Painting, Light, and the Caribbean

Trinidad in and out of Light / CLAIRE TANCONS

Curtain Piece / Anna Serrao

Lighting the shadow describes the duality of life in the Caribbean. It is an expression used by lighting designers and it is literally what the artists in the exhibition attempted to do—without the help of lighting designers.

Marlon Griffith’s installation

Kathryn Chan and Marlon Griffith’s installations and Anna Serrao’s sculptures were lit so as to create shadows on the walls of the exhibition spaces or onto themselves, while light was the primary device of Abigail Hadeed’s photograph and Yao Ramesar’s video. Some of the works were under- or over-exposed. Others blinding or blinded. Those lighting accidents were welcome as they highlighted the purpose of an exhibition concerned with vision and perception¹

Shadows in the exhibition neutralized representation, challenged perception and generally deceived vision in the interplay of light and obscurity. By using shadows, the works evoked the transient and artificial characteristics of a borrowed environment and made-up culture of forced immigrants. At the same time, the use of shadows allowed reappraisal of a culture of experiences—Mas, Pan and Calypso ² —originally cyclic and disposable, that has become commodified and is marketed as part of a “year-round Bacchanal Factory.” Shadows were used as critical tools—Serrao, Hadeed—and as means of empowerment—Griffith, Chan, Ramesar.

Lighting the Shadow could have been seen as embodying the spirit of Jouvé ³, whether directly—Chan, Griffith and Ramesar—or indirectly—Serrao and Hadeed—manifesting its enduring spiritual and political implications and asserting its constantly renewed conceptual strength despite repeated assaults against it. Lighting the Shadow in its Jouvé incarnation is the manifestation of artists who, very clearly for Serrao and Chan have put nature into cycle, and refused the instrumentalization of their culture and environment, showing instead a more ecological relationship to it. ⁴

Lighting the Shadow also sought to propose an alternative to common perception in a society where appearance is often tantamount to reality and tends to prescribe lived experience.

To the public, this exhibition of shadows offered an a-typical vision of the Caribbean and of Caribbean art as it avoided Painting, the most stereotypically Caribbean medium and medium of stereotypical representation of the Caribbean. ⁵ To the artists, the exhibition created a context for their work at the center of fundamental questionings on vision and perception, with reflections in contemporary cultural, spiritual, and political phenomena, outside of the traditional pitfalls of representation. ⁶

The follo
wing essay is a transcript of what an ideal public tour of the exhibition would have been. A walkthrough of the exhibition was organized on November 2, 2004 and attended by Anna Serrao, Abigail Hadeed and Marlon Griffith. ⁷ Use is made of their transcribed words to give voice to artists who have little opportunity to talk about their work. Kathryn Chan and Yao Ramesar are supplied with their own words as well, though not first hand, but coming from newspapers or magazines in the case of Ramesar, and from Chan’s website. Notes from studio visits with Marlon Griffith (August 19), Abigail Hadeed (August 24), and Anna Serrao (September 3) are also quoted as are lyrics from songs about which the works may be or to which they may refer, as part of an encyclopedic conception of the exhibition. ⁸ The photographs illustrating this essay, most of which are courtesy of Che Lovelace, can be difficult to read. They bear witness of the lighting deficiencies evoked above. The essay follows the works of the artists in the order in which they appeared in the exhibition and allows entries into points that are more specific to their work in particular—often its context of creation—than they are to the theme of the exhibition in general.

Anna Serrao: Conquest and Quest of Trinidad

Passing Cloud/ frontal view / Anna Serrao

A Brief History of the Caribbean via Trinidad and Tobago

The general historical context of a Caribbean island is well known. A discovery in the late 15th century; the subsequent partial or total decimation of its Native American population; the enslavement of Africans throughout the 17th and most of the 18th centuries; their emancipation in the late 18th century; the indenturship of Indian and, in lesser proportions Asian laborers shortly thereafter; and, eventually, an independence granted in the mid-20th century by dying colonial powers. In a few cases, integration to the national body of the former colony (French and Dutch West Indies). In one exceptional case, a Revolution (Haiti, 1802).

From discovery in 1498, to emancipation in 1838 and independence in 1962, Trinidad and Tobago is a good pupil of the colonial history class. However, there is an oddity in the post-independence history of Trinidad and Tobago, mostly dominated by the preeminence of its first-ever political party, the long uncontested People’s National Party or PNM. The Islamic-inspired coup of 1990, hastily organized, quickly dismantled, shortly archived in the Bacchanal volume of the country’s unwritten history, shook the spirit of a people who thought that, for a moment, its soil had been fertilized with the seeds of political consciousness and revolutionary drive. Passing annoyance for the politics, longer lasting source of entertainment for the local population, the echo of the coup is now difficult to hear but at times in the rumor of a public opinion prone to story-whispering.

Anna Serrao got it out loud and in plain words during the public walkthrough of the exhibition. ⁹ In 1990, she remembered thinking, “What is this thing that we constantly fight about?” What is this thing that is to difficult to grasp? And if it is so difficult to grasp how can it be fought about and what for? If Trinidad is that almost invisible dot onto the map of the world, lost among foreign oil ships almost bigger than it is, who would this tempest in a teacup matter to? What Serrao could put out in plain words she could not put out in plain light. Not because light is lacking in the Caribbean. Rather, because there is too much of it and it create
s shadows so big that they can cover the island so small, so small that the island can itself become a big shadow.

Maps would indeed be the surest way to circumscribe that piece of land emerging at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean sea, of passing interest to sea-arpenters and flag-planters. Serrao had been working with maps for quite some time when she created the works in the exhibition, since 1986 to be precise. Not only maps of Trinidad but maps of Guyana as well, her native country, not much bigger for being a country, not less an island for being on a continent. It is still unclear how Serrao started to “mess around” with shadows. The coup of 1990 gave her the impulse to create a body of work, which came into light just a year later, in 1991.

By using the map as a tangible symbol of Trinidad, Serrao does attest of the existence of the island. By casting the shadow of the map of Trinidad, Serrao questions not only the geo-political relevance of the island but also its mere physical reality.

In Passing Cloud the map, the stuff of frontiers-obsessed cartographers, evokes times of conquest while in Curtain Piece it appears as a metaphorical landscape of the mind, the sign maybe of a more personal quest.

Passing Cloud: The Conquest of Trinidad

A cloud passes an embattled fort and, for less than it takes to the fatigued eye of the soldier to blink, on the slant of one of its many loopholes, between a lull and a lost bullet, a shadow is cast. At the bottom of the fort, an armed formation of fellow fighters. A high-ranking soldier is on a horse, three men are in close proximity with erected spears. Three others appear smaller—an effect of perspective, they must be at a distance. At the bottom of the nearing hills, in the hallucinatory haze of the sun, a colorful mess of fringed flowers, purple petals, a couple of pink birds, and underneath it all, forgotten or not yet spotted, the sparks of a golden treasure.

A visual metonymy with a loophole in lieu of a Spanish fort, Passing Cloud is an intricate depiction of Trinidad as an embattled field caught between a slice of nature and a page of history.

The time must be 1498. The place one of the three hills from which the Spanish named the island. The faux-marble box-like structure is the loophole. The fighters on its sides are figurines of copper, Conquistadors flat and tamed as in the pages of history books. The flowers, birds, and el Dorado treasure are no more than plastic pacotille encased in Plexiglas just like in the vitrines of a Museum of Natural History. The little appendage to the back is a cloud in the form of a metallic anamorphosis. The shadow it casts is a distorted map of Trinidad—or was it Iere still at the time, the land of the famously un-coercible humming bird? Faux-marble but not marble, copper but not gold, plastic and Plexiglas, are the materials that render the artifice of preciousness and lushness that so much attracted the colons. Today they are the artifices with which contemporary Trinidadians cover up their miseries, expose a borrowed taste or simply exhibit pretense.

Passing Cloud /Anna Serrao

“I wanted to play with, this is general in Trinidad, our use of laminate as something that hides and covers and pretends […] and the plastic objects inside that are not really what they are.” Confirmation of Serrao’s affirmation can be found at Pax Guest House, in Tunapuna, the guest house that extends the hospitality of the nearby Benedictine monastery to the non-religious native or foreign souls alike. In the midst of the most exquisite European antique furniture, between the upholstered armchairs and reclining beds of the upstairs terrace, are two identical low-tables. Of wood panels bolted or screwed, with four strictly
vertical feet each, their top, probably a conglomerate, is covered with a thin sheet of faux-marble. The green-veined laminate is exactly the one Serrao used to give her passing cloud a reflective surface. No doubt that would the expedition be further pursued into private homes, plastic flowers would be found, an irony in a place of constant blossoming, a sign of acquired taste?

“In a immigrant society, memories growing dim, there was no guiding taste. […] There was no guiding taste because there was no taste.” ¹⁰ Is the use of artifices and artificiality participating in the taste for things borrowed characteristic of an immigrant society? This is what Naipaul seemed to suggest the very year the island became independent. It is also what Serrao suggested the year of the coup. If there isn’t far between lack of guiding taste and lack of taste for Naipaul, there isn’t far between lack of guiding taste and lack of guidance for Serrao.

