Monday, January 24, 2011

Sculptural Proposal for Postcolonial Conferrence

Material: Metal

 Challenge normativity



















The University of the West Indies
Department of Liberal Arts and Institute of Gender and Development Studies
New Geographies of Postcoloniality and Globalization

Repositioning the Body in Postcolonial Communication:
Confronting the Privatised Consumerist Agenda
(Artists’ thoughts on Installation Proposal)


1.      As we sit for dinner - mother, father, cousin, nephew, niece, sister, brother in-law; food is laid out and we prepare to dine in conversation when the iPods, the cell phones, the games shows emerge; in some way setting the rule of some kind of disengagement.

2.      A trip up to the Aripo valley in the Northern Range with the cousin and the academic and suddenly, just like that- the iPod. I am incensed. What’s up with dat? I ask inquisitively - there are three of us - join in the conservation. Your mother didn’t bring you up like dat.

3.      It is Carnival and we heading in a packed car to Port of Spain. The car stereo is playing music of the season and suddenly, the iPod is whipped out and the young woman sitting at the left rear window retreats into her world. She leaves us.

The three situations above present examples of the privatization of the modern social practice, and the deconstruction of habitual notions and practices of communication.
Free-market globalization and new developments in information technology have allowed for a deconstructivist intellectual position that allows for the liberalization and de-territorialisation  (i.e. westernization ) of thought and practice’ Using concepts such as the “global culture” a dialogue that is pervasive amongst artists, politicians, technocrats, bureaucrats and a business sector..., which states that since we belong to the global world population we have every right to absorb and utilize their cultural influence to advance our very own. This statement true as it is for small post colonial state usually comes at the peril of our heritage and our very own cultural self. These debates usually come from a very well articulated, educated and disparaging middle class which perceives itself as modern and global. 
This approach challenges traditional notions of “self” which regulates that the “self” belongs to a body, a tribe, a community for the continuity of the very “self” and the very community in which the “self” exists. These new formulations of how we present this “self” belongs to a narcissistic Western philosophy of modernist capitalism that tells us that the “self” belongs to the inner contemplations and ambitions of the individual with no responsibility to a wider community. This prescription has been the result of a consumerist middle class angst aimed at repositioning and maintaining good standing within their social group. This angst is evident in the heavy prescription for young people of qualifications and proper social etiquette in activities such as dance, swimming, choir, football, cricket, basketball and karate  Activities which prepare the young to advance within their class and peer group but have no real intention to building community.  The above may differ due to class and intention. These activities facilitate belonging in this group but do not provide the philosophical tools to critically analyse their situation.
This preference is reflected in the need to acquire the latest tools and gadgets that will give them the trappings of social mobility and plays into the consumerism that has corrupted our social order. The current tools are the cell (smart) phones, iPods, video games, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the game box, and other forms of bling.
The concerns of individual social mobility within one’s group are carried out in the interest of privilege and privatized concerns.  In other words, my interests become more important than the other: setting the table for confrontation with siblings and peers. These mobilization concerns at times have resulted in the destruction of long-standing institutions resulting in the development of privatized preferences to schools, medical services, members clubs, gangs, sporting and social clubs, blocks, setting a pathway, for new forms of communication?
Personal space is considered a one-inch circumference around an individual. Modern communication technology has increased that space considerably through an alienation of the individual from his or her social space, creating distance between people resulting in a lack of empathy, which increases the political ideology of the ‘self’ and consequently the iPodization of space.
So we have constructed this social bubble that has no correlation with our traditions, our ancestral and heritable grounding around - how we socialize, how we communicate with each other, or how we design our communities, our space and families.
Globalizing Culture or the Americanization of our Postcoloniality through its media and pop culture has created the authenticity of the narcissistic self;  presenting the ambitions of the individual as more important than any other concern. It is here the online self is born, to connect, yet disconnect at the moment. To read and listen, to chew and speak, to listen and talk.
Like a partner (friend) said recently in relation to an event affected by low participation - “Two hundred people on Facebook said they were coming, dey all lie.” This disconnect is possible as it is all too easy to press the key, to turn up the volume, to kill another alien, than dealing with the pleasantries and challenges of human communication.  How do we find the nature within us, me, and within you? How can we get a glimpse of this unsettling behaviour of our moving away from the skin of the other?
I am proposing that we adjust the dining experience to force people to be seated in close contact of each other; in some way we force them to rethink the relationships between bodies and activities. There are clear ways in which the body operates in this very personal experience. Usually a dining experience is laid out in a grid network and the personal organisation is square or circular and within specific measurements according to the number of people sitting at the table. By readjusting the measurements you can radically alter how the body reacts to the other. By redesigning the utensils you re-order the communal, bringing skin closer to each other.
What if we were to ask each other to discard our cell phones, iPods, laptops, etc. for that moment while they sit in one of our most primal and private of activities- dining?
What will be observed?
I wish to challenge our modernity by repositioning the body back into our living conversations.  This should set the stage for the consideration for new alternatives that will challenge our Neo- Postcolonial “Self”, which has branded the privatized body with elements of paranoia, gangster-ism, exoticism, religiosity, fundamentalism, capitalism and politicization. The native body more than ever is evolving into an unconventional form, without the critical analyst that will give it that specific flavour we so ideologically speak of, when we refer to the Caribbean body or “self”.     
 In essence what I am proposing is the deconstruction of a particular design order for the possible reconstruction of a social design manifesto by re-imaging the primitivism of an indigenous performance such as dining which is an important ritual of our lives.  By re-inserting the “self” in a very embroidered manner into the design of this space, creates a highlighted concern about the political body, recognizing that this belongs to us all as it has always been communal and social, creating the possibility to understand the possible in the non-literary and non-linear ways in which we communicate.


Dean Arlen
Artist/Sculptor
25.10.2010 

Thursday, January 13, 2011

pictures of We the Artists, Opening Night 5th of January 2011

Buy One Get One Free, 2010.
Matrial: Acrylic, Spray Paint Enamel.
Dimension: 60x80 Inches.





Artist: Embah
Title: Parrot,
Date: 2007
Material: Mixed Media.



The National Museum and Art Gallery of Trinidad and Tobago.





Artist: Vadis Turner,
Title: 4th Place,
Date: 2010,
Material: Meixed Media.





Title: Buy One Get One Free,
Artist: Dean Arlen,
Date: 2010,
Material: Acrylic and Spray Paint Enamel.

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

We the Artists, Exhibition at the National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago

We the Artists, exhibition at the National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago, January 05-26 2011.

Opened on a Wednesday night, to a pleasant crowd of colleagues, friends and well wishers. The Annex Gallery was light, the walls wasn't congested with work and gave a freedom to allow the work to breath, as I wondered where were they going to be placed.

Some artists work didn't make it and that was a disappointment or a blessing it would have crowed the little Annex Gallery, maybe a need for expanding the Annex Gallery?

Ann Hilton and David Subran seemed to be disappointed by the work presented. Due thou to logistics and a lack of critical analysis, which brings up the need for art education and critical thinking in our education system.

What can I say about the experience, first for the National Museum and as an artist. It was the first show with a comprehensive programme, a film night, an artists talk, printed catalogue and a certain investment into a curator thoughts. These are brave steps for a cultural body that has been stuck within a cultural vision of itself. The Jamaican Gallery have a programme where they invite curator to present shows.

We artists have always complained about the role of the Trinidad and Tobago National Museum in representing us the artists and translating our product to the community, to the state and to the corporate sector, for their understanding and betterment.

The Museum is there to connect ideas, bridge gaps, create alternative options  and assumptions about life. There is still so much that we can present and talk about. If "We the Artists" is the beginning of a progressive investment into the exploration of the aesthetics, through the visual arts, design, dance, music, poetry, theater, then hey cool all good.


But if it's other endeavours are fast foods exhibitions that are pushed up then pulled down with no discerning footprints then the Museum and the community will miss the opportunity to mature culturally. We're at this time in our cultural history at a cross roads, It's bad really bad, as is evident by articles written or talked about art and culture in the media.







      What can be said about this experience, only that there should have been a professional photographer to take shots of my work for the catalogue, does that mean that I have to invest in takeing my own professional photos of my work, yes!. But when an organization is carrying out such a project that is one of the perxs, getting your work photographed by a professional. That is a $2,000 investment I aint have, or if I have it, it's already been spent, Yo.




It's imperative that the artists participate with the National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago. They need us to speak about their possiblities and they need to improve their present infrastructure, needed to truly facilitate projects.

Which means the National Museum will have to go head to head with the state to justify a much more intensive progressive yearly programming.




The National Museum will have also look at self financing their own programmes. Setting up a museum store, branding products, selling their services etc.



We the Artists, is a light in the armor of something that can be or may be happening. But I know it's happening in Alice Yard, Studio 66, the Abovegroup, the Studio Film Club, the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Reel Trini Films, Latin Nights, the Erotic Art Festival, the Red Earth Festival etc. The job of the National Museum of Trinidad and Tobago is to articulate all dat Obeah!



I will place photos later.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

The One Day Symposium- In Our Space: Art, Architecture and Design: New Perspectives on Art and Design Practice in the Caribbean

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

On October the 6th 2010, in collaboration with the Department of Creative and Festival Arts. The One Day Symposium was held at the School of Education Auditorium. It was well attended and well received.

Cross Section of Crowd at the Symposium.

Cover of the Abstract Booklet.


