Caroline (Bops) Sardine and Philip Nanton
Shades by Caroline “Bops” Sardine
“Every Island is Different – Every Island is the Same”
by Therese Hadchity
“Every Island is Different – Every Island is the Same” is presented as a collaboration between Caroline Sardine, or Bops (as she prefers), and Philip Nanton. Perhaps it is more precisely described as an ongoing relay, which started with Nantons lively interpretation of Bops’ painting ‘Sunnii-side-up’ for the group-exhibition “Words on Paintings” in 2008. Nanton followed up by inviting Bops, in turn, to design a cover for, and subsequently comment – in painting – on each of the mono- and dialogues he launched later that year as a CD titled ‘Island Voices’. It is a collaboration which, of course, prompts the viewer to ask whether the two artists have anything other than their Vincentian origins in common, and – if not, whether their interaction has been meaningful nonetheless.
Zemicon Gallery, Bridgetown, Barbados, March 15th – 31st 2009.
best boy
Though born into the tiny white minority of St. Vincent, Bops spent her early childhood blissfully unaware of social hierarchies and racial difference. The world was whole and an arm’s length away: through her window, she could see Young Island and the Grenadines, Kingstown was a few miles up the road, the peak of Soufriere somewhere in the distance. Soon enough, however, this idyll was invaded by the harsher realities of the external world, and growing up became equivalent to coping with a steady proliferation of challenges (looking white, but ‘feeling black’ being just one of the crowd). Ultimately she came to see ‘difference’ as the most constituent aspect of her identity. Like most people, Bops had no easy-won means of processing the daily onslaught of verbal, visual and emotional impressions – yet for her it was imperative to do so. At school, and to some extent even at art-school, she found herself butting her head against the conventions of spelling and ‘life-like’ drawing, until she at one point simply revolted and took a direct approach to both writing and picture-making: breaking rules became a means of appropriation, any style and any medium a vehicle for self-expression. Her irreverence paid off: after graduating from the Barbados Community College she was accepted into the Edna Manley College of Visual Arts in Jamaica and subsequently the Royal Academy in London. What emerged in the course of this education was a written vernacular, which has become somewhat of a Bops signature-style, and an arresting pictorial language, crafted through trial, error and dogged determination.
She has described this language, which draws equally on street-art, graffiti, imagination and the trenches of her own psyche, as a sort of ‘intuitive surrealism’.
A large part of Bops’ works were thus produced abroad, geographically and temporally removed from her beloved childhood (and) island, in environments she found bleak, restrictive, lonely and uncomfortable. Commencing with the tapestries she created for her graduation at the BCC these works were often (if not always recognizably) auto-biographical and marked by an insistently childlike, if darkly humorous, approach: paintings and constructions populated by monsters with jagged teeth, grotesquely overgrown children and infantile adults, make-shift structures, compromised anatomies. As she has pointed out, these works fed off her sense of displacement and longing: in London, found materials became new-found friends and reinvesting them with individual importance was an auto-reflective act of redemption – embellishing and transforming them into works of art gave her a sense of belonging in return.
Philip Nanton reading at Zemicon
Philip Nanton is known as an academic, writer, poet, dramatist and producer of several radio-documentaries. Vincentian by birth, he studied sociology in the U.K., where he remained until 1999, when he relocated to Barbados. Among his recent productions is ‘Remembering the Sea’, a commissioned commemoration of Frank Collymore (a likeminded ‘serious humorist’). Island Voices, however, was Nanton’s own initiative and is written and produced by him. The recording is directed by Robert Leyshon and the characters are interpreted by Kaye Foster, Laura-Lyn Hutchinson, Simon Alleyne, Patrick Foster and Philip Nanton himself.
Wake up call
The setting is an imaginary island-nation, ‘St. Christopher and the Barracudas’ (at once St. Vincent and any other small Caribbean island), and the album consists of 16 mono-and dialogues, each sketching one or a few ‘island-characters’ and relationships. The jargon is witty, perceptive and fast-paced: there is the taxi-driver with the tourist in the back-seat, a couple of police-constables, the garrulous radio-host, a cross-section of gossipy middle-class women, a coconut-vendor with a captive audience, the neurotic retiree, a nightclub owner from humble beginnings, a poet/jazz musician (Shake Keane) in his Brooklyn exile and an assortment of bus-drivers, passengers and labourers not altogether distinguishable from a further array of crafty small-time criminals. We are supposedly listening in on a preliminary audition with ‘Emmanuel ‘Fish-head’ deFreitas’ (retired Chief of Police), who nonetheless objects to a great deal of the language and proclaims most pieces useless and unsuitable for the ‘final’ recording!
