects that have gone before, it seems like so much research has gone into each one these exhibitions, they always came to us, we always gave them as many contacts and answers and sent them to see these curators, these writers and look for these texts and you know we just keep doing it. But there needs to be somewhere in which that work can be put down and then all of us in doing the same things can form that into a resource. I mean across the board. Now we are certainly committed to doing that, that is our main mission right now. Alongside the Residency Programme it is really taking that and moving it forward so artists listings and database of artists throughout the region, the curators, the institutions, where are the art schools, where are the important texts, the exhibitions that have gone on in the past, projects in the works throughout the islands, important thesis document that have never been seen within the islands, the research was done while it was here. So if that means engaging as part of our Residency Programme, more researchers in residence, more curators in residence and historians coming down and spending time then that is also something that could be considered but certainly the resource that we are talking about goes far beyond he commitment of an exhibition. It is not just a resource for that but it is a resource that has always been so lacking and just for those of us in the room if we were to put our heads down to the already existing databases and networks and just volumes of information that we have all contributed to and know about, I mean it would be huge, but it hasn’t been done.
Veerle Poupeye:
I just want to make a footnote to the remarks made about the need to look at foundational texts, there is an excellent book, I think it was published about two years ago edited by Nigel Bolland, it’s called The Emergence of Caribbean Civilisation and it looks at the sort of foundational texts and Caribbean though from the Hispanic, Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean and it is an absolutely amazing resource. A lot of the texts pertain directly or indirectly to the arts. It was published by Ian Randall in Kingston. I’m not sure how widely available it is on Amazon and so on but it is an absolutely fabulous all in one resource on Caribbean thought and I highly recommend it.
Jane Rubin:
I just want to add something because I was at UWI (University of West Indies) yesterday just checking on the Centre for Caribbean Thought and what was going on. First of all I am not sure within other traditions that Caribbean thought in the French tradition or, actually, the Spanish literary tradition, whether it has resonance and that was actually my first question after I had finished taking all these notes. The Centre for Caribbean Thought and Ian Randall, they are very active and they are about to become even more active with, I am not sure what sort of agendas because they have just had a conference last week at Brown on new directions for Caribbean civilization. All the words we have been talking about. I have been trying to get a report on exactly what went on but the underpinnings for that are not only the Centre for Caribbean Thought at The University of the West Indies which is focused actually on the English speaking Caribbean irrespective of the Randall text but Brown University and The University of Cape Town and I don’t know much more about it than that. They are planning to publish two or three more volumes either through UWI Press or Ian Randall. I saw the outside of the reader but I haven’t looked at it …
Does it have everything?
everything that this person thinks is everything but Ian Randall is a commercial press I mean you can simply get that, that’s really easy. Whether or not it would be translated or not is a whole other thing.
Sarah Clunis: I know for reasons of diplomacy we have not really mentioned artists or art in itself because I guess then we would have to mention different artists’ names and stuff like that. I am still concerned with the art object and I want to respond to Florence’s comment because I feel like I myself in my own research have often come to projects like this one or my dissertation or articles whatever with the idea of something I wanted to say that comes from history or philosophy or all of my knowledge of the Caribbean or art in general and have been just really humbled by the art object itself, and what it tells me, and the information that it gives me and that interaction with the object and the information that not only the object gives me but the interaction with the artists gives me has led me on different paths to look at Caribbean art that I would never have embarked on if I had not really, really looked at the object. And I think this is such a successful interaction what has happened here but I still want to if we have a blog or some kind of forum for discussion, I still think the art image and the art object and the artist are important VOICE INTERJECTS : Central…Central, because we have our ideas of what we want to say but we are scholars and things are going on up here and what we really want to communicate is the way in which the art object or the performance communicates all of these ideas. So I think we need to humble ourselves and look at the art object for the information and see where that takes us and that’s pretty much it.