“There is this vapor coming out and it casts a shadow of Trinidad and really what I am trying to create is this moment when the country and who we are become visible, and then a minute later, it’s gone. It’s like a series of chances and coincidences and it is changing all the time. It is hard to get a hold off and we are struggling, I am struggling.” When continents are known to derive, it is easy to think of islands as being à la dérive. And indeed, would Passing Cloud be subjected to changing natural light and not to the artificially fixed light of a bulb, the shadow of Trinidad would only be aligned to the orifice of the loophole, that is visible to the viewer, at certain times of the day, and in a shape morphing according to the inclination of the sunrays. Trinidad could also be seen like a sundial, subjected to the passage of time of course, but also creating his own as Trinidadians are already well-know to do, having established a subtle difference between clock time and Trini time, the difference between the two possibly residing in this lapse of time when the island is out of grasp.

“I was trying to create an object that has a history, that puts our place in a context of time, so that we could make our history, not history in the factual sense but create a context for things, see ourselves in a context, and that is why I am interested in using the map, because of course, you know, it’s like the brand [of Trinidad.]” One may not know about the coup of 1990 and one may be even less likely to know that it is the source of Serrao’s inspiration for this body of work. But it is easy to recognize some of the historical facts enumerated in the introductory history lesson, although they are definitely not presented in a factual manner. There is as I have mentioned, a bit of the history book and the Natural History museum colliding into Passing Cloud—a piece that should definitely be acquired by a National museum. But what comes out of Serrao’s box is not just the history of the conquest of Trinidad. It is Serrao’s conquest of her idea of Trinidad.

Curtain Piece: The Quest of Trinidad

Curtain Piece, the working title Serrao never finalized could easily be replaced by Flying Curtain. The work is indeed meant to represent a curtain flying in the wind which, caught within rays of the sun would cast its surprisingly immobile shadow onto the nearby wall. If contemplating a curtain flying one realizes that it nonchalantly lift itself from the ground to painfully achieve the effect of a bird taking its first flying lesson. If it has a veil underneath it, though it is lighter, it does not offer the promise of a more elegant take off. Curtains are not carpets, they cannot fly.

Serrao has explained how the piece was originally conceived to be attached to the wall. For the purpose of this exh
ibition, she removed it from the wall, hanging it from the ceiling instead, a gesture which had the effect of increasing the shape of the shadow. It is a shadow of Trinidad of course, easily recognizable as it is not distorted as in Passing Cloud. Depending on the vantage point one is at, one may be able to recognize the shape of Trinidad in the undulated piece of metal covered with an actual scrap of curtain.

For both Passing Cloud and Curtain Piece, the images chosen to represent Trinidad, a cloud, a curtain flying in the wind are barely more tangible than shadows themselves. Subjected to natural light both would be sundials and give back to the sun its function of natural clock. Indeed, the sun seems to be at the head of the natural phenomena that govern both works. The rays of the sun and the rotation of the earth provoke fluxes of wind, themselves engendering fluxes of water. Seawater evaporates to form clouds, clouds in turn are transported by the wind, and the resulting water is carried from the source of the river to the sea, so that the cycle can go on. Keeping this solar cycle of heat, wind, and water in mind, one understands how the sun is not just what creates the shadow. It also produces the cloud above the little fortress of Passing Cloud along with the wind that allows it to pass and, at the end of the cycle, the water that maintains the vegetation alive and lush.

What ultimately emerges out of Passing Cloud and Curtain Piece is a reconstituted cycle of the nature and history of Trinidad. For Curtain Piece, there is a turmoil in the cycle, for as empirical observations have shown, it would take more than the tradewinds of the Caribbean for a curtain to be lifted horizontally and undulate the way it does in Serrao’s design. Just like the origin of Passing Cloud was a political tempest, at the origin of Curtain Piece may be one of those hurricanes that hit Caribbean islands sporadically during the rainy season. They tend to spare Trinidad miraculously. “God is a Trini” Trinidadians say as a means of explanation.

To Serrao, Trini God notwithstanding, Trinidad’s ongoing forecast seems to be: cloudy, with strong winds.

Abigail Hadeed: (The Caribbean) Man and his Double

The Bassman (1995)

A Calypsonian named Shadow

Calypsonians, monarchs of Carnival road marches, often masquerade under colorful dressed-up names. Some, like David Rudder retain their real names. Most however, as many entertainers do, adopt pseudonyms. Theirs seem to unite them in a grand spiritual fraternity of Mighty, Lords, and Brothers, whose devotion to the power of the verb, be it political or sexual, is unrivalled in the Caribbean. If shadows and sparrows, snipers and spoilers, invaders and kitcheners may seem to fall short of a political program, most Calypsonians, at least those revered as true Calypsonians, have made of the social commentary and the political denunciation their subjects of choice. ¹¹ Personal narratives and moral tales borne out of lived experience also come to feed the frenzied rhythm of a music that for being engaged hasn’t lost anything of its party spirit. Yet again, the shorties and the blackies may seem quite inadequate as pseudonyms to announce any kind of personal program. However, since choosing Mighty Shadow as his stage name, Winston Bailey has carved for himself the image of a personality invested in political change and moral upheaval. In deciding to be The Shadow, Bailey also portrays an ambivalent if familiar persona as black man and entertainer.

Calypsonians are black men. There are some women Calypsonians. There are s
ome Calypsonians blacker than others. In the shade culture of the Caribbean one can object to the label black being attributed to such and such individual whose degree of blackness may seem closer to consensual brownness or escapist whiteness. It is rarely the case for Calypsonians and it is definitely not the case for Shadow. Shadow is a true black man by which an ethnically-minded Caribbean culture will understand that his skin is really black.

African-Americans may have called him Blue. As an Afro-Trinidadian he called himself Shadow.

Both African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean men share the Invisible Man symptom, famously analyzed by Ralph Ellison’s eponymous novel. In it, blackness is seen as the ultimate experience of invisibility and light is used as a critical tool to give form to the concept of the (in)visibility of race. Indeed, the black character of the novel, feeling a greater need for light in order to be seen, fills his basement apartment with innumerable light bulbs shining on him night and day. ¹²

Not that being invisible and being a shadow is the same thing. “A shadow is a degradation or a diminution of light and colors which ultimate degree is black, not that a black body is completely deprived of light, in which case that body would be invisible; but the black body is of all bodies that which reflect the less light, because it absorbs and extinguishes it almost entirely.” ¹³ (my emphasis) Being a shadow still demands to receive a certain degree of light, while being invisible requires no light at all. Living in the Caribbean is to be subjected to a lot of light even when not under the spotlight. In a place where light can be lived as a curse, invisibility could very well be seen as a luxury.

Of course, Calypsonians have humor as well as a great sense of self-parody and one can easily imagine how in choosing his moniker, Shadow court-circuited any temptations at deriding his appearance by anticipating the joke and making it himself. Yet, one cannot help but notice the dramatic psychological dimension with which The Shadow posed in Abigail Hadeed’s The Bassman with no trace of irony in sight. The mise-en-scène of an almost invisible Shadow, with his shadow reflected into a puddle of water, conveys a sense of split of personality between a public persona epitomized by a shadow, and a private self half-obliterated. By making Mighty Shadow The Bassman as Hadeed does in giving her portrait of Shadow the title of his song, she may have very well played the pathological game to which Stoichita’s theory of “the Shadow Stage” gives a new prospective outside of the strictly racial one. To Stoichita, there exists a Shadow Stage in the development of human beings which, in contrast to the Lacanian Mirror Stage—the drama of identification through the recognition of the self—is the recognition of the self as other, an othering of the self. ¹⁴

“I don’t know how this thing gets inside meh head
But every morning he driving meh crazy
Like he taking meh head for a panyard
Morning and evening like fellah gone mad
And If I don’t want to sing
When he starts to pull his thing
I don’t want to but I have to sing
And if I don’t want to dance
He does have me in a trance
I don’t want to but I have to prance”

—Winston Bailey a.k.a Mighty Shadow in The Bassman

“Shadow, the The Bassman from Hell, 1974. Eleven years old. It makes an impression on you when you hear music like that. And it’s lived on as an enigma for me and it consumes you and how do you represent a big man, a big figure, an icon in Trinidad without being typical. And of course I wanted to address his music which talks a lot about hell about madness and about if you don’t see the negative how do you see the positive. I work from a negative to make a positive. So all these things play and com
e together and the reflection, the shadow, it’s also another play of mirrors. This image for me represents a lot of things. It represents light and dark elements because again if you don’t see the light how can you see the dark if you can’t see the dark how can you see the light. […] This image to me talks about all the things that we as a people do not embrace in ourselves.” ¹⁵

—Abigail Hadeed

The recipient of this year Commonwealth Award for Photography, Hadeed is at ease in artistic photography, documentary, and commercial photography alike and seems to practice the three with equal degrees of success. Hadeed says that her non-commercial photography is “straightforward black-and-white photography” for which she likes to be “very close, very involved, not removed from her subject.” She says she doesn’t like to “mess around” and doesn’t like “fussy things.” She despises “trendy photography” as much as she does “sensationalistic World Press like photo-journalism.” Diane Arbus is a major reference. Hadeed has different body of works including such areas of interest as Carnival (Peter Minshall with whom she has played on occasion—the remnant of a Sailor’s hat from Minshall’s latest Sailors band is on view in Hadeed’s studio—is her favorite masman); Steelband and Calypso (among her well-known photographs one, of a famous steelbandman, is reproduced on the cover of the Faber and Faber edition of Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance); Theatre (she has been a long time follower of the work of Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop and of Little Carib Theatre and has stunning photographs of Errol Jones and other famous Caribbean actors on stage); and South America (whose black population of Caribbean immigrants she recently tracked down.) She believes in photographing what she sees, truth, as she puts it, and a lot of photography she does not like she characterizes as not “true,” “honest,” “authentic.”

