Cavin-Morris Gallery

Visiting Wilfred Francis

2008-07-23T09:44:00.002-04:00

He lives on the edge of a Kingston ghetto. Not the worst Kingston ghetto by any means but non-the-less a ghetto. A place where survival doesn't reveal its secrets voluntarily. But he has found ways to survive.
We park and four youths are playing dominoes standing up. Noisily. To our right is a deep concrete moat covered on the bottom with a slight greasing of grey green water and trash of all sorts. It is a mess with signal. A message that says we really aren't hoping for anything very much here.
A low building is divided into many rooms almost like a motel but with entrances and gates. This is where Wilfred Francis lives. A man wearing only shorts nods to us that the artist will be out in a moment. He was quicker than that. I had been expecting an older man. I had been expecting someone who was said to be sick but the man in front of me was a spry spirit much less decrepit than I am.
I had first seen his work in the Intuitives lll exhibition curated by David Boxer at the National Gallery. I was very impressed seeing some connection in his earliest black and white drawings with Chelo Amezcua and a dash of Lee Godie. Lee Godie with horror vacuii. But the work was expensive even back then and I was worried about the fact that they had been done in magic marker. For some reason I didn't look at the dates, I didn't look closely and it didn't occur to me that he had done amazing things using texture and shading with those markers.
He says that now he is a pure Rastafarian. There is little in the work to give the nod to this other than the predominant colors of red gold and green. He has told my friend Herman in the past that he was a kaballist. And he is also a Seventh Day Adventist. I put all this aside as I examined the work that covered the sitting room inside the entrance, behind the room where piles of rice and sugar and other small groceries were meticulously divided into plastic bags and that he sold to the neighborhood through a small window. While we were there a boy purchased a small candy. He also sells single cigarettes. His earliest work according to Herman who was given a tantalizing glimpse of it was geometric with a lot of interwoven circles. Somehow these now have become the brims of the hats the women wear in the drawings.
The Jamaican self-taught artists are not long on romantic sensuality in their artwork. Zacchareus Powell and a few who sell phallic carvings along the roadside are the few exceptions. Jah Morris has carved some beautiful nudes that are exemplary in their graphic delicacy. Though Francis has made nudes, erotic and unselfconsciously exotic in their beckoning, it is his clothed beings that are truly sensual. They are less touchable than his nudes. They seem to be from another age somewhere in between Victorian and flapper. Faces hidden by their beautifully drawn hats, their hair drawn meticulously and obsessively they move through vision, almost opiate, they move through worlds of slowed motion, unexplainable visionary things happen behind them, conversations not heard, a hint of violence here and there almost like illuminated Ethiopian manuscripts. They are like following the meandering improvisations of a low saxophone through a jazz age that never really was, still with one foot in the church and the other in a huge secular world of history and travel.

Wilfred Francis at 83

2008-07-22T14:46:00.003-04:00

Herman is the bearded gentleman on the left.

Wilfred Francis Studio

2008-07-22T14:26:00.001-04:00

Wilfred Francis in a Private Collection

2008-07-22T14:21:00.002-04:00

These were shot at an angle so sorry about the skewed perspective.

My Summer Vacation final Installation

2007-08-10T13:14:00.001-04:00

Here is the last part: I will put up some individual photos of artworks next week: Enjoy!

It was a yam roast of a day when we left to go southwest a bit from Port Maria to visit Lloyd Atherton. The last time I had seen him was on a similarly sun-drenched day last summer and I had been very excited by what I had seen that day but was so distracted by the politics of trying to save our Jamaican show in the artworld that I felt I hadn't paid enough attention. Although he is a second generation carver Lloyd has marked out a distinctly different place for himself in the art world that seems to be more connected to the bush than his father. But even more significantly for me, I feel Lloyd's yard is a direct tie-in with the yard shows of the Southern United States.

Lloyd Atherton wastes no time pulling you into his visions. You cannot go into his yard without first crossing a stone laid into the ground at the gate marked with warding calligraphy. The gate itself is strikingly painted in black with punched out symbols and others created by laying on red tape. Crosses, numbers and any number of kalunga signs, circles with crosses are everywhere. On the gate is painted the words Dred Love (He is not a rasta though he does have neck-length locks, glyphs, and seals placed all around the yard with various types of offerings and arrangements on them. Much of his iconography and personal sense of writing recurs enough that future visits will be needed to focus on them and come up with some way of interpretation. There is nothing accidental or random in this yard.

