What Is an Island? Caribbean Studies and the Contemporary Visual Artist

Stephens, Michelle

doi:10.1215/07990537-2323292

Cited by 31 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Those issues have centered the art criticism from and about the region in the last decades. See Poupeye (1998), Stephens (2013), Thompson (2006) and Wainwright (2011). I have engaged this debate in Garrido Castellano (2014, in press).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artistic autonomy in non-autonomous contexts: reframing collective agency and insurgence from Caribbean artist-managed spaces

Castellano

2017

Social Identities

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This article engages the debates on collective agency, autonomy, institutional practices and socially engaged art by comparatively analyzing the activity of two Caribbean artist-managed spaces which emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century: BetaLocal in Puerto Rico and L'Artocarpe in Guadeloupe. Based on fieldwork research and interviews with artists and art audiences, the examination of both projects will be driven by three main objectives: the first has to do with assessing in which ways both initiatives are shaped by their emergence in territories still attached to political and economic bonds. Secondly, I attempt to measure how both collective artistic organizations can approach the material conditions of cultural (re)production and autonomy, confronting the restrictions of Puerto Rican and Guadeloupean cultural and economic policies. Finally, I intend to locate my case study within a global panorama of socially engaged and collaborative artistic practice. From this perspective, I assert that collaborative practices emerging in still dependent contexts constitute a privileged viewpoint in order to examine issues of collective agency, empowerment and alternative futures.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Artistic autonomy in non-autonomous contexts: reframing collective agency and insurgence from Caribbean artist-managed spaces

Castellano

2017

Social Identities

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“…The characterization of Caribbean artists as “natives without narratives” forms part of a major pitfall of Caribbean criticism and the presence of a certain negativity in the consideration of artistic agency, ultimately engaged in the task of “fault-finding.” A focus on imaging and imagination has prevailed in the most recent criticism. In trying to contest the inheritance of the colonial gaze within the picturesque imaginaries (Thompson, 2006), the politics and times of reception of Caribbean visuality (Wainwright, 2011, 2012, 2013), and the commoditization of racial and sexual difference within and beyond the region (Kempadoo, 2013; Mohammed, 2011; Stephens, 2013), a strong emphasis has been placed on exploring and categorizing the counter-narratives elaborated by Caribbean artists. This literature intends to “reorient thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and creativity as emergent and embedded in Caribbean visual sensibility” (Kempadoo, 2013: 152).…”

Section: A Cultural Object and The Caribbean Curatorialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Caribbean curatorial agencies: A Cultural Object’s unruliness and its affective aftermaths

Castellano

2016

Cultural Dynamics

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This essay analyzes A Cultural Object, an installation made by the Jamaican artist Dawn Scott in 1985, in order to discuss how institutional practices and criticism are framed in contemporary Caribbean art. Through an examination of A Cultural Object's afterlife in the space of the National Gallery of Jamaica, I attempt to examine the relation between the agencies of the museum, the artist, the spectators, and the installation. In so doing, the text intends to reconsider the potential of unpredictable human and nonhuman relations within Caribbean institutional and cultural spaces.Borrowing from these debates and adopting Williams' active, situated notion of criticism, this article examines some of the ghostly presences and pitfalls in Caribbean critical and curatorial practices and the thinking surrounding them. My main concern is with challenging the primacy of discourse in the configuration of national and regional histories and understandings of artistic practice. In order to question that tendency, I will suggest that there is much to be learned from spectatorship and from artworks themselves. I will analyze A Cultural Object, the installation that the Jamaican artist Dawn Scott created in 1985 for the celebrated exhibition Six Options: Gallery Space Revisited, which took place at the National Gallery of Jamaica. Scott's project consisted of a complex labyrinth formed by zinc sheets and labeled "A Cultural Zone." The labyrinth's walls were covered with a disjointed mixture of street culture paraphernalia referring to religion, dancehall, consumer culture, and garrison politics, 1 centering on a derelict scenario presided over by the supine body of a homeless person. A Cultural Object is said to have translated the atmosphere of Kingston streets within the space of the museum (Poupeye, 1985), sharing the realism and pessimism of the 1980s, which followed the socialist government of Michael Manley. 2 From this standpoint, the project's main asset is based on the shock it provokes in the "uptown" visitor of the National Gallery. 3 However, I will argue that Scott's installation is somehow subjected to a contradictory valence: on one hand, it constitutes a cornerstone in the process of introducing popular culture within the Jamaican national canon. On the other hand, it emerges as a gesture orchestrated by the very institution it sought to criticize.A Cultural Object arose from a very particular context and temporality. However, as it also poses poignant and timely questions to our understanding of creative agency and institutionalism in the present. Since its creation, the installation became a popular referent, attracting the attention of several generations and developing a sort of afterlife. As we will see, this afterlife is far from being unproblematic. In this article, I maintain that there is an "unruly" potential in Scott's installation. This potential relates its capacity of fleeing institutional normality and demanding alternative emotional responses. The "unruliness" of A Cultural Object emerges as an ...

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“…A big effort has been made to challenge the visual commoditization of Caribbean reality. A similar interest has pursued to insert Caribbean visual practices within a global arena (see Wainwright 2011;Kempadoo 2013;Stephens 2013;Mohammed 2011). In critical theory, authors such as Juan Flores (2010), Jorge Duany (2011), Silvio Torres Saillant (1999) or Yolanda Martínez San Miguel (2003) have attempted to dismantle the nation-diaspora divide, pointing out the centrality of the "cultures of migration" (Martínez San Miguel 2003) for any understanding of the Caribbean cultural imagery.…”

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confidence: 99%

Shadowy Presences: Mobility, Labor and Absence in the Work of Dominican Photographer Fausto Ortiz

Castellano¹

2017

Photography and Culture

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This article aims to examine the ways in which contemporary art from the Caribbean, and specifically from the Dominican Republic, is analyzing mobility and human trafficking within a transnational context. In this case I will critique the work of the photographer Fausto Ortiz (Santiago de los Caballeros, 1970), who has reflected recently on the consequences of migration and displacement for Dominican cultural politics. Rather than addressing the representation of marginalized sectors and marginal forms of economy in the particular case of the Dominican Republic, I argue that Ortiz's photographic practice deepens and broadens the debates about race, citizenship and social inequality, forcing his audience to consider those issues as a central part of the everyday. While addressing those issues, this article tries to insert Ortiz's photographic practice within international debates on mobility, border practices and displacement.

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What Is an Island? Caribbean Studies and the Contemporary Visual Artist

Cited by 31 publications

References 16 publications

Artistic autonomy in non-autonomous contexts: reframing collective agency and insurgence from Caribbean artist-managed spaces

Artistic autonomy in non-autonomous contexts: reframing collective agency and insurgence from Caribbean artist-managed spaces

Caribbean curatorial agencies: A Cultural Object’s unruliness and its affective aftermaths

Shadowy Presences: Mobility, Labor and Absence in the Work of Dominican Photographer Fausto Ortiz

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