Laurence Hegarty

2. Eddie Minnis, Hay Street Yard, 1984 oil on canvas, (20 x 25 in.)

hotel and in 1978 Buster Hall produced the painting Royal Victoria (5). There are no perfectly-paved driveways in this painting. Instead the viewer meets a once larger than life mecca of prosperity fallen from grace. This work marks the end of an era and is perhaps one of the more [visually honest] representations of architecture in The Bahamas at the time. The historical significance of the Royal Victoria painting is grounded in Bahamian culture and exists as a paragraph in the story of Bahamian society. This history, though indicative of a darker and wilder time, has grounded this nation and one can hope it prompts wiser decisions in the future.

5. Buster Hall, Royal Victoria, 1978oil on canvas, (32 x 40 in.)

As much as these British colonial roots, the influence of North American architecture [and cultural movements] is especially striking in The Bahamas. Nowhere else in the Caribbean is there such a melting pot of imported American practices and construction styles (Gravette 33). In one example, the juxtaposition of African-American influenced hip-hop and urban culture with the deeply rooted, ‘rake-an’-scrape’ culture* in The Bahamas presents a rare opportunity for cross-generational debate and discussion. With questions arising daily about the “Bahamian-ness” of rap songs created by Bahamians, similar discussions about the appropriation and adaptation of other aspects of western culture began to be represented in Bahamian art in the early 1980’s. Dave Smith is an artist known for his stylized realism and juxtaposition of contradictory ideas and subject matter. His work Kill and Kill Again (4) combines ideas of consumerism, poverty and symbols of cultural identity (Glinton et al. 34) that [reflect conflicts and connections between traditional and contemporary experiences in poorer communities in the Bahamas.]

4. Dave Smith, To Kill and Kill Again, 1980 acrylic on canvas, (32 x 50 in.)

The Bahamas is a nation ripe with contradictions: the latest car models can be found parked in the yards of the oldest-looking homes in Bain and Grants Town and a satellite dish can be found perched atop a roof that in all appearances is being held together by a prayer. How far will we go as a nation to keep up with the Joneses, or in this case, our neighbors to the north? Is this a regional obsession with extreme consumerism, or is this particular to The Bahamas? I would argue that it is a regional obsession. Yet within this consumerism [and in discussion with it], Bahamian artists can offer a glimpse into the lives of the occupants of the island clapboard house, beyond tourist visions. Dave Smith’s representations of Bahamian spaces and lives raise the challenge of selfactualization by posing the questions: ‘Where are we now? And where are we going?’

Architectural depictions in fine art act as revealing and at times poignant references for historical and ongoing commentary on societal issues. They also serve as barometers for cultural identity and whether this identity is seen through the eyes of a resident or visitor. Artists such as Dorman Stubbs, Eddie Minnis, and Dave Smith are a small sample of individuals who took on the role of architectural translators through painting. Hidegarde Hamilton, Brent Malone and Sterling Miller were also artists who, whether consciously or subconsciously, realized the importance of creating still shots of Bahamian history. These paintings, like all creative works, have become a way for a nation to track [and reflect on] its cultural heritage and identity. It rests on the shoulders of artists across disciplines to do the same.

References

Baumgart, Fritz. A History of Architectural Styles. London: Verlac M. Mumunt Schauberg. 1970. Print.

Glinton, Patricia, et al. Bahamian Art: 1492-1992, The Bahamas: Finance Corporation of Bahamas Limited, 1992. Print.

reviews

Chan Pratt, Cambridge Street, 1984oil on canvas, (30 x 24 in.)

Biography: Born in 1985 in (Nassau, Bahamas) Nastassia is an artist and is presently pursuing studies in architecture at Ryerson University (Toronto, Canada). Recent exhibitions include Beyond These Doors (Doongalik Studios, June 2015), Dwell I (Lyford Cay Club, January 2015) and Nassau Facades (National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, July 2014).

Keywords: Trespassing, Al-Mutanabbi Street, relatedness, beekeeping, ephemeral, languages, marginless, fractures

In recent years, in New York City, Moira Williams has developed a body of work that engages rituals of social ecology, perambulations long and short, the entanglements of artists and non-artists in Brooklyn Neighborhoods, beekeeping in Bogotá Columbia, the many wars the United States wages, and extremely locavore agriculture. All of this has been pursued with a canny, below the radar political acuity. We have not even mentioned her role as demi-restaurateur (we’ll get to that later).

Among other things, Williams is part of “The Walk Exchange”, a Brooklyn collective that conducts “educational and creative walks.” Not exactly a dérive, or simply running errands, these are walks that take one on a passage through time, space and relatedness. They range from Brooklyn-bound neighborhood investigations, to a planned walk from New York to Detroit. Sometimes Williams’ walks are part of this collective and sometimes she just wanders off by herself. In such endeavors, everything, the work, the audience, the site, the context is taken to be a malleable, plastic component of the artist’s practice.

It comes as no surprise then that Williams’ work itself is fugitive in nature. To begin with, it is ephemeral because [it is] performed. Often [her work] feels like it is on the run – perhaps because of all those walks. And it is not uncommon for her to restage an event, some interaction perhaps, that occurred elsewhere in time and place. Her work is often performed and re-performed collaboratively with different participants, at different sites and with a different, so to speak, script. Thus, the work is never quite the same thing twice. Often Williams is there herself at the center of the work performing, organizing or helping to organize others as they perform. At the same time, it often does not feel as though she is the sole proprietor of the voice we are hearing. Instead, voices seem to trespass upon one another. Something we might call “territory” is part of Williams’ overall struggle: who belongs here, what flora belongs where, what voice or language belongs to whom.

Recently, Williams was a participant in a poetry slam for the Al-Mutanabbi Street project. Mutanabbi Street is a thoroughfare in Baghdad, Iraq. It is the historic centre of Baghdad literary and intellectual culture - a street lined with bookstores and book stalls. On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on Mutanabbi Street. Thirty people died and at least 100 were wounded. In the day-to-day calculus of violence in Iraq, post the U.S. invasion, the numbers themselves were not remarkable. The target, however, resonated with intellectuals and artists far afield.

In far away San Francisco, Beau Beausoleil, a poet and bookstore proprietor, inaugurated the “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” project in solidarity with Iraq’s bloodied intellectual community. The project started with a first wave of letterpress-printed broadsides responding to the attack and has evolved over the years to include an anthology of writing, published in 2012, plus some 260 unique artists’ books and an eruption of performances and readings, of which Moira Williams was a part. As might be clear by now, for Williams, voices, sources and authorship are dispersed, multi-parented or collectivelyowned. The Al-Mutanabbi Project [echoed that view] and ratcheted up the volume of the many-voiced art work. Performed at The Center for Book Arts in New York and restaged at several other New York sites, with new and repeat performers – the slam evolved into a multi-linguistic Poetry Sculpture. Readers cum performers read in Arabic, English, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Lenape, Spanish, and Turkish. Their simultaneous and margin-less voices interwove many languages, while their Dervish and Shaker-like dances wove together the bodies and book-like artifacts from which they read.

It was a mess. A heteroglossial trainwreck of cultures and contexts poaching and infringing across boundaries. Williams read her poem in Lenape, the language of the Algonquin First Nations from which the artist identifies her own heritage. The poem read by each performer in each language was ‘today I do such simple things’ by Jim Saliba. The poem memorializes Muhammed al-Dura, the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who was photographed crouching beside his father, moments before the boy was [allegedly] shot dead by Israeli soldiers, at the Netzarim junction in Gaza. The ‘books’ from which the participants read were made from sliced adobe bricks and Persian silk ribbons. The brick and ribbon tablets were smashed as part of the performance. The debris was to be cut up and made into newspaper-style broadsides. The broadsides would be printed with recipes from and in the language of each of the countries that the United States is currently invading.

So here, Williams the artist is a kind of loaned-out voice: the artist as library book we could say. To be sure, she was the one who organized the specific event. She brought together the performers, created the ‘books’ from which they read and she selected the Saliba poem. Then this event would become folded into the pages of the Al-Mutanabbi project and once there, it all folded deeper into the contested territory of the Middle East. In walking down Al-Mutanabbi Street, Williams’ project sidles up alongside questions about who belongs where, about how people and places come to be named and unnamed. The work straddles political voids in language, and it steps fully into the trespassing of one culture upon another.

Holes in language seem to attract Williams. An earlier performance of hers, bore the unsayable title . Here the fracture in language resounds differently.

Williams was asked to explain the “hat” she wears in this performance piece. Her explanation [came in the form of a] parable about beekeeping. This was a hat, Williams assured listeners, made from bleached newspapers; newspapers from Bogotá Columbia. They were newspapers that Williams had, while working on her beekeeping apprenticeship in Colombia, either slept on by night or worn stuffed into her shoes by day. Williams’ hope, she said, was that the words of the newspapers would enter her dreams and that, having entered her dreams, she would acquire the ability to speak Spanish, through a sort of linguistic osmosis.