Anthea McGibbon

Drawing on my own roots in the Caribbean, I have urged students to weigh the contributions of artists and critics from that region and from throughout the “third world” to international contemporary art and criticism. Such explorations have introduced my students and associates to issues related to the formation of national cultural identities in a post colonial world. The project of post colonial cultural reconstruction is widely acknowledged to be among the most pressing issues of the last half century. Its impact is felt not just in young nations, but also in major capitols around the world where artists are struggling against racial and cultural marginalization, and in the process evolving new artistic vocabularies of great power

My most recent travels have taken me to China, and led to the creation of two series of works entitled Bicyclical Journeys and Pyramids and Eggs—A circular Journey.

Both were principally inspired by my experiences living in Beijing, although I had already begun to use egg and bicycle motif earlier. Beijing in some ways recalled for me my formative years in Jamaica where large and long established Chinese communities are part of the fabric of the nation. I had numerous Chinese friends in Jamaica where their integration into the economic, political and cultural environment is foregone.

So living amid the Chinese in China was not an altogether new experience for me. I also shared a second commonality. The dynamics at play as China emerges from a period of relative cultural isolation and asserts itself on the global stage, have a great deal in common with those of us who emerged from colonial experiences and have also had to struggle for cultural and artistic recognition.

In a very real way, our experiences are parallel ones within the context of international contemporary art. And finally, as I looked around China, I was struck by the speed with which the country is rebuilding itself. It is impossible to not be amazed by how a civilization thousands of years old, is reinventing itself before your eyes. This rebuilding simultaneously leaps backward and forward, reaffirming fundamentals as ancient as the pyramids of Egypt while daring to build new towers that pierce the sky. This paradox suggested to me the juxtaposition of pyramids and eggs.

I was excited to see how my work and that of other colleagues from the Caribbean found a place in the emerging cultural awareness of China’s 1.3 billion people. With the inevitable waning dominance of older traditional centers of art such as Paris, Berlin, London and New York, we seem on the eve of a great new flourish that will bring to the fro the finest artists from what used to be the “third world.”

With fresh optimism, economic revitalization, and the genius of enormous populations to draw upon, the post colonial black world and the emerging Asian nations may yet establish a 21st century cultural world order that escapes the arrogance of the West and the ideological strait jacket that so long constricted aspects of Soviet era thinking about the arts. I think that the Chinese have a big role to play in such a future. In any case, we all need to think boldly about that the opportunities in art production, criticism and history as well as the realignments within the international community brought to us by the century that we have just entered.

 
See also The Jamaica Sunday Gleaner’s Art: Beyond the Natural Realm on Bryan’s exhibition in Jamaica.

See also NY Mag review on Bryan’s exhibition in USA.

Article made possible with the courtesy of Bryan McFarlane.