Gabriela Rangel: I was going to say the same thing, I agree with you, but also I may add that we shouldn’t limit ourselves in this reader to include art, art history or critical material but also to include, for example, manifestos or film information or literary sources because I think is a very important person to take into account if we are talking about the Hispanic Caribbean or, in the film field, we have a lot of materials that we have to take into consideration so that’s why I talk about a multi-disciplinary approach and I agree with you maybe for example we should look at a film and then from there we should depart, the discussion will be triggered.
Virginia Pérez Ratton:
I want to support that also because the first time I came to the Caribbean to do research, that was a little over ten years ago I couldn’t find any catalogues or history books except for a few books on modern sculpture or something so I bought all the literature I could find, so I bought novels and poetry and from there I started to know something about the Caribbean. I would also like to include, before I forget, there was a seminar in Austin in 1999, called Representing Latin American and Latino Art in the United States, which could apply very well to representing Caribbean art in the United States because there is Caribbean in the United States and we spoke a lot about looking for frameworks and we arrived at the conclusion that the best framework was when there was none because the framework changes at the same time that you research. And the time goes by and the framework seems to be changing and modifying itself and I don’t know if there is any publication available on that but maybe the archives in Austin could have the transcriptions or something but it was a very, very deep thought seminar that could be very useful.
Yolanda Wood:
I think now all the ideas in the basic orientation of our work is very, very important. I think this exhibition, this project, maybe needs to have an honourable committee integrate the important personalities of the literature, music of different manifestations of the Caribbean culture. I think, for example, Rex Nettleford, Maryse Conde, Chamoiseau, Glissant, Derek Walcott, I think some persons, maybe others, that can send the ideas for us about what does he think is the Caribbean today. We need maybe the ideas about the personalities that can I don’t know why Sullivan he write the text he is not here… (Other voice:…he couldn’t come, he didn’t send someone which I found amazing) okay, maybe it will be interesting to inform, to know to have some participations of an honourable committee that send ideas that will question some of the ideas because they are the people with big recognizance in the Caribbean and outside the Caribbean and maybe for us it will be interesting to exchange with the personalities about the Caribbean today, their ideas about the more interesting problems about 20th century in the Caribbean because I think all the ideas about that it will be important for this project. I think it is important to have personalities that send us some ideas; maybe a conference, seminars to hear, to discuss, to have the possibility to exchange. I think that may be important. We have the bibliography about the Caribbean art. In each island we have many publications; in Haiti, in Dominican Republic, in Cuba. In Curacao they have a new book about the art in Aruba and Curacao and in Trinidad the work that Charlotte does here is incredible. That information exists. I think the problem is that all of us are not specialized in that, we need the people that know and maybe it is important that Jenny explain to us about Curacao art, we don’t know that, we need to know. Maybe the Bahamas. What was interesting about this presentation today? What is this period, this moment, this chronological period is important in Jamaica? It will be a question of why if we have really here…this is practice for Jamaican art…I think it is important to have the specialized opinions and maybe we can do it with a seminar. I know it is very important to have the ideas, the basic ideas for us, for all the people, where we go, what we want, what is the future for this project, but at the same time we need step by step the specialization work in this way and I think to invite some persons, the names I said, maybe others, it will be very interesting. What does Rex Nettleford think about the 20th century in the Caribbean, it will be very interesting for all….
Gabriela Rangel: But don’t you think this is a place for a catalogue?
Yolanda Wood:
No, I think it would be useful for us because the first responsibility of this exhibition is our responsibility. We need to know the big, more important, I am absolutely in agreement with her, the complexity of the region is not the problem for the institutions but we cannot ignore at the same time the more important problems of the 20th century in the region. And all that it is possible to have in this way I think it is important. Why not speak with Rex Nettleford? Or Maryse Conde…why not?
