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Thursday 30 August 2007

"Sheer multiplicity"

In its apparent continuing effort to be as un-Manhattan as possible, the Brooklyn Museum has been cooking up shows that the fashion-obsessed art establishment is guaranteed to find uncool. Hip-hop, “Star Wars,” feminism. What could be next? “Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art” is next.

Multiculturalist terms like identity, hybridity and diversity may sound like words from a dead language in Chelsea, but they are the lingua franca of the Brooklyn show. Once-hyped forms like installation art and the neo-conceptual object may be disdained by Manhattan tastemakers, but they are embraced here....

One of the show’s stated purposes is to ask whether there is, in fact, a cultural entity — or a type of contemporary art — that can be securely identified as Caribbean. And it arrives at its answer — no — through a display of sheer multiplicity. There may be fundamental links between the diaristic drawings of the Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier; the platinum-plated plantains of the Puerto Rican Miguel Luciano; the self-portrait in lederhosen of the Haitian artist Jean-Ulrick Désert; the participatory installation by the conceptual artist Satch Hoyt; and a sad, suspenseful video piece by the young Cuban artist Alex Hernández Dueñas. But if so, they are not mapped here.


-- From Holland Cotter's review of Infinite Island in the New York Times. In the New York Sun, Lance Esplund says:

The show, comprising videos, installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and interactive works, emphasizes the West Indies' cross-cultural nature, and is colorful, musical, and multifarious, but it is also serious-minded and politically charged. The exhibit acts primarily as a provocative platform for social causes, which ultimately may tell us more about the contemporary issues embraced by the art world than about the rich diversity of the Caribbean.

1 comment:

clarabella said...

I'd like to have seen Infinite Island, and more power to the Brooklyn Museum for mounting such a show. Of course, so much depends on who is curating a show like this, on what that person's understands by "CONTEMPORARY + CARIBBEAN Art" (would that admit Colin Garland, for instance?), on the awful limitations that must obtain, given the energy of artistic production in the Caribbean. I don't know how much Holland Cotter knows about the Caribbean, but even if he knew just a little, he would know that sheer multiplicity IS us, as per Glissant's rhizome culture, Benitez Rojo's polyrhythms, my own prismatic or refracted vision. So maybe Lance Esplund is closer to it when he says, "The exhibit acts primarily as a provocative platform for social causes, which ultimately may tell us more about the contemporary issues embraced by the art world than about the rich diversity of the Caribbean." Much thanks for the info on the exhibit... pam