Whether her Bassman is true, honest or authentic, I leave it up to your best non-ethnocentric judgment to determine.

Which genre it belongs to is easier to determine: it is definitely not commercial photography, and it is not quite documentary. The Bassman is undeniably part of the artistic category, however artificial (untrue, dishonest, inauthentic) the genre may be. ¹⁶

Twenty-something years after hearing The Bassman, Hadeed took Shadow on a cross-country journey in search of a place which mood would best complement the singer’s indescribable aura. They eventually arrived at an abandoned Chaguaramas warehouse, not unlike that which houses nearby Peter Minshall Mas Camp often photographed by Hadeed during the frenzy of Carnival preparation. Having decided that she wanted The Shadow’s shadow reflecting into water, Hadeed found that warehouse which, having a few broken windows or a leak in the roof, offered a puddle of water of dimensions formidable enough to host Shadow’s mighty height.

The composition, allegedly chosen by the photographer and willfully enacted by her subject—as Hadeed puts it: “he was very willing and I was very happy to have his company”—seems inverted. Shadow emerges upside down as his shadow, in the enlightened frame of the warehouse’s gate left open. The water, though littered with trash is smooth like oil. The deceptive character of the photograph lies in the fact that the shadow is a better rendering of Shadow than Shadow himself. Not only because, of Shadow himself, one can only see the bottom of his pants and shoes, but because his mirror image has much sharper edges on the perfectly plane surface of the water than Shadow does in the dusty haze of the ambient air. The composition was of course carefully rehearsed and staged, the effect sought. Hadeed said: “I did not want to see him. I just wanted to see the impression of him. What impression I had when I was eleven years old and I heard
The Bassman from Hell.”

Black Narcissus

There is always a narcissistic dimension in getting one’s portrait done. In Hadeed’s photograph, it is a black version of Narcissus himself that Shadow seems to embody. According to the Greek legend, Narcissus was a handsome young man who, having fallen in love with his own image drowned himself while attempting to embrace his reflection in water. Narcissus is often depicted as laying in a pastoral setting, sometimes with narcissuses, the flowers borne out of his death, at the critical moment when, still on the earth, he is almost already fallen. He is naked but for the conspicuous wine-leaf, beautiful indeed as Greek antiques are, his body smooth and chiseled. Shadow could not offer a more contrasting sight. He stands tall in the remnant of some industrial building, his features evaporated in darkness, his body lost under yards of black garments. His feet are close to the puddle, yet his erect attitude does not indicate that he is close to falling into it. At best, he may be stepping into it and getting wet but one cannot get drowned into a puddle of water. But who knows if shadows don’t liquefy in water?

More importantly, unlike the mythological Narcissus, Shadow cannot possibly see his reflection in water nor can he wish to embrace it, as he is shadow and as such quasi-invisible and unreachable. His image is denied to him for he has denied himself an image of him.

To the moral dilemma of self-contemplation is added the racial challenge of self-contempt, if an ironic one.

Whether intended of fortuitous, the similarity of form and theme between the antique myth and its depiction in numerous classical European paintings begs to be analyzed, regardless of, or maybe precisely because of voices that could be raised about the relevance of such a conceptual frame in contemporary Trinidad. Such a cultural leap also raises questions of politics of representation, of who represents and who is represented and at whose expense if at anybody’s expense at all. In this iconic representation of the singing idol of the photographer’s youth, is it Shadow, a black man, who played the game of Hadeed, a white woman, by complying to her antique set-up, or Hadeed who played the game of Shadow, in buying into the mythology that he has created for himself?

Only assumptions as to what the photographer and the photographed sought can be made outside of their own stated intentions. What is sure is that Hadeed can hardly be accused of casting an ethnographic gaze onto Shadow, as would be commonly expected of someone of her position and status. Of Shadow, whom to a non-Trinidadian audience may not even be recognizable, if known at all, she doesn’t reveal the features or expose the race in ways that are traditionally seen as stereotypical or ideologically biased. Unless by giving of Shadow only an impression rather than a good look, Hadeed does indeed reflect on that which as a people Trinidadians do not embrace in themselves: their shadow people.

Politics of representation play a very important role in photography a medium which, and as Hadeed herself as a practitioner subscribes to, has often been heralded as purveyor of truthful and authentic representations, the biased ideology of which was systematically analyzed in a ground-breaking exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. ¹⁷ At its inception in the United States, photography was a key tool for the propagation of racist theories and the categorization of a people’s nation into racial types of greater or lesser significance as citizen. Aside from considerations about the racial premises of photography, what is interesting about Hadeed’s photograph is that the very setting of the photograph somehow mimics the photographic process itself getting at its very essence as an artistic medium. Light is the vector of the reflective image onto the puddle of water that acts as a sensiti
zed surface, just like it is the medium of the photographic image onto Hadeed’s selenium toned paper.

“Music turns me on” Shadow goes on singing in The Bassman. His music certainly turned Hadeed on. Or rather, the echo of it for if his shadow could sing it would probably be as an echo of his voice. It was the nymph Echo who had called out to the goddess Nemesis to bring Narcissus to his fall. Echo had been so saddened by Narcissus’ despiteful attitude towards her love that she had let herself starve, and having physically vanished, the sound of her voice alone remained as trace of her existence. The power of myth is strong. Having carved for himself a mythological persona and found in Hadeed the definite recorder of it, Shadow will live on well represented in the Olympia of Calypsonians, having achieved iconic status, if only in a land of shadows.

Marlon Griffith: Starting Afresh (Jouvé, 1)

The Mas Camp: Art School and Artist Studio

The best art schools in Trinidad are mas camps. ¹⁸ A cross between a factory and a sweat-shop for the fabrication of Carnival costumes, the best mas camps are also vibrant workshops where a wide range of skills and techniques are learned, passed along and refined from masters to apprentices. It is in the mas camp that an artist may get his first trial and error experience with materials spanning a limitless spectrum of possibilities for the making of contemporary art. Wire-bending, papier mâché molding, cane work, wood carving, metal repoussé, are but a few of the techniques an artistically inclined mas lover may learn from a more seasoned mas maker. He may choose to stick to one technique in particular, often based on his appeal for a particular material over an other—he may like the soft versatility of fabric better than the harsh implacability of wood and the treacherous malleability of metal in fusion—and refine his skills at mastering it. To some, the skills learned at the mas camp will transform into an artistic practice, to others, into a trade. Whether they choose art or crafts, most will retain the polyvalence of skills that is at the core of the making of mas.

An artist studio in Trinidad can also be a mas camp. Is it simply because the mas camp with its unbridled yet disciplined creativity offers the best of models for the production of artworks? Or is it because the making of mas is the highest goal an artist can achieve? Combining the widest range of performative activities mobilizing dancing and musical abilities in order to put into motion human ensembles of up to tens of thousand individuals, a Carnival band is œuvre d’art totale. Tried as it has been, the concept of œuvre d’art totale remains the most ambitious artforms and possibly the most appropriate one to meet the challenges of diversity and globality of the 21st century as Matthew Barney may have understood when he created a Carnival band for the Carnival of Salvador. ¹⁹

Callaloo Company

It is at Peter Minshall’s Callaloo Company mas camp, in the coastal city of Chaguaramas, that Marlon Griffith made his classes—he also has a technical diploma in graphic design from John S. Donaldson Technical Institute and experience as a graphic designer to several Caribbean publications—and in the Port-of-Spain neighborhood of Belmont, home to several legendary masmen that he has set his own studio mas camp. Griffith’s most recent contribution to “Callaloo”, as it is affectionately referred to, w
as the Ship of Fools band of 2002. On his own, he has produced several kiddies Carnival bands. This year, the band he is creating for a primary school of Port-of-Spain is called Arrows to the Sun and is inspired by the great pre-colonial civilizations of Central America. Griffith is also a talented draughtsman and printmaker who recently brought back from South Africa large-scale drawings of unsettling zoomorphic beings—humans with animal heads or masks of elephant and rhinoceros—demiurgic animals one would not be surprised to encounter in a Carnival parade.

In August 2004, Griffith’s studio showed the remnants of past masquerades, masks of painted cardboard he had made while in residency at the Bag Factory, an artist residency program in Johannesburg. It was crammed with sketches, magazine cutouts, works-in-progress, pieces of unidentified materials…It was an artist studio. Later in November, Kathryn Chan reported that his studio had become more crammed with more sketches, more cutouts, more works-in-progress and more pieces of unidentified materials. It had been turned into a mas camp.

A mas camp is nothing other than an artist studio with increased production capacity. A masman, an artist with heightened creative ambition.

In the night of November 21 to 22, Griffith lost everything in a flood. “If he is a real masman he will start over” an older man said, not particularly moved by the account. Nothing can characterize Griffith and the spirit of mas better than a tested endurance to renewals. But Griffith never really has to start from scratch. At its most experimental, his work is always in progress and he is always ready to improvise it into new configurations.