Chris Cozier:
Not that I am unsympathetic to what you’re saying Yolanda it is just that there is a way in which these signature figures are very available in terms of the vast amount of content they have generated. In the production of, let’s say, Small Axe when it first started we were very aware that we came after the New World Quarterly, after Savacou, after a range of journals proliferating across the islands and, subsequently, there is the Carifesta culture which, I don’t want to sound too cynical about it, but I mean one of the strange things was that I remember many years ago interviewing Nicole Awai in New York and one of the most interesting things she said to me in that interview is that when she left the Caribbean she felt she was trained to be the perfect listener and that very much identifies about the last three generations of practitioners in many of the Anglophone islands. I don’t know if you all have he same crisis in the other territories because you have a signature generation of the 40’s and 50’s who, in a sense, through mechanisms like Carifesta and other things come every four years and just add an extra paragraph, or shift the introduction and shift the epilogue of a kind of speech about the Caribbean, about diversity, hybridity, and many of the topics that we have covered in this discussion. So the question is the planning of a contemporary project, to what degree do you get the listeners involved? Because in a way after three or four generations of listeners there may be some thoughts that have yet to be documented. I personally as a visual arts practitioner have a deep belief that is perhaps one of the things that has made contemporary practice in the visual arts one of the most interesting because, in essence, it is not so much about a list of names or chronology as we had discussed or bodies of work per se. One of the things that has really interested me, somebody used the word fluidity and that’s word that has been crossing my mind since I have been listening to the debate. It seems there are three things at stake: fluidity, flexibility and topicality because in a way when you negotiate with institutions and you negotiate with the kind of monumentality of institutions…this is where I coalesce with you Yolanda, and Florence, this notion of complexity is something we live with and we constantly negotiate but when it intersects with institutional spaces something of those three entities becomes threatened and the work moves into a zone of almost becoming neutered. You’re talking about decentralizing, about commodifying and objectifying so there is a kind of way in which, in the space we’re in, when we do intersect with these institutions what aspects of those three elements become sacrificed. I was thinking a lot about this artist his name is…I went to a show by Kerry James Marshall at the Chicago Institute a couple of years ago in which he had set up a kind of proposal in one section…I am not saying that this is a template but what intrigued me about it was the way in which he negotiated with the canon. In other words we have had a century of Caribbean artists, you know Wifredo Lam saw himself as a Trojan horse, this one saw himself as that, so Kerry James Marshall takes on Donald Judd, he takes on this and that through his own perspective as an African American. Then he takes on the notion of multi-disciplinary responses. He did comic books, he did this, he did that, then he talked about his political awareness in terms of the black experience in the United States and the Civil Rights Movement and so on and then, I think, in the fourth or fifth section of the show he said I like these five artists, these young artists and I am going to let them into my show. So he is talking now about collaborative enterprises and inclusivity so, in a way, a kind of theoretical position that the artist addresses he institution and into which he is moving without necessarily sacrificing the terms and conditions under which he or she may practise. In a similar way I think in this context there are a number of mechanisms, discourses that are operating so what we are really discussing is how do we intersect...I am not say that there are not things that we aspire to and need but the big question is, where do we meet? In essence while I do agree that there is a grand tradition in many of the territories there is also another circumstance that we found ourselves within where there has been thirty or forty years of people who just smile and listen. Moving between the two spaces, the hegemonic space of the Euro American narrative or Jansen and Hart and so on and then the internal nationalist and nation building narratives and there is a very interesting space somewhere in between that perhaps we need to think of. Sorry.
Jane Rubin:
I just want to talk about the cultural signifiers of the word ‘committee’ because I think there is serious difference in the people who are coming from the United States as to what that level of usefulness is. I have no idea what happens with committees in France anymore. I don’t really have that good an idea of what happens in Cuba other than an issue of approvals. But a committee in the United States is about something very different than information because basically the information that you would like is available and people should be approached with a very interesting strategy and I think that strategy could be worked out. But to create a committee at this point that basically uses prestigious intellectual names, it’s not so much the first four or five that everybody doesn’t agree on, but it’s the next five and the next five and before you know you are in a very big mess and you’ve boxed yourself in and you are sending a signal to groups that you do not even know about. So at this point I think that the list, however you want to describe it, whatever platform we decide of basically, the people that are very important to consider as part of this construct is a very good one. But to actually invite them to join a committee associated with the process and use their name as some kind of validation I think would be a really big mistake. I mean premature.
Yolanda Wood:
Excuse me. I don’t say you use the names of these people. Excuse me. It’s not that… I think that the possibility, to exchange, to consult with these people, it will
be very important and it is that that I said, I don’t think in Cuba, in other countries, that we use the personalities that I named, I say here Maryse Conde, Glissant and the others to use these persons. I didn’t say...not only in United States and everywhere it is not what you say. And in Cuba, it is not.
Virginia Pérez Ratton: I am just kind of worried, it’s 3.30 and we keep throwing in things to the forum and I know I am not the chair of this meeting but I think I would just like to express my concern that we will be closing the session in a half an hour or so because we still have a film to see and I think we should start talking about steps to take from here to the next meeting; if the next meeting is going to be inclusive or everybody or if it going to be a smaller group and what would be the methodology because I think there are certain things that have been said like the words that have been mentioned by Chris that I think are important and the object of art which I think is a major issue and taking these things and saying okay what are we going to do now. A website or a blog? Information, communication and analysis, and then start from there for the next meeting because I feel we are still talking about many things but not pinpointing it for something we can construct for the next meeting
Gabriela Rangel:
I was going to talk about that, the pragmatics of the meeting, the wrap up. But I propose the reader precisely to include those people that you mentioned because they are mainly thinkers and some of them they are philosophers so they are not specialized. They build real abstractions so I think for pragmatical reasons I recommended a reader because a reader will encompass all the needs of this group and also will be a democratic tool for learning more about the region. I think this exhibition is not a specialized exhibition it is more a general approach to several problems that are characteristic of the Caribbean.
Tom Finkelpearl
I think in terms of making concrete plans right now the idea was really to step back, we have all had this long series of conversations, take two steps back and think it over more carefully amongst the participants but one of the things I waned to say about the bibliography or the reader is that if the list is too long it is not useful. And so I think if we can centralize some sort of information then it should be like an annotated short bibliography but not here are ten names…you have to say why it’s important.
Valerie Smith:
Tom, don’t worry about it. How are we going to do this? Who is going to take responsibility for it? I mean we have to solve that problem.
Julián Zugazagoitía
Let’s take the pressure off. I mean it is infrastructure, it is funding. We all struggle with the same things, whether it is New York or the Caribbean. Funding. Human resources and time, and they go hand in hand. So basically what I think we are agreeing upon is first of all that there should be an Internet, web based element in which we can continue this dialogue moving forward the agenda. It has been very well received the idea of a reader and I totally agree with Tom that a reader is as useful as how it is annotated and again even when we have been referring to books we’re saying this came to me like this and so I think it has to be very open ended, open source, maybe a web blog. I just came from a conference on museums on the web and sharing information so I think there are easy ways to do this but we have to think it through so that it is really accessible to all, that it is very easily indexed and it grows and it stays. One of the things to think about from the onset is where does this information live so that it is sustainable. So that all of a sudden a company or someone that wanted to host it generously goes out of business, there is no funding and it disappears. So there are two many issues to be able to decide or there is not any institution who can say I have all the capacity technologically, humanly and that we’re going to do it and it’s very easy for us.
Tom Finkelpearl:
The other thing I want to mention is it has to be managed. No website manages itself. So that’s a staff and a money issue. So there is no way right now we can say okay we are going to commit a staff member to do it without thinking it over very carefully but it is, no matter how open it is it still has to be managed. But we should do it right?
Julián Zugazagoitía:
The principles are there. From here to the next meeting, again a question of funding, we hope that the next meeting will happen with the help of some friends that we might be having dinner with tonight and that would then happen in the French speaking Caribbean. So we are fund-raising and developing at the same time. What we are asking each and every one of you is definitely give yourself this month to put something together. What we can say at this same is that we can centralize the emails. If in this month we can have a meeting about how we can develop a website, even if it’s a blog, but let’s bless the fact that we all have emails so centralize that and we will do it the old way we will send it again and that takes the pressure off. So if you want to develop your reader in this next month, if Yolanda wants to react to the white paper and some of the very interesting comments you have been providing and for instance Veerle we were talking about your essay, send it to us electronically and we can immediately send it to everybody. So it is interactive, let’s not take momentum off because we have not sorted out exactly what is the technological way while we all have today he big privilege of having email. Let’s just use that as the going factor and in the meantime we will resolve it. And we have been advancing it every time so that would be my last word, never to lose faith that this process is advancing.
