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Tancons, Claire, “Carnival and the Artistic Contract,” 6_tancons:nka_book_size 2/28/10 6:26 PM Page 106 CARNIVAL and THE ARTISTIC CONTRACT SPRING IN GWANGJU CLAIRE TANCONS Mario Benjamin (Haiti), The Banquet, in SPRING, May 18 Democratic Plaza, Gwangju, September 5, 2008. Curated by Claire Tancons for Gwangju Biennale ’08. 200 participants, 90 min. Photo: Akiko Ota. 106•Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art Nka•107 6_tancons:nka_book_size 2/28/10 6:26 PM Page 108 Can a Masquerade Salvage Humanity’s The Adoration of Hiroshima had first been per- tacle sold out to the diktat of entertainment. becoming a lingua franca—not least because of Declining Star in the Era of Spectacular formed earlier that year during the annual Indeed, it should come as no surprise that a carni- the opposing yet concomitant currents of accrued Power? Trinidad Carnival. As a proponent of Mas’, the val designer whose first carnival band was individual freedom on one hand and increased artistic component of the island’s national festival, Paradise Lost (1976) would question the strategies state media control on the other. To Washington’s Feathers for Smoke Peter Minshall was the leading masman of the of the spectacle. His approach was much like the posthumous nuclear guilt, Minshall offered a In 1985, a group of Trinidadian artists calling 1980s and 1990s. His mas’ were characterized by San Francisco-based activist group Retort, whose buoyant parade of sins. To Bush’s purported anti- themselves “Project MAS” (referring to both an unabashed critique of society rooted in the tra- book rallying against spectacular politics, Afflicted nuclear crusade against Iraq, Washington antiwar “Masquerade” and “Mutually Assured Survival”) dition of old-time carnival characters and Ole Powers, also borrows its title from the verses of the protesters retaliated with placards and banners contributed a carnival procession to the peace Mas, brought up to contemporary relevance seventeenth-century English poet John Milton.1 bearing threatening messages of peace. To the march organized in Washington, D.C., commemo- through the choice of topical subject matter and Discussing the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World masquerade of the Iraq war, suburban recruits rating the fortieth anniversary of the atomic bomb- the use of innovative techniques. Minshall’s The Trade Center in New York, an updated iteration of turned American soldiers responded with the the- ing of Hiroshima. Designed by Peter Minshall, The Adoration of Hiroshima at the Washington Anti- spectacular power perpetrated against—rather ater of horror of Abu Ghraib. Taking their uni- Adoration of Hiroshima sought to admonish Nuclear Peace March signaled the possibility of than by—the West, Retort advanced the state- forms for mere costumes of G.I. Joe dolls, and dis- humankind for its deadly worship of nuclear successfully combining Carnival and political ment, “We do not believe that one can destroy the guising their POWs as hooded penitents in one of weapons through the artistic idiom of Mas’, a car- demonstration, of marrying the Caribbean ver- society of the spectacle by producing the spectacle the darkest farces of the beginning of the twenty- nival tradition native to the Caribbean islands of nacular of resistance with the Western language of of its destruction.” But wasn’t what Minshall had first century, America’s soldiers staged a carnival Trinidad and Tobago. The procession’s master- political propaganda against spectacular power, of accomplished with Madame Hiroshima, by trans- of war grotesques where torture became entertain- piece, Madame Hiroshima, was a grotesque which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was one forming the costume into carnivalesque, in itself ment—The Disasters of War brought on by The embodiment of the nuclear threat, a baroque of the first examples. grotesque? In Minshall’s words, the 18-foot-tall, Sleep of Reason. Madonna whose aureola was a cloud of feathers If, with Madame Hiroshima, Minshall has cre- 120-pound costume was “a purposeful vulgarity of reminiscent of the atomic mushroom that signaled ated an icon that partook of the spectacular, the glitter and ostrich feathers,”a “Folies-Bergère non- If Debordian Spectacle Is To Be Rejected, the destruction of Hiroshima on June 6, 1945. procession as a whole was far from a cheap spec- sense.” Shall Bakhtinian Carnival Be Allowed Back In? Bacchanal and Parangolé Sleep and Dream Peter Minshall, Sketch for The Adoration of Hiroshima, 1985. Ink on paper. Far from being meaningless, Minshall’s Can Can The monsters in Francisco Goya’s famous etching Courtesy of The Callaloo Company, Chaguaramas, Trinidad. figure is agitprop theater and nonsense is fruitful El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos foolishness, bearing the blooms of an alternative (1797–1798) could have been born out of the sleep carnivalesque ideology that opposes senses to of reason as much as out of the dream of reason— sense and reverses the age of the Encyclopedia to the Spanish word sueño can translate into either that of the Bacchanalia. “Bacchanal!” exclaims the “sleep” or “dream.” For these monsters—a cat, Trinidadian when unexpected events erupt, which owls, and bats with iridescent eyes—can be seen as outcome cannot be predicted. “Parangolé,” pro- both the last specimens of the not-yet-vanished posed Hélio Oiticica at the height of the military folkloric substrate of Europe upon which its carni- dictatorship in Brazil. Almost synonymously, the vals were bred and the metaphorical monsters that Greek vocable turned Caribbean vernacular in the mechanical and nuclear ages would bear out of typical Walcottian fashion2 and the Brazilian near- Man’s blind reliance on logic and science—the cre- neologism of the Tropicália era signals a New- mation chambers, the atomic bomb. World strategy by which carnivalesque excess dis- There is only a short step between the sleep of arms spectacular conflict and the grotesque reason and war, which disasters Goya rendered gauges power. with rhetorical excess and eloquent violence. The If the carnivalesque strategy of antispectacular unrelenting darkness of The Disasters of War spectacle thrived as the native colonial language of (1810–1812) is further deepened in the portrayal the Americas, it was only disrupted in Europe, of the killings of the 3rd of May 1808 (1814), where unmediated popular undercurrents of which would inspire Picasso’s Massacre in Korea resistance were kept alive after the festival van- (1951). The genealogy of erring reason from the ished. It now plays a central role in Asia, where the first modern artist (Goya) to the icon of mod- democratic movements of the 1980s are finding a ernism (Picasso) reads like an alternative chronol- new breadth on the global stage. Indeed they are ogy to mainstream art-historical trends, with 108•Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art Nka•109 6_tancons:nka_book_size 2/28/10 6:26 PM Page 110 Peter Minshall, River, Trinidad Carnival, 1983. Courtesy of The Callaloo Company, Chaguaramas, Trinidad. Photo: Derek Gay. Goya’s insane nightmares and Picasso’s primitive seventeenth century, Europe had not yet lost its fantasies defying the cool, linear ideology of Shrovetide festivals. In Paris, under the impulse of progress. King Louis XIV (1638–1715), whose love of danc- Indeed, Picasso’s affinity with ancient and non- ing and costuming is well documented, carnival modern civilizations helped reframe art-historical masquerades flourished and slowly gave way to a discourse away from the univocal Western narra- formalized type of spectacle that was to engender tive of modernism. His soldiers in Massacre in the grand classical tradition of ballet. During that Korea are naked barbarians wearing rustic helmets same period, France and other Catholic European and antique, three-pronged weapons, grotesque nations that celebrated Carnival were engaged in warriors whose crude nudity leaves them as the colonial enterprise. Goya’s bats flew to the exposed as their victims. In the 1983 Trinidad Indies. (The Bat is, in fact, one of the oldest tradi- Carnival, the king of Minshall’s band River was tional characters in the Trinidad Carnival.) Mancrab, a river-polluting crab and genocidal As Carnival withdrew from Europe as a major criminal of the River People. Though more elabo- popular manifestation, giving way instead to the rate than Picasso’s crude warriors, Mancrab bore rarefied enjoyments of the few, it surged in the resemblance to them in their metallic harnessing New World, where slavery and colonization and embodied the line of development from prim- replaced servitude and feudalism. Europe’s itive modernism to carnivalesque sophistication growing, and soon excessive, consumption of along a path of history still too often left unbeaten. spices and sugar, cocoa, and cotton announced the beginning of capital accumulation and stood Capital and Carnival in contrast to the famishment of the naked mass- The Middle Ages were the times of the grand es of slaves and indentured laborers, breeders of European carnivals to which the painter and its material pleasures. To their masters’ material- printmaker Pieter Bruegel gives a long-lasting ist pleasure, the newly oppressed opposed the Peter Minshall, Mancrab from River, Trinidad Carnival, 1983. mystique with The Fight Between Carnival and physical and spiritual experience of transient Courtesy of The Callaloo Company, Chaguaramas, Trinidad. Photo: Noel Norton. Lent (1559). But by the time dawn came upon the existentialism. 110•Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art Nka•111 6_tancons:nka_book_size 2/28/10 6:26 PM Page 112 If the accumulation of capital is the condition Césaire, the proponent of the black-conscious- expressions of popular angst against real and per- trasting picture. The torch left Tiananmen Square of the Spectacle, the cancellation of capital is the ness movement Négritude, which has been seen as ceived abuses of power. under the warm auspices of Chinese officials and condition of Carnival. If capital excess breeds the French West Indian equivalent of the African returned to Hong Kong to muffled protests by Spectacle, the lack of capital engenders Carnival.
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