By: Verle Poupeye
March 18, 2022
Several recent publications on Caribbean art are based on doctoral dissertations, which makes important new research and critical work available to a broader readership. Successful dissertations do not always make for the best books, however, as their approach often serves to satisfy program requirements and dissertation committee expectations rather than to produce a broadly useful analysis of the research. The title under review suffers from these problems and is overtheorized and underresearched.
What is left, when the layers of largely redundant, standard-issue cultural studies theorization are peeled away, is a surprisingly concise and cursory critical examination of how the Caribbean contemporary art scene has positioned itself vis-à-vis earlier developments and foundational ideas in Anglophone Caribbean art. Hadchity brings to this undeniably important subject a wealth of lived experience of the art scene in the Eastern Caribbean, where she has run a commercial gallery in Bridgetown, Barbados and served as a critic, curator, and lecturer.
The strongest parts of the book are those where she engages frankly with the environment in which she has worked for several decades: for instance, her examination of three influential artist-run spaces and their context—Alice Yard in Trinidad, Fresh Milk in Barbados, and, to a lesser extent, Popopstudios in the Bahamas—lucidly analyzes the dynamics between these organizations and other cultural institutions and initiatives in each context and provides valuable insights into the Caribbean art ecology.
Hadchity also discusses the oppositional relationship between the contemporary art scene and the earlier generation, the presumed artistic establishment. This earlier generation was, as she puts it in an interview on the publisher’s website, forcibly “retired” by the new generation, which quickly became a new, internationally networked establishment. While the actual dynamic is far more complex than Hadchity suggests, this vexed subject has been insufficiently acknowledged in the literature on Caribbean art, even though it has been the source of significant, and often very counterproductive professional animosity and institutional intrigue throughout the region.
Hadchity’s sources are almost all associated with the contemporary art scene, and since she has professional access to a wide range of artists, especially in Barbados, the question arises why she did not also document the views and concerns of those artists who were allegedly displaced by the new generation, as this would have allowed a more wholesome understanding of this troubled intergenerational dynamic. That is a problem throughout the book: important points are raised but the argumentation, and the supporting empirical research, are not taken to the point where genuinely useful insights are achieved. Hadchity also assumes a lot of preexisting knowledge of the local art scenes on the part of her readers; more contextual information would have made this book more accessible to international readers who are not familiar with the Caribbean art world.
The most significant failure of the book, however, is its reductive, underdefined and almost compulsive use of dated and questionable labels, genealogies, and classifications. The contemporary art scene is labelled wholesale as “postmodernist” and characterized as an “avant-garde.” This disregards the fact that those two labels are conceptually incompatible, as the notion of an “avant-garde” is quintessentially associated with modernism and was in effect challenged by postmodernism. This contemporary “avant-garde” is then juxtaposed with what is labelled “Afro-Creole Modernism,” which improbably lumps together artists who are as far apart, chronologically, ideologically, and aesthetically, as Edna Manley from Jamaica and Ras Akyem Ramsay from Barbados. Inadequate as they are, these labels and classifications take on a life of their own and, ironically, prevent Hadchity from presenting a convincing, appropriately nuanced argument.
Equally troubling is the intellectual rigidity and lack of critical self-reflexivity that is evident throughout the book, and the heavy-handed style of argumentation used only amplifies this problem. The book is entirely written in the first person and peppered with phrases such as “I posit” and “I surmise,” but Hadchity’s efforts to write with an authoritative voice often cause her to sound authoritarian and prescriptive, while the subject under discussion would have benefited from a more questioning, less regimented approach. She admits to “a rigid and totalizing argument” (p. 194) in the last paragraph of the book but, ironically, the book’s biggest failing is that, for all the convoluted argumentation, and all the reductive labels and rigid, binary classifications, there is ultimately no clear or convincing overall argument or position.
Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com. The first two installments of this series can be found at her personal blog.
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