Visual enterprises - Portrait Sean Drakes

Contemporary Caribbean art longs for respect.
Sean Drakes asks Christopher Cozier to weigh in on the discourse

“I have been orbiting the art world in this country since 1966, but I was seven years old,” muses Christopher Cozier. Port of Spain is hastily prepping for delegates of the Fifth Summit as we chat in the organized chaos of the studio Cozier and his wife Irénée Shaw built amidst the hills of St Ann’s.

The son of Bajans who were civil servants in Trinidad, Cozier recalls his parents’ trepidations: They were “worried, I’m a male, it’s a Caribbean society after independence”. In his teen years, he notes, “there was a sense that if you’re interested in art something is wrong with you. And all that implied, in terms of sexuality and macho culture, and that bullshit that society deals with. I kind of went through a period where I didn’t do any art at all because I was afraid of the associations and the peer pressures, and I stopped going to M.P. Alladin’s classes.” He wasn’t derailed for long. Today, Cozier is among the most widely exhibited,recorded and revered contemporary artists working in the Caribbean.

Cozier travelled the familiar route for aspiring artists in Trinidad in the Sixties to Seventies. “I went to John Donaldson [Technical Institute] and studied design; I worked in the advertising system for three years.” His aspirations to paint steered him to Maryland Institute College of Arts in Baltimore in 1986, then to Rutgers University in New Jersey for post-graduate study. “The interest diversified to video and performative work,” he explains. “I realized I was more interested in drawing than painting in a formal sense. Certain types of conceptual work began to slip into the process. For some strange reason my interest in writing increased. When I came home I saw no difference between what I was investigating in my visual work and what I was going after through text. The visual work is more in the domain of the imagination, most of my writing is journalistic critical writing around the problematics of making work in a place like this.”

That place Cozier analyzes is Trinidad and Tobago, an oil-rich democracy with immense potential to be the catalyst for contemporary Caribbean art, but has too few stakeholders committed to nurturing the breadth and vision of contemporary expression. “The contemporary conversation around the visual arts really began in the early Eighties [with] people like Ken Crichlow, Wendy Nanan, Francisco Cabral,” says Cozier. And in 2000 that conversation expanded exponentially with the birth of CCA7, a sprawling industrial space supported by international funding that facilitated exhibits, residencies and workshops. “The necessity for CCA7 was [rooted in] the fact that we wanted links with the region and the world—the international game,” attests Cozier. “There’s a rising interest in the Caribbean all over the world in ways we haven’t gathered. We still think it’s calypso, pan and reggae, but it’s actually a much wider interest. CCA7 seemed the logical outcome from that…it facilitated being a bridge between local artists and artists who were outside the region and wanted to find a way to re-connect back in.” CCA7 was shuttered in 2007.

Cozier is a pivotal agent in the evolution of the contemporary art conversation. His observations and deliberations on today’s art scene and the next generation of custodians of creative expression in the Caribbean reveal what kindles angst, dismay and enthusiasm: “I’m fascinated by the space that [young artists] are in. When I was younger there might have been three artists you could have gone to [for inspiration]…now you have choices. There are lots of artists doing many different things, a young artist has things to look at first hand by a wide range of practitioners. Sadly, there’s nowhere for them to go to see it. The [National] Museum hasn’t seriously collected contemporary work, the galleries don’t really show it. So it really is heavily dependent on interpersonal relationships and trying to meet people and get into their studios. That’s what CCA7 was supposed to do and failed to accomplish.”

Cozier continues: “What’s exciting about these people is that their careers aren’t limited to Trinidad; some of them haven’t had shows in Trinidad because they’ve been able to very astutely take their practice out of the Caribbean to wider discourses: Marlon Griffith, Wendell McShine, Jaime Lee Loy, Nikolai Noel. Thematically, what interests me about these younger artists is that they’re not into cultural representation, they’re more about process. Look at Griffith, he’s not just interested in simply transferring Carnival from Port of Spain to other locations; he is interested in the dynamics of street performance derived from Carnival transplanted into other societies. He’s interested in the methodologies and processes of Carnival and not necessarily interested in representing or displaying Carnival internationally.’’

Cozier notes that artists are digging deeper into themselves, “into their personal iconography, into their own experiential domain’’ to find methodologies and new ways to talk about the experience of growing up in a place like Guyana, Barbados, St Vincent. “The question always comes up: what about this work is local? I don’t understand that question because we all grow up reading V.S. Naipaul and George Lamming. Most of those books were written in England in the English language. The novel form is not local; that is really a small point. What’s really at stake, the work is really a form of analysis not just a decorative way of responding to local mythology. It’s a way of using visual enterprises to understand one’s relationship to the outside world and to tease out what is the distinctive quality of the experience of growing up at this point in time in the Caribbean.

It is remarkable the work that they are doing and the degree to which the society provides them with absolutely no incentive to make work of that critical calibre.’’

Cozier says that at some stage in our developmental process, the people who control resources in favour of visual arts practice, whether collectors or government institutions or private enterprise, have to make a choice about what they are investing in. “The way it is right now, they are complaining about crime [and] disenfranchised youth but what they don’t realize is that it is better to invest in that person. Why is it we should only hear about youth when their leg is sticking out from under a cloth on Duncan Street or some part of Laventille. That little, cute boy playing pan, where is he going to be in 10 years. Is his leg going to be sticking out of a cloth on the front page of Newsday. I’m not talking about an irresponsible freedom, there’s this chupid thing that comes up about art and nakedness and all artists want to do is show genitals and that’s how artists measure artistic freedom. The measure of a democracy is the degree to which artists have the freedom and right to experiment and to engage us. We live in a society [where] if an artist wants to take a risk the society recoils. When young people have ideas, are you going to put your money where your mouth is! International funders [and] collectors are [keeping our] contemporary scene alive, which means we are dependent, in a post-colonial environment, on international agencies to support our cultural enterprises. There are people in this country with tons of money, they’d rather throw two tent in dey yard and spend TT$50,000 for one night than buy a painting by a contemporary artist for TT$10,000.”

A prominent part of Cozier’s contribution to the evolution of this discourse is stacked on his worktable and tacked on walls around us. The patchwork of 9”x7” drawings mounted behind him is from his growing “Tropical Night” series. Every day he expands the collection that dissects Trinidad and Tobago and was part of the monumental Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. “Paper has a life just like a thought, over time these drawings can die because they live as long as the idea lives. It’s always waiting on a kind of intervention,” observes Cozier. “Art lives in our mind’s eye, once you’ve seen a work of art and you’ve talked about it…how many people have seen the Mona Lisa. We understand it through graphic interpretations of it, through dialogue and song. In Trinidad, somehow we haven’t bought into that, we still believe a work of art has to be a material object.”

Cozier explains, “My work is shifting in three different mediums, but what my work is, is this process of speculation and analysis on growing up in a place like this, in this particular moment in time, and how that teases out the boundaries of what is possible.” For the wider contemporary Caribbean art community, abolishing boundaries to unveil new possibilities shapes the agenda that fuels the enduring discourse.