Vocabularies Of Visual Memory

Tejpal S. Ajji, Jon Soske & Alissa Trotz in conversation

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 20:47:31 +0000

[ Apache Indian, "Arranged Marriage," music video stills, 1992. Courtesy of Universal Music. ]

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters brought together eight artists whose work is situated at an intersection of African and South Asian history, politics, or culture. These encounters occur in a variety of forms and locations: Trinidad’s Carnival; a South African ghetto; the music of Black Britain; a family’s history of migration from East Africa; the colonial monuments of a historic slave port; a vial of perfume; and the actual speaking voice of an artist.

The eight artists work in a variety of different national and transnational contexts, including South Africa, Kenya, Trinidad, England, and Canada. However, each of their works engages one of the most contradictory legacies of European colonialism. Over the course of centuries, Africa and South Asia have been drawn together through Indian Ocean trade networks, systems of forced labour (like slavery and indenture), anti-colonial political struggle, and post-colonial migrations to Northern metropoles. At the same time, colonial racism—and later anti-colonial nationalism—frequently reified the difference between “African” and “Indian.” South-South sought to envision new geographies of colonialism and its legacies, for example maps in which the imperial centre is displaced or moments when the Northern city becomes a site of transit and exchange between different regions of the South.

[ Louise Liliefeldt, "A Letter of Love,"; video still, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. ]

This exhibition was part of a year-long series of events organized by New College (at the University of Toronto) that brought together scholars, intellectuals, and activists from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean as well as their diasporas. South-South Encounters: Conversations across Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean hoped to transcend the often artificial divisions inherited from colonial racial categories, Cold War geopolitics, and state-sponsored multiculturalism that continue to render histories that cut across categories like “Africa” and “India” either derivative of some pre-established identity or completely invisible. By discussing the interrelations, entanglements, and divisions within the colonial and post-colonial worlds, South-South Encounters also attempted to move beyond a generalized notion of the “Global South” and raise questions about new social and political configurations taking shape after the failure of the Third World project.

South-South: Interruptions & Encounters ran from April 2 – May 19, 2009 at the Justina M. Barnike Gallery, Univerity of Toronto. It was curated by Tejpal. S. Ajji and Jon Soske and co-organized by the South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC). Participating artists included Omar Badsha, Allan deSouza, Brendan Fernandes, Marlon Griffith, Jamelie Hassan, Apache Indian, Louise Liliefeldt, and Hew Locke.

[ installation shot ]

Trotz: The South-South catalogue, and in particular the essays by Mark Sealey and Christopher Cozier, warns of the dangers of appropriation in the form of curatorial practices that neutralize and contain the political import of work from the “Global South” under the rubric of difference. For example, Mark poses the following very sharp critique and question: “It’s also important to note that globalization has resulted in a new category of artist: the professional ‘other’ who, casual as you like, will claim the position of being ‘post-race,’ ‘Afro-politan,’ or ‘altermodern’ depending, of course, on whatever curatorial opportunity presents itself. Chameleon-like practice has now taken centre stage. What is left of and on the margins?” How did we envision this project as a series of conversations where pathways/routes rather than cul-de-sacs/containment was the raison d’etre? Where relationality was foregrounded?

Ajji: As a strategy we choose not to commission new works from the artists (except from Louise Liliefeldt who produced A Letter of Love), rather acknowledging a set of existing projects, discussions, and similar trajectories between the artists and intersecting within the exhibition. The exhibition works were produced since the 1980s, although their own subject matter can be traced much earlier: the travelogues of an English colonialist documenting an East African translator inter-woven with a 20th century family history within deSouza’s narrative; the Indian- and Kenyan-“inflected” English accents more than two hundred years in the making in Fernandes’ video Foe (2003); the Hindu votive sculptures or Islamic tomb within Omar Badsha’s photographs.

[ Allan deSouza, "Bombay," carbon transfer wall text, variable dimensions, (exhibition dimensions, JMB Gallery, 366cm x 610cm), 2009. Courtesy of the artist - detail ]

While each work, in some way, examined an intersection of “Africa” and “India,” it was important to suggest a visual syntax between the works that could displace or interrupt the varying colonial, nationalist and other historical understandings of “African” and “Indian.” And for this to be experienced through the construction of exhibition—the phenomenon of each visitor building sequences of encounters between works and histories—working towards the dynamic relationality you speak of. The interactions between the works needed to be open, layered, even discordant.
Our initial floor plan curiously grouped artists in hubs proximate to the Atlantic Ocean/Caribbean and the Indian Ocean with some correlation to sites in the North. In the end, we opted for a series of juxtapositions (temporal, sonic, geographic, bodily) through multi-conditional objects, which often traversed or tied together widely divergent locations. Mark Sealy warned of the de-politicization of exhibitions of the “South” through overly broad gestures, overwriting localized and regional political situations. We tried to use the agentive role of each artwork to stand in as a global positioning marker, and the artist as an ambassador, for geographies that both traverse the nation state and—lingering outside our current maps –complicate any unitary construction of the South, revealing ruptures as well as unlikely intimacies.

Our strategy also consciously looked towards aesthetic practices outside the art industry and academia, such as the music videos and LP covers of Apache Indian’s “bhangramuffin.” This work registered the limit of inclusion ascribed by the “gallery,” questioned the rhetoric of inter-disciplinarity and foregrounded the failures of disciplined vision. We wanted to frustrate the patronizing gesture of elevating that which is outside art to the level of art, or subjugating it to the realm of ethnology. As the South-South panel series worked across a series of area specific debates, the exhibition worked through a series of intersecting aesthetic practices.

Trotz: This certainly raises the issue of the way in which visuality and space as conjoined analytics can enable thinking beyond the historicist (and linguistic) trap that obsessively returns to separate identities that are “always-already” in the making, and brings to mind the provocation at the end of the catalogue introduction: the suggestion that artistic practices can allow us to see certain new historical realities that we cannot yet name because of the historical grounding of our language in circumscribed discourses of race, culture, diaspora, and nation (“allied terms” that often simply stand in for each other). Is this the radical potential that art offers in this context? At the same time, I think that the South-South project as a whole also tried to engage with how space itself is non-innocent, implicated in these compartmentalized representations of race, culture, diaspora, nation, that it does not stand outside of these historical processes.