We waited outside the gate for him and then there he was striding toward us looking like a lion in his kingdom from the Burning Spear song. Muscular, full bearded with just the beginnings of white showing through here and there, a cord around his neck with two mule teeth on it, plaid shorts worn well beneath his lean belly, blue plastic sandals and a big cautious grin. Had to keep telling myself that with his father passing in the last two weeks his life was in the midst of many changes.
"Did you see that?" He pointed up into the large tree that nearly abutted his gate. I looked up and there was a human figure hanging by the neck wearing a turban and an oversized shirt. Next to it in classic Yardshow 101 style dangled a truck tire slowly turning in a delicious breeze. We hadn’t even gotten inside the gate yet! The figure seemed to be fully carved under the clothes. He chuckled softly as he saw my surprise. “What do you call it?” I asked, cringing as the words left my mouth knowing I was going to get one of those expected and totally understated answers. “Oh, “ he said, “It’s a scarey crow.”

Of course it was more than that. Don’t fool yourself for a second. It isn’t like we were standing in a cornfield waiting for a murder of crows to swoop in picking off the crops. This was St. Mary, a parish known for its higher percentages of Revival Zion, Pukkumina, Convince, Maroons, balmyards, and some Kumina. There could be no mistake about the constant and never-ending presence of double valenced meanings here. In many ways this was a new beginning for us in initiating dialogue with Lloyd Atherton. His father had been buried three days before, the nine-night and other ceremonies performed to release and free the old man’s spirit were over and suddenly Lloyd was the one of the five Atherton sons who seemed to hold the old man’s legacy of herbs, power carvings and spirituality. In fact his knickname is ‘Powah”.

There was that feeling of beneficent tingling again as I realized that once again I had stepped into a place unlike any other known place on this island. Not even close to art for art's sake but art made for its original meanings and from an intentionality formed by culture and iconoclasm because it wasn't dictated by any sort of immediate traditional form. Yet it reached out in the world. Yet it connected with those yards in other places. For me this is the quintessence of what I mean by homeground. Some might call it the racial unconscious but to me it is very conscious in the sense of awareness and wakefulness. The spring that feeds creativity here is thousands of years old and is not dictated by materials or fashion but rather by deep interwoven genealogical needs and human hardwiring. The hand that puts the yard together is the artists and the creative talent that shapes the space is the artists and the language he speaks is his cultures. And when it is bigger than or more special than the ordinary we call it art.
As Paul Arnett says in Souls Run Deep there are many quiet yardshows as well. Lloyd Atherton’s yard is not quiet.

In fact Jamaica is not a quiet culture. Earlier in the day I stopped off to finally see if it was cowfoot day at the restaurant and Wayne went off to get a machine part and I stood waiting for him on the main street in Port Maria. It is a small town. But if I closed my eyes the place was a wave of sound. I could listen to it like musique concrete. Not so much traffic sounds but human. Arguments, laughter, children, higglers calling, jitneys calling for passengers, wandering merchants selling batteries and plastic bags of juice, men and women flirting, the babble of madmen and madwomen. Noisy and very much alive. And so it isn’t such a surprise to me that the spirit world reciprocates and echoes this noise with its constant presence on other planes. It is languages’ life without or beyond the written word. Mankind is always in a boisterous dialog with the ancestors. Word sounds have power.

As we walked past the gate into Lloyd’s yard for a few moments I thought that I was actually seeing the spirits and hearing the sharp tiny buzz of their barely articulate voices. They were all around me and I could feel the wind of their passing against my neck and face.
Then Wayne said ‘bees’ and Lloyd said ‘bees’ and pointed over to the corner of the small yard where he had two hives both painted with symbols and faces. “Don’t wave your arms around.” And I’m thinking to myself little cynical thoughts like ok ok if it were too easy you’d be suspicious…there is always going to be something that reminds you of your human condition whether it’s the heat or mud or mosquitos etc. The bees were everywhere and I do have to say they animated the landscape in such a way that nothing was static. I cut back my artworld propensity towards grand sweeping gestures and joydancing.

Lloyd is the son most like his father yet very different as well. There are two other carvers. One is Raphael and I have not yet seen his work. He lives in Connecticut and was a policeman and somehow I just don’t think his work will be like Lloyds’ or his fathers. Then there is another brother who carves: Leroy. But Leroy is a carpenter he is more out in the world getting jobs and he is not a bush doctor like his father or Lloyd. His carvings don’t have the variety or intensity of the other two. His yard itself is more circumspect.

