"Intersection +" 2000
"Attack of the Sandwich Men" 2000
"taking aim" and "Jus' walk" (1999 Jo'burg)
Wanted: A Crutch
His whole life as an artist, Cozier has been articulating an alternative vision
of art and life on "this side of the Middle Passage". His disinterest
in depicting luscious images of tropical fruit, of packaging the landscape in
enticing ways, has not made life easy for him or the handful of other artists
who have attempted to reinterpret art in the Caribbean. Cozier’s gaze is
sardonic and unforgiving, much like that of his famous compatriot, V.S. Naipaul.
The difference is that Naipaul had to flee the region in order to be the kind
of writer he insisted on being. Cozier, on the other hand, has spent the last
10 years forging a practice in what is increasingly a hostile space for someone
with his ambitions. In the year 2000, Cozier, therefore, finds himself at a
crossroads. His subject has always been himself, and those who have had the
fortune to follow his work would have seen the genesis of the current crisis
raising its head in Cozier’s show of early ’98: Migrate or Meddle/Medal.
There, in one of his multi-panelled artworks, was a piece called Beheaded;
in this drawing Cozier’s head was depicted floating in a box-like space,
prone as if the artist were lying down and thinking, but detached from his body
or a sustaining structure of any kind. The box then appears to be a coffin,
airless and confining.
Cozier is an artist who draws his mind much as others may speak their minds. One may think of his mind as a sketch-pad in which notes are constantly being recorded. Visual notes. At exhibitions of his work we a re privileged to engage with pages from this sketchpad or notebook. One is reminded of this year’s Ca.lypso Monarch Shadow’s famous song about the bassman in his head driving him crazy because has taken the singer’s skull for a panyard. A panyard in which he frenetically beats out his rhythms. Cozier’s head has likewise been turned into a studio, churning out images, shape-shifting mindscapes obviously indebted to the fade-ins and outs of film and music video. As the man in his head processes the space in which he finds himself, he draws and writes his location and his predicament.
No Thinking Here. The message one receives in these islands of the Antilles is as simply stated as the various signs one sees all over the place warning us of what will or will not be tolerated in our public spaces. NO SMOKING HERE. NO URINATING. NO THINKING. We may do all this in private, but in public we must control ourselves in many ways. Thinking can be deleterious to the health of the nation. Therefore it can not be tolerated. In his work, Cozier captures the plight of intellectuals and artists in these former labour-camps-turned-nation-states.
Cozier’s offerings in this year’s Havana Biennale are profoundly informed by such ruminations. His three-month stint in South Africa in late 1999, where he was a guest artist at the Bag Factory in Johannesberg, has left its mark on his work. An artist who is used to working in a variety of media from video to performance, Cozier restricted himself largely to the medium of drawing in this new space. His drawings were haunted by images bodies gracefully balancing empty tea cups and empty blackboards on their heads. The crutch was a recurring symbol which, though it had appeared in his work before, now tended to transform itself into a weapon. Suited and booted black bodies wielded cellphones, while naked ones held up signs beseeching passersby to look and respond to their messages. Cozier’s response to "Jo’burg" as a postcolonial space, the images and symbols he articulated, were very well received by the audiences who came to his show. This puzzled Cozier. What was the meaning being conferred on his work by a completely different people in a completely different space on the other side of the Middle Passage? It turned out that – completely unknown to one another – Cozier and South African artist, William Kentridge, were employing a common workforce of images. In style, too, their work was extremely similar, dominated by drawing, fluently articulated sketches and jottings which mapped the scaffolding on which their respective societies rested. As South African artist and critic, David Koloane put it: "Cozier’s penetrating eye looks through the window dressings of culture to the core global equations." As Cozier himself put it, "I was organising things brought with things found on arrival." The thought that carefree, happy Trinidad may have something in common with a society with the apartheid history of South Africa is startling and chilling, but cannot be overlooked. That is why Cozier now finds himself at the crossroads. The crossroads between silence and migration.
Unwilling to confine himself within the available "ideological kraals" of life in the Caribbean, unwilling or unable to mask or soften his gaze, he finds himself pleading with passers-by in the manner of vagrants at intersections holding up signs asking for help with transportation, money or a means of livelihood.
Look, he seems to be saying, like the Jamaican DJ Bounty Killa whose song of the same name faced instant bans in that country, simply because the songwriter refused to mask the reality he was urging his compatriots to look at and respond to. "Look into my eyes/ Tell me what you see/ Do you feel my pain/ Am I your enemy?" Like Cozier, Bounty brandishes his crutch, in this case a nine millimetre gun. "Listen to my voice/ this is not a threat/ Now you see the nine/ are you worried yet?" But neither Bounty nor Cozier are merely asking for handouts. What they ask for is infintely more threatening because it would involve dismantling a system as oppressive and unjust as apartheid. This would mean acknowledging that the multi-coloured splendors of paradise portrayed in the tourist brochures are little more than pretty lies. This is the crossroads that faces the Caribbean in the prime of its post-coloniality.
Annie Paul
'Intersection +'
An exhibition of recent projects by Chris Cozier
Christopher Cozier is an artist and writer living and working in Trinidad.
His recent exhibitions, in January of 1998 entitled "Migrate, or Meddle
/ Medal" in the CCA programme of that year and "Works in Progress"
in 1999 at the Foundry in Barbados, consisted of a series of large mixed media
drawings on paper discussing issues of migration and development. In the latter
part of 1999 the artist did a residency at The Bag Factory in Johannesburg where
he embarked on a new series entitled "Intersection" in which his current
concerns were further investigated in the South African context. This work was
exhibited in Johannesburg in November of 1999 and will be presented in the Havana
Biennial in November of 2000.
"Intersection +" is a collection of works from these projects.
'Intersection +' was displayed in the Exhibition Space at CCA7 from June 29th to July 28th, 2000.