[ Omar Badsha, "Funeral, Cemetery, Brook," black and white photograph, 24cm x 30cm, 1980. Courtesy of the artist. ]

Soske: The first point that I would make is that the use of the term “site” allowed us to establish critical distance from the vocabulary of diaspora. Although writers like Paul Gilroy initially deployed this rubric to theorize a dialogic structure of identity shared–and contested–across enormous heterogeneities of historical, political, and cultural experience, this word has since flattened into another synonym for race. As a result, the problematic of identity often becomes the a priori theme around which historical or anthropological narratives are organized, reproducing the racial categories inherited from colonial governance and anti-colonial nationalism as the inevitable outcome of analysis. In the contexts that we were most interested in exploring (Kenya, Trinidad, Guyana, Black Britain, Natal), this framing leads to the thematization of the past in ethnic terms and generates a dangerous convergence between the terms of academic intellectual production and different forms of right-wing, communitarian nationalism.

It is, for example, common to see both artistic production and historical writing about Indian diasporas in East and Southern Africa in which the African majority scarcely exists. I would go so far as to argue that a certain tendency within diaspora studies adopts the epistemological standpoint of settler colonialism: it begins with the erasure of the historical “before” that always haunts and defines the present in much more complex and disturbing ways than can be captured by analyzing how a community is defined in relation to its “others.”

So how to get at that “before”? Influenced by the writings of people like Stuart Hall and Aisha Khan, we chose art works that explored sites of encounter—forms of entanglement, mixing, fusion, or interrelation that in certain respects are originary, preceding and continuing to exist within what later become clearly demarcated identities. We wanted to shift the focus from artistic embodiments of Indian or African identity to works that explored the spaces within which the borders between the “African” and “Indian” were simultaneously crystallized and interrupted. Consequently, we expanded our understanding of site to include moments of encounter ranging from the streets of parades of Carnival to the materiality of an artist’s voice.

[ Brendan Fernandes, "Foe," - video still, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Diaz Contemporary (Toronto). ]

We were arguing that the aesthetics of these encounters could generate new appreciations of both local spaces and broader geographies. It is absolutely true that such locations must be understood as equally “constructed” and historical as racial categories. However, one of the most striking dimensions of space is that the mode of its production and reproduction operates through different mechanisms than the institutions regulating discourses, leading to possibility of highly visible disjunctions. In other words, the regimes of truth at work within discourse and the production of spaces can sometimes come into conflict. This argument suggests that we can use artistic practices (strategies of the visual production, performance, or conceptualism) to interrogate–even extend–our current theoretical understandings: not because of a privileged relationship of sight to the real, but due to the different materiality of the two domains.

[ Bint el Sudan, perform bottle courtesy of Jamelie Hassan, acquired c.1978 ]

Ajji: The “thematics of relationality,” as manner of thinking through connections within the exhibition, is useful for considering how the sites Jon mentioned converge and confound the expectations of the terms “African” and “Indian” encoded within the visual and aural conditions of each piece. Through disjunctive elements between works (such as the multiple intricate components of Jamelie Hassan’s Slave Letter (1983) to the rhythmic captivation and repulsion collocated in Louise Liliefeldt’s video A Letter of Love (2009) and registering a work’s temporal situation (a vial of perfume originally produced since 1920s, Black Britain in the early 90s, Grey Street of the 1980s), we offered a series of subtle arrangements between works and throughout the exhibition space: the physicality of text and materiality language (Jamelie Hassan, Allan deSouza, Omar Badsha, Brendan Fernandes, Apache Indian), the ironies of embodiment and composure (Apache Indian, Marlon Griffith, Louise Liliefeldt), the performance of authenticity (Brendan Fernandes, Louise Liliefeldt), and commercial flows indexed through material goods and cityscapes (Hew Locke, Omar Badsha). The phenomenon of moving through the exhibition space constructs and imagines the possibility of the artwork connecting a series of political and social conditions throughout history. This “time-travel” is the exhibition’s offering, which helps trace itineraries less traveled or which text edits out.

Trotz: Another important lesson of South-South has to do with de-centering Toronto. I am thinking of anthropologist Sidney Mintz, who in a memorial lecture given over a decade ago made the point in relation to the Caribbean that it was here that ‘the world’ became a modern concept. In other words, the kinds of South-South circuits we wanted to track offered genealogies, clues to other paths travelled. I am always struck at how Toronto names itself as the multicultural city par excellence, because frankly what is celebrated here has such a longer history in the Caribbean, for example. It’s nothing new. Naming it as new is a form of violence to these other histories and geographies.

[ Hew Locke, "Edward VII (Restoration series)," C-type photograph mounted on aluminum, MDF, and Formica with metal and plastic items affixed to front, 183cm x 122cm x 15cm, 2006 ]

As referenced in your introduction to the catalogue, we were acutely aware of what at times seemed ironic: staging a South-South dialogue and encounter in the ‘North’. We can come at this in a number of ways: the question of the diasporic (expressed here for us for instance in the fact that so many of the cultural workers who participated in the exhibition live or travel regularly across metropolitan cities or countries, or live in major cities even in the South); the way Hew Locke’s layerings force one to confront empire materially and metaphorically; and the various circuits that produce the ‘here’ that we occupy. I think we recognized fairly early on that South-South could never only be about privileging conversations that relate to these spaces in isolation from the North, but about tracking the kinds of unexpected questions that emerge when we follow these less travelled itineraries.

How did foregrounding the problem of location require us to confront curatorial practice in Toronto? What kinds of questions are posed by this city space in a context where the exhibition could so easily have fit under a multicultural rubric in which pockets of difference are celebrated and managed while the mainstream remains relatively untouched? Toronto is perhaps one of the metropolitan sites where this staging was really in danger of getting read in a particularly Eurocentric way. This is in hindsight, but perhaps it underscored the relevance of precisely such a challenge, and therefore the importance of doing this in this city?

Soske: Toronto is remarkable not only for the size and sheer plurality of its diasporic populations (which is by now a something of a marketing cliché), but the different ways that they have made use of public space and the numerous histories that operate in the visual field. There are large sections of the city that feel like literal extensions, to take one example, of Hong Kong: most people interact in Cantonese; stores signs, bank service, restaurants all employ Chinese characters; the iconography is drawn from current Chinese popular culture, etc. In a real sense, these districts are not recreations of an elsewhere, but appendages of Asia, points where China is refracted through Canada. In contrast, many of the stores in “Little India,” much of which is now owned by Urdu-speaking Pakistani immigrants, employ recognizably “Indian” symbols to attract tourists (many of which, like the Taj Mahal, simultaneously invoke a Mughal past) and consciously mobilize a Commonwealth, and even British colonial, heritage. Of course, part of the work carried out by the language and institutions of multiculturalism is the translation of such heterogeneity—of history, or aesthetics, of social strategy— into a manageable form of “diversity.”

[ Omar Badsha, "Tailor and Partner, Grey Street," black and white photograph, 24cm x 30cm, 1984. Courtesy of the artist. ]

With respects to contemporary art, the discourses of multiculturalism and diversity are profoundly constricting, crippling. They draw every discussion of visual practice back to the thematics of identity and authenticity, which consigns the artwork to the role of a convenient stage to act out an incredibly scripted drama regarding race and national identity. Any serious analysis of the work—and particularly art that subverts this script and poses more challenging political questions about capital, class, imperialism—is precluded. There is no room for wonder, surprise, intellectual difficulty, or beauty. The art leaves you completely unchanged.

The problem here is much more fundamental than liberal tokenism. It concerns the way in which Canadian nationalism is often narrated through a form of racial allegory: artists or curators are placed in the position of acting as ready-made illustrations of an “immigrant experience” or “minority experience” that is meaningful only in so far as it comes to symbolize a shared, multicultural patrimony. This framework also establishes an “official” oppositional space—the struggle for inclusion, incorporation, and visibility within institutions whose authority remains intact, even strengthened. At the same time, the lexicon of diversity allows many in the art world to dismiss those who work outside the incredibly narrow boundaries of Euro-American modernism as “identity politics” art–even when their work has relatively little to do with “identity” per se.

[ installation shot ]

I think one strategy that we employed in disrupting this narrative was to insist on a certain level of artistic quality—as unnerving as that word is to define—and even difficulty to the art works. Many of the pieces would not be immediately legible to the audience since the stakes of their artistic practices were situated within histories that cut across several cultures, regions, and historical periods. This was true even of some of the most popular and accessible forms included in the show: Apache Indian’s music videos (which work between Caribbean, British, and Punjabi musical styles and performance cultures) or Omar Badsha’s documentary photographs (which narrate the entangled histories of an apartheid city and everyday gestures resisting its mechanisms of dehumanization).

Other works—like Hassan’s “Slave Letter” or Locke’s pieces—were quite conceptually driven in how they deployed the specific histories and materiality of objects. While trying to bring together a collection of works that offered a number of different entry points to a range of audiences, we also chose pieces that would force viewers to grapple with history and geography otherwise. I think that we were fairly demanding of the viewer: he or she would have to work to understand the geographies traced by the show, and that process would take them elsewhere, someplace either unfamiliar or at least de-familiarized.

[ Marlon Griffith, "Hukaro," handmade Washi paper sculpture, variable dimensions, 2005-2009. Courtesy of the artist. ]

Ajji: While decentering Toronto through a critique of multiculturalism, one confronts not only the disregard of previous histories of intersections, such as in the Caribbean, but the occlusion of the histories within the multicultural rhetoric. Time starts when multiculturalism begins, and within the representational field, bodies and “diasporas” are registered as essentialized caricatures (managed as images of dress, cuisine, the aesthetics of language, etc.) and more-or-less confined to certain sections of the city.

The often location-derived nature of the artworks challenged this type of multicultural personification. The artists often act in or refer to a site (a public square in Gwangju, statuary in the city of Bristol, Cape Town through a newspaper) producing an artwork suffused with their own bodies (by the act of creating the work in situ, collecting objects from a geographic coordinate, or recording their presence within an image frame). In doing so, the works registered a series of political inscriptions—biography included (though not exclusively)—rendered through aesthetic modes which enabled us to conceive of an expanded notion of site, which move beyond the site of production or reference, entering the gallery as a set of “convergences.”

[ Marlon Griffith, "Runaway Reaction," performance with compressed foam and fabric costumes at the 7th Gwangju Biennial (Gwangju, Korea), 2008. Photograph by Akiko Ota. Courtesy of the artist. ]

To unpack these convergences, South-South attempted to address a broad curatorial framing dilemma: How to consciously provide a suitable companion text available in the exhibition space to supplement the exhibition experience. A text which acknowledged the socio-cartographic descriptions (spatial and linguistic) necessary to gain control over a space one has not visited, the often binding and conflicting nature of biography, and the semi-autonomous nature of the art objects.

The catalogue essay implicitly interrogated the requirements necessary to produce, offer or suggest meaning within an exhibition working is so many terrains. This to enliven the pedagogical value of the curatorial text—written from within a university—yet to avoid a didacticism negating the possibility of envisioning new configurations and constellations produced by the viewing and exhibition participation experience.

Soske: It is also important to discuss some of the modes of collaboration that we developed in this process. In many academic contexts, artists are invited to contribute for merely pedagogic or didactic purposes—or an art exhibition is attached to a conference in order to facilitate a broader public engagement. The visual remains adjunct, suspended in between evidence and illustration. Basically, the exhibition is where everyone goes to drink wine after they have finished the “serious” work of giving and listening to talks. Not only is there little serious engagement with the artwork, but the idea that the artwork or artists have major interventions to make in the broader intellectual discussions never really gets entertained.

