| [::..articles..::] |
|---|
| :: resumé [>] |
| :: galleries [>] |
| :: catalogues [>] |
| :: articles [>] |
| :: art links [>] |
:: Lespri Endepandan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture ::
Lespri Endepandan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture will be a groundbreaking exhibition of great scholarly and curatorial importance, bringing together a diverse selection of over 50 pieces from Haitian sculptors spanning the past half century to the present. The exhibit will open at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum on Friday, September 10, 2004 and will continue through December 5, 2004.
This unprecedented exhibit marks the first time Haitian sculpture is the sole subject of a major museum exhibition. The complexity and richness of Haitian sculpture is well deserving of its own study. Haitian sculpture diverges from the easy narratives, rich colors, and sweet depictions of everyday life traditionally found in Haitian painting. A profound expression of Haitian life, this new tradition of Haitian art has few colors but great intensity.
The curatorial focus of the exhibit will emphasize the intrinsic importance of the materials used in Haitian sculpture and their social, religious, economic and political significance. The works in Lespri Endepandan are made from a variety of materials including iron, aluminum, glass, paper-mache, found objects, terracotta, wood and cement. The artists' distinctive techniques and methodologies work outside the confines of the Western aesthetic and these non-traditional practices have established a new paradigm within Haitian art. Lespri Endepandan represents the independent spirit, not only in terms of Haiti's history of political independence, but also the Haitian sculptor's disregard to traditional western paradigms from which is borne the artistic independence.
Three categories will loosely guide the structure of the exhibition: Iron Traditions, which will feature the work of the Iron Masters who laid a foundation for the sculptural tradition in Haiti. Ritual Objects with a focus on their three dimensional characteristics, and finally, Contemporary Interpretations, cutting edge work from Haiti's younger generation of sculptors.
The tradition of metal works, beginning with Georges Liautaud, was born in the 1950's in the Haitian village of Croix-des Bouquets. The innovative creations of the Iron Masters initiated this art form of hammering and chiseling intriguing forms out of iron oil drums found in Haiti. These sculptures are a moving testament to the creativity of the Haitian people, inspired by their unique history of cultural and religious independence. A diverse selection of the Iron Master's work from this period will be featured in the exhibition.
Haitian sculptors working in metal interpret vodou themes to convey the transformative elements of the natural world. The influence of vodou is so embedded in all threads of Haitian life, that it can be seen as a cultural phenomenon beyond-a spiritual belief. The ritual objects in the exhibit are laden with strong symbolism based on vodou traditions. Haitian expert, Karen McCarthy Brown states, "Living is understood to be a process of continuous transformation. Everything is about to turn into something else... the young into the old, the man into the woman, the woman into the man, the human into the animal."
The younger generation of Haitian artists is increasingly innovative in their use of materials. The work of the contemporary artists in the exhibition reveals fresh perspectives on Haitian culture. Their creative methods are unique primarily because of the bold juxtapositions of materials used which can be called post-modernist in their re-interpretation of existing art-making processes.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a comprehensive bilingual (Kreyol and English) catalogue including an essay by leading expert and scholar, Donald Cosentino, Ph.D., and will undoubtedly become an invaluable contribution to the growing body of scholarly literature of Haitian art.Virtual Vodou. Haitian [Post]Modern Sculpture
Donald Cosentino"[T]hat art of reassembling fragments of pre-existing images in such a way as to form a new image is the most important innovation in the art of the century. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized" (Simic 1992:18).
No matter how [postmodern contemporary Haitian sculpture might appear, it is crucial to appreciate its debt to the ancient African Atlantic aesthetic of appropriation, and assemblage. In many of the best pieces of contemporary art, the streams of the Haitian Renaissance and the Wanga tradition seem to flow together, engulfing new media, and demonstrating once again the infinite adaptability of Haitian culture and especially Vodou, to re-figuration.
Indeed most of Haitian art can be described as postmodern, so long as it is understood that the canons of postmodernity were first established in colonial St. Domingue with the slave trade. The French colony was in fact a free-floating signifier, a place where, as Charles Simic described, "the old world shipwrecked" (92: 21). The culture built from that wreckage never experienced the processes of modernism. Ripped from any linear European, Amerindian or African history, the Haitian Weltanschauung was necessarily synchronic. The prefabricated products of the industrialized world dumped into Haitian markets were welcomed as signs of another order of existence. This tumble of iron barrels and plastic dolls was regarded as flotsam and jetsam from the world under the sea, where divinities and ancestors dwelled. With an X-ray precision, Haitian sculptors continue to discern their "Real Presence" lurking in the most improbable and various detritus; and with singular imagination and craft, they shape their art to reveal that Divine Presence to the rest of the brave new (postmodern) world.
What separates contemporary Haitian art from its antecedents is self-consciousness. The trajectory from the unknown sculptors of paket kongo to the eye-popping assemblages of Celeur, Nasson, Boucard, Vilaire, St. Eloi or Duval-Carrie is marked by the artists' ever greater awareness of global contexts. Making gods from the market has become making gods for the market. Contemporary artists are establishing what now might be called Haiti's "Waning of the Middle Ages," that secular moment when the art of belief becomes the art about belief.
I doubt many Haitian artists would recognize the muse described by Andre Pierre, "Before I paint, I take this canvas and I put it on an easel. I wait for an inspiration, before describing it on canvas. Then an inspiration comes. I sing a song, and then I describe what I sang. I describe the song on the canvas" (Cosentino 95: xxiii). The intuitive is buttressed by a knowing cosmopolitanism, as sophisticated artists force-march their Iwa into the global art mart.
Edouard Duval-Carrie. In thus querying these sculptures, we appreciate that postmodern artists can engage traditional Vodou imagery to address contemporary realities in ways not open to the material metaphysics of a Liautaud or a Barra. The work of Edouard Duval-Carrie is exemplary (illustration 31). Every material is grist for his postmodern Vodou sensibility. The Iwa now board "Bossou's Red Boat" equipped with palos (sticks) from Kongo reaching out like radio antennae. Where will Bossou sail his boat? North, along the Gulf Stream to Miami, Brooklyn or Montreal where new Little Haitis re-establish their gods? The Iwa are ersatz anemones from Ginee: the Island Beneath the Sea. In Duval-Carrie's sculptures everything is lit-up, vaselined and ready for action. Heavy red resin divinities who inspired Lespri Endependan now seem poised for postmodern revivals.
Los Angeles, 2004.