Drawing in Lighting: Experimentation and Work-in-Progress

“This work for me was very accidental. I did lots of drawings, did printmaking, but what happened essentially is that I got bored, and started to look at new ways to present my work. I am very involved in Carnival. I started to experiment with the different materials that I use, cardboard, wire, but the most successful so far has been plastic. What I started doing was taking all my old lino prints blocks and printing them [in plastic]. There was something interesting there, there was this piece of plastic with all these textures…And one night by accident, I just happened to hold it up into the light and there was a shadow. Yes, there is a shadow, but what is interesting to me is that you have this clear piece of plastic and you get this image happening, you also get texture, Sometimes you look at it and you get almost a three dimensional effect. It has been a work-in-progress for the past two or three years you know, and every time I work with it, at times, I mean, some of the images you can barely see, so at times I wonder whether or not I should make the image clearer, or leave it as it is. Would it be as interesting as a very bold image on the wall, or faint like this where you really have to look at it and try to figure out what is there? ” ²⁰

—Marlon Griffith

As often creations are, Griffith’s are accidental. The creation of the works on view in the exhibition, composed of both prints and shadows, was twofold. Twice Griffith provoked accidents, the first one, that of the creation of the support of the shadow, the plastic print, he went onto detailing as such:

“What I did is that I took all my lino blocks, which I carved, put them on a vacuum forming machine and heat plastic and there is a vacuum at the bottom that sucks the melted plastic over the object and that is how I get the impressions from the lino. It is almost like doing a print you know, where you have to do an edition, and out of that edition, you start picking and choosing the ones that are suitable for presentation.”

One cannot help but think that the experimentation could have very well turned into an actual accident had the heating or suc
tion process gone wrong. More important is Griffith’s carefree use of the vacuum forming machine, a machine introduced to Trinidad and Tobago for the fabrication of Carnival masks and other headpieces for masqueraders’ costumes. The machine which, at the scale of mas making in its time, announced a shift from handmade masks to mechanically reproducible ones, is at the origin of another shift in the personal practice of Carnival-trained artist Griffith years later. With it, what Griffith obtained was a hybrid object of sorts, part-mold, part-print, a molded print in effect, reminiscent of both its mas-making origin and its print-making intention. While it could no longer entertain the function of a mask, it bore many of the characteristics of the print. Just like an actual print, it had been made out of a sheet, only not of paper but of plastic—PVC to be precise; it had a motif, not of pleins-et-déliés but of concave and convex curves. As a print, what it lacked essentially, was ink.

Marlon Griffith’s installation with artist Akuzuru

And then “one night by accident, I just happened to hold it [a plastic print] into the light and there was a shadow.” The second accident bears the aspect of a revelation. And it may have been revelatory indeed to see the print reveal itself in shadow like onto the veil the face of Veronique. More than to a religious experience however, the revelatory nature of Griffith’s night discovery harks back to the Bachelardian theme of solitary creation, not by the flame of a candle but under the fluorescence of a light bulb. ²¹ Out of that phenomenological experience, the result of reverie under electrical light, the print had been completed. The shadow was its ink, only it was sympathique.

The further complication was that the ink was not to go onto the plastic like for a traditional print onto a sheet of paper. The sheet of PVC being translucent, it needed yet another support which turned out to be the white wall. Given the quality of projected image of the shadow, it could have also very well been a screen. In fact, the installation has very strong cinematic qualities, if only because the characters were organized in sequence, coming together as if to create continuous scenes for a movie. Added to that the fact that the characters were blown up and bigger than life, and that they seemed at times to move, Griffith’s installation looked like a preliminary version and introduction to Yao Ramesar’s film projections. The size of the characters was a result of the distance from the light source, a spotlight mounted between parallel metallic rods, to the reflecting surface, the white wall, with the translucent plastic print as an intermediary lens-like device. The impression of movement, and at times actual movement of the shadows, was the result of the haphazard interaction of light with the texture of the prints, and of visitor’s hazardous interaction with them, a gesture the artist encouraged. The texture of the prints resulted into textured shadows, a most interesting visual phenomenon, one of the most complex types of shadows indeed. Griffith employs the word texture, a word found in the scientific analysis of shadows of Michael Baxandall—scientific validation of Griffith’s most empirical use of the word. Without going into the refinement of details Baxandall’s book offers, it is interesting to note that of the three types of shadows Baxandall repertories—projected shadow, self-shadow, slant and tilt shading—textured shadows comprise them all. ²² With their contrasted shading and their soft edges which, by the confession of the artist himself “you can barely see” Griffith shadow-images, drawings of lighting, were indeed hard to ”figure out.”

One can detect how Griffith’s indet
erminacy as to whether or not to make a faint image clearer betrays an interest in visual perception. His preoccupations meet those of 18th century scientists, psychologists, and artists alike who analyzed the occurrences and behaviors of shadows, mostly projected shadows as it turns out—the result of light meeting an obstructing solid—as a means to further their knowledge of the world through vision, an heritage of Plato’s oculocentric approach to knowledge. ²³

For scientists, shadows were objects of perception which “having been caused by physical realities […] carry information about the three-dimensional world.” ²⁴ To some dubious self-proclaimed psychologists like Johann Caspar Lavater, the father of Physiognomy, shadows were at the center of a quasi-religious divination practice meant to reveal the intricacies of the human soul and possibly find “the divine in the human being.” ²⁵ To painters, shadows presented concrete technical and compositional problems, which if overcome, could offer the possibility of presenting the dual nature of man. ²⁶ To a masman like Griffith, used to the immersion of all the senses, not just visual, in the magma of the masqueraders’ crowd, shadows maybe, presented the ideal medium with which to revive the lived experience of the mas.

A Mas of Shadows

“It also has to do with Jouvé and light, coming out of the darkness, starting afresh.”

At the onset, Griffith infused his work with the experience of Carnival, from the materials he used—the plastic sheets and the metallic rods—to the technique with which he transformed them—vacuum forming for the plastic—and the motifs he imprinted into them. Griffith’s installation-in-progress was composed of five plastic prints of different sizes, titles, and motifs. Two similar ones, or rather two copies of the same edition, are untitled and show a woman in bikini, which one imagines young given her sturdy shape. Trinity, a nod to Trinidad, represents three young women holding each other, as if to confide in a secret or share a conniving laugh. In Embrace, two Blue Devils hug, their intertwined tails flirting with subdued eroticism. Finally, Self-portrait is an arresting evocation of the artist as a young man standing, straight on his legs, maybe claiming his ground.

Pretty Mas and Old Time Mas seem to mingle happily in Griffith’s installation as they do on the road during Carnival. Onto the bikini of the young women, dark spots onto the wall, one imagines the glitter of the sequins, the colors of the beads. As a background to the three other women’s conversation, one can hear the clamor of tens of thousands of masqueraders, among the deafening bass of the music trucks. In the middle of it all, devils embrace, oblivious to their cumbersome costumes, the gossips of their friends, the noise of the multitude. Are those revelers simply rehearsing, one of those Sundays before the Lenten week? Are they parading on their way to the Savannah’s Grand Stand for the election of the year’s Carnival King and Queen? Or are they wining and jumping up on Carnival Monday? Let’s bet it’s night still, but dawn is on its way: it’s Jouvé morning.

Coming out of the darkness, starting afresh as Griffith puts it. The eight shadows of the installation, negative shadows and silhouettes of light do seem to come out of darkness, while Griffith the visual artist starts afresh as a mas maker. For it is a mas of shadows Griffith created, shadows that as the sun rises and revelers come into the light, through immateriality, reminds them of their very materiality.

In the darkness of the night, moved by the chants and drums that once shouted liberty, bodies united in blindness may forget of their essence of flesh. When their shadow is
cast, the memory of their embodied life comes back, of the freedom maybe not yet acquired, of one more day under the sun.

Having honed his artistic skills at the mas camp and turned his studio into one, it was all but expected that Griffith put a mas band, if an unlikely one, in the gallery. By dematerializing Carnival, stripping it bare of its material signifiers—beads, feathers, sequins—Griffith allowed for a recovery of Carnival as a spiritual experience. By putting shadows into Jouvé, Griffith put light back into Carnival, thus suggesting that it may be its very essence.

IV. Kathryn Chan: Out of the Past (Jouvé, 2)

Horizon Line at Macqueripe, 5:17pm, December 2004

From Merida to Macqueripe
What do the Yucatan and Trinidad have in common? To the West, the Caribbean Sea wets the borders of the Mexican peninsula, while to the East it licks the shores of the southernmost Caribbean island. But more than a sea, it is the sun that the island and the peninsula share, a hot unsparing sun which was at the origin of a work Chan did while in residency in a former convent of Merida, the Capital of Yucatan, and the prodrome of the as of yet untitled work-in-progress featured in the exhibition.

The work in Merida was site-specific, not only in that it responded to the larger atmospheric context of Mexico, extreme solar enlightenment, but also because it evolved specifically out of the architectural features of the Conkal convent for which it was designed. Constellation as it was called, was also and almost inevitably so, an homage to the astronomical system of the Mayas, the Indian population indigenous to the Yucatan, known for its religious adoration of the Sun

In the open, on a historical site, and under a hot sun, Constellation contrasted with its Trinidadian counterpart insofar as it was “an attempt to think in a blank white box” as the artist put it, not designed to be specific to a site, at least a natural one. It was caged between the four walls of a stereotypical white cube, and under the spots of artificial light. Yet, as much as Chan may not have liked it to be site-specific and wanted it, as an installation, to have the portability of other less cumbersome and more contained artworks, it was site-specific nonetheless, for it dealt first-handedly with the very specific constraints of size, configuration and logistics of the exhibition space—mainly with its track lights system as it were.