From early on in our conversations about this project, we recognized that we wanted to develop a different model that drew on the specific forms of experience and knowing facilitated by art work. How does artistic production open new domains of South-South analysis? As artists increasingly mobilize strategies of archival research and ethnography, how might the use of different aesthetic strategies—especially an expanded engagement with new media—transform historical and social scientific research? How can we think differently with art?

These questions proved more far more challenging than any of us initially expected. The curators and historians/social scientists involved in this project started with very different ideas of rigor, how to address our audiences (even who they were), and what constituted effective work. Developing a shared analytic vocabulary involved series of incredibly intense and involved conversations over the course of a year and a half. Some of the obstacles to this type of project are institutionalized. On the one hand, many people within and outside the university still perceive the art gallery as a space for performing insider knowledge: the rituals, etiquette, and forms of socializing of the art industry remain enormously alienating, even for many people who want to find a way to engage with art.

Although a number of academics came to the show in the end and seriously grappled with the work, it required a substantial amount of individual outreach to break down some of these barriers. On the other hand, the majority of intellectuals outside of the art world do not possess a basic analytical lexicon or points of reference to talk about contemporary art: their idea of art remains mired in the concepts of like beauty and representation. As a result, they have little sense of the conceptual, theoretical, and socio-political stakes of contemporary art practice.

Ajji: Legibility is a concern when working in any interdisciplinary context. Political responsibility must be accompanied by acknowledging parallel traditions and include processes during which critical languages undergo translation—which make this a collective lexicon building task, and as we proposed, one which integrates the visual field. It is nonetheless critical for us to examine the convenient forms of lecture, panels, etc., and the affects these formats have on controlling the speed and efficiency of discourse. When the same formats get replicated, the academy over-produces a spectatorship model of learning which is less effective at mobilizing, at least among students, critical skills to grasp cross-area methodologies in forms outside the strictly discursive or inter-textual.

[ Brendan Fernandes, "Foe," video stills, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Diaz Contemporary (Toronto). ]

Brendan Fernandes’ workshop and the fourth year seminar led by Jon were productive solvents mediating the relationship between the South-South program, academy and exhibition. Fernandes expanding on his work Foe with a group of students from the University’s area studies and art programs. The two-day sessions explored the performative aspects of language and accent through a set of discussions, readings and screenings, after which, the group, as a “choir,” recited a passage of J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1987), ostensibly the script for Fernandes’ work, in the “Kenyan-,” “Indian-,” and “Canadian”-English accents derived from artist’s video. And Jon’s South-South Encounters class hosted a great traffic of artists, activists and theorist-academics (Louise Liliefeldt, Brendan Fernandes, Vijay Prashad, Omar Badsha), encouraging students from a range of area studies to engage with the broader panel series, screenings, and exhibition, while discussing academic and artistic material representing several intellectual traditions. The class was a proposition to the students to act on South-South, even as it interfaced within their biographies.

To add a contrasting narrative to the unresolved tension—between the visual/performative and discursive, we need to address some origins of this divide. Arts workers—artists, curators, art historians—in the academy are still managing the aftermath of avant-gardism of the early 20th century. The avant-garde(s) rigorously constituted new autonomy—from history, the academy most certainly, even from other movements in art, and envisioned almost as a total world-view (recall Futurism was not just about art rather how the whole world could be a new Futurist order). According to this dominating lineage of Western contemporary art, and all too significant one of separatism and invention, the question is also posed: how does art and curating [re]-integrate within the academy?

Trotz: It’s so imperative for us to think about intellectual production more widely, and I agree with Tej’s injunction to creatively challenge the divide between the academy and exhibition space. At the same time, we should be wary of romanticizing public space as if it is somehow necessarily oppositional (feminists know the dangers of this only too well), and to incorporate into our pedagogical approaches a sense that space is dynamic, processual, to see it as produced through various forms of practices that are always interested, always non-innocent. For me, the workshop and the class (which also brought undergraduate and graduate students together) offered the most potential for moving beyond spectatorship models. Certainly students in these sites were the only ones involved in a sustained way in all aspects of South-South programming this year, tracking bits and pieces from one space into another, mixing things up, in ways that were transformative for them and us.

Despite everything we accomplished, I’m not sure that area studies in its present configuration holds the potential to offer the kinds of lessons we’ve been raising (just consider its emergence in the US academy in relation to a foreign policy apparatus whose language was one of containment, or in the Canadian academy where it often gets tethered to the politics of multiculturalism). It also returns us to the question of location that was raised earlier (area studies, after all, is an invention of Euro-America), prompting perhaps a more modest reflection on what it was about these spaces that we wanted to critically intervene in, as opposed to thinking about a more grand destabilizing promise.

Perhaps the most we can say (and this is still a lot) was that in our encounters this year we started to unlearn – through practice – the various ways in which we insulate ‘areas’ from each other in the academy. It required us to confront the challenges ahead when we are already struggling for our survival as small and cash-strapped undergraduate programmes, because we live in a world in which such conversations across our institutional boundaries can be misread in our neoliberal present as fulfilling broader university mandates of efficiency, erasing the promise of what I think we were working towards.

The institutional barriers to decolonization are immense, and a potentially radical move can be co-opted and neutralised so swiftly. This was, after all, a one year experiment. The exhibit has gone, the seminars are archival material. There are no faculty lines, no curricular arrangements that can as yet speak in a sustained way to what it was we were trying to gesture towards. For me, this is why South-South was really less for us to romanticize– although we should never belittle the incredible labour of love that it represented –than the recognition of vulnerability and limit: not just of what we are struggling towards, but what we are up against.

