Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean.

Island Thresholds Contemporary Art from the Caribbean The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts February 19-June 5, 2005

The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), founded in 1799 in Salem, Massachusetts, is one of America's oldest museums. Since it is primarily known and celebrated for its collection of maritime and Asian art, many were surprised by PEM's recent exhibition, "Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean," which unites recent work by four internationally-acclaimed artists: David Boxer (Jamaica), Tony Capellan (the Dominican Republic), Kcho (Cuba), and Marc Latamie (Martinique). Organized by Sam Scott, assistant curator of maritime art, the exhibition was born from a reconsideration of what is meant by maritime art--an ambiguous category that includes everything from ship models to painted seascapes, objects which are most often united by their documentary intent to depict real events, people, and places. For the curator, looking to contemporary art posed an opportunity to embrace new directions in maritime scholarship that looks at the sea as an active, constructive force on cultures and throughout history. Nowhere is this more true than in the Caribbean, an Atlantic region marked by European exploration, colonialism, imperialism, and migration: historical experiences inextricably linked to and made possible by bodies of water. From this starting point, the exhibition united compelling work by four contemporary artists from different nations whose work evokes the particularities of their respective homelands and the cultural complexity of islands surrounded and shaped by water.

The PEM and the curator must be commended for their ambitious and largely successful undertaking, which grows so naturally from the museum's mission and historic collections. By tackling a region most often addressed through national or language-specific surveys, (1) "Island Thresholds" offered an opportunity to contemplate the island-rich region from a more expansive perspective. Although this was not their only intention, the exhibition is also a respectful attempt to make the museum's offerings more culturally relevant to Salem's changing population, which now boasts a significant Caribbean, specifically Dominican, presence.

Beautifully installing the exhibition in a series of spacious and newly renovated galleries, the museum went to great lengths to challenge the public's exotic expectations. Visitors were greeted by an introductory video featuring the artists discussing their influences, artistic processes, and specific national contexts. Throughout the exhibition, extensive wall labels written in three languages--English, French, and Spanish--emphasized the distinctiveness of each artist's work, underscoring that Caribbean art and culture is diverse rather than monolithic. However, even though the exhibition was more carefully nuanced and sophisticated than the average survey organized by a nonspecialist, ultimately the subject is so profound and complex that "Island Thresholds" and its accompanying catalogue could only touch the surface of its epic theme.

Jamaican David Boxer, the oldest of the four artists, approaches his work like a historian, offering serial painting and book projects that are a kind of visual sidebar to official history. Focusing mostly on the legacy of slavery, Boxer's triptychs such as Chiwarageist (1995-96) are seascapes that conjure historical memory through densely painted surfaces and abstracted forms reminiscent of African sculpture. The title and angular forms that break through the horizon line make reference to the horns of a Bamana chiwara headdress from Mali. Here the fragmented canvas is as much a representation of violence as it is of resilient cultural memory. Boxer's most engaging entry into the exhibition was The Black Books (1992-2003), a three-volume series intended to memorialize the Middle Passage, the historic voyage of Africans to the New World. Over the course of 344 pages--each page representing a year between Christopher Columbus's arrival in Jamaica in 1494 and the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1838--Boxer appropriates and digitally collages Christian, Taino, and West African iconography, among other visual references, to evoke a clash of cultures. In creating this mournful picture book, dominated by monochromatic images, Boxer also challenges the relationship between the book form and notions of accepted and official knowledge.

In one of the most fascinating entries in the exhibition, Mark Latamie's interactive installation Ajoupa (2004) asks participants to allow their olfactory sense conjure up memories. Modeled and titled after a simply styled wood building in Latamie's native Martinique, Ajoupa is a narrow, wood structure with two doors allowing participants to enter and exit. On each side of the structure, shelves hold small bowls that contain aromatic substances, such as coffee harvested in the Caribbean. As participants walk through the structure, they can pick up the bowls and let their memories wander. While this work is largely about the experience of diaspora and the the desire of migrants--including the artist himself, who now lives in New York City--to remember the scents and comforts of home, it is also about the Caribbean's colonial past. In presenting sweet spices like cinnamon and vanilla, Latamie reminds us that the islands are associated with earthly pleasures and raw, exportable commodities. By including aromatic substances, Latamie in particular recalls the original European impetus to reach the Americas--an alternative route to the "Indies" and access to its spice trade.