You walk through Lloyd’s gate and you are immediately immersed in spirit languages and spirit writing and iconography. It is tacked to the trees and painted on the buildings and scattered on the ground. I wouldn’t swear to the fact that Lloyd is literate but he has a very finely tuned in sense of the iconic power of inherent in the word sign. His shack is splashed with words, pieces of zinc are painted with what he says are the watchful faces of ancestors making sure the yard is under cosmic scrutiny.

There are certainly larger and more elaborate yard shows than Lloyd Athertons’. But the intimacy of the space has the effect of making the whole thing seem more shrinelike even though he lives in a small elevated shack about eight or nine feet square. The first thing you se when you get in, after you reach mental equlibrium from the bees, is a loose almost basketlike structure where he keeps a group of his larger carvings willy nilly mostly open to the elements and insects. I was instantly reminded of the Yupik masks or the Zuni War Gods slowly returning to the earth.

I peered out between the bees and forced myself to slow down and contain my excitement so I wouldn’t miss anything. I of course felt a buzz that went way beyond the teeming apiary. My disappointments about the Jamaican exhibition falling through were gone and one year later I could see things much more clearly.

Lloyd was excited we were there and Wayne and I both picked up a new openness to our presence in him. It wasn’t so much about the selling of carvings and because of his father’s presence in our book Redemption Songs and the mention of it at the funeral. He seemed to have just as much need to tell us things as we needed to hear it. Later on Wayne and I agreed that it seemed he was taking his role as his fathers’ successor and cultural gatekeeper very seriously.

On atable off to the side were an altar-like arrangement of plants, bottles with liquids in them, a mesh basket covered with one of his fathers sculptures. In a few words Lloyd opened a major discourse about Jamaican religion and about the intentionality behind his work and his father’s work. He called his fathers sculpture a seal. Bang! And he called the table a Bongo table thus situating himself firmly in Convince or Kumina tradition. Bongo is Kongo influenced. I don’t want to get into it more till I thoroughly research the implications of his use of the word Bongo. But him calling the sculpture a seal answered volumes on why and what he and his father carve. Seals are spiritually enhanced offerings that beckon and invite the spirits in. We had known that Atherton senior considered his pieces attraction and repelling devices for spirits but calling them seals placed them in a Jamaican perspective and added depth to those words. It also opened up discourse on other carvers and this absolutely New World manifestation of older forms.

I am still deciphering and weighing the experience of Lloyd Atherton’s yard in my head but will end this for now and put some of the pictures up. Any organization interested in a groundbreaking and neverbeforeseen exhibition of Jamaican work in this country (there is much more material now since the Diggs exhibition) can contact me at Mysteries@aol.com. These few artists I hve briefly mentioned are only several of many for several generations back. This is American art and an important part of our understanding of the African Diaspora. It is time that serious attention be paid to it.

Thanks for reading thus far.

2007-08-10T13:11:00.001-04:00

Bongo Table with Vincent Atherton Seal

2007-08-10T13:10:00.000-04:00

2007-08-10T13:07:00.000-04:00

Lloyd and the Other

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2007-08-10T13:03:00.001-04:00

2007-08-10T13:00:00.000-04:00

2007-08-10T12:58:00.001-04:00

LLoyd Atherton

2007-08-10T12:54:00.000-04:00

Altar-like contruction

2007-08-10T12:51:00.000-04:00

Seals by LLoyds' Father Vincent

2007-08-10T12:49:00.000-04:00

2007-08-10T12:33:00.000-04:00

figure on the trees

2007-08-10T12:31:00.001-04:00

Lloyd Atherton: the Gatestone and Entrance

2007-08-10T12:23:00.000-04:00

My Summer Vacation Part 3

2007-08-06T14:58:00.000-04:00

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

Sylvester Stephens 1

2007-08-06T14:55:00.001-04:00

Sylvester Stephens 2

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Sylvester Stephens 3

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Sylvester Stephens

2007-08-06T14:46:00.001-04:00

One Eye Open

2007-08-06T14:44:00.001-04:00

I said this one is looking inside and outwards at the same time. "Yes," he said, "Just like me."

2007-08-06T14:42:00.001-04:00