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| Guitar, '89-'90 material- cardboard, house paint, wood. |
LOOKING AT A DISAPPEARING AESTHETIC.
THE TEMPORARY NATURE OF THE ASSEMBLAGE.
THE POLITICS OF SPACE
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| House, Front Yard and Back Yard material- wood, house paint, wood, photograph |
Mom called, they will be spraying the work for the fourth time again. It seems that the material has be attacked infested with termites and they had to be soaked with chemicals to see if they will be able to protect the works from destruction, NAH they cant, the work will be gone soon. Works that was created during a period where I would pick things off the street and drag them home to create object of desire. It was me trying to avoid the art store, It was me trying alternatives, It was me keeping money for Pelican night (a local pub in Port of Spain), It was was me being radical- what ever was going on in the gallery I was going the other way. It was me being ignorant.
But what ever impetus they came from they are now on their way to their finality, out of sight. Some of them were exhibited during the early years of the creation of CCA7 and Aquarela Gallery. But most of them have not been seen or presented due to the fact that I saw these objects as explorations, developments that will lead to somewhere.
Maybe that was where it has lead to, here, this conversation about space, materials and aesthetics. I remember Yao, telling his story of filming in a house (Yao is film maker with a heart of an assemblage artist, finding objects within his space and including them into his aesthetics of the film project) to return the next day to find the house gone. This story of temporariness is a familiarity that we have come to understand, it is part of our political frame. Our language and our desires. Historians will tell that Trinidad and Tobago and The Caribbean being part of the colonial project, was developed as a space of temporiness, to extract as much as you can and leave. it is now in our 40's that we are now settleing as a people. It will be our politics that will see how and in what manner we settle. So far shit hit the fan........dat is another story.
As I listen to a advert shot from Power102FM a voice from the advert exclaims "Wha people doing with hoe in dey han in these times, where de money for the whackers, where is the money for the whackers".
We are a people who are always looking to upgrade, to dispel the past and create a future that suites our idea of the creation of modernism.
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| Exploration into shadow and color Material- Wood, Acrylic, Cardboard, Glue |
A friend just came back from Chile, on hearing the advert exclaimed to me, you know what I saw the people cutting the grass with....Brushing Cutlasses.
Its the "idea", that is disturbing, that "idea", that made me drag out materials from the garbage or the side of the road, never in my head came across the concept of termites or how long this will last, if it was there it must have been dismissed forthwith.
This lack of criticality, has been solved and dealt with in my personal growth as an artist. But in conversation with other artists there seem that we still fall prey to the temporary nature of the object. We still develop in the fly, we build up and we crash down, or we totally dismiss the idea all together. I was wacthing a video of the Tate Modern, conservation team going over a Chris Offili's work, they replicated the painting to find all its structural faults, that they will be able to conserve it better. Where do we stand in the idea of material conservation and protection of the object. Rather than standing by the object and telling the patron not to touch the object.
Dem shacks we see, the church in Quanapo, dem food stalls on the Highway, the Christmas stalls in Independence Square, De book stall that used to be in Woodford Square, (dat used to kill de grass, den tun to mud when rain fall, so when yuh walk in de sqaure dey was dis big ass mud hole watching yuh in de face), de squatters in yuh area are all built with the politics of "on the fly" with the idea we will fix up and upgrade to a permanent fix later on. The temporariness of our space has dwindled to the temporariness of the person.
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| Blue Bull Material- Wood, Cardboard, Paint and 3 Rum Bottles |
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| These were part of a larger piece that was displayed at one of the earlier CCA7 exhibitions that was held in the Fernande's head office, I think. It was where Gary Turton's Office is. |
It was interesting developing these work but as they move to another state, looking back, then looking at ones feet and around me to see where I'm in conceptually developing work, that will stand and past from generation to generation, or is it that the work must be come co modified into a consumer product of temporariness and live a certain life then pass on. As with the African crafts man it is in that making of the object that is important.
The question here is where is the object of desire in relation to the evolving nature of our politics of space and nation.
GOOD TIMES,
Bye My Sweet Hearts, Bye.
