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January 2013
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In this movingly utopian text, she writes: “Our salvation lies in our capacity to create new and more inclusive mythologies, to move beyond the homeland myths of origin, as if return were at all possible one day,” citing Earl Lovelace’s proclamation that the task of the writer is “to lead society out of despair, to constantly provide hope.” She advocates a poetics of the transcendent, as opposed to realism and the rehashing of the familiar reductive binaries of African and European, rational self and irrational other, male and female, and tradition and modernity, in order to “move these societies beyond the literalness of any single group’s narrative to the melding of the historical experience which of necessity contains both the agony and ecstasy of survival.” My own research cuts through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, examining in particular the conceptualization of modernity and modernism in Latin America at the beginning of the twentieth century and also the construction and presentation of the art of the present. Earlier, it was common for writers to engage in a similar advocacy as Prof. Mohammed does in her “Mythopoetics” article. Artists and thinkers in Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, the Andes, and indeed throughout the region, called on like-minded individuals grappling with similar issues in their search for a collective identity to consider certain approaches, such as revalorizing the indigenous world, the rhythms of Africa, and the forms of vernacular culture in literary and artistic creations. That kind of advocacy is not at all common now. Although art in our era of globalization is more plural than it ever was before, it is also more individualistic, and the art world remains more interested in identifying individual “geniuses” than with excavating generational or other kinds of collective narratives. Poetics has not had much of a place in the contemporary art world either. I think it has come to be seen as antiquated, relegated to a similar state of oblivion in contemporary culture as aesthetics. The most recent edition of the Sao Paulo biennial, however, which I had the great fortune to see last week, was decidedly anti-trendy and invoked poetics in full force. Indeed, its title is “The Imminence of Poetics,” a concept which was inspired by a conversation with none other than Homi Bhabha. Writing in the catalogue, Bhabha describes poetics in relation to language: “Language never gets bogged down in reality; it hovers over the surface of the world and from that hovering height configures the making – the poesis – of the designs of our daily habitations and the horizons that point to our new destinations. Is this not why so many important liberatory thinkers – feminist, anti-imperialist, postcolonial, ecological, gay – find their persuasive ethical values of freedom and fairness in the flight of language, its metaphoricity?” Bhabha goes on to name Martí, Gandhi, Césaire, and Fanon, among others. As he continues, his commentary on the emancipatory potential of poetics resembles the power ascribed to it by Prof. Mohammed: “Language’s capacity for counterfactual expression and pre-figurative representation allows us the freedom to live paradoxically: to deeply identify with our embattled ways of being while envisaging, at the same time, the possibilities of reconstruction – the ways and means of affiliating with enlarged and inclusive conditions of life.” The question to ask then, of the biennial and of Prof. Mohammed, is how do we configure the relationship between art and language? Does the image have the same liberatory possibilities as the written word? As an art historian, I find time and time again that the word is privileged over the image, and, indeed, much of Prof. Mohammed’s work is involved with justifying why images are important. Can a painting or another sort of artistic intervention have the same power as a manifesto? We find an answer in Prof. Mohammed’s writings in the following passage from the “Mythopoetics” article: “I am attempting to link the idea of ‘morality’ to the imagination, an imagination which gives primacy to the visual, to the collective unconscious of a piece of nature that we share amongst us and that has been entrusted to our preservation, and that which makes it possible for us to envisage beyond our present experience and perceptions.” In the biennial, the reintroduction of poetics into the discussion of the visual arts was gratifying because it has not been a topic worthy of attention (at least in mainstream manifestations) for a long time. Since the chief curator, Luis Pérez Oramas, is a poet himself, it is not surprising. As I read through Prof. Mohammed’s work in Sao Paulo, I was struck by the wonderful synchronicity between her “mythopoetics” and the biennial. As she so rightly notes in her writings and films, western conceptions of art have long relegated the Caribbean to a marginal status. The biennial’s reorientation of the art of the present towards poetics and other possible ways of seeing gives me hope that we can find a space for the Caribbean in mainstream art discourse. Professor Tatiana Flores holds a joint appointment with the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers. She specializes in twentieth century Latin American art and contemporary art. This was her presentation at “Approaches to Critical Caribbean Studies” with Professor Patricia Mohammed on November 28, 2012 at Rutgers. |
In our selection of readings, there were two texts that related to the visual arts, my area of expertise: the introduction to the tour de force book “Imaging the Caribbean” and “Morality and Imagination – Mythopoetics of Gender and Culture in the Caribbean – The Trilogy” by Professor Mohammed. Where the book constitutes an attempt to understand the Caribbean through a journey through images from the past, including some that have no discernible direct correlation to the Caribbean but are masterfully woven into the narrative nonetheless, the “Mythopoetics” article reads as a manifesto for the creation of images and other types of art forms in the future. In “Imaging the Caribbean,” we find multiple images of the colonial encounter, including maps, representations of slavery and indentureship in various forms, the construction of the Caribbean picturesque, and the ever elusive subject of the native indigenous population – that is to say, images of the Caribbean’s subjects by its European colonizers – in “Mythopoetics” Mohammed offers us ways out of what she calls “the imploded world views of the Caribbean colonial experience.”