Hurvin Anderson and Courtney J. Martin

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:09:19 +0000

On painterliness…

Barbershop: Afrosheen, 2007, oil on canvas, 208 x 250cm. Private Collection London. [fig.1]

Painterliness is a term that people throw around a lot, without qualifying or defining it on its own. In a formal sense, it is the space of light and shadow created by colour, rather than by form, in a composition.[1] As such, painterliness connotes a more complicated manner of painting that deviates from the rote rendering of lines. It is this connotation that can be expanded into the discussion of contemporary art and extended to define the visual qualities of other media. The first time that I saw Hurvin Anderson’s paintings, they were, in fact, not paintings but prints.

Technically, they were colour etchings from his first print portfolio, Nine Etchings (2005).Despite their process, they retained the expansive idea of painterliness for which he is known. The entire set appeared to be a riff on a view.

By this I mean that there seemed to be a central image (in this case an imposing two-story home set amidst a tropical vista) that occasioned several additional closer studies. One could call these studies derivatives or details. If this were literature, they might be called vignettes in recognition of their scale and close focus. I had the sense that each of these images was related, yet that relationship was neither obvious, nor was it necessary to the function of each of the individual prints. This is a situation that Anderson might describe as possibilities, and, more specifically, possibilities based on observation. In his work there are recurrent themes and objects that suggest common compositional tropes of relationship like narrative or serialization. But Anderson resists this and, instead, offers something that is far less tangible in the form of the possibility.

For over a decade, Hurvin Anderson has worked out a quietly vibrant painting language. What might at first seem contradictory (quiet and vibrant), Anderson realizes as a way to work with both abstraction and figuration. He accomplishes this in several ways. One way involves the use of fixed objects – like a house, a tennis court, or a security gate – within a loose landscape. In other works he subtracts the associations of an object (an advertisement, for example) while playing up its formal (angles, lines, precision) attributes, often through colour. These are effects that are both subduing (for the composition) and evocative (for the imagination of the viewer). So too is there a play between public and private in his renderings. This is particularly evident in his use of human figures, many of whom seem to be positioned in a balance between public revelation and private reflection.

Born in Birmingham, Britain, Hurvin Anderson studied painting at the Wimbledon School of Art and the Royal College of Art, both in London. Now resident in London for nearly two decades, Anderson has shown internationally. In 2005, he was the artist-in-residence at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Prior to that residency he had been invited to the Caribbean Contemporary Arts residency in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. This spring, we met during his most recent exhibition, Peter’s Series 2007- 2009, which was on view at Tate Britain. It has now travelled to the Studio Museum in Harlem.[2] In the fall, Anderson will be an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California. The following conversation took place over the spring and early summer in Anderson’s studio in London.

Barbershop: Afrosheen, 2007, oil on canvas, 208 x 250cm. Private Collection London.

CJM: How long did you work on the paintings for the Art Now exhibition at Tate Modern?

HA: Two years.

CJM: One of the things that I really liked about the series was that, as a viewer, I felt as if each one was very contained, yet visually and spatially, the paintings are related (fig. 1). Is there a narrative?

HA: I can see why you would think that but I wasn’t thinking about narrative at the time. I wanted to use this space in a painting and somehow protect the barber’s privacy and not enter into sentimentality.

CJM: Why did you feel like you were intruding?

HA: Because it was his home. I felt I was taking advantage somehow by painting it. But there was a history there that fascinated me. I wanted to keep the discussion going about painting it and how it works, but some of the work slips into something else and, then, it becomes a social thing.

CJM: Why are you worried about that?

HA: The Barber is Jamaican. Jamaican’s are very protective of their image, and it is the barber’s home. So felt I was invading his privacy.

CJM: Are these portraits?

HA: No, I see them as observations. I was trying to understand what is happening in this space; trying to work out my attraction to this space.

CJM: Is that why the show is hung that way, so that the viewer focuses on the figures in the later paintings?

HA: No, it was hung in the order that the paintings were made.

CJM: Compositionally, how would you describe Peter’s Series 2007 – 2009?

HA: I was aware I was removing objects, patterns, furniture, figures, striping things back. It could have been this romantic scene about “how things use to be”. I didn’t want that. I wanted a space that spoke back to you; for things to be, not quite right. It was a battle to be objective when you feel so subjective about things. In the previous work, The Barbershop Series, I wanted to make a space that talk to you. The imagery on the walls and mirrors were supposed to tell you something. This series became technical, which wasn’t something I had really considered. They became about these two elements.

CJM: What do you mean by two elements?

HA: Above the counter, where all of the cupboards are, there is a kind of flow to the way that everything happens with the objects. When it came to the chairs, the floor, and the cupboard, the painting seems to change pace, it becomes a different picture.

CJM: Would I be wrong to suggest that the switch between a horizontal and a vertical orientation between those two spaces reflects that?

HA: Maybe… I am aware of that in Barbershop: Short, Back and Side 2006 (fig. 2). The painting was made on the wall and laid flat on trestles. The posters, mirrors, counter, etc. were painted when the image was in the vertical position. The rest was painted while the painting was on the trestle. This seem to be the only way that I could make the transition between the two spaces

Barbershop: Short, Back and Side, 2006, oil on canvas 186 x 155 cm. Private Collection America. ( fig.2)

CJM: Was it similar to your study of Barbershop from 2007 (fig. 3)? Had you done that before?

HA: Yes, but this is the first time in a long time that I have made a large drawing. I consider it a painting; I do not see it as a drawing.

CJM: It there a difference for you between painting and drawing?

HA: Yes, Normally, I consider it a drawing, a kind of study. But because it was larger size, 175.4 x 145.5 cm, I realized that it felt more like a painting. If it were a drawing, I could stop anywhere. This had to be taken to a conclusion.

Barbershop, 2007, acrylic on paper, 34.4 x 27.8 cm. Private Collection London. ( fig 3)

CJM: If you were a viewer in this painting (fig. 2), he or she would be sitting and looking above the bar. The lower part would be your physical space in the painting. Is this why it is difficult to execute, because you come into the work at this angle?

