Caribbean Artistic Genealogies of Withdrawal. Rethinking Caribbean Visuality Beyond Objecthood

Abstract

This essay examines how Caribbean artists have employed withdrawal in critical, insurgent ways. I confront several Caribbean projects developed in different chronologies and locations that have attempted to use withdrawal in order to challenge uneven institutional dynamics. The examples I discuss here – Cuban art dedicates itself to baseball (Havana, José A. Echevarría Stadium (Vedado), 1989), Silvano Lora’s Marginal Biennial (Santo Domingo, multiple locations, 1992), Joëlle Ferly’s L’Art de faire la grève (Martinique, Fondation Clément, 2009) and L’Artocarpe (Guadeloupe, ongoing) – problematize the role of artistic agency, the reach of the exhibition form and the influence of foreign expectations. Traditionally, Caribbean art has been subjected to a process of commodification and exoticization. Through the examination of those four practices, I will assert that an alternative genealogy of active, productive interventions concerned with staging emancipative spatial dynamics beyond representational constraints and objecthood can be found.

• art institutions
• artistic agency
• biennials
• Caribbean studies
• spectatorship
• withdrawal

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Post-Doctorate Fellowship granted by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT). It was also supported by the research project ‘El artista y el dolor: El sufrimiento como límite de la representación en la cultura artística contemporánea (HAR2012- 31321)’. The developed research was produced over several long-term research stays in the Caribbean and the United States (Lilly Library, Duke University, 2013; NYU Bobst Library, New York University, 2015). Finally, the text benefitted from the conversations with Denisa Tomkova and Fernanda Gil Costa.

Notes

1 There are important theoretical antecedents for this task, with Buck-Morss (2009) and Fischer (2004) as two of the best-known examples.

2 Although some work has been done in this regard in countries such as Cuba or Jamaica, we still need a more comprehensive view on both how nationalist cultural politics has conditioned curatorial interventions, and on how these interventions have instituted alternative strategies and means.

3 Unlike Jamaica and Barbados, Trinidad lacks a solid public infrastructure of contemporary art institutions. The development of modernist trends in the country owes much to initiatives such as these.

4 Mere months prior to the game, René Francisco and Eduardo Ponjuán’s exhibition Artista Melodramático was censored, and Marcia Leiseca, then Vice Minister of Culture, was fired.

5 This process has been well documented. Worthy of mention in this regard are the essential contributions of Luis Camnitzer, Rachel Weiss, Gerardo Mosquera and Lupe Álvarez, among many others.

6 Both the Caribbean Biennial and the Marginal Anti-Biennial were part of the few events including the continental Caribbean. However, even if the latter was driven by a political enactment of national “Hispanism” in cultural politics, this inclusion implied something totally different in the Marginal Biennial, where it stood for an articulation with third-worldist emancipative agendas and continental unity.

7 Ferly remembers the case of a Swedish artist living in London whose English was perfect, save for a slight accent. This speaks of the versatility of the project.

8 For instance, L’Artocarpe has created bonds with other similar artist-managed spaces and curatorial initiatives in Trinidad, South Africa and Senegal.