Leon Wainwright

Americocentrism and Art of the Caribbean: Contours of a Time–Space Logic

Art of the transnational Caribbean has come to be positioned by an understanding of the African diaspora that is oriented to an American “centre,” a situation to be explored for what it reveals about the hegemonic status of the United States in the discipline of contemporary art history. The predominant uses of the diaspora concept both in art-historical narratives and in curatorial spaces are those that connect to United States-based realities, with little pertinence to a strictly transnational theorization. This has implications for how modern art and contemporary art are thought about in relation to the Caribbean and its diaspora, in a way that this article demonstrates with attention to a number of artists at multiple sites, in Trinidad, Guyana, Britain and America.

Solving Caribbean Mysteries: Art, Embodiment and an Eye for the Tropics

This article discusses various perspectives on image-making in the Anglophone Caribbean with reference to the economy of relations between its visitors and inhabitants during the modern colonial period and its aftermath. It evaluates the framework of the “tropical picturesque“ as a locus of embodied visual practices–with a significant, if often mysterious past–and debates Krista A. Thompsons notion of an “eye for the tropics” by reference to recent art historical insights drawn from fieldwork in Trinidad.

Back to Black

Taylor and Francis Ltd CTTE-A-147232. gm 10.1080/095288 0500472498 hird Text 0952822 (pri t)/1475-5297 (online) Or ginal Article 2 06 & Francis 000Janu ry 006 D LeonWainwright L.Wainwright@mmu.ac.uk What does it mean, as Richard Powell has suggested, that visual images can help in ‘the rediscovery of Africa as black America’s forgotten cultural locus’? Along with freelance curators David A Bailey of Britain and Petrine Archer-Straw of Britain and Jamaica, Powell, based at Duke University, North Carolina, has created an exhibition that tries to explain. Back to Black is a major survey of the so-called Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the United States, Jamaica and Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. But since there was never a BAM in Jamaica and Britain, the exhibition peddles quite a fiction. It illustrates a history of Black victories, in style and image, that were really only ever American. It loses sight of the difference between African-American issues and those of minorities and imagined communities elsewhere. Strictly speaking it is protonationalist, designed around a cultural politics addressed to AngloAmerica, in which race and nation would supersede geography. Ostensibly to do with the 1960s and 1970s, Back to Black looks to rediscover black America as the forgotten cultural locus of Jamaica and Britain.

Sonia Khurana: The Contemporary Art of Relationality

During the decade of the 1980s, it had become common for many artists of black and Asian backgrounds in Britain to group together for the purposes of exhibiting their works, while seeking to foreground the issues and difficulties involved in such public displays, notably at the levels of resources and reception (see, for instance, Araeen, ‘Success and Failure’; Chambers; Hylton; Owusu; Wainwright, ‘Bibliography’). The ensuing narratives of making and exhibiting this art have been elaborated in a remarkable and notably critical body of commentary, writing that includes polemical interventions and historical overviews, documentary and archiving projects. A recent renewal of academic interest in this history has sustained the effort to show how artists produce their works within the diverse range of experience that comes with living in diaspora communities in Britain, and how art-making is a field of inscription and identification in the sphere of public culture. This conceptualisation takes its cues from post-structuralist scholarship on everyday signifying or semiotic-like practices of ‘making things mean’ (Hall, ‘Rediscovery’ 64; Hall, ‘Black Diaspora’; Mercer) which came to be applied to the evaluation of black and Asian British artists’ participation in film-making, photography, performance, painting, installation and so on, as well as more broadly based involvements in exhibition curating, publishing, archiving, arts organising and activism. In this way, black British art has long been conceived as a corpus of practices consisting of performed identities, as commentators have chartered the relationships and ‘articulations’ between contemporary art and the lived experiences of difference. Against the background of such attention, however, by the end of the twentieth century many artists of diverse ethnic or racial backgrounds in contemporary Britain began to feel unsure about the lasting value of such cultural criticism. Black British art, as it was identified, seemed to be governed almost exclusively by the drive to make visual texts, by artists who held the goal of cultural representation centrally in view, along with an interest in revisionism and political opposition (a trend consistently noted by Araeen, Other Story; Araeen, ‘From Primitivsm’; Araeen, ‘New Internationalism’). Those associations brought many artists to a sort of impasse as they came to feel encumbered rather than galvanised by matters of cultural identity and cultural politics that dominated their art’s reception. That feeling has extended, indeed, to broad discomfort among artists with regard to the black British label of identification and its uses for building a transformative discursive space for creativity in contemporary Britain. The situation bears comparison with the United States, where complaints of reductionism have prompted certain American artists and thinkers to move ‘beyond black representational space’; favouring a mode of ‘strategic formalism’ within art criticism and historiography, in order to draw out

Bodily relations and reciprocity in the art of Sonia Khurana

This article explores the significance of the ‘somatic’ and ‘ontological turn’ in locating the radical politics articulated in the contemporary performance, installation, video and digital art practices of New Delhi-based artist, Sonia Khurana (b. 1968). Since the late 1990s, Khurana has fashioned a range of artworks that require new sorts of reciprocal and embodied relations with their viewers. While this line of art practice suggests the need for a primarily philosophical mode of inquiry into an art of the body, such affective relations need to be historicised also in relation to a discursive field of ‘difference’ and public expectations about the artist’s ethnic, gendered and national identity. Thus, this intimate, visceral and emotional field of inter- and intra-action is a novel contribution to recent transdisciplinary perspectives on the gendered, social and sentient body that in turn prompts a wider debate on the ethics of cultural commentary and art historiography.

