ANDRE BAGOO REVIEWS “OBJECTS” BY AL BRAITHWAITE See Link here: newsday.co.tt/features/0,202352.html “THE OBJECT OF LIFE” NEWSDAY SECTION B, THE BEAT, Saturday 1st November 2014, Page 1 OBJECTS tell stories. Though inanimate, they bear witness to what is around them. From a weathered stone which, over centuries, has been polished and shaped into a tiny kidney bean, to the toothbrush left innocuously on a bathroom sink. Photographs tell stories too. They organise, curate the world: shaping things in a frame. They reveal something about the photographer and the viewer. The choice of what is photographed tells us about what the photographer values or finds interesting or just likes. And the reaction of the viewer to that vantage point will be a reflection of their own internal system of values: their own personality. Film is the membrane where the photographer and viewer meets. Sometimes there is osmosis, sometimes not. The latest show at the Medulla Art Gallery, at Fitt Street, Port-of-Spain, asks us to contemplate what happens when photographs and objects are placed side by side. “Objects” is a new mixed media exhibition by Trinidad-based London artist, Al Braithwaite. The exhibition includes collaborative photographic work by artists Richard Arrindell, Miquel Galofré, Abigail Hadeed, Nadia Huggins, Marlon James, and Alex Smaile, all in response to selected objects. According to the organisers, “The world gets fractionally altered... via a restless hand that does its work with simple found materials. Things get repositioned slightly, deployed in certain contexts; meanings get mutated, norms come in for questioning, combinations are reset, functions reappraised. This is the simple migrant logic of juxtaposition, but it often startles before it assimilates, carrying as it does a tense load of hybrid baggage.” But of course beneath these complex ideas is a simple fact. Ultimately, the human body is an object. Yes, we may agree that there is a soul. But when the time comes, and the body no longer breathes, what is left behind is flesh and bones, ash and mineral. A wrist-watch might as well be worn on a rock. And objects, in the end, are props for something else: our humanity. At the same time, they exist within a physical world that is much larger than us that endures long after we are gone. So to think about an object and what it is or could be is to think about everything around us and to realise, yet again, the mystery of what makes us all not just things, but also people. The objects are intriguing, particularly a book by Braithwaite, entitled, Museum No.1: Hizbollah’s Caviar. The book is 354 pages long, with text and images. It contains a dedication to Edward Said, who wrote Orientalism, a text that has been at the centre of post-colonial studies. (Said was a big fan of Trinidadian CLR James’ important book, The Black Jacobins.) Looking at the book purely as an object, its isolation is striking. A pair of white gloves are provided for visitors to the gallery to wear when leafing through its pages, a pragmatic procedure which, nonetheless, emphasises something. While a book normally contains fragments of its owner (hair strands, skin particles, notes, bookmarks, notes left inside) this one stands apart. We also think of how a book can contain a world. Think of some novels that manage to embody their own cosmos. (For instance you get the sense of a complete world in VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas or Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or in writers like Dickens or the Russian novelists.) But the book is within the world and, in this instance, within a gallery space. Imagine the possibilities: a book describing a world which contains a book which describes a world, ad infinitum. Before we even consider what a book says, we realise that it embodies the dizzying mirage of art. And what is art but illusion within illusion: trompe l’oeil? Yet, what is an illusion? Can an illusion, in some ways, be so powerful that it is more real that life itself? The photographs tell stories of transformation and place the objects in resonant contexts (for example relating to the environment; gender). But they, too, act as mirrors to these questions. They echo along the walls of the gallery. Show runs until November 10.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 21:53:59 +0000
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