HA: I see what you are saying. The fact that this would be the space you enter and occupy and have an interaction with, whereas the upper part is slightly more distant could be seen as the space of the imagination? Maybe. It could be that the perspective is slightly forced. I think that the drawing is slightly easier. I am always aware of painting when it comes to this point.

CJM: Can you tell me a bit about your palette?

HA: How I chose it? Well this one (fig. 2), I tried to take it [the colour] from a photograph.

CJM: Did you take the photograph yourself?

HA: Yes. Sometimes I take snaps: you are somewhere and you see something interesting. The camera is a kind of sketchbook. I took about six shots and collaged them back together to get a sense of the space. But the first paintings were based on the colour in the photograph. The idea was to bring the photographs into play. The posters in the photographs had a commentary… a story. There were posters for parties, football teams and newspaper cuttings. There were also flags. And then there were posters of pop stars and landscapes. It seemed to be a kind of conversation that went on within the images, as well as the place [the barbershop]. So, I was trying to bring those elements into the painting. I actually wanted to make a bigger painting.

CJM: How much bigger?

HA: I don’t know. I don’t know how much more that I could have made it, but I felt as though the figures needed to be seen.

I am getting around to discuss the colour, but it is kind of roundabout. As I have gone through each painting, I was trying to adapt the space to what I was already using. Here I wanted a red, white and blue environment.

CJM: On purpose? Given the connotation of those colours?

HA: Yeah. I went passed the barbershop again and saw the red, white, and blue colours on the outside. It was fascinating. As kids, you would avoid red, white, and blue in any way. Whereas in the barbershop, these guys seemed to embrace the British flag quite easily. It was a kind of shift, and the images were not vague. In this painting I wanted to become more figurative, more explicit, so that I could articulate the images. I wanted to manipulate the colour…to feel that the red, white and blue coordinated the whole composition. But I also wanted a kind of harshness as well. There is a way that these environments are not designed, not planned. There is some kind of planning in these barbershops, yes, but there is also an element of the unplanned. I like the idea of using the colour to explore this jarring, uncoordinated harshness. At the same time, the harshness is not complete in the painting. I think that it is perhaps more the flaw, this kind of awkwardness. Your high street designer salon would not look like this.

CJM: It is the visuality, and not the physicality, of the poster, that interests you?

HA: I suppose it is both. At the moment I am interested in becoming visual. I am still fascinated by the way that discussions go on within society. They show themselves within the community: in how things happen, in how we do things. How you have a barbershop, for example? To me it feels like there is this ongoing discussion. It may not be verbalized all of the time, but it is there.

I wanted this lack of coordination. But in the original image, I was more intrigued by the mirrors. It created a kind of kaleidoscope. Though there was stillness in the seating area, there was activity, movement, in the background. That kind of intrigued me.

CJM: Is movement a significant feature of your painting?

HA: Yes. In the interim years between leaving Wimbledon School of Art and going to the Royal College, I made several paintings about movement. These were paintings about ships and men making ships in the middle of London. I was intrigued by what it means visually when you hear of someone planning to return home. I wanted to make a representation of someone always planning by using the biblical analogy of Noah’s Ark. I was also trying to correct the perception that all Jamaicans came here on a boat. And actually all of my family came on a plane.

Ball Watching,1997, oil on canvas, 183 x 121 cm. Private Collection London. (fig 4)

CJM: What about the series of paintings and drawings (fig. 4) that depict a group of children in a field, are these also about movement?

HA: Yes, Ball Watching (fig. 4). It came from a photograph of me and some friends playing football in a park. On the odd occasion the ball would go into the pond. When you see the photograph there is a ball in the middle of the park. It was odd because it brought up so many other things for me. Like the idea of everyone waiting on the edge of the water. It looked like they were waiting for something, or waiting for something to happen. They also seemed to be going somewhere. Or wanting to be somewhere else, so there was the question of space and territory. I tried to re-imagine this image in a clichéd Caribbean landscape, but I made it very crude to make a statement.

CJM: When you stated before that you wanted to make a larger painting, I remember that your last show at Thomas Dane gallery included diptychs, like Double Grille, 2008 (fig. 5). Was this an attempt to make larger paintings?[3]

Double Grille, 2008, oil on canvas, 187 x 278.5 cm Private Collection London. (fig 5)

HA: No, I started to make things one size and they grew and extended out. I have an idea for making larger work. Larger work may not be just about a painting. It may be about a different way of working: How do I create this narrative? What’s going on with these posters? What’s happening with the story of these things? They are a kind of metaphor for me.

CJM: Metaphor for what?

HA: There is a kind of cultural aspiration for everything Caribbean that can be embodied in those images.

CJM: I noticed that in your exhibition at Tate Modern, you seem to latch onto an image and work out all of its possibilities by painting it in different ways. The exhibition was like watching several different possibilities take shape. Do you feel like you are trying to do that? Is there is a serial aspect to your process?

HA: I feel like it is more about possibilities. I have one idea and then I work through this idea, which would produce one, maybe two, paintings. It is like going back to a spot and seeing something different. I am constantly trying at get at something. I thought of it one way, then, no it is not quite like that. In life maybe you cannot do that, but this is a painting. You can go back. In life, you have one coherent way of working. The way that I paint often feels like I am jumping around, but within that I think that there is a consistency in what I paint. I am interested in this idea of the past in the present. The past is always around, the past as a way of discussing the future.

CJM: How do you know when you are done with an idea? When you get inside an image and you keep working though it? And, as you have said, you keep returning to it? Are you ever done with it?

HA: Yes, I am. It just stops. The painting actually feels tired and I start to think about something else. I really want to make something else, so I realize that I am coming to the end of that other thing. The idea of returning to an older idea would be quite difficult because it feels like it is loaded with another time. It almost feels like it is another composition, more has been resolved.

CJM: The first time I saw your work, I thought the barriers were a formal device; spatial props in the composition. But hearing more about them and seeing more of the ways that they function, I wonder if they are just that? Where do they come from?

