I think we need to be careful of something as we orchestrate the architectural music of the field’s defining infrastructure. Especially when we throw around words like ‘authenticity’. We have seemingly agreed on the idea that self-taught has come to mean certain things. We have even come to see that in terms of being self-taught in our field self-taught itself isn’t enough. So we have finessed that to mean the work is not intentionally made as the handmaiden in any way to serve the purposes of the art world. It is not made to reflect upon art history itself it is not concerned with academic issues. But beyond this point there really isn’t much else etched in stone.
My own contention has been that there are three generalized areas to the field: Art Brut, indigenous Drawing and Sculpture, and what has come to be called Neuve Unvention or Fresh Invention. Of course there are going to be hazy areas as well s areas of overlap. And only the three areas regarded together make up what we call the field. Any one of these three areas taken alone is just not enough. If the barriers or borderlines or parameters between the three fall away, they must all fall away together.
Making work for the marketplace as a concept confuses the field. In Art Brut it is pretty much anathema to the concept of so-clled purity and invites suspicion. Even the so-called ‘bread’ pictures of Wolfli’s seem to take on an automatically lesser status in the art world because he sold from the. I find this ridiculous. It is mostly true that art brut rtists make work in solipsistic havens of creativity. The work is a process fo self-development and self-healing and not a means of commercial sustenance. It is not uncommon to hear people question the artists commercial intent in making an assessment of their authenticity.
I feel these vlues change markedly in looking at the other two categories. Much of the work of self-taught artists in every area of the world is made by poor people, by lower middle-class people and by people ho might not even show up in the class system at all. By sufferers fighting uphill during an avalanche of disadvantage. In the case of Neuve Invention, an area created by Dubuffet for self-taught artists maintaining more sophistication or contact with ‘high’ culture than ion the other two categories, commercial involvement with their own work can be a more frequent occurrence, often happening simply because they are younger, they re ‘discovered’ younger, and they don’t have a lifetimes’ backlog of work like the older artists and also because they are younger an alive and therefore continuing to make work after ‘discovery’ by the artworld.
Wayne and I had a game with this. We gave and took away points to each artist depending on the way some people in the field would perceive their ‘levels of purity’.
McKenzie for example lost ten points for having a digicell phone but quickly regained it when it became clear he didn’t have the electricity to recharge it. Vincent Atherton had a hundred points because he rode a donkey to work. Kevin Sampson lost three hundred points because he used a computer. Etc. Etc.
The work that I include under the aegis of Indigenous Drawing and Sculpture comes to commerce in an entirely different way than Art Brut. The market is a cultural phenomenon in this category, often enough. It is often rooted in that spiritual homeground; the individual working within community and the information and affect of the community on the individual. In these communities the market place is as much a part of every day survival as anything else. Art is not a privileged act of leisure. It is as natural as making a High Table of spirit seals or cooking a stew. If it becomes a means of engendering financial gain it is a positive action. Just because it is visible at the roadside along with the commercial carved Rasta heads does not make it a sell-out. This is why Atherton’s family remembered him as a Carver. It was one of the many things he was.
When I first got to the island on this trip and took the shuttle to meet Wayne and Myrene I passed the roadside yard of Sylvester Stephens and it looked lush and filled with sculpture. Was funny passing it without stopping. It let me see it as through the eyes of hundreds who pass it everyday on the main road between Montego Bay and Negril; the heartland of the all inclusive hotel belt on the North Coast of Jamaica.
It’s not a transparent place, the yard of this spiritualist who seems always a little flummoxed by the why people don’t just leap out of their cars and buy his meaning laden low fired ceramics for their gardens and patios. Wayne, Myrene and I came back a few days later on a day that made asphalt into soup on our way to their house in Port Maria. It was my first time back to visit Sylvester in several years ut he greeted me as if he has seen me the day before. His yard was magical as ever.
It is still going to take me a long while to even partially unpack the uniqueness of this mans yard and vision. Again, though dreaded and living ital he is ot a Rastafarian though he, like many others, has taken on aspects of the Rasta worldview. There are also elements of New Testament and Revival in his yard. In this sense each artist in Jamaica is in an ongoing process of self-creolizing.
