Caribbean Artistic Genealogies of Withdrawal. Rethinking Caribbean Visuality Beyond Objecthood

Carlos Garrido Castellano

doi:10.1080/1369801x.2017.1348243

Abstract

This essay examines how Caribbean artists have employed withdrawal in critical, insurgent ways. I confront several Caribbean projects developed in different chronologies and locations that have attempted to use withdrawal in order to challenge uneven institutional dynamics. The examples I discuss here – Cuban art dedicates itself to baseball (Havana, José A. Echevarría Stadium (Vedado), 1989), Silvano Lora’s Marginal Biennial (Santo Domingo, multiple locations, 1992), Joëlle Ferly’s L’Art de faire la grève (Martinique, Fondation Clément, 2009) and L’Artocarpe (Guadeloupe, ongoing) – problematize the role of artistic agency, the reach of the exhibition form and the influence of foreign expectations. Traditionally, Caribbean art has been subjected to a process of commodification and exoticization. Through the examination of those four practices, I will assert that an alternative genealogy of active, productive interventions concerned with staging emancipative spatial dynamics beyond representational constraints and objecthood can be found.

Highlights

The dependence in Caribbean criticism on artistic discourses and the exhibition format overshadows the strategies undertaken by Caribbean artists to escape external categorizations and thematizations
Lora’s anti-biennial was not a Dominican Salon des Refusés reacting against that model; the project withdrew from the space of official institutions and moved the event to peripheral locations in Santo Domingo, denouncing the cultural spectacularization and segregation behind the official commemorative programme envisioned by President Joaquín Balaguer
By positioning itself at the margins of process-oriented, long-term creativity, the residency enables ongoing feedback and international exchange despite the cultural oblivion motivated by the organizational distribution of the Caribbean d’Outre Mer (DOM)