Timed Out: Pathways and Pitfalls for Art History and Caribbean Studies

This essay reflects on the contribution made by Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (2011) to alternative futures for the Caribbean-focused study of art and its histories. Wainwright emphasizes the need for better attention to the complex “geopolitics of time” that is central to the formation of Caribbean creative experience, and outlines the discursive field, the art market, and the policy and funding landscape through which Caribbean and diaspora artists move. In response to the discussion of Timed Out in this issue of Small Axe, Wainwright explains the continuing need to explode the existing dominant art canons (while highlighting the problematic assimilation of counterdiscursive and plural positions) and proposes various pathways by which the Caribbean’s role in changing powerful modes and priorities of art historical scholarship may be extended fruitfully to the wider humanities.

Disturbing pasts: memories, controversies and creativity

In many countries, legacies of war, colonialism, genocide and oppression return again and again to dominate contemporary culture, politics and society. This anthology explores how these pasts also inspire creative means by which the past is remembered and challenged. It brings to the foreground the rich visual and creative responses that issue among artists, and how these carry suggestions for effective ways that such pasts are confronted, disturbed and transformed. Contributors to this volume are keen to register the important idea that any meaningful encounter with the past has to be felt at the personal level, no matter how difficult to recall and painful to represent, however contested or fraught with risk and freighted with emotion. Recollecting stories of this kind is complex and sensitive, and this book recommends how it can benefit from the joint efforts of artists, curators and academics. Based on a major project of international collaboration supported by the European Science Foundation, the volume brings together professional art practices, art history and visual culture studies, social anthropology, literary studies, history, museology and cultural policy studies. From diverse contexts are gathered voices, histories and images relating to ‘disturbing pasts’ in South Africa, Germany, Namibia, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Australia. The results reveal a courageous and carefully examined global picture, with a variety of new approaches to confronting dominant historical narratives and shaping alternative interpretations.

Aubrey Williams: a painter in the aftermath of painting

ion. As in the later canvases, large areas of Revolt are empty and abstracted. Consequently, the canvas is empty of topographical signifiers; it is neither a domestic interior, nor a landscape marked by ruins, nor a built or urban space. Through the placement of figures on a ground that they do not fully disrupt, the rebellion pictured in Revolt is staged in a utopian space, a space without place; not specific to that eighteenth-century moment in Berbice or the twentieth-century moment of a decolonising British Guiana. Unlike so-called ‘history painting’ of the nineteenth-century academy, the canvas has an abstract noun for its title, rather than a name, place or date for an event. Revolt is, therefore, interchangeable with other gestures from elsewhere and other displays of violent resistance throughout history. That the subject of Williams’s painting is not tied to any particular historical context is a common virtue of his canvases as a whole, and the basis for the philosophical and critical quality of his art. His particular take on time is complemented in a corresponding abstraction of space. Together these interests emphasise Williams’s works as a political response to the strictures of being contained within one’s own historical moment and suggest how to imagine alternatives beyond the present. He broaches through the medium of painting Martin Carter’s parallel sense of the contingency of time and being, his appreciation of the intersecting nature, the simultaneity or affinity, of time and space, as conveyed for instance, in his poem ‘Our Time’: ‘The more the men of our time we are/the more our time is. But always/we have been somewhere else’ (Poems of Affinity 14 /15; Robinson, Martin Carter 40 /43; Rohlehr 184 /185). Likewise Williams suggests a political desire to reclaim a place in the present, to hold a role in the shaping of history denied to colonised subjects. But the use of picturing has a special status in articulating such anti-colonial goals; and its material presence works differently from writing. Williams was able to create a physical object which was both present in Georgetown in 1960, yet made absent from public view. Its creation, and Williams’s choice to gift the painting to the people of Guyana, was driven by the anti-colonial desire for a virtuous state of being which is released and recuperated from the condition of the provincial and belated. Figure 3. Aubrey Williams, Time and Elements, oil on canvas, 1985, 123 180 cm. Image courtesy of October Gallery, London. # Estate of Aubrey Williams. All rights reserved, DACS 2009. 70 Aubrey Williams: A Painter in the Aftermath of Painting

On Being Unique: World Art and its British Institutions

The current interest taken in Britain by art historians and curators in the areas of World Art, cultural diversity, global culture and multiculturalism is failing to challenge the exclusion and marginalization of artworks, artists and academics historically associated with cultural, ethnic or racial differences. Such a failure can be explored in British institutions of art history, collecting and display in their efforts to examine cultural difference, cultural diversity and World Art. While this article avoids a survey of such art institutions, it offers a comparison of three key locations: a recent touring exhibition called ‘Alien Nation’ (Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Institute of International Visual Arts); the Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History project (GLAADH), a national project of curriculum change funded by HEFCE; and World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia. What emerges is an account of World Art as a category of institutional experience in Britain, as the basis for suggesting critical and theoretical initiatives and alternatives for historicizing art and difference.

‘Indian Art’ in Trinidad? Ethnicity at its Limits

Addressing present day art making in the southern Caribbean island of Trinidad, with specific attention to the notion of a diasporic ‘Indian art’, this article offers a genealogy of some relationships between ethnicity, nationhood and visual imaging. Focusing on the painter and sculptor Shastri Maharaj (b. 1953), who is descended from South Asian indentured migrants to Trinidad, it shows how artists in the Caribbean have negotiated the regions period of strident anti-colonialism to the present. Examples of Maharajs art comprise works of figuration and landscape, including depictions of local architectural styles and Hindu ritual, as well as more ambiguous and abstract forms, also presented as gallery installations. Paying attention to these the discussion highlights the problematic relations between the exegetical tendency for ‘reading’ such visual materials, and the ambitions of artists seeking to transcend the limits of expectations about ethnicity and cultural difference. In place of those limits it recommends an alternative historiography able to enjoin the critical search among contemporary artists for perceptual and aesthetic agency.