While Latamie's poetic work gained effect through multiple associations, Tony Capellan's installations offered some of the most direct social critique in the exhibition. In both Mar Caribe (Caribbean Sea; 1996), and La Bandera de los Ahogados (the flag of the drowned; 1996), Capellan used an abundance of found materials carefully placed in repetitive patterns to suggest the endless supply of poverty in his native Dominican Republic. La Bandera de los Ahogados, for example, is a memorial to those Dominicans who perish en route to a purported better life in Puerto Rico on precarious boats through the dangerous waters between the two islands. Installed directly on the gallery floor, this work recreates the outline of the Dominican flag and is composed of salvaged shoes collected by the artist from the Dominican coastline and placed on four large quadrants of sand. The individuality of these discarded, worn shoes, each of which bears the indexical trace of its former owner, is a harsh criticism of the half-island nation's disavowal of the poor. Yet, in using materials such as sand, the work is also a pointed commentary on the stubborn Club Med stereotype that hovers over the Caribbean. While Westerners flock to Dominican resorts like Punta Cana for a little bit of paradise, citizens literally die to get off the island.

Like Capellan, Kcho incorporates found materials in installations and recorded performances to comment on the challenges of living in contemporary Cuba. In Para Olvidar (to forget; 2000,) Kcho constructed a precarious and humble pier and its environs using wood and beer bottles salvaged from Cuban shores. While piers are traditionally a point of departure for many sea voyages, a wall blocks this pier, preventing any movement. This ironic juxtaposition acts as a kind of metaphor for contemporary Cuban reality, which remains closed to the United States due to the more than forty-year embargo. Like resourceful artists, all Cubans must survive and construct life through ingenuity. In this environment, resorting to creativity or the temporary reprieve of a good drink are your only options.

Kcho's provocative video L.Q.N.T.M.T.F. (2003) also posits Cuba as a closed cultural circuit. In addition to being a possible ode to Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. of 1919, the title references the initials of a Caribbean colloquial phrase that roughly translates into "what doesn't kill you will make you stronger." The video itself records a performance where the artist, with the help of friends, cooks a communal stew in a large wooden boat on the rocky shores of Cuba. For the non-Cuban specialist this work can be a bit cryptic, as it directly references the foundational ideas and concepts of Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz (1880-1969). Over the course of his long and prolific career, Ortiz created brilliant metaphors for the nature of Cuban culture, one of his most well known being the ajiaco, or Cuban stew. (2) The ajiaco is a delicious dish composed of ingredients both indigenous and imported to the island by the various cultural groups that settled in Cuba during, before and after European colonization. For Ortiz, the ajiaco was made possible by Cuba's island nature, which was open to influences coming from all sides. In cooking the ajiaco in a boat, the artist repurposes a vessel no longer needed for its intended purpose of transporting goods, ideas, and people to and from Cuba. Kcho's twenty-first century ajiaco is clearly different than that of Ortiz, who wrote most of his foundational texts before the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Nowhere in the exhibition catalogue or on the object label is this important Cuba-specific reference discussed, leaving most viewers at a loss for understanding the meaning of the work.

And here lies the challenge of doing regional exhibitions. By increasing one's curatorial peripheral vision, as it were, you invariably loose the ability to focus on some important details. And, while it is understandable and even corrective to emphasize the diversity present in Caribbean art, there are also provocative continuities that require elaboration. Why is there a need to memorialize forgotten victims and use found materials that suggest a challenging lived reality? And how can we interpret the prevalence of a kind of making-do aesthetic that transforms what one has in hand--be it the archive of art history and visual culture or beer bottles that drift onto the shore? And while Mark Latamie and Tony Capellan's work raise the issue of the contemporary Caribbean diaspora, this important chapter in the epic story of the Caribbean and the sea is never fully engaged by the exhibition or the catalogue. For clearly now the island of Manhattan is just as Caribbean as the Dominican Republic. In the end, the answers to these and other questions are at the root of Caribbean culture, born of a colonial past and clashing cultures, and forever caught between waters that unite and separate it from the world.

(1.) Recent examples Include: "Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island" (1999) at Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, Arizona; "Here & There/Aqui y Alla: Six Artists from San Juan" (2000) at El Museo del Barrio in New York; "The Caribbean Abroad: Contemporary Artists and Latino Migration" (2003) at The Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey; "None of the Above: Contemporary Work by Puerto Rican Artists" (2004) at Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut; and "Island Nations: New Art from Cuba, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Diaspora" (2004) at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island.

(2.) For more on Ortiz's notion of the ajiaco, see Gustavo Perez Firmat's The Cuban Condition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).