HA: To return to Ball Watching (fig. 4). The barriers are partly a personal story that I am trying to take to another space…less a personal space. Maybe it is a political discussion. To get to the place where we played football, we had to cross mainline railway tracks and climb over a fence. When we crossed these tracks, time seemed to slow down. For some odd reason it never seemed like I had enough time to cross. So, I started to make this painting about that sensation of slowness. Then other people brought up ideas associated with crossing the tracks. Like in the States…

CJM: …it is a metaphor for moving from good to bad.

HA: Yes, or from one community to another. Or from rich to poor. It had these resonances as well.

CJM: Many of your paintings shift from fully representational to semi- abstract and fully abstract.

HA: How much do I give away? A lot of the times it is more about the image. I just wanted to see what this thing would look like.

I had not really acknowledged this. The play between the foreground and background that you mentioned or the spatial devices, such as how the grill functions between spaces. I was fascinated with re-imaging this space. I was interested in looking at the idea of stillness in a painting. I wanted these images that looked as though I had been there painting, but actually they are from a photograph.

CJM: Does acknowledging that you use a photograph matter to you?

HA: What can I do, the camera is here. I enjoy the way that you can glimpse somewhere else. I am still caught up in the baggage of what you are supposed to do. I have tried working from life, but the work become about the object or about the place.

I see the photograph as an assistant, something that helps you out. I have worked with one or two found images before but not many. Most of the time I take the photographs myself. But there is always a transition between the photograph and the painting; I have never worked straight from a photograph. I might collage several together. And I even painted onto the photograph from which Ball Watching (fig. 4) was taken. You might come to the studio and see a photograph, but from that photograph, I have made 20 drawings before I start to use it for a painting.

CJM: When you describe a photographic image, you seem to describe it from your memory, rather than the actual photograph.

HA: The photograph is almost a bi-product of the process. I am trying to remake a scene. For example, I was here, in London, and wanted to make a painting about a place in Birmingham that would transport you into another time. So, short of going back to Birmingham and taking a photograph, I had to collage other images. Essentially it is the actual place, and there is a similarity to what I remember. It is familiar. I am interested in things being on the edge of familiarity. The edge of what I know, or what I knew. Maybe that goes back to what you asked about abstraction.

CJM: Are you interested in that kind of realism?

HA: Not exactness, but I am interested in feeling like I know it.

CJM: It is fascinating to me that there is so much more detail in your depictions of architecture than in your human figures. Your portrait of the tennis court, Country Club Series: Chicken Wire,2008,(fig. 6) is one example. Do you have an interest in architecture?

Country Club Series: Chicken Wire, 2008, oil on canvas – 240 x 347 cm. Private Collection London ( fig 6 )

HA: In passing. I have never looked at it like that. It may have to do with my training, working with perspective.

CJM: Country Club Series: Chicken Wire (fig. 6) was one in a series of paintings that you completed after returning from Trinidad and the CCA7 residency in 2002. Did working in Trinidad affect your process in any way?

HA: There is still the perception of the Caribbean being one big place of relaxation. I am interested in the contradiction between the perception of the place and what is actually going there. So, yes, I went to Trinidad and it was personal. But that personal element left the work and it became something else. Though I did not paint at all while I was there (I took photographs, did some drawings and made water colours), I returned to London wanting to paint. There is a way that the light changed in the paintings, after I came back. I had to acknowledge the light in the Caribbean. When I returned to England it was very grey, but I was still physically adjusting to the light in Trinidad.

CJM: Is it noticeable to you that you don’t paint London? You paint Birmingham and other places that you’ve gone.

HA: I think that perhaps London is too close, too familiar. I need to paint things with a little bit of distance. It is hard to grapple with things that are too close.

[1] Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (London: G. Bell and Sons, ltd., 1932).

[2] Hurvin Anderson Peter’s Series 2007-2009 was on view at Tate Britain February 3-April 19, 2009 and at the Studio Museum in Harlem July 16 0 October 25, 2009.

[3] Anderson had a solo exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery, London. It was on view 25 November 2008- 10 January 2009.

Ebony G.Patterson and Oneika Russell

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:13:03 +0000

Mi Did Deh Deh

A candid conversation between two contemporary Jamaican artists.

Ebony G. Patterson - Untitled I (Khani+di Krew) From the Disciplez Series

In the first section Oneika Russell asks questions of Ebony G. Patterson. In the second section the roles are reversed.

OR: How did you transition from the earlier Meat series works towards the Vulvic works and then reaching to the new Dancehall-oriented/ focused works?

EGP: I was involved in events, you know going to parties and… I remember an interview and in that interview I had referenced ‘loving the vulgarness of bodies in Dancehall’ and the way bodies move in that space. I guess coming back more to the question, for me The Meat Series had a lot to do with beauty, and obviously before that when I was at Edna (Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts), the last few works that I did made reference to Jenny Saville. So I still had her as a very strong reference at that time when I was making The Meat Series and The Vulvic works.

I guess at that time I was still struggling to find my own language and make a connection between my own context, and hence I started examining Jamaican curse words and looking at the visceralness of those words and how they connect to the body in many ways. Again I was very interested in talking about beauty, the grotesque and the body as it related to that, but after doing that I did another series of work called Hybrids. They were all of these nippled forms that were suspended in very open white space, and it was at that time that I began to get quite decorative. I started using a bit of wallpaper here and there, like cutting out and removing elements from the wallpaper to decorate these nippled forms, and then, I don’t know, I kind of caught myself thinking, ‘Do I just wanna keep making the same set of things over and over and over again, to what avail?’ So I started thinking ‘How could I talk about beauty in another way, umm, that didn’t seem like it was, you know, piggy-backing on so many other things?’

I had read an article in The Gleaner about criminals using bleaching to elude the police, and it just seemed so fascinating to me. Just thinking about this idea that the police are out there looking for a dark-skinned man yet a brown-skinned man is out there walking about. I thought it was interesting to see how beauty or things that are associated with practices of beauty are now crossing to criminality, and just thinking more about the process of bleaching itself; thinking about how that related to my own interest.

This is something that is quite a grotesque practice, but then at the same time it’s also quite a creative practice, because of the various kinds of concoctions people will use to lighten their skin. It’s quite a grotesque practice but a grotesque practice used to beautify, that is accepted. Something that was very widely practiced by women is now being marginalised by men, who have become even more involved in the practice.

So, you know, all of that became very interesting and I thought, well, criminality, beauty; how do I even begin to visually merge these two things that, you know, immediately may not have such a strong correlation? Maybe painting gangsters would be the way, you know, like actual real-life Jamaican gangsters would be the way to go about it… and that’s how the project started.

Ebony G. Patterson – Ednz- Khani+ di Krew – Mixed Media Installation (detail) – 2009

OR: That’s very interesting, ’cause I wanted to ask the next question being about self. All your work that I am familiar with has been involved in elements concerning Ebony’s identity so I wanted to know how does the work involving Gangstaz and bleaching etc. What do you think this has to do with what you as an artist feel about self?

EP: I guess you’re right, I’ve always found one way or another to talk about self. I guess my grad school experience was really good for me because then I began to think, well, ok, so I’m gonna make work about me, who cares, you know. How can I open it up so it doesn’t become so narrow and the discussion becomes more open, and it’ll involve my viewer a lot more instead of me screaming at the person that this is about me, me, me, me, me? How can I allow that person to enter the work and place themselves within the work?

So I guess that’s why there was this slight departure from the work having this strong autobiographical take. I thought that it was more poignant for me to speak about these other things. Other things that are still of great interest to me because, as I did say, I am involved in Dancehall. You know I was just telling somebody, when I am not home and I know it’s time to make a trip home, a month before coming home I make sure I start surveying all the latest dances so I am up to scratch….

I guess in that way that’s how I see myself being involved in the work, because I feel like I have a very strong connection to dancehall, because it’s my generation’s music. At the same time I guess I also have concerns about certain discussions surrounding Dancehall and the kind of attention it has been getting. Not so much in a positive light but in the negative sphere, but at the same time I also feel like the position I have taken where the work is concerned… I guess I feel like I am presenting the contradictions within the community and asking people to take these things into consideration. I guess I see myself as some kind of Dancehall mediator or cultural mediator in some ways.

Just thinking about the contradictions, not just as it relates to Dancehall but as it relates to our wider society, because I do see Dancehall as this kind of waterhole that re-enforces and affirms certain kind of cultural beliefs, so I think it spins right back into the wider Jamaican context. I feel like it can be pinned into our wider context. Our own beliefs are not so specific to us as it relates to a conversation about gender as it relates to masculinity. You will find that a lot of the ideas that we have as a people here are rippled throughout the Black Diaspora and I’ve even seen a very strong correlation between Dancehall and Rap culture and Hip-Hop culture and the same kind of contradictions also exist there.

OR: So when we spoke earlier you mentioned doing heads and… what was the other name for them, it was heads and…?

EGP: It was just heads.

OR: Ok, but immediately because of painting and the context, they are read as portraits.

EGP: Portraits.

OR: I don’t think, well certainly myself, I can’t get away from associating them until I am educated on what the artist wanted, so what was the kind of engagement then with this idea of a head or a portrait in the work and also about the motifs around it.

EGP: Ok, well, one of the things that I was saying before that I was incredibly concerned about was, you know, people make these associations that this is about a particular person. And of course one of the obvious questions I would get, which is a very human question, is ‘Who is that?’ Who is this person? And I didn’t necessarily want it to be about Jim Brown who is living next door or, you know, Max who was living down the road from you, but rather I wanted people to kinda think about these images in a wider construct. That this could be somebody within your own family. So when choosing images I made sure that I chose somebody who was, as I said, Jamaican, they fell within a particular age range.

I think it’s really poignant to associate the practice with this kind of involvement with a young generation; with the youth populace. And they also had to be black, because I think in many ways–I think the problems or the shifts in masculinity isn’t happening for the little brown-skin person living in Jacks Hill, you know what I mean. I guess I am also interested in where these people come from too. What kind of socio-economic background they come from, because of course this kind of reconstructed idea of masculinity is happening in particular places. It is happening amongst people who come from a particular socio-economic background. In thinking about the work, that’s how I began to construct some of these ideas… What was the other part of the question?

OR: Motifs. There are motifs around the work that, I don’t know if I am right, but I have seen things that resemble fish.

EGP: Yeah it does, they are.

OR: And then there’s the doilies. Just talk about that for a bit.

EGP: So the fish, I mean obviously I am also playing with our cultural language or rather slang here in Jamaica but then at the same time I am also referencing I guess… art history as it relates to images that have a particular symbolism to them. So a fish is a feminine symbol and also here in Jamaica, when you use the word ‘fish’ in relation to somebody, it means that they are male and homosexual. So I am also playing up the language within the work, but then at the same time a fish is also a Christian symbol, which is also something that’s interesting that’s kind of thrown into the work.

The doily is also something that is quite easily associated with the domestic, which also has a wider discussion that is associated with feminism in the same way that wall paper does. So I am trying to use all of these things that have been historically related to the feminine and then using that again with the masculine that is being reshaped by these once considered very feminine things.

OR: And what about the question of visual memory, its vocabularies and the part that plays in your work?

EGP: In relation to the works that I am dealing with now from the Gangstaz for Life series, I guess I have always thought of them in relation to minstrelsy, a kind of reverse minstrelsy. Especially because the practice of skin bleaching is done widely in the Dancehall community but it was something that started with dancers. It also became this signature for people who were coming up with these creative moves within Dancehall space and I guess in some ways it becomes almost like a kind of masking. It’s hard for me not to think about minstrelsy, which happened up to during the 70’s with that kind of relationship. Blackface has always had a performative association and I guess in many ways Jamaica’s Whiteface has the same kind of association, but in some ways it’s not even related to a dialogue about race, but a dialogue about fashion.