Art as propaganda

Newsday’s Anne Hilton, however, had a different opinion. "The paintings are quite lovely," she wrote. Her only criticism of the main subject of the paintings — black Caribbean women — was that "apart from weddings and funerals, when last did you see nubile young women wearing a hat as they walk down the street?" But UTT chairman Ken Julien had no objection to such anachronisms since, in a speech at the exhibition’s opening, he asserted that, although Holder had been living in New York, the paintings showed that he "had not lost touch with his roots".

Well, there are roots and there are roots. The UTT, which co-sponsored the exhibit, has given Holder an honorary doctorate. Other recipients were musician Mungal Patasar, photographer Noel Norton, engineer Robert Yorke and, posthumously, Rudrunath Capildeo. The award to Capildeo particularly interested me, since he was described by the UTT as a "mathematical scientist". Yet Capildeo, to my knowledge, never wrote any mathematical formulae with practical applications nor even a mathematical proof.

Bowen asks, "What is that exhibition about, the big boys at UTT needing a forum to show yet more lip service by co-producing a most mediocre exhibition? Is it about aesthetics, is it about creole nationalism?" Part of the answer may, perhaps, be found in the list of "Honorary Distinguished Fellows" nominated by the UTT"s Board of Governors: Pat Bishop, LeRoi [sic] Clarke, Fr Anthony de Verteuil, Earl Lovelace, Bertie Marshall, Peter Minshall, and David Rudder. These persons are certainly competent in their respective fields, with Minshall and Rudder being first-order geniuses. But the list reveals a specific bias in the UTT’s proposed Academy for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs.

Bowen’s outrage is both personal and professional. "Here I am teaching figure painting at UWI," he writes, "trying to explain the many thousands of inferences and details just in the process of looking at the human figure and reading it in space, attempting to get away from sentimental stylistic embellishments, reading the figure with microscopic eyes in its immediate context, and then stretching the boundaries of personal skill to accommodate and interpret new attitudes, new feelings, and revelations in the learning process."

Passionate discourse, but not necessarily true in its underlying assumptions. Modern artists who do not deal in popular art like graphics, design, and comic-books, make a fetish out of being different. American writer Tom Wolfe, in his book The Painted Word, explained this process as follows. "First you do everything possible to make sure your world is antibourgeois, that it defies bourgeois tastes, that it mystifies the mob, the public, that it outdistances the insensible middle-class multitudes by light-years of subtlety and intellect — and then, having succeeded admirably, you ask with a sense of See-what-I-mean? outrage: look, they don’t even buy our products!"

This process does not fit neatly into the T&T context, of course. We do not have a true middle-class, a bourgeois, although a protean sensibility has perhaps begun to form over the past 20 years. In our society, popular art is that which appeals to the "grassroots", whether Afro or Indo. The middle-class here is defined by income and education, not so much by their aesthetic or intellectual preferences. But, since no social group can exist without cultural products, this Trinidadian middle-class is catered to by North American culture. This is not a bad thing unless it is exclusive, for exclusive reliance on a foreign culture stunts the individual psyche. Art may be universal, but it ent that universal.

However, the same stunting occurs when local culture becomes fetishised. This is why I am against the blanket call for 50 percent local content on all radio stations. That call has to do with ethnic and individual self-interest, not culture. If culture were the primary concern, the quota call would be based on a simple formula — a tabulation of available products for 24-hour stations over a 12-month period, with 75 percent of the total excised as likely to be crap. Divide the rest and you have a reasonable quota demand — and it won’t be 50 percent.

Such calls, however, represent a lobby that the UTT seems to be catering to. Even if Bowen’s own artistic perspective might not withstand critical scrutiny, this does not invalidate his criticism of Holder’s work. The very fact that Holder was officially described as a "painter, photographer, dancer, actor, director, writer and designer" tells me that he is not a first-class painter. Such Jack-of-all-trades are rarely master of any. But mediocrity has another root, identified by VS Naipaul’s in his book Beyond Belief. "Good or valuable writing is more than a technical skill; it depends on a certain moral wholeness in the writer. The writer who lines up with any big public cause like communism or Islam, with its pronounced taboos, has very soon to falsify. The writer who lies is betraying his calling; only the second-rate do that."

The "big public cause" in Trinidadian society is not specifically ideological or religious, but ethnic; and, as Naipaul says, there are no first-class writers or intellectuals from that quarter. Yet it is to ethnic sensibilities that the UTT’s proposed Arts Academy seems to be catering, if the initial indicators are taken at face value. This is a pity. An academy of this sort is supposed to train talented persons and also help provide a living to artists of various stripes. But it already seems that ethnic politics, as well as the politics of who-know-yuh, has infested UTT’s 2020 vision. Which means that, unless Bowen’s implied warning has any effect, the Arts Academy will become an institution for further mediocritising the arts in T&T.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com

Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh