As Derek Walcott famously reminded us, the Caribbean has never primarily been noted for great monuments or magnificent ruins. Yet there are few regions of the world, where the imprint of history is more ubiquitous: it stares back at us through the way Caribbean people look, speak, eat and worship; it underpins our economies, global connections and invisible boundaries; it feeds our anxieties and informs our sense of place in the world.
Every Caribbean artist knows that a traumatic and turbulent history looms large over creative practices and demands tough choices: artists can try to re-tell, re-examine or embellish the past, they can ignore it or approach it indirectly by hinting at its ultimate un-representability. These choices can be uninformed, but they can never be innocent, and for the region’s white artists, the dilemma is, needless to say, particularly thorny. Such artists may (as the saying goes) feel damned if they don’t engage with history, and equally damned if they do: it is indeed questionable whether it is possible to ever get it ‘right’.
Though Nick Whittle never shied away from these challenges, the centrality of history to his work has perhaps not been well understood. Infused with complex metaphors, intersecting personal and historical narratives and a high degree of self-reflexivity, his work has often been bracketed as ‘difficult’ and provocative. Though he trained and exhibited in England before settling here four decades ago, Whittle’s artistic identity is, however, intrinsically tied to the Caribbean and Caribbean history. Successive bodies of work have ventured into the territory of historical culpability, victimization and angst; delved into the individual and collective crevices of mind and memory. More marked by depth than by a breadth of scope, the work has thus continually revolved around the perception, self-perception and possible role of the white person (and artist) in a postcolonial society.
Whittle knows as well as few others the pitfalls of entering this terrain, above all the irony of lucrative careers structured around white guilt and penitence - yet the relatively inaccessible nature of his work has arguably safeguarded it from easy gains or moral tradeoffs. As the world is witnessing a shocking rise in racism and ethnic marginalization, excessive subtlety can, however, become untenable. As if compelled to remind audiences of the origins of the current world-order, Whittle’s latest body of work registers a shift from a predominantly psychological perspective towards a more objective and material engagement with Caribbean-Scottish history and the ‘new world’ trajectory. While the new works continue to interweave personal and historical narratives, the former is therefore no longer key to their interpretation.
If the entry point to the present series – the Scotland to which the artist traces his maternal lineage - is personal after all, it serves as a reminder that each of us is situated somewhere in relation to this historical trajectory. Indicative of the formal and thematic approach in the works that follow, Merchant City (the earliest piece in the exhibition) thus concerns itself with the colonial exploits and accumulation that laid the foundation for the prosperity of a city like Glasgow. The five units laid out in the shape of a cross point to the hypocritical rationalization of the colonial project. Resembling ships ready to launch, the sardine cans are at once suggestive of the merchant fleet and of the terrifying conditions onboard during the Middle Passage. The stacked origami boats, which occupy the central unit, invoke the Amerindian canoe, but their vaginal shape is also tied to Whittle’s previously established iconography, where male and female genitalia represent the colonial encounter as a rape. The female element is thus repeatedly linked to the new world, to fertility, protection and generosity, but also to subjugation and exploitation (while the (so often misunderstood) phallic shape has suggested white/male/colonial transgression and domination). Altogether, the four lower units gesture towards the material facts of the Scottish/Caribbean connection. More personal reflections on how this history continues to affect social relations today do, however, appear in the uppermost unit, which carries the opening line from one of Whittle’s poems.
The exhibition’s remaining works fall into two categories, one of which centers on the terrifying events leading up to the Middle Passage and on the passage itself, while the other reflects on the fate of the survivors and on the culture gradually fashioned by their descendants.
As the exhibition title suggests, the most important premise for an engagement with any traumatic history has to be the basic human identification with its victims. Displaying a simple humanoid shape with bottle-ends arranged on an unembellished, nondescript background, Artefact gestures towards the ethical and intellectual dilemmas of trying to reconstruct irretrievable histories, and encourages us to do so responsibly, always reaching for a shared humanity. Accordingly, works like Captured and Family take us back to those horrific moments, when African societies and families were ripped apart by capture and abduction. To counter the imperial (sardine-can) fleet symbolically – while also gesturing towards the new world - Whittle employs the folded paper boats (with their simultaneous connotations of agility and vulnerability) as a symbol for the captured and subjugated. Family represents the forced separation with a simple blood-red dividing line, while Captured condenses the moment and after-effects of such an attack into one compelling symbolic composition. The long row of aluminium cans may thus be seen to represent the (seemingly unending) chain of abductors and abductees. The circle with the eroded red object at the centre conveys a sense of being surrounded and absorbed into the chain, and of a violated and decimated community. The slightly asymmetric arrangement of the cans underscores the sense of disruption and imbalance.
The Middle Passage that followed upon such raids is monumentalized in the Ancestors installation, arguably the pivot point for the entire exhibition. The piece features hundreds of hand-thrown monkey pots (representing the abducted) arranged on an elevated ‘ship’s deck’. Ropes coiled around the assemblage at once hint at high waves and capture, while the broken pots refer to those who perished and their individual and cultural knowledge.
Adopting a more cerebral approach, the piece titled After William Elford paraphrases a diagram used by abolitionists to expose conditions onboard the over-packed slave-ships. With its interlocking paper-boats, now also resembling coffins, it is a stark and simple reminder of the triangle trade’s cynical logistics. By contrast My Son Slipped Into Darkness - one of the most emotionally stirring pieces in the exhibition – reestablishes a basic human connection and, with its outstretched, downward-reaching empty hands, conveys an acute sense of loss and empathy.
Starting with the two closely related installations Journey and Arrivants, the exhibition’s remaining works are dedicated to the life that commenced in the new world. Alternating in tenor between elegy and hopefulness, they speak of extreme hardship and cruelty as well as of resilience and inventiveness. In their focus on the Middle Passage, Journey and Arrivants echo Ancestors, albeit with a slightly less mournful inflection. In lieu of the monkey pots, the baobab-flowers, which appear in both works, thus represent the newly arrived (or arriving), who will gradually throw down roots. Journey, where the flowers are connected through the cane lattice (alluding to the sugar production) with the blue ocean underneath, encapsulates the entire process from the transatlantic crossing to the sugarcane plantations. Arrivants, however, reminds us of the mercantile premise for the whole undertaking, and the reduction of human beings to mere commodities, as indicated by the coins and tokens separating the flowers.
Equally sinister, works like Against Her Will and Castrated acknowledge the (sexual and other) violence of the plantations. The former once again links the (vaginal) canoe-shape with the female, and hints (through buttons and curves with connotations of breasts and pregnant bellies) at the transgressions commonly visited on female slaves. Castrated echoes this from a male perspective, while suggesting a more general sense of emasculation.
Though the original presence and near-eradication of indigenous Amerindians tends to be somewhat overshadowed by the trauma of the triangle trade, they are continually referenced and acknowledged as joint casualties through the paper-boats. The deceptively simple piece titled Evidence, moreover, features a beautiful Amerindian food-cover set atop a piece of tartan-cloth (that of the MacLeod clan, connecting it to the artist’s personal history). Underneath the cover, placed on a piece of mirror-glass and unseen by the viewer, however, is a groin protector punctured with copper nails. The piece therefore not only observes the dialectical relationship between cultural identity and resistance, but in its very configuration alludes to other narratives, rendered invisible in the history written by its putative ‘victors’. Once seen, however, the mirror-glass implicates the viewer directly, as it draws us in and places us squarely within this narrative.
The craftsmanship and cultural practices invoked in this piece is contrasted with several works, which focus on the Christian church and its embarrassing implication in the colonial project. The sarcastic placement of a rosary against a jooking board in Baptism sets the tone and, in Codrington College, the cross of nails emblazoned against the cane inevitably points towards the victims of the sugar industry, rather than those of the faith. Taking a more nuanced approach, the warmly illuminated interior of Confiteor indicates the light of the faith, while the canoe-shape also becomes the all-seeing, yet (in the context of slavery) inexplicably blind eye of the Christian God. In the uppermost section, the mathematical signs for ‘more than’ and ‘lesser than’ ( < > ) thus hint at the elusiveness of the church on the matter of social hierarchies. This is followed up in Black Pews and White Pews, both of which are suggestive of racial segregation even within the church, but also, through the fine white lace, of still prevailing notions of decorum and respectability, and the generally complex role of the church in the Caribbean.
Yet another group of works draw attention to the physical and cultural resistance with which the colonizers were met, and the novel, hybrid forms that were born in the (violent) meeting between their divergent cultures and interests. As a reference to human stamina and fragility, the strikingly simple, piece titled Backbone is a compelling reminder of the integrity of the human body and its always-latent violation. Drummers and Birth of Pan, on the other hand, pays tribute to African retentions and their translation into new forms of music and rhythms. With its ship-like connotations, drums, ‘steel-pans’ and red/green/yellow ribbon, Drummers acknowledges that this revival, which continues to the present through resistive movements like Rastafari and various other cultural expressions, may already have commenced during the Middle Passage. Creolization-processes are similarly referenced in the installation Four Women at Three Houses Spring, which at once returns to and transcends the personal starting-point for the series. The piece draws inspiration from stories (told by the artist’s mother-in-law) of Barbadian women gathering to wash clothes, but also to form bonds, tell stories and, inevitably, forge a cultural identity. The large spread of madras-fabric represents the innumerable intersecting narratives that converged in such locations. Notably, it also indicates the transformation of the simple Scottish tartan (representative of imperial power as seen in other works) into a sprawling, polyrhythmic texture, symbolizing the Caribbean at large. Capping this upbeat portrayal of fertile interculturation, the two works titled His Navel String Buried Here and Her Navel String Buried Here hint at an emerging sense of belonging and self-determination.
However, in an overarching reflection on this historical trajectory, the small, but extremely poignant piece Middle Passage is far from celebratory. On the contrary, it points towards black diasporic history as one of ongoing vulnerability and victimization. The black boats inserted into the grooves of the jooking-board (a powerful symbol of hard and repetitious labor) thus speak to the past and the present at once – to a sense of repetition and sameness. Lest viewers move on with a sigh and a shrug, the piece called Where were YOU? moreover challenges us individually to own up to our inherited position vis-à-vis this legacy.
Opening and closing the exhibition are two pieces consisting of clay vessels with plants – Sansevieria Trifasciata (originally from West Africa) in Memorial and Aloe Barbadensis in Purification. Neither is intended to offer closure or prospects of immanent healing, but rather to suggest that this history is living, embedded in our soil and still evolving.