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Andil Gosine's "Cane Portraiture" and the Aesthetics of Indenture Matthew Ryan Smith, Ph.D

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Andil Gosine's From the SelectedWorks of Matthew Ryan Smith, Ph.D. Fall 2019 Andil Gosine's "Cane Portraiture" and the Aesthetics of Indenture Matthew Ryan Smith, Ph.D. Available at: https://works.bepress.com/matthewryansmith/160/ by Matthew Ryan Smith The ‘kala pani,’ the black water they were forced to cross and which erased behind them all traces, broke all ties, engulfed their memory so not this land, not this island, no, exile. Who can understand now that we are in the third or fourth generation? Who wants to understand such an existence in absence, the lack of belonging? — Ananda Devi, Le Voile de Draupadi1 50 \ ndil Gosine’s Cane Portraiture emerges from a set AESTHETICS OF INDENTURE of conditions that aestheticizes the social history of indentured labourers in the Caribbean through Cane Portraiture participant-driven performances. The selection of the relational aesthetics model theorized by Bourriaud, which Asugar cane for the backdrop in these performances functions characterizes the rise of participatory frameworks in visual art as an indexical reference to the cultural memory of Caribbean practice during the mid-1990s. For Bourriaud, relational aesthetics diaspora. It also emphasizes sugar’s problematic relationship manufacture an interhuman sphere of rhizomatic connections; to the history of indenture. During preparatory research for the these unpredictable, transactive exchanges between participants work, Gosine mulled over his family’s photo albums that feature and the artist support his notion of relational aesthetics as “a set him and his family inside Trinidadian photo studios from the of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical 1960s and 70s. In the photos are backdrops displaying iconic point of departure the whole of human relations and their social architecture such as Paris’s Eiffel Tower and London’s Big Ben context”.6 The trouble with Bourriaud’s conceptualization watchtower, in addition to other European monuments. The begins in its ethical dimensions; in the propensity of writers and existence of this vernacular imagery throughout the colonized critics to deduce what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘good’ or ‘bad’ about Caribbean demonstrates a sense of longing, feelings of nostalgia, an artwork’s collaborative dimensions. Claire Bishop maintains or idealization of Europe. that the ethical turn towards “social art” criticism is fuelled by a In Cane Portraiture, Gosine deconstructs such images of lack of rigour; that failures of critical analysis occur most when one becomes preoccupied with an artwork’s “good intentions”.7 .It follows that artworks utilizing a participatory framework tend 1). For Stuart Hall, the hegemonic presence of Europe, what he to be evaluated on their potential to strengthen the social bonds calls “Présence Européenne,” in regimes of visual representation instead of their aesthetic merit. dominate the social identity of colonial subjects.2 By inviting Cane Portraiture approximates the conceptual framework of participants—many of whom happen to be the descendents of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics model by facilitating active indentured labourers—to have their portraits taken opposite participation from audiences; however, the work implicates a sugar cane backdrop, Gosine engineers a set of connections participants in a personal and/or collective politic. As a mnemonic between the descendants of indentured labourers, the Caribbean, apparatus, the sugar cane backdrop symbolizes the migration of South Asia, and the artist himself. That being said, Cane hundreds of thousands of South Asian labourers—who were Portraiture guaranteed free passage, gainful employment, and safe passage European and European individuals amongst the sugar cane, the home (under false pretenses, and if they managed to survive)— artist implicates all participants in the history of colonialism. to European colonies throughout the Caribbean.8 In addition Doing so emphasizes that colonial states of the Global North to documented cases of sexual assault and rape committed by were built upon the exploitation of labour from the Global ship doctors during passage, coupled with unhygienic living South. This complicated and unsettled relationship with Europe conditions, those who crossed the kali pani, or “Black Waters” remains today. of the Indian Ocean, often took up residence in former slave Gosine’s Cane Portraiture quarters. They were regularly subjected to malnutrition, chronic relations surrounding “coolitude”—the dissemination of Indian illness, and overwork, leaving them seeking medical assistance labour during the 19th century—by redressing one of its most that would subsequently be docked from their pay.9 Gosine’s indispensible discourses, the “coolie odyssey.” Gosine’s attempt performance of Cane Portraiture shred the “social fabric” by to locate “home” within this odyssey takes on new and unresolved insinuating how exploitative systems of labour such as slavery forms. His work suggests that the pathos of displacement ebbs and