A RESPONSE TO THE HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF HAITIAN ART: SOME REFLECTIONS

SHU L. XU

In his public lecture titled “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian Art,” Bogues first considers the conventional misinterpretation of Haitian art as ‘primitive’ and then suggests a historical dimension to Haitian art. The conventional framing of Haitian art is paired with ideas of ‘naive’, ‘primitive’, ‘folklore’. A clue about the use of such terms can be found in Picasso and Matisse’s cooptation of ‘primitive’ elements in African masks, sculptures, and possibly the color, blue, especially when both of them were looking to turn against the dominance of certain artistic forms in their own time. A visit to Paris’s colonial markets was one of the sources that helped them to learn about the primitivist ‘other’ However, whereas a primitivist turn of Picasso or Matisse may complement their roles as the avant-garde, the description ‘primitive’ links tightly to how some scholars think of or misunderstand black art. In this case, Bogues’s investigation suggests that the circulation of elements of black art both serve an inspiration to the avant-garde art which challenges one kind of dominance, and such use of diction and preexisting artistic elements creates another form of dominance: that the presumed understanding about black art, here, Haitian art, is always linked with the idea of the ‘primitive’. In other words, whereas the avant-garde sought to create the sense of otherness or outsideness, the Haitian art was pushed further from receiving a just interpretation but became the real ‘otherness’. Here, the description of Haitian art as ‘primitive’ obviously departs from a scale of Occidental comparison that operates on a hierarchy that compares ‘civilized’, to the ‘uncivilized’; or, with the ‘human’, against the ‘nonhuman’. The adoption of the term

“the primitive” when attributed to Haitian art ultimately heightens the superiority of the gaze of scholars influenced by, or standing within a place with which this “primitive” is used as such a comparative model. According to Bogues, one can hardly know the nature of Haiti in this comparative sense, if the comparative method were the beginning and the end of interpretation.

In addition to the historical dimension of the misconception of the Haitian art, the image of Haitian art also takes on a political dimension. In 1940s, when the surrealist artist André Breton visited the Caribbean and encountered the work of Hector Hyppolite and other Haitian artists, Breton said to the translator, “If I had seen the work of Hyppolite and others, I would not have gone into surrealism.” Regretfully, the translator captured this link as “Haitian art is surrealism.” According to Bogues, this is the point at which people started calling Haitian art “surrealist”. In other words, the circulation of “a slip of translation” registers a public impression of Haitian art. In the same vein, Bogues briefly mentions the imperial archive’s records of “Haiti as chaos,” suggesting that one who attempts to stay away from |the dominant western archives, ideas, or even mistranslations, has to transform the conventional images of the Haitian identity, religion and art from outside the dominant, the elite, and the misconceived imagery that has been allocated by the Western eye.

Bogues’s discussion on the conventional misconception of Haitians and Haitian art uncovers a less accurate historical and political approach based on comparative method utilized by the dominant groups. Haitian art needs the markers of a “real” political and historical reflections on itself, which announces three accounts of Haitian art: “the negro art is linked to life, as a form of humanism, which traverses history, mysticism, and naturalism”, the voodoo prince in the Haitian revolution in early 20th century, and ‘history’s dialectical relationship with popular imagery in Haiti. While the first account subjected to the quality of “life” in Haitian art was brought together with ideas of “order, beauty and control sensitivities” shared between popular and artistic constructs (marvelous realist fiction), the second account, the participation of the voodoo prince in both the marvelous realist fiction and the Haitian revolution, points to a mystical life behind the order and also creates an alternate order for specifically Haitian fictional imagery and history. In the novel The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, which Bogues introduces to us, he presents the protagonist as mad and a voodoo practitioner, who has knowledge of poisons and herbs. In the Haitian revolution, voodoo priests were leaders of the independence war which overthrew the French. In this sense, voodoo as both popular imagery and a historically proven form of activism, is an example justifying that “the history of Haitian is rooted in popular imagery”, while popular imagery finds its counterparts in real experience. What is further from the discourse of civilization and scientific knowledge than madness, voodoo, and herbalist knowledge? How are these different forms of knowledge practiced in these different political systems? The history and culture of Haiti can help with developing the vocabulary and concepts to understand Haitian art without the dominant perspectives that have often been used to describe it and fetishize it. When it comes to the form of Haitian art itself, it is “to live in history”. As Bogues puts it, “the way that Haitian society is constructed is through a living history.” We should be ready to live in history.

Bibliography

Bogues, Tony. “An art for whom? The public art of Any Given Sunday in post-apartheid South Africa.” Any Given Sunday, Mail & Guardian (January 21 to 27, 2022), 10-11.

Bogues, Tony. “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian Art.” Lecture.

Zoom: California Institute of the Arts Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series. March 17, 2022. https://youtu.be/wFvxGFUkdwI

Endnote

1 Tony Bogues, “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian Art.”

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid. Bogues did not specify which history exactly, but I take his use of history both as an abstract reference to the idea of history, and concrete situation of Haiti from the colonial to the contemporary periods.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 This idea has benefited from Amanda Beech’s feedback and their help of framing it in an eloquent form.

13 Ibid.