Earl M. Bartley, Contributor
"KITSCH", PRONOUNCED kich, is a word of Germanic origin that means "low-brow, of poor quality, and vulgar". I hesitate one million times to put down anybody's work, but the statue 'Redemption Song', recently installed at Emancipation Park is kitsch art. It detracts from Bob Marley's great song of the same name, and diminishes rather than enhances the otherwise elegantly laid out Park.
On Emancipation Day I took the opportunity of going to view the monument created by artist Laura Facey-Cooper. From afar and up close the very much larger than life monument is quite imposing. The other good thing about it is that the figures are proportionate and the craftsmanship of the work is competent.
Apart from these positive features, the work is deficient in nearly every other respect. For one, the square-shouldered figure of the man and woman are completing lacking in motion and fluidity apart from a twisted neck and upraised head. In their stiffness and blue-black colouration the figures resemble monstrous cadavers - totally lifeless.
More fundamentally, the monument seems flawed in conception, but even more so in translation. This is a monument that is supposed to represent Emancipation. It is depicted by a man and woman which begs the conclusion that they are a couple. Yet the artist executes the work with the man and woman completely disconnected. They are not touching or even looking at each other.
SPIRITUAL
One commentator has argued that their joint gaze towards infinity connects them spiritually. But considering the connection between modesty and spirituality it is hard to see how these massive unclothed figures evoke or reflect spiritual transcendence.
Another commentator has explained that the monument captures the newly-freed slaves at the moment when they were cast off the plantation naked and bewildered. That may well be so. But the monument is a symbol. And as a symbol, it seems to me, that it might have been more appropriately constructed with the man and woman embracing each other and showing the love and support that Africans must have exhibited in order to survive 350 years of slavery.
Moreover, an embrace by the couple might have mitigated the artlessness of the present work. The female figure suitably positioned against the male might have mitigated the indelicacy of full frontal nudity in a public monument to be viewed by all ages. Instead, by constructing the well-endowed figures stiffly apart in their birthday suits, the effect is to focus attention on the nudity itself and that makes the figures almost pornographic. The pornographic effect in turn makes the inscription "None but ourselves can free our minds" seem ludicrous.
DISTASTEFUL
What I find particularly annoying, is that despite repeated public displeasure over publicly commissioned works of art, the authorities continue to leave the selection to a small group of artistic and cultural elite. It is true that the traditional and naturalistic preferences of the average Jamaican towards art might lead to a proliferation of predictable and boring public statues which in itself could be quite kitschy. But I would rather be bored by the conservatism of public sensibility, than be offended by vulgarity trying to pass as modernism or expressionism in art.
In the future, whenever the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission desires to establish a public monument, I hope it will restrict the Selection Committee to mainly pre-selecting five or six works reflecting the various styles of art. They should leave the final decision to the general public through write-in newspaper polls.
Though some artists often benefit from controversy surrounding their work, it is probably quite humiliating to others to have a great deal of unfavourable publicity about their work, or worse, to have it withdrawn from public viewing. Yet I hate to think that I might have to encounter Mrs. Facey-Cooper's work every time I go to Emancipation Park. I also wonder (tongue in cheek) whether an anthropologist who unearths that statue 10,000 years from now might not think that Jamaicans were hedonists and phallus worshippers.
Art is predominantly about self-expression. But art for public spaces has to be far less self-indulgent and be more cognisant of public sensibilities. I believe Mrs. Facey-Cooper's work fails the broader public sensibility test. It panders to Jamaican black people's conceit about their beautiful bodies, and even more crudely, their sexual fantasies about the "big bamboo and buff front". This Altar of Dionysus the Greek god of passion needs to be removed from the centre of the city.
Earl Bartley is an economist and businessman. You can reach him at adapapa@cwjamaica.com