The UWI Sculptural Project.
Repositioning Aesthetics, Artists and the Institution.

The UWI Sculptural Project 2004-2010 began as a proposal for the installation of seven sculptures on the grounds of the UWI St. Augustine campus by some of our progressive contemporary artists. So far one has been installed.  This project was not just a case of ‘art for art sake;’ it was an exploration of the relational and performative angst that exist between the artist and local institutions and to some extent the wider society. This project also aimed to bring the role of art and aesthetics into the discourse on development, alongside other deliberations taking place in relation to architecture and urban planning but without the input of the artists.

Even though art has contributed to the shaping of modernity in many contexts this has been much less the case in Trinidad and Tobago.  The introduction of new terminologies and practices such as social sculpturing, site specific architecture and artists and architectural collaboratives have created major sensations internationally.  There are a number of initiatives worldwide of artist involvement in development projects.  These include The Artists’ Collaborative Movement in Toronto, the Phoenix Solid Waste Management Facility 1993, designed and built by two designers Michael Singer and Linnea Glatt and the Row Houses Project of the 1990’s, by artist Rick Lowe.[1]
Locally, CrossOver Designs, Peter Minshall’s Mas Camp, Studio 66, CCA7 and Alice Yard are other examples of collaborative artists’ projects in Trinidad and Tobago. Yet the recognition of the potential of aesthetics as a redeeming factor for the development of our civility and our civilisation has fallen on deaf ears. This is due in part to the ignorance and arrogance of technocrats and bureaucrats that resulted in the infamous NAPA fiasco of 2010, between artists and state.
This symposium, a component of the UWI Sculptural Project is taking place in the post NAPA era. It explores the situation where even in our creative diligence, we as artists have not been able to capture the imagination of the country, at least not since the early pre and post independence era.  Artists have a responsibility to put in place an aesthetic philosophical framework through an honest exploration of our craft. Setting down mile posts for other discourses to develop. This arrogant dismissive attitude we have to our art performance, within academia, galleries, artists’ groups and established cultural institutions must cease.  Through this serious intellectual investigation and a physical articulation of these findings we hope to regain our political[2] imagination and philosophical direction.
As we sit to break bread, there is a possibility that this will be the beginning of an engaged aesthetic movement that can redefine the modern Trinbagonian artists. This was what the UWI Sculptural Project is really about.
Dean Arlen
Project Convenor.     
July 6, 2010






[1] See: Tom Finkelpearl, Dialogues in Public Art, First MIT Press, Massachusetts, 2001.
[2] Political – an engagement with agenda-setting, social change and engagement with the society.


Another Cross Section.

I was Video Tapping the Panels. I should have taken more photos.

The Artists Panel: Presenters were GA Gardner Ph.D., Shastri Maharaj, Peter Doig. Moderator Gabriel Hezekiah.

Artists Panel.

More Artists- Why did I take photos of only the artists panel?

Ah the last one.




The symposium brought a cross section of artists to the table, painters, designers and architects. There should have been a presentation by the urban planners, that was unfortunate. Dr, Gerard Hutchinson missed his presentation, but I'm sure his presentation will be in the publication that the Department of Creative and Festival Arts is working on and will launch sometime this year.

The Presenters were

Artists.
Shastri Maharaj.
GA Gardner Ph.D.
Peter Doig.

Designers.
Richard Rawlins.
Adele Todd.
Robert Young.
Lesley Ann-Noel.

Architects.
Mark Raymond.
Jenifer Smith.
Geoffrey Maclean.
Vernelle Noel.

Art, Design and Architecture and the Wider Community.
Sean Leonard- Architect.
Prof. Gerard Hutchinson- psychiatrist.
Gary Turton- Architect.
Keith Cadet- Designer.


The Symposium brought out and up interesting issues that will need to be expanded on in the next dialogue that happens. Issues- Such as the nurturing and the supporting of artists to the conceptual believe that our modernity has reached it's point, to the historical tracings of our public aesthetics.

We looked at the role the state can play in development and even in stagnating an environment of fear and bureaucracy. There was even the discourse on architecture as a product of local cultural vernacular.

LOOKING BACK- We should have had more time to debate the issues brought up in both the Q&A and the Plenary section of the symposium. Which we missed due to a scheduling error.

Moderators- should be effectively used. They have the opportunity to bring out of the presentations and the presenters intentions, clarity, analysis etc., especially when presenters aren't as effective as they should be.  

This One Day Symposium will only work if there is a constant in the dialogue. It should be carried to the other level, the work of artist and designers should be able to be seen in real time and ably critically analyzed.

Therefore it is imperative that there is a certain amount of growth and ambition to the next symposium.

Which will be REDESIGNING THE MILE POST PROJECT.....aka "SHOWINGOFF"

and that is another story.