For those very reasons and as much as it is important to trace the genealogy of the work, it is important to retrace its genesis. As much as the work in the exhibition appeared to be the evocation of a day environment, and a bright one at that, it was originally meant to be the recreation of a night atmosphere. The four sides of the square of mesh Chan adapted to the dimensions of the square-within-the-square created by the tracklights, each supported elements of a nocturnal iconography—a bat, a moon, a constellation. A more ambiguous element was the horizon line.

Not much more reliable than the rays of the sun if only in the rigidity of their trajectory, the spotlights, old and rusty and mounted onto antiquated tracks, did not allow for much maneuvering in terms of both the positioning of the lights fixtures and the adjusting of the light level. It became clear that the desired darkness of the space would have to be compromised by the light of a sunny day. Still, and as much as light could be dimmed, zones of darker or brighter luminosity could be tuned, to the various elements represented. For instance, a gradation of luminosity from darker to lighter was composed for the horizon line, while the corner in which the bat deployed its wings was made sensitively darker than the rest of the space.

Ultimately, the defectiveness of light, along with the versatility of the design, allow
ed to operate a reversal from dark to day, radical as is everyday the passage from night to light. The butterfly chased the bat away in a flap of not so dis-similar wings, while the moon, conveniently full, left way to a sun of near-perfect rotundity. And to top it all, the constellation became scintillation.

As for the horizon line, hardly discernable in darkness, its undeniable presence felt at most, it forced us to reckon that what we had taken for day and night, may have been dawn and dusk. What was sure, for the artist had told me, and even brought me there, is that the horizon line was that of the sea at Macqueripe. For the setting and time we usually choose to look at the sun rise or set, particularly in the Caribbean, is usually the horizon line of a beach at dawn or dusk.

Reconstructed Landscape, Reconstructing Painting

Kathryn Chan, Horizon Line, 2004

Chan started out as a painter. Much to my sadness, I do not know her paintings well. I know that they were—for she stopped to paint and destroyed quite a few of them—mostly landscapes, some bearing the infinite melancholy of romanticism—I recall seeing from the corner of an eye the Caspar David Friedrich-like image, possibly a self-portrait, of a lone woman sitting onto a rock and looking out to a landscape of sublime depths—and I suspect that there must have been quite some depictions of beaches, horizons, and such.

Chan’s latest work is very much a landscape, if a reconstructed one. It is still painting and it is drawing as well, only Chan is reconstructing painting through drawings of paint. The lines of each and every of the four elements, as well as the general composition of her work, is undeniably that of a skilled draughtsman, as is the color combination that of a consumed painter. It is because the lines of her drawings are, if abstracted, still figurative, and because the color is local, that is, in mimetic concordance with the natural colors of the objects it depicts—blue for the sea and sky, black for the butterfly/bat, white for the sun/moon—that the form of the landscape is so easily discernable. The original painting(s), maybe landscape(s), out of which this new landscape of paint was born, is no longer, as are many other paintings of Chan. They were stripped of their frame, the canvases torn apart in temperamental tempests which sometimes dried up in bonfires. The one(s) that survived to be built into a new tri-dimensional composition was cut out in dots of similar shape and size of approximately four inches but for a few smaller ones. They were subsequently fixed onto the mesh with staples, and each ultimately backed with masking tape. The dots, attached inside the space circumscribed by the mesh, had their backs of canvas facing outside. Their painted side revealed themselves from the inside only. The horizon line, the furthest remote element on the side facing the entrance, was fully visible from the onset while the other elements unveiled themselves as the visitor proceeded into the installation. The mesh had been cut open on the left-hand side to allow passage.

Bat, general installation view

About cutting out her old paintings, Chan wrote: “It is a cleansing process—cutting up, destroying my old paintings from the 80’s, reinventing and understanding who I am, where I come from and where I am going.” In light of this statement of projection of the self, there is little wonder why Chan was so interested in fully exploiting the de-doubling and even multiplying potential of the shadow. Indeed, if most circles had their direct equivalent in shadows, though at times distorted in size and shape, some did not have do
ubles at all, while others yet had triples. Examples of those troubling phenomena of perception, to which the viewer had to allow some time to experience, could be found in the projections of the wings of the bat which were at least triples as if to recreate a flapping effect. The horizon line in contrast did not project shadows, which had the effect of further enhancing the feeling of its ephemeral character. In contrast, in both Serrao’s works, very much playing on illusions and distortions, the relationship between shadow and object is not immediately discernable as the former often is a deformation of the latter as opposed to simply its double. Furthermore, at least in Passing Cloud, forget about the visual relationship between object and shadow, the physical relationship between the passing cloud, small and set outside the box and its shadow, somewhat bigger and into the restricted aperture of the loophole, is not at all obvious. As for Griffith, he repeatedly confessed that if it had been for a better spatial organization of his installation, he would have been much happier to make the plastic prints completely invisible so as to immerge the visitor fully into a veritable shadowland. Furthermore, in Chan’s drawing of shadows, the visitor himself cast his own shadow upon entering in the sacrosanct space of the installation, thus inserting him/herself into Chan’s cosmogony. In the work of Chan the shadows, very much as in Hadeed’s, aside from being a direct evocation of the particular living conditions under the Caribbean sun, act as a reminder of that other possibly unreal and fantastical side of what we call existence.

Jazz

For Chan’s landscape, if it is not downright unreal, does have a fantastical feel to it. It is furthermore quite problematic, to say the least. The problem is with the veracity of time. Whether we choose to see the landscape as diurnal or nocturnal and associate with it the appropriate creatures and phenomena, time is anachronistic. Indeed, how can one see and experience at the same time both a sunset and a full moon, or the sun rising and being at its zenith at the same time? How can a butterfly bigger than the sun itself mingle with a bat bigger than the moon? Rather than anachronistic, the elements of the work, no longer a bi-dimensional landscape but a tri-dimensional environment can be seen as part of a natural cycle put in motion. Not unlike Serrao’s, the effect is also very much in tune with Chan’s astronomical inspiration for her Mexican work. As nature follows its cycle, each of the features of the landscape-environment would have to be seen as succeeding one another. After sunset, the bat would come out, later to be caught flying, its dark mantle contrasting against the white luminescence of the moon—a stereotypical vampire movie shot. The moon in turn, would be cast against an increasing number of stars as it raises higher and illuminates them more. Time would then be chronological.

But in Trinidad, even with those seeming discrepancies, time could very well be synchronic. Where can one see a big fat moon hand in hand with a skinny bat, its old black jersey tight on the chest, and they would even be dancing along with a Mayan sun? In Carnival of course! It is not just in a landscape we have entered; it is a Carnival parade.

Revelers of light

I do not know if Chan played Carnival as a kid. If she did, she would have certainly been happy to play in Griffith’s pre-Columbian inspired Arrows to the Sun band. As a adult, she has very much been involved in Carnival, like Griffith only for much longer, not so much as a player but as a designer. Long-time associate of Peter Minshall at the Callaloo Company Chan, who is currently organizing a museum retrospective of the work of the master masmaker, worked or rather ran her way all the way from the Maco Jumbie
band of 1988 to the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games of 2001-2002, having on her way contributed during each of the year that span that period but for a break in 1990-1994 which she spent in mas-loving London, to the design and production of six other carnival bands or carnival-inspired performances and two other international events. Along the way, she had created her own section of a band. It was the “Baachacs” in Tantana in 1990.

Baachacs is the Trinidadian vernacular name given to that particular species of ants that can be seen in strange army-like formations, carrying leaves onto their back. Just like every good mas maker, Chan started out observing the anatomy and behavior of the baachacs to draw inspiration for her design and choreography. The result was a colorful and aerial flow of coordinated fabric, played partly by her then students, a kiddies carnival of sorts, a form which as we have seen with Griffith, often gives emerging masmakers their first start. Long before Chan started to work for Minshall, he had designed a band called Papillon (1982), the French word for butterfly, a band which as the title indicated was made of and about butterflies, if unlikely ones, bearing on their wings the design of what could be called butterfly-like figures, from Marilyn Monroe to Che Guevara, for their martyr propensity at having ran into fire, like butterflies burning their wings to the light of a candle

No wonder then than such a design may have subsequently found its way into Chan’s Carnival evocation, so much so that I witnessed a visitor exclaiming himself: “This is Peter Minshall!” upon seeing what he took, more than a bat, for a butterfly. But much like Griffith, Chan’s use of Carnival in her artistic practice is not just at the level of borrowed imagery. Masmaking techniques and know-how are embedded within the construction of the work at very subtle levels at times. For instance if, at least to a mas-watching Trinidadian it may have been quite obvious that the plastic mesh—300 yards of it—Chan employed was of the very kind used to fill the structure of wings, of which winged carnival costumes there are many; and even maybe if s/he had figured out that she attached her canvas discs onto it very much as she would have sequins or other decorative elements, s/he could not possibly guess, unless s/he had been present when Chan was mounting the work, that she treated the paper on the ground—to fill a 40 x 34 feet surface—like she would have fabric, like she had treated the mesh before, unrolling and cutting it with the skills required of a seamstress to cut up yards and yards of textile.

