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

JACKIE HENSY

Any Given Sunday, curated by Raison Naidoo, was a socially engaged art project that unfolded publicly across the city of Cape Town in 2016. Anthony Bogues contributed an essay to a recent publication on the event entitled An art for whom? The public art of Any Given Sunday in post-apartheid South Africa. In the essay, Bogues offers a historical lineage of the political and cultural considerations that prompted Naidoo’s public art project, which Bogues describes as an act of “curatorial activism” driven by a “preoccupation of the relationship between art and the people.”1 While this line of questioning surrounding art and the public is not unique to South Africa, the context from which it arises and how the questioning takes form in African art has roots in radical anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements. African and Afro-Caribbean art (Bogues elaborates on the latter in his writing on Haitian art in this volume) and its relationship to culture cannot be understood through conventional art historical perspectives which separate art into the categories of the political and the aesthetic, an impossibility in Bogues’ thinking on African art and on radical art. Offering an important historiographical correction to the imperial archive’s idea of African art, Bogues provides insight into the relationship between art and the popular in Black culture by “[thinking] through [African] art on its own terms”. 2

When Western art practices such as the colonial market, the gallery, and the art school intersected with African cultures, constrained thinking of Western critics led to a mischaracterization and patronising framework for viewing African art. In the early 1900s, French visitors took artwork with religious, spiritual, or symbolic orders and circulated it outside of the context it was intended for (including Picasso and Matisse), describing the artwork as naive and giving it the homogenous label of “Primitivism.” Bogues counters with an essay by Aimé Césaire written in 1935 that introduced a lasting “central claim of African and African diasporic art”, that “African art was about the ‘humanisation of humanity.’” The concept was expanded on in a talk on “Marvellous Realism” by Jacques Steven Alexis at the 1956 Paris Congress of Black Writers and Artists, which Bogues views as a seminal event in Black culture, Black art, and Black thought. Alexis describes the “fundamental link to life in Negro art” and reiterates African art as a form of humanism that “traverses history, mysticism, and naturalism” and “contains order, beauty, logic, and cultural sensitivities,” also described as the real. In interpreting Alexis’ thought, Bogues locates the real within that which is marvellous and necessitates Voodoo, a symbolic order established under conditions of racial slavery when African religions merged with French Catholicism, as critical in the understanding of Haitian (and African) art. The orality and popular imagination of the Caribbean people, which is bound up in resistance, is expressed through their art. Voodoo, marvellous realism, African art, and Black critique are “practice[s] which [puncture] the cosmology of the west.”3 Bogues pulls from W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, highlighting the second (oft forgotten) portion of Du Bois claim that “the negro has the second side.” From this marginal place in dominant society, insight is available into society itself and offers Black art its radicality. This intertwining of aesthetics and culture, this locating of art within the popular, explains how politics and art practices cannot be separated in understanding African art. This illustrates why the question of art’s relation to the public presents so differently in an African context. Returning to Any Given Sunday, the project emerged from “the long history of debates about the role of the artist and that of art within [revolutionary] movements,”4 many of which Bogues presented, but only a fraction of which are mentioned here, and in a time when “political equality had ended juridical and formal structural apartheid.” This shifted artistic discourse, introducing “the white cube spaces [as] the apex of one’s artistic dreams,” which is antithetical to the historical relationship between art and African culture. Naidoo stated that the project, to him, was successful “when a member of the public stopped to look at a performance…which he/she would never encounter because they would never enter a museum.”5 In dissolving the boundary between the white cube gallery and the people, the elite and the everyday person, the artist and the public, Naidoo reaches to bridge a greater divide in repairing African peoples’ historical relationship between art and culture, which was fractured by the West’s intervention.

Endnotes

1 Bogues , Anthony. “An Art for Whom? The Public Art of Any Given Sunday in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Mail & Guardian. Cape Town, (January 21, 2022): 10–11. Pg 10.

2 Bogues, Anthony. “Art and History: Reframing Aesthetics and Politics - A Reflection on Haitian art.” Lecture with James Traffors as part of CalArts Aesthetics & Politics Online Lecture Series: Dominance and Revolution. April 7, 2022. YouTube video, 1:33:11. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wFvxGFUkdwI.

3 Ibid.

4 Bogues, January 2022, Pg 10.

5 Ibid., Pg 11.