Veerle Poupeye:
It goes back to what Sarah says, our role is really to provide you with resources, with access, with ideas but ultimately it is your privilege, your responsibility as organizing institutions to make the curatorial decisions that go with this exhibition. But I do think that you really need to see more of the art. I really think you need to send a team into the region to look at work, I think that is essential to the whole process of putting this exhibition together.
Julián Zugazagoitía: Don’t worry, Veerle. This exhibition is about art. So it will be taken into consideration. We didn’t want this particular forum to be discussing art
Charlotte Elias: But you saw a lot of stuff.
Julián Zugazagoitía:
We saw a lot of stuff but it wasn’t about sending it right now. This was not a curatorial trip and I distinguish very much when you have an exploratory curatorial trip and you only focus on the art and then you already have a framework of how to select. What we do want to have through all these conversations is a framework of discussions that will enable us to start looking at art in a different way. And when we go in an informed way so that, little by little, and as you said earlier, definitely the art talks to you and takes you into rooms that you had not explored and that’s what why we are all in the arts because there was one moment when something blew our mind and life was never the same after. But what you want to have is a certain kind of a canvas otherwise nothing is relevant. So I think that is what we are paving. I think after three days we are all tired, exhausted by discussing things, wanting to go see more art, maybe lie on the beach but rest assured …hey we are in the Caribbean… I have not seen the beach, some of you did go to the beach…this is the ultimate anti-climatic experience, not seeing the beach but I think this has been a major success. In many ways it has been so stimulating and having the layer of the one before it just adds. Now the engagement is going to be very dynamic in many ways so the conversation is just starting and we will be receiving things from you. We will be asking more questions, we will be soliciting at the different stages certain kinds of inputs and some will have to do with art specifically, and at one point we might ask what are your 10 favorite artists and why... Or why did you think this artist? But I don’t think we can sustain this big ideas thing for five more times, no. Rest assured we will be moving on.
Florence Alexis:
I just want to add, to respond to Yolanda’s concern and also to Jane. I did a very stupid job before coming here and I didn’t have any chance to show you but maybe next time. I did a stupid list of artists from the Caribbean from the past and from the present, including young, emerging artists. And I collected a few images for each of them. So this is the stupid job I’ve been doing two weeks before coming here. When I say stupid…we are always seeking for methodology but sometimes we have to go back to very simple methodology and my method is lists, I believe in lists. My whole career was built on lists, and I have done wonderful things, some failures, but some wonderful things just starting with list. So I thought, I don’t know what you were expecting exactly, I did this wonderful list of people with a few images and also for Yolanda’s concern I also did a list of important people for me in the Caribbean, who could be alive or dead, but who have contributed to this diversity, complexity, call it what you want, from the different islands because I had the chance to circulate among all this Caribbean Mediterranee as my father used to call it. So I am ready to share that and this is very concrete and whoever wants to copy me will be more than welcome to collect and maybe compose a document, a Power Point document, which will help us to start somewhere. The next thing I would like to say if you still think about doing something in the French Caribbean I would be more than happy to help you to do that including in terms of funding because that , as you now, is part of my profession and experience and I know how difficult it is. So I am thinking about the difficulties you are going to face to build that project and if I can help I would be really happy to do that. So as I told you before in a private conversation we have few opportunities, Haiti might be difficult these days, mainly for security problems. I am sure we would be more than welcome by Haitian artists and the Haitian community there but I still think it might be difficult. But the local government of Guadeloupe which is composed of very good friends of mine who have a very strong involvement with Caribbean culture would be good partners and excellent hosts for us. So now we have to work in terms of schedule and all that and of course, budget but if I can help I would do it with pleasure.