Very much like Minshall’s, her mas was stripped of its decorative elements, avoiding un-necessary glitter. Like Griffith’s, it concentrated instead on the experiential, initiatic-like feel of mas, the essence of mas. If the bat or the butterfly had been embodied by revelers of flesh instead of being pinned like specimen for entomologist, they would have deployed their wings and made them move along with their entire body, maybe to the music of that constellation which Chan calls Jazz and sees as “notations for a piece of music, creating a melody that could be repeated again”—an idea very much in tune with her aforementioned desire of creating a portable, i.e. reproducible work.

Chan writes: “There is a moment at the end of Carnival, when a lone mas player walks along in the now empty streets to get home, in the dark and sudden quiet, once again out of the spotlight for the remainder of the year, until the next Carnival, this feeling is always present in my consciousness.”

Doesn’t she worries. She knows that Carnival repeats itself, again and again, every year, if just for two days, bringing to its paroxysm the work of the 363 other days of the year. Her favorite moment of Carnival, like Griffith again, is Jouvé, the spirit of which is present in her work in its evocation of dusk and dawn atmospheres, in its horizon line at Macqueripe, a beach like many other beaches around the island whic
h, at the break of dawn welcomes mud masqueraders for their yearly purifying ablutions, Griffith and herself among them, each at the opposite end of the spectrum, one starting afresh and the other letting go of the past.

* * *

V. Yao Ramesar: Awakening (Jouvé, 3)

Yao Ramesar, Celebration (Moko Jumbie), 1993

Caribbeing: Filming the Caribbean

“I knew this guy who brought a set of lights to a shoot in the Caribbean.”
[…]
“I thought it was an insult to the Caribbean sun. I like natural lights and shadows, light filtering through Venetian blinds.”
—Yao Ramesar

It is no surprise that a filmmaker would emphasize the importance of light to his medium depicted as writing with light, and from a Caribbean one to stress the often underrated filmic potential of sunlight. What is more surprising is that out of that belief would derive an entire philosophy of life and work, equally operative for an artist who, from documentary to poetry, has proven that there is nothing like the sun to evoke and invoke the soul of his people. To Ramesar, light is the most patent political tool.

Since returning from the US where he got a BA and a MFA in Film Production and Directing, Ramesar vowed that he would “not be going into any exile [again]” and that he would make of the Caribbean in general and Trinidad in particular the site and subject of his work with the sun as its “centrifugal force”. Born in Ghana of mix African and Indian descent to Jamaican and Trinidadian parents, Ramesar in virtue of his place of birth—one of the poles of the slave trades—and his mix heritage—former African slaves and Indian indentured laborers form the majority of the population of the Caribbean—can be regarded as an über-Caribbean of sorts and his work certainly embraces a Pan-Caribbean approach.

Caribbeing as Ramesar has profusely defined and discussed it in academic papers, local and international workshops, seminars and conferences, is about “releasing the spiritual essence of the Carib-being with the sun as a centrifugal force” or put in another way about “explor[-ing] the supernatural essence of being Caribbean.” Clearly a means of empowerment, Ramesar’s technique aside from the exclusive use of natural light has been characterized by unusually low angles, handheld camera, sharp contrasts and frequently iffy focus. His non-documentary style is often non-linear and his projections not always very square. In Lighting the Shadow, for the projection of his two shorts in a loop, he widened the frame of the screen—a large ochre-colored wall outside of the gallery where Chan’s installation was—in order to take full advantage of the expanse of space he had in hand, and to such an extent that the original square of the projection evolved into a trapezoidal shape. As Ramesar explained, his expanding the screen was, more so, than taking space over, a means of greatly increasing the size of the films’ characters, common Caribbean people which he sees as bigger-than-life characters. Related to this desire of representing his people is Ramesar’s most ambitious idea, the creation of a so-called CariColour software which would render more truthfully the skin tone of Caribbean people. It is indeed not just at the level of representation, but of technological invention as well, that Ramesar intends to carry out his own brand of révolution par l’image.

It is interesting to note that of all the artists in the exhibition, all of different and often mixed ethnic background, altogether a very representative panel of the diversity characteristic of and unique to Trinidad and Tobago, Ramesar is the only one to stress his ethnic identity with such emphasis, and at all actually, the complexity of which may seem somewhat unusual to a foreig
ner but is very common to Trinidad and other Caribbean islands. Possibly the result of both a great racial self-awareness, probably honed after years studying in the United States, and of the general racial context of Trinidad and Tobago, increasingly divisive of Africans and Indians, and which in recent years has seen the emergence of public stigmatization of people of mix Afro-Indian descent Ramesar is very outspoken about his identity and has chosen documentary as the genre of choice to celebrate both sides of its heritage and possibly reconcile them.

The directness and sense of urgency with which documentaries can depict locations and convey circumstances has made it a genre very much in favor in developing countries which particular conditions are still widely unknown or overlooked. Ramesar has made it the task of his lifetime to record each and every aspect of Trinidadian culture from its most peculiar manifestations—particular religious manifestations such as those of the Baptist or the Rastafari community; or of alternative economies such as trash picking—to its most mainstream ones—Carnival—developing further his Caribbeing philosophy along the way. But it is not surprisingly in his non-documentary work that Caribbeing has evolved more freely, outside of the constraints of accurate representation but without relinquishing anything of its inherent ideological charge.

“The vibration from our Caribbean sun and moon light are essentially different from the vibes of artificial tungsten light and resonate with a different visual and psychological impact. Then there is the exploration of our jet-black dark nights. Darkness if the other side of our filmic coin. To render our belief system of spirit darkness and spirit light we have to explore everything to get the invisibles and intangibles present within the frames.”
—Yao Ramesar

Nothing could describe better the project of Awake (2002), a seven-minute color video, than these inspired words of Ramesar’s programmatic declaration. Originally a music video for a Jouvé song of singer Ella Andall—an unusual “clip” by current MTV cut-up standards—Awake fully explores the range of formal effects and spiritual implications of the Jouvé journey in the passage from darkness to enlightenment. In Awake, night and day become very tangible, their darkness and brightness accentuated, and the people in it very visible, their multifaceted colors and features magnified by Ramesar’s rainbow rhetoric.

After Griffith’s ghostlike evocation and Chan’s abstracted vision, Ramesar’s depiction of Jouvé was like the outburst of all the sounds, shapes and colors that his fellow artists refrained, an explosion of movement, music and multicolor costumes restituting a vibrant recreation of Jouvé that was complementary to theirs. Set against Andall’s powerful voice and enthralling lyrics as sole musical background, night shots alternated with day scenes in a rhythmically intense procession of Ole Mas characters in the purest Jouvé tradition. The film begins with the revelers carrying torchlights in the night, to light the path to those who, going from house to house, they wake up and embark into their awakening experience. Out of the contrast between the well ordered night procession unified by the all-encompassing darkness of the jet-black night and the disorder of boisterous dancers and messy costumes, emerges the sense of an undeniable cohesiveness, characteristic of group experiences, but most importantly representative of the Trinidadian people during Carnival, a unite nation at last, worthy of its “all ah we is one” and other “together we aspire, together we achieve” popular slogans and official mantras.

Awake warriors awake
Jouvert morning come
Begin to paint the picture
Spirit rise come to touch the sun
Darkness pass and the morning come
We done pay homage to we ancestors
We done do the ritual
Pour the libation
So we calling the warriors to stand on guard
To protect and preserve this transition
As we fill each heart
Every
hollow drum, with love
Awake warriors awake
Jouvert morning come…
— Ella Andall, Awake

…Ella Andall goes on exhorting her followers in what sounds like a veritable call to arms. Rite of passage out of the past and into the future for Chan and Griffith, Jouvé is above all for Andall—and for Ramesar through her—commemoration of the Emancipation celebration with which it once coincided, an exhortation of the rebellious spirit of the people of Trinidad and Tobago. Earl Lovelace reminds us how by an interesting twist, “sometime in the mid-1840s, the colonial administration [had] moved the celebration from that day [ August 1 ] and tacked it onto Carnival.” “Jouvay became Emancipation” he writes, “[…] confirming not only the dawn of Carnival Monday morning, but asserting the dawning of a New Day for those who had been previously enslaved.” However, Andall and Ramesar’s Jouvé band, unlike the prominently African celebration that Jouvay-Emancipation used to be, is encompassing of the nation’s diversity, featuring in its mix a dread-locked black woman in sailor outfit as well as a Chinese woman with whitened face in Pierrot. In this ideal recreation of Jouvé at least, where political ideal and national unity bond, Earl Lovelace’s fears that the Emancipation-Jouvay movement would have been sacrificed for the grander idea of making, of all of the Trinidad people, one nation, are temporarily tamed.