indenture undercut relations between the Global North and through generations like the ocean they once crossed, yet the South;10 it is a proposition grounded in political antagonism,11 3 and their descendents where evidence of European colonialism arouses tension by is shifting and unstable; it is, as Neil Bissoondath proposes, quite literally hanging in the background—here the photograph a state of being that neither gives up the past nor accepts the fate of the present.4 Gosine’s aesthetics of indentureship offer a In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes ruminates on the inference critique of the relational aesthetics model proposed by Nicholas of photography as a sensorial record of experience, yet stresses Bourriaud, pointing towards the ways that indenture systems that the photograph is never representative of memory proper affect senses of displacement and cultural loss. The historical the sight by force”.12 For Barthes, photographs are not narratives presented in the work are personal and collective, easy recollections of the past; instead, they trace events, things, individual and communal; as such, the sugar cane photograph draws upon the question of home by attempting to locate its in/ preserved for posterity.13 U s i n g t h e a e s t h e t i c s o f i n d e n t u r e , G o s i n e 5 By creating a migratory, seeks to re-establish connections to the land, its people, and the Cane Portraiture imitates the physical movement of women, men, and because it presents a counter-ideology to European regimes of children during passages from India to the Caribbean under the visual representation in the Caribbean since colonialism. By indenture system of labour. In doing so, this gesture provokes replacing conventional studio backdrops of European landmarks a questioning of the perception of “home” as an interminable like the Eiffel Tower with Caribbean iconography such as negotiation between the absent past and the tangible present. sugar cane, he delegitimizes idealization for Europe while transforming sugar cane into a monument comparable to the / 51 Eiffel Tower itself. Symbolically, this gesture relocates “home” Speaking on the integration of his dying partner into the work, away from Europe and back to Trinidad, where Gosine grew up Gonzalez-Torres confesses: before he and his family emigrated to Oshawa, Ontario. To this I was losing the most important thing in my life—Ross, with that introduces personal experience into wider constituencies home, ever. So why not punish myself of memory14—the sugar cane photograph is at once an act of even more so that, in a way, the pain would be less? This is mourning and a source of strength. It is a reminder of what home how I started letting the work go. Letting it just disappear”.16 once was and could be. The catastrophic loss of what once constituted home for MAKING “HOME” Gonzalez-Torres is visualized in works such as Untitled (Loverboys) as an allegorical representation, where mnemonic Cane Portraiture is activated during interactions with Gosine, objects of personal memory are gifted to the viewer. As it fellow participants, the photo camera, and the take-home analog happens, giving pieces of oneself (and one’s lover) away, 10.00 x 15.25 cm photograph. By offering participants a take- allegorically speaking, is essentially imitating the process of home snapshot of their likeness, Gosine replicates the service entropy itself, albeit most beautifully. of conventional portrait studios (though his images are free). Though its circumstances are noticeably different, Cane Yet, he also expands the intersubjective categories of relational Portraiture also emerges in the midst of heartbreak—the sudden aesthetics by extending the performance’s life outside the gallery and unexpected end of Gosine’s long-term relationship with his or museum where it can take on a life of its own. partner. The performance, coupled with several other works in Of the most recognized artists to utilize take-home aesthetics Gosine’s WARDROBES series, negotiate his ancestral migration is the Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose from Trinidad, the complex history surrounding indentureship, seductive installations composed of stacks of paper and heaps of and, much like Gonzalez-Torres, the understanding that love can wrapped sugar candies tantalize viewers to remove them—the exist as a surrogate for “home.” For Gosine: works are then replenished by gallery attendants according to dimensions stipulated by the artist. In works such as Untitled There was this kind of recognition of how much that (Loverboys) (1993), the scale and weight of the installation ‘home’ for me, and how emulates the actual body mass of the artist and his late partner much I was still mourning and contending with displacement Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991, and from Trinidad to Canada [...] I was forced to think more about represents a type of unconventional double portrait15 what it means to see oneself as a service to labour, and [...] I began to recognize an argument about trauma, desire, labour, and migration.17 Gosine’s personal and collective histories converge in Cane Portraiture Gosine`s former partner.
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