Tom Finkelpearl:
Okay, I haven’t yet thanked our hosts, thank you guys so much. And I haven’t yet thanked publicly Jane and The Reed Foundation who made it all possible.
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One of the gorgeous parade floats in the famous Batalla de Flores
Meeting in Curaçao at Kas di Kultura
Pages
Curatorial Team in Barranquilla
One of the gorgeous parade floats in the famous Batalla de Flores
WE NEED YOUR INPUT
Want to add some information to this blog? Caribbean Crossroads is interested in bibliographies, scholarly essays, suggestions for artists (both historical and contemporary), suggestions for collections to be mined for objects, and ideas related to interpreting the Caribbean and its visual culture. If you have information you'd like to share, please email us at admin@caribbeancrossroads.org.
Curatorial team in Curaçao
Meeting in Curaçao at Kas di Kultura
Institutions we like
- (CARIB) The Caribbean Association for Resource, Information & Building
- Americas Society
- Aruba Arts Community
- Barbados Arts Council Gallery
- Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies
- David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
- El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR)
- El Museo del Barrio
- EL MUSEO NAVAL DE EL CARIBE
- Gallery Alma Blou
- http://arubarts.ning.com/
- Instituto di Cultura Aruba
- Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Panama (MAC)
- Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
- Museo de Arte de Ponce
- Museo de Arte Moderno de Barranquilla
- Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO)
- Museo de Historia, Antropologia y Arte
- Museo del Hombre Dominicano Santo Domingo
- Museo del oro
- Museo Nacional de Colombia
- Museum of Latin American Art
- National Cultural Foundation Barbados
- Queens Museum of Art
- Studio Museum in Harlem
- The Haitian Art Collection at Bryant University
- The National Art Gallery Committee, Barbados
- The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB)
- The National Gallery of Jamaica
- Vassar Haiti Project
Places We Like
- Alice Yard
- Alliance of Dominican American Visual Artists
- Art Bemao
- Atis Rezistans
- Boricua Culture
- Centro León
- Gens de la caraibe
- Ghetto Biennale
- Haitian Art Company
- Instituto Buena Bista
- Instituto Buena Bista
- Inter Americas
- Landuis Bloemhof
- MUSEE / GALERIE D'ART NADER
- Médiathèque Caraïbe
- Parque Cultural del Caribe
- popstudios
- Sociedad de Amigos del Museo Afro Antillano de Panamá
- The Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago
- The Hub
- Wakaman Project
Exhibitions We Like
- 8 Bienal de Arte, Panama 2008
- Arnaldo Roche: Brotherhood / Hermandad
- Cuban Exhibition: Unbroken Ties
- Ghetto Biennale
- Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art
- Landings3, Sala Temporal María Asensio vda. León
- LITERATI: From the Page to the Stage
- None of the Above (Real Art Ways, Hartford CT)
- None of the Above: Contemporary Works by Puerto Rican Artists (El Museo del Arte del Puerto Rico)
- Surrounded by Water: Expressions of Freedom and Isolation in Contemporary Cuban Art
- “Saving Grace: A Celebration of Haitian Art,” Affirmation Arts
Websites We Like
- Anthurium
- Art Jamaica
- Artzpub
- Avisca Caribbean Art
- Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters
- Caribbean Review of Books
- Caribbean Review Weblog
- Da Wire
- Draconian Switch
- El Box Score
- El-Status.com
- http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php
- Paramaribo SPAN
- Petrine Archer: Art History, News and Reviews
- Platano Verde
- Repeating Islands
- Small Axe
- Small Axe (A Caribbean Platform for criticism)
WELCOME!
El Museo del Barrio's galleries are currently featuring a collaborative project organized with the New York Historical Society. The exhibition focuses on the relationship between New York City and the Spanish-speaking world over the past 300 years. Join us through January 9, 2011 for this wonderful show!