Celebration, a fifteen-minute black-and-white and color short film celebrates the spirit of Trinidad and Tobago through the popular and religious traditions of its African and Indian people. Carnival characters of the Ole Mas, Moko Jumbies, Midnight Robbers, stickfighters among them collide with Hindu believers tending to traditional rituals. The members of each population appear and disappear seamlessly on screen as colorful, at times recolorized or simply black-and-white apparitions of contrasted light, merging into one and only body when of them Ramesar only shot their shadows projected onto the ground. While in Awake, the emphasis was on the night to day passage, in Celebration which predates it of almost ten years, the accent is on the black-and-white to color contrast, just another play on lighting, if a more artificial and conceptual one. And where in Awake there is only one dancing shadow interspersed between otherwise continuous scenes, in Celebration there are countless single frames of shadows of a host of different characters. This effect of de-doubling is accentuated further by the fact that each shadow is in turn multiplied, appearing in triple juxtapositions. As the movement of the dancing shadows seem accelerated, the ultimate effect is that of an even greater feeling of transience and disembodiment of the figures.

In Celebration, there is an array of arresting technical effects of artificial coloring, de-doubling, superposition, inversion and blinding each more disorienting that the other, all concurring to question the veracity of the representation. The blinding effect is of particular interest as it uses the sun to hinder the view rather than enhance it, in what is an ultimate no no of orthodox filming: overexposure. In one instance, a Moko Jumbie emerges on his stilts out of a hill, the glaring sun obstructing a full formal appreciation of his shape, while at the same time giving him back the spirit—jumbie—aura of its origins. In another one, it is a crystal ball held by a young Hindu woman that turns the gaze back onto itself, as the light cast onto the translucent surface refracts back at the viewer. And as if to further underline her spiritual power already evoked by her diviner attribute, the bindi—third eye—of her forehead shines of a surreal glow.

The contrasting and contrasted approaches of two great British film-makers of Caribbean descent, Steve McQueen originally from Barbados and Isaac Julien from St Lucia are interesting to discuss in relationship to Ramesar’s. Operating within the context of what Julien calls “circum-Atlantic diasporic cultures” both McQueen and Juli
en have made the journey back to the Caribbean most notably for the production of Carib’s Leap (2002) for the former and Paradise Omeros (2002) for the later. Carib’s Leap is the oneiric commemoration of a mass slave suicide in which marrooned slaves jumped off a cliff to meet their death in the sea that, as the slaves are only evoked as ghost-like Icarus figures disappearing in the flows, is in fact the central protagonist of the movie. But it seems to me that it is in another video [ South African Mine, title ] that McQueen’s strategy is closer to Ramesar’s as he explores lighting in dark environment. In it, he immersed the viewer in claustrophobic darkness so as to mimic the descent of the South-African miners into the depth of the earth symbolic of their seemingly unending ordeal, just like in a complete reversal of the terms of lighting Ramesar connects with the experiential and identity-defining nature of Carnival using the blinding effects of sunlight.

Julien on the other hand, directly confronts the issue of what he calls “creolizing vision” in Paradise Omeros (2002) homage to Derek Walcott’s Omeros Caribbean epic of 1990. Light and lighting effects are studied in Julien’s, the glaring sun and irradiant blue sky of a Caribbean beach onto which the soon to be exiled St Lucian youth works, contrasting with the doomed atmosphere of London where he follows his parents. A tale of coming of age through exile, Paradise Omeros uses Julien’s signature split-screening in which two side screens featuring a mirroring image frame a central screen where the main action takes place. Though of another nature, truly structuring of the screening, those are effects of de-doubling partaking in the disorienting strategy Ramesar uses within the film scenes themselves rather than for the organization of the screens. It is interesting that Ramesar too would have had his encounter with Walcott, as he was asked by the St Lucian poet, Trinidadian of adoption through his Trinidad Theatre Workshop, to put his poetry into images, which Ramesar did with his elliptic Saddhu of Couva of 2001.

As film-makers sharing a Caribbean background, what obviously differentiates McQueen and Julien from Ramesar, is the diasporic culture of the former that sees the Caribbean “as a site of mythic cultural fantasy” though in wholly different terms. In light of those filmmakers various strategies, calling forth the Caribbean to account for a globalized state of the world, the question is: where do the Caribbean and globalization lie? In Julien’s and McQueen’s creolized vision or in Ramesar’s Creole one?

* * *

Jouvé, Shadows, and Trinidad

As a blue screen follows the latest scene of one of Ramesar’s shorts, signaling the end of the looped projection, so does the tour of the Lighting the Shadow comes to an end.

The after-images of the shadows in mind, we wonder if we have gone back to pre-painting history as narrated by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History, when art was no more than the delineation of man’s shadow. More disturbing is the passing thought that we are just barely emerging out of the cave of spectral representations Plato put us in centuries ago in his famous Myth of the Cave allegory. It is to Victor Stoichita that comes the merit of having put into dialogue the myth of origin of Western artistic representation and theory of knowledge. Using the shadow as a starting point to a reflection essentially based on vision and perception, as means of representing and appropriating the real—the natural and cultural environment outside—Pliny and Plato may have been Caribbean before the colonial conquests. Rather, by sharing fundamental questionings on vision and perception, the artists in the exhibition while rejecting the outcome of Pliny’s art history—Painting—adopt its starting point to create for themselves and the Caribbean th
e conditions of original artistic practices. Whether in Greece or in Trinidad, then and now, before and after the various waves of globalization, which the spiritual descendants of the former initiated and the mixed progeny of the later accommodated, natural phenomena have given men sources of reflection onto their culture.

It is ironic that a few Caribbean artists, gathered together almost by accident, would be unknowingly experimenting with the sources of a hegemonic culture they more or less pointedly challenge. At a time of necessary reappraisal of Western ideologies, and in a place that is partly the product of these ideologies it was tempting to oppose an inherently Caribbean vision and philosophy of the world which would have made of light its driving force. But without shadows, light is nothing… It was equally tempting to respond to the current clarion call of Creolization and label creolized all the works in the exhibition and call the artists Creole. But light still is light and shadow shadow…Despite mixing, crossing, amalgamating, hybridization, métissage, globalization; oppositions, contrasts, ideologies, hegemonies remain, forming a reality that cannot be summarized to either the opposition of ideologies or their integration into a greater global or Creole entity.

Of course, the exhibition did by no means unveil a movement or even a trend. Maybe point out to a reflection about alternative modes of artistic creation, process and presentation. What the exhibition revealed however is a politic of lighting the shadow which the tradition of Jouvé embodies; where light would be a torch with which to choose what to see and how to see it; where light would be a political weapon in the hands of a people with the newly acquired power of representing itself.

Lighting the Shadow is the expression I will retain to depict the tension between complexity and globality, which so many of the works hinted at or threw us into at the liminal spaces of light and obscurity. The artists seemed to have found it in Jouvé whether directly—Chan, Griffith and Ramesar—or indirectly—Serrao and Hadeed—manifesting its spiritual and political implications or asserting its conceptual strength. Lighting the Shadow is the manifestation of artists who very clearly for those who have put nature into cycle—Serrao, Chan—refuse the instrumentalization of their culture and environment—Trinidad and Mas as shadows—showing instead a more ecological relationship to their environment.

* * *

Pat Ganase concluded her review of the exhibition by writing: “Maybe, just maybe, we can come to terms withTo Earl Lovelace who wrote “ With the Emancipation-Jouvay figures emptied of their force and threat, and steelband tamed and almost put to bed, it is time for us to look elsewhere for the challenge that has always been integral to the Emancipation-Jouvay tradition” artists may have to prove that they can revive Jouvé and that so long as it will see the light, challenges can rise, they will raise them.

Notes

¹ I was a curator-in-residence at Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA7) for four months, from the beginning of August to the beginning of November 2004. The exhibition, Lighting the Shadow: Trinidad in and out of Light was held at CCA7 for four weeks, from October 7 to November 4, in and around the so-called Inter-Americas Space, an air-conditioned white cube with wooden floor that can be accessed by two lateral entrances. The exhibition was accompanied by a printed brochure/education program designed by Kathryn Chan. CCA7 is a non-for-profit organization which sees itself as an alternative to traditional artistic institutions and commercial galleries in Trinidad and the wider Caribbean region.

so much else that we do that should be Art—music, pan, calypso, film, mas, living—and in so doing
revalue ourselves and our ability to live beyond buying and selling.” By combining, art and popular culture, personal experience and political engagement the artists in the exhibition have certainly re-appraised their culture from within.

² Mas, Pan and Calypso, or Carnival, Steelband and Calypso are three cultural expressions native to Trinidad which came to prominence in the second-half of the 20 th century and acquired particular significance as the country was made into a self-governing nation.

₃ “Jour Ouvert, Jou ouvert, Jourvert, Jouvert, J’ouvert, Jouvay, Jouvé! : Trinidadian Jouvay is derived from the French, jour ouvert, the opening day of Carnival which begins in the early morning hours (often officially 2 am) Monday morning before Ash Wednesday. Jouvay is a nocturnal mas that breaks up shortly before dawn. Thousand of revelers in old clothes covered with mud, or as Blue or RedDevils, or drenched in black oil (Oil Men) fill the streets. They chip and wine following calypso street racks or sound systems on tractor-trailors, or they create their own music by beating biscuit tins. Jouvay originates from the celebration of Emancipation […].“ The glossary also refers to the article about Carnival Monday and mud mas, and in the later, one can read: “Some feel that experiencing sunrise after dancing all night covered with mud is a mystical or transcendental experience that is essential to Carnival.” See Carol Martin, “Trinidad Carnival Glossary”, in The Drama Review 42, 3 (T159), Fall 1998, Milla C. Riggio Guest Ed., Special Expanded Issue Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, (New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) p227 and p230

⁴ See Edgar Morin, La Méthode. 2. La Vie de la Vie,(Editions du Seuil: Paris)1990. The challenge of our times according to Morin, is not just Globality but Complexity as well, of which method he has been delineating for the past few decades. It can be seen as a further development of his encyclopedic thinking defined in footnote 8. An ecological thinking—pensée écologisante—would be the desired outcome of this method, as it would “situate every event, information or knowledge in a relation of inseparability with its cultural, social, economical, political and of course natural.” My word for word translation from the French: “La pensée écologisante situe tout évenement, information ou connaissance dans sa relation d’inséparabilité avec son environement culturel, social, economique, politique et biensur naturel.” This sentence, in English or in French, may not seem very revelatory. But its methodological application to all disciplines could have a potentially radical effect. In the Méthode, revolution may lie. It did in the Encyclopedia.