I came into a much fuller understanding of Jamaican religious belief on this trip. Wayne and I have been torturing outrselves as two outsiders trying to at least absorb the fundamental points of view of Revival Zion, Pukkumina, Convince, Kumina and the tapestries woven before and after the ever-encroaching juggernaut of Pentacostalism. To this date no one, not even in Jamaica, has approached the work wholistically with the visionary intent in mind. This is why it is so important for us to contexualize it with the rest of Art History. The older artists are disappearing to fast to wait any longer.
Revival is where Africa went after emancipation when Africa decided to investigate the Church. Pkkumina, Convince waled part of the way with Revival. Kumina remains Kongo in the New World with no church. We began to see that most of the artists we were interested in, the ones with vision, came from the Revival Zion, Kumina side of things. As Revival changes or disappears the art will change again.
Sylvester Stephens probably wouldn’t say he was Revival if you asked him outright but there was evidence all around us in the yard. Not in the form of churchical proselytizing but in the use, for one example,of high seals. In fact most of the yard in a seal format of poles with objects on them. Once they had been on bamboo pedestals but as his pieces get larger and larger and heavier he began making them out of concrete.. He has made an independent variation on many themes. In a Revival church setting the seals have fruit, the bible, glasses of water and other things on them to attract the Angels who will possess the observers and who will bring them communications and instructions from ancestors. Many of Sylvester’s sculptures do just that in that they are tributes, offerings, and portents of ancestors and Jamaican culture bearers from Garvey to Marley to Nanny.queen of the Maroons. This will prove to be the first of two yards we visit where vessels are placed on seals to mediate between worlds.
I am sure of the connective tissue between the seals in Jamaica both in the churches and the yards and balmyards and the objects placed around the yard shows of the African-American United States. The Homeground is similar, the need for mediation in a hostile universe. This is not the shallow reading of homeground as mere ‘place’ but the one that is legitimately rooted in Africa and renewed here. The life is geared toward a physical and non-physical sense of well-being; physical and metaphysical. Afrophobia (resistance and hatred of the idea of Africanness by both whites and blacks) is rooted in the Western support of a good vesus evil dichotomoy as opposed to the African way of moral neutrality where it is up to the individual acting for self and community to balance the moral world.
There are many who find this demeaning. The middle and upper classes are often the ones who find the idea of temporal Africa most upsetting. Ask Kevin Sampson some time about his troubles finding trained African American artists willing to show alongside self-taught artists. The same thing happens in Jamaica where the trained artists are usually from the privileged classes. Even those who aren’t are often resentful of the attention the more oppressed less privileged self-taught artists get. Often the discourse attempts to remedy this by obscuring or denying the homeground context of the work. Jenifer Borum article in Sacrd and Profane is one of the first to address this.
Sylvester Stephens has taken it upon himself to establish his yard as a series of provocative challenges and a shrine of Remembrance. It is impossible to walk through the seals and not reflect on the Elder’s wisdoms. He is fascinating because so much of his yard is hidden right out in the open. He performs for an audience which in most cases will not see or understand what he is showing. Now he has opened a booth on the property which will sell drinks. His yard show is in the face of the overclass yet cannot depend on their willingness to receive this information to be successful.
Yet, and he is very different from say, Finster in this respect, he makes no effort to be commercial in order to engage the public more efficaciously. He chooses to sell cold drinks before he will change his mode of making. He does however sometimes make more traditional pots but ironically these have been replaced for the most part in common usage by plastic. His pieces break and are clumsily mended and the wounds become part of the history of the pieces. The clay he uses is not the best but it has meaning to him and he will not switch. Language and the power of wordsounds is important to him and the way words serve as commentaries and contrapuntal themes throughout the yard.
I am converting my slides to digital images and when I do I wil post some of the previous incarnations of the yard. Sylvester Stephens is extremely complex, related somehow to the Revival homeground, fascinating and brilliant in the uniqueness of his presentation. He is a young patriarch making art in a way that is not seen anywhere else in this hemisphere.
To be continued
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