Wayne and I went to Vincent Atherton's funeral today. Was in a 7th Day Adventist church but none of the Athertons are Adventists. There was one local pastor and two visiting deacons. Atherton lay in a bright candy-flake purple coffin covered with floral wreathes. He had 15 children, 5 sons and five daughters survived. They were all present except Lloyd who was at the house. Lloyd is the one most like his father.
As we walked into the small but airy Church, ventilated by rows of fans mounted on the walls, the electric keyboard was being set up by a young musician. He tested it with a pre-set of Hard Day's Night. We walked up the center aisle and looked in the coffin but it was not the wild haired old man I had met for the first time the year before. This man in the coffin had been carefully groomed and besuited and one could sense that in the ceremonies and celebrations that had been held all the previous week while he lay in state at his house, the spirit that had occupied that flesh was well on its way to the original Homeground. This was the shell left behind.
Raphael Atherton, a son I hadn't met before, the oldest son, an ex policeman, was dressed in a white shirt suit and white patent leather shoes. He was sitting next to Leroy Atherton who wore a new black suit and was holding in his hand an old tattered copy of our (Waynes and mine) exhibition from 1996 “Redemption Songs.” Raphael leaned over and told me that his father had told him he wanted to be remembered somehow for his carving and his works and Raphael at the time had wondered how that could ever happen but when he came back to Jamaica two years later Redemption Songs had been published and his father was known and this had been a major life-affirming thing on his own personal path. He repeated this when he got up to do the eulogy except he even remembered the page numbers his fathers photograph and words appeared on. And later when I looked back at the text again I saw it was ok little as there was but wished it could have been the expanded version I am working on now. Its been over ten years since that time till this great man died and in all that time there was a long section written on him by Wayne in Prophets and Messengers but still nothing in a major book and I am thinking this was a major crime. So I was grateful, very grateful to hear Raphael Atherton's words, thinking I am reaffirmed also in my need to continue to write about these people and still struggle to catch as many of them alive in their own time as I can. In a way then writing itself becomes an act of libation.
It was a good feeling to hear his family praise him for his role as a Carver. Atherton was a bush doctor, a role too complex to fully explain here. Even the pastor remembered his command of gathering and dispensing healing herbs. He was not a church-going man, his church was the bush, and his community and his African American spirituality. The pastor pointed out that the first carving by Vincent Atherton he had ever seen was a merry go round the old man had made for the local schoolyard. I kind of wished I could have been a fly on the tree at the Nine Night Ceremony the week before to see the communities less formal responses to the man's death.
Again I was reminded of the delicate path we in the artworld walk through these people's lives. It had never even occurred to me remotely that the patriarch would be affected by the few words I had written for him. I had called him enigmatic in the text and he was still enigmatic to me now. Sylvester Woods is barely alive and Ras Dizzy is becoming erratic. We are in the presence of an art historical and cultural changing of the guard.
Of course I have no worries whatsoever that other self-taught artists are out there and will be found in Jamaica. This country exudes creativity from every pore, from the endless delight of its street signs to the painting and patterns on the surfaces of its buildings to its unending wordplay in speech and song. As in the US the forms will change and our expectations will always be sidestepped. One can never be too complacent here for too long. The next to last hymn was sung to the tune of Finiculi Finicula and I knew it would be a great mistake to sell this funny old world short.
Tonight I am standing on a hill overlooking the water outside Port Maria in St. Mary's Parish where Atherton lived. There are fireflies and stars and great expressionist dark clouds that muffle and render occult the excited energy of the lightning behind it. A breeze is blowing and it is like a lover whispering everything in particular against your neck. I am drinking guava and pineapple juice and thinking about Vincent Atherton the Carver.
A few days ago we were driving down one of the most commercial anonymous roads in Jamaica near Negril and we saw a sign that simply said: Helicopters. I didn't take a picture of the sign and I am wishing now of course that I had. But we stopped. We did stop and asked this bright eyed woman where the helicopters were. She pointed around the side and we saw this little structure no bigger than a voting booth and on it was a metal cutout flat helicopter brightly painted and nailed to the door. It actually was a pretty damn good helicopter cutout and it was also a pretty damn good Bert Hemphill moment.
She asked if we wanted to go in and we said of course we wanted to go in and we had to get out of her way so she could pull the door open and we went in after she turned on the light and there were three or four shelves on two walls of the room filled with hand made helicopters. They were made of gourds supplemented with wood structures, some in bizarre shapes and then brightly painted with enamels. The Hemphill in my head was positively dancing with excitement. It was what will happen and still does happen in Jamaica over and over again once you learn the ancient ceremony called “Stopping the Car”. You drive along an innocuous road and you see a sign that says Helicopters and so you stop the world and investigate and instantly you have something new and deep added to your world. Several days later you are standing in front of a bright purple coffin which holds the body of a cultural artist elder singing a hymn to the tune of Finiculi Finicula.
This morning in the wildly glaring sun on the main street of Port Maria I was looking for the restaurant that had cowfoot and I saw a six and a half foot rail of a man walk by completely naked. Suddenly he fell down upon his belly in the middle of the street and began to lap up grayish green water out of one of the ubiquitous potholes. No one bothered him or stared. The next day his pants were back, though quite loose. I backed away and found the restaurant and it was the wrong day for cowfoot and too early for everything else.
Vincent Atherton's carvings are made to flail off evil in any of its forms. They are expressionistic amulets. His herbs were to heal the body from the vagaries of what people in Jamaica have to do in order to survive. His carvings were for repelling evil and attracting good. He started carving late in life yet it is so obvious from the confidence of his hand that he was not unsure or insecure about what he made. Yet they look unlike anything made in Jamaica since the time of its premier inhabitants: the Taino who either went maroon with those who wouldn't be slaves or else committed suicide rather than give in to the colonialists and the slavedrivers. They were gone by the 17th Century. But they used the same materials as Vincent Atherton and other vernacular artists did later. (trees) Lignum Vitae, Cedar, all the indigenous flora that is still growing on this lush island. They painted on cave walls. Some of Vincent Atherton's carvings look like what was painted on those walls. Eccentric minimal faces. But they also look like the three dots on coconuts which Jamaican folklore sees as eyes. The saying is : The coconut has three eyes, it sees you before you see it.
But that is only a very small minority of what Atherton carved. People seeing his work for the first time immediately remark on its African qualities but, as with the work of Woody Joseph there is no direct tribal co-relative. There is a fleeting resemblance to some of the ceremonial carvings of the Fon people who also use a minimal cutting style to maximize effect. But for me this similarity comes by way of subject and process rather than by intentions. Atherton is a black man from Port Maria. His homeground is situated in black Jamaican country. His subjects, his forms, his intentions are part of where he lives and what he looks at. They are in the compressed language of his homeground. That culture itself still holds many of its own abstractions of remembered, retained, and reinvented African life. We have enough to unravel in the complexities of where he actually lived than to look for facile formal comparisons to art that is not part of his immediate context.
The parish of Port Maria is poor and still very much host to various churches that practice the Africanized Baptist religion of Revival Zion.
No comments:
Post a Comment