A humorous intent combined with a cast of predominantly working-class characters could easily have steered the whole production towards the stereotypical. Yet, while Nanton’s attentiveness to social hierarchies (as determined by money, position and colour) gives away his sociological background, the real subject-matter is neither the social distinctions, nor the psychological nuances of each class or individual, but those of their language (it is no coincidence that Fish-head reacts so strongly to it!)
In the recordings, the actors use various Caribbean dialects, but above all Nanton has a great ear for the construction of language – its subtleties, loopholes and quantum leaps, as well as individual and cultural mannerisms ranging from the naïve to the ingenious. It is indeed through his sensitivity to the language and its subversive power, that Nanton averts the stereotypical. If the energy of the script sags a bit when it deals with middle-class characters (especially female), compared with those of the working-classes, it leaves the listener wondering whether this reflects a lesser investment on the part of the author, or if their comparative dullness is part of the characterization. It is certainly significant that the free-wheeling, creative and highly individualistic use of language at the bottom rung of the social ladder makes the middleclass look strait-jacketed, pale and – well, deprived – if only of cultural distinction.
ladies of the hieghts
So how does Bops, for whom the notion of ‘home’ always has been crucial, respond to Nanton’s electrified and satirical portrayal of a place so closely resembling her native St. Vincent? And how does a visual artist relate to a script which as its theme has – not only a spoken language, but one so heavily saturated with puns and playful ambiguity?
It will seem that Bops wisely has acknowledged the futility of trying to keep pace with Nanton’s rambling rap, or the intricacies of the relationships he outlines. Instead she has picked up on a particular phrase or concept in each piece (or, in a couple of instances, the overall description of one character). Where ‘Country’, for example, may refer to a certain form of music, but also to the bus as a metaphor for ‘nation’, Bops has wisely chosen to focus solely on the driver’s hilariously cross-cultural paraphernalia, and the result is that the painting can function independently of the corresponding sound-piece. This is generally the case, when she is able to substitute the narrative with a singular and striking image, as in, say, ‘Wake-up Call’, ‘Morning at the Library’ and ‘Man to Man’. ‘Shades’, in which she wittily identifies the coconut vendor with his product, is the most easily recognizable, whereas ‘Big Man’ actually transcends the self-satisfied and paranoid retiree of the script, and creates an alternative and perhaps even more interesting character in the form of a puffy and transparent white puppet.
Bops’ St. Christoper is every bit as colourful, obzoki and energetic as Nanton’s, but it is not a place invested with sentimentality or indeed very much of the almost sacred character the concept of home has occupied in her previous oeuvre. Whether this results from her loyalty to the task at hand, or whether it reveals that ‘home’ is not a geographical location at all, but the lost realm of childhood, is difficult to determine. If indeed the nature of the assignment has caused Bops to substitute the emotional intensity of former works with a different and more exterior sort of intensity, it is hardly surprising.
Country
More intriguing is the fact that although Nanton’s presence naturally reverberates throughout the album (and although one can argue that behind every portrait, there is a self-portrait), he seems to have taken pains to suppress it. It may not be all that hard to detect the ideological base of his sympathies (which rest not with individual personalities, but with certain sociological categories in receding order from the bottom of society and up), but the absence from his cast of someone in sociological proximity to Nanton himself is somehow conspicuous. The closest he gets is ‘Red Salt Fish’, where the author makes an inaudible appearance as the chronicler (one of these ‘university-people’) to whom the monologue is addressed.
There is, however, a discrete self-declaration of a different sort, which imparts a certain vulnerability on the writer: for a glimpse of Nanton without the protective shield of a character, we must turn to the two pieces, which – almost as if by design – are least likely to hold the listener’s attention: ‘Mood for Mugging’ and ‘Weather Reports Grenada’. The poems woven into these scripts are Nanton’s own (in one case meandering around Shake Keane’s ‘Angel Horn’). Chances are that, when you have forgotten the rest of the album, they stick.
Has the ‘relay’ then been worthwhile? In the sense that the listener/viewer walks away with the reverberating echo of Nanton’s
‘Blessed Hiroona – yo yo yo’ and with Bops’ hundred pairs of eyes fixed on her back, the answer is clearly yes. And Nanton may report back to his sponsors, that the collaboration has been a very successful marketing-stunt, in as much as the audience leaves with a craving for more of both artists. Though perhaps especially
when closest to ‘themselves’.
Caroline (Bops) Sardine and Philip Nanton.
Zemicon Gallery, Bridgetown, Barbados, March 15th – 31st 2009.
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