⁵ The following account by V.S. Naipaul in The Middle Passage. The Caribbean Revisited (Random House: New York, 2002), p58, makes for a good depiction of the state of painting in Trinidad then—1962—and now, 40some years later: “Everyone has to see the West Indies tropics for himself. The landscape has never been recorded, and to go to the Trinidad Art Society exhibition is to see how little local painters help. The expatriates contribute a few watercolours, the Trinidadians a lot of local colour. ‘Tropical Fruit’ is the title of one painting, a title which would have had some meaning in the Temperate Zone. Another startlingly, is ‘Native Hut’. There are the usual picturesque native characters and native customs, the vision that of the tourist, at whom most of these native paintings seem to be aimed. The beach scenes are done with colours straight out of the tube, wi
th no effort to capture the depth of sky, the brilliancy of light, the unsubstantiality of colour in the tropics.” Aside from some abstracting tendencies maybe, little seems to have changed, even with the advent of local Che Lovelace and expatriate Peter Doig.

⁶ In the debate of representation, I follow Gerardo Mosquera’s application of Wole Soyinka’s concept of Tigertude to Caribbean art whereby the latter would not be so much about representing identity as it would be about enacting it. Jouvé and Carnival along with Pan and Calypso is certainly about enacting identity. See Gerardo Mosquera’s debate with Stuart Hall in “Towards an Ethics of Vigilance” in Okwui Enwezor et all, Créolité and Creolization. Documenta 11_Platform 3 ( Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003), pp 53-56.

⁷ Public walkthrough of the exhibition, introduced by myself, attended by Anna Serrao, Abigail Hadeed and Marlon Griffith, November 2 nd 2004, 6:30-8:30, CCA7. See Daily Express announcement of Monday, November 1, 2004, p19. In attendance were, among others, artists Che Lovelace, Peter Doig, Wendy Nanaan and John Stollmeyer, who contributed fruitful comments to the talk.

⁸ See Edgar Morin, La Méthode. La Nature de la Nature (Editions du Seuil, Collection Points, 1977.) Borrowing from Edgar Morin, it is the etymological acceptation of the word Encyclopedia I follow in this essay, according to which en-cyclo-pedia is not so much accumulation of knowledge, as it is literally knowledge put in cycle.

⁹ All quotes are from Serrao and are my transcriptions from the recording of the walkthrough.

¹⁰ V.S. Naipaul, p52

¹¹ Play on words on Calypsonians’ names. Mighty Shadow, Mighty Sparrow, Mighty Spoiler, Mighty Sniper, Lord Kitchener, Lord Invader, Lord Blackie, Lord Shortie, Brother Valentino…

¹² See Claire Tancons, “Concerto in Black and Blue” in NKA #18. Journal of Contemporary African Arts, Cornell University, Spring/Summer 2003, p94-95. A review about David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue installation of 2002 for Ace Gallery, New York.

¹³ Lecat quoted by Michael Baxandall in Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995) p.156. The original is in French. The English translation is mine.

¹⁴ See Stoichita, Chapter 1, The Shadow Stage, pp11-41

¹⁵ All quotes from Abigail Hadeed my transcriptions from the November 2 public walkthrough unless mentioned otherwise.

¹⁶ All quotes in this paragraph are from Notes from my August 24, 2004 studio visit with Hadeed

¹⁷ Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis, eds, Only Skin Deep. Changing Visions of the American Self ( New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 2003)

¹⁸ Mas, a short for Masquerade, is the Trinidadian word for Carnival. A mas camp is the place of fabrication and distribution of Carnival costumes and possibly of rehearsal of the band. A masman is the creator of a band or simply someone involved in the creation of a Carnival band.

^1
9 See Bennett Simpson article in ArtForum

²⁰ This quote and following are my transcriptions of the November 2 nd public walkthrough. Emphasis are mine.

²¹ To be more precise, since Bachelard’s study on The Flame of a Candle is ultimately a book about the psychological modalities of the Dream, the expression “solitary creation” is a short for “solitary reverie leading to creation.” In the preface to the book, in which Bachelard introduces its different chapters, about the second chapter entitled “The Solitude of the Candle Dreamer” he writes “ The flame illustrates the solitude of the dreamer; it illuminates the pensive brow. The candle is the polestar of the blank page.”, p9. The theme here is clearly that of creation, symbolized by the blank page awaiting to be filled with the thoughts emanating from “the pensive brow.” See Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle (The Dallas Institute Publications: Dallas) 1988

²² Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1995) p6-7

²³ Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, (Reaktion Books: London, 1997), p160.

²⁴ Baxandall, p9

²⁵ Stoichita, p22

²⁶ Roberto Casati,”Strange Shadow Picture” from shadowmill.com

²⁷ On the artist’s website, kathrynchan.com. This quote is taken out of the description of a work tentatively called Out of the Past, of which this newer work is the continuation in an ongoing process of reinvention of the artist practice. Out of the Past was installed in the exact same space a few months only prior to the newer piece created for the exhibition. Unlike the piece in the exhibition, the intended darkness of the work was respected as the track lights had been left off, and only lights on long cords dangling in the middle of the space provided the necessary lighting for the shadows.

²⁸ In the Flame of a Candle, Bachelard reminds of the figure of the butterfly flying into fire, originally a German romantic tradition, usually an allegory of the Psyche. “Though the butterfly may come to burn its wings in the lamp because we did not take the trouble, before the incident could occur, of extinguishing the flame, this cosmic lapse rouses no sensitivity in us. Still, what a symbol this is, this being who burns up his wings!” The emphasis is mine, in Bachelard p35-36.

²⁹ Debbie Jacob, “The Bold and Bizarre Art of Yao,” Express, September 8, 1995.

³⁰ Marina Ama Omawale Maxwell, “Yao Makes Us See,” Trinidad and Tobago Review, Vol. 22, Nos 9/10, November 2002, p28

³¹ Caribbeing Cultural Imperatives and the Technology of Motion Picture Production Caribbean Quaterly Vol. 42. No 4.

³² TTR, p28

³³ TTR, p28 “Apart from using the camera more intensively we even have to think in terms of creating a CariColour software which is ultra-vibrant to render our coloured people truthfully rather than the
motion picture filmstock based on “average skin tone” which is of course in those contexts pink”

³⁴ In Trinidad and Tobago the racial power struggle lies between Blacks and Indians who equal approximately exact number. Those who are called Douglas—a derogatory Hindi term designating people of mixed African and Indian parentage—carry the burden of politically and economically motivated ethnic separatism in the battle for political hegemony.

³⁵ TTR p28

³⁶ Trinidad and Tobago has been called a Rainbow nation, like South-Africa with which it shares some similarities in the ethnic make-up of its population.

³⁷ Earl Lovelace, “The Emancipation-Jouvay Tradition and the Almost Loss of Pan” in TDR Special Carnival p54. In this very important article, the author of The Dragon Can’t Dance, the epic of a Carnival Dragon caught in the turbulence of the independence movement, weighs the pros and the cons of what has now become “a totally inclusive and genuinely Trinbagonian celebration” catering mostly to “a middle class whose race is Trinidadian” but has been “torn from its political and social roots, gutted of its power and presented as a neutral aesthetic creation” in the mix. p59

³⁸ paraphrase of “ Was the Emancipation-Jouvay movement sacrificed for the grander idea of making, of all our people, one nation? “ op.cit. p57

³⁹ Isaac Julien, “Creolizing Vision,” in Okwui Enwezor et all, Créolité and Creolization, Documenta11_Platform3 Hatje-Cantz, Germany, 2002 p150

⁴⁰ See Créolité and Creolization, “Creolizing Vision,” p154

⁴¹ See Stoichita, Introduction, pp7-10 in which he contends that both the birth of Western representation as told by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History and the birth of the Western theory of knowledge as narrated by Plato in the Myth of the Cave are borne out of the image of projected shadows.

⁴² In an interview with Luigi Sampietro published in Trinidad & Tobago Review, Vol. 27, No.3, March 7, 2005 (The Trinidad Express) Dereck Walcott says “But as I grew older I realized that — you know — that the simplicity of certain things in the Caribbean must be the same as the simplicity of certain things in the Greek islandsî and later — in that sense, I consider the Caribbean to be more Greek than Europe.”

⁴³ For a review of the exhibition see Pat Ganase, “A way of seeing” in The Sunday Guardian, News Section, October 31, 2004, p8. Heartfelt thanks to Pat for her support and advice throughout.

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