Cathy Lebowitz, “En Mas: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean.” New Orleans, Contemporary Art Center. Art in America, Sept 23, 2015.
Carnival celebrations today have lost much of their original social and religious purpose, becoming, like most everything, highly commercialized events. Carnival in the Caribbean can be traced in part to the masquerade balls thrown by 18thcentury French plantation owners in Trinidad, alongside which slaves and newly freed Africans developed separate revelries that evolved into what Trinidadians call “playing mas.” To play mas encompasses conceiving, creating and performing a character. Music and dance are as crucial to these productions as objects and outfits.
One of the first things viewers saw upon entering “En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean,” which not only explores but fosters the cross-pollination between popular and high art, was a black-cloaked makeshift mannequin on a ladder, wearing a large helmet with headlights shining out of the eye sockets. In addition to several other blackoutfitted wire-form figures, Marlon Griffith’s installation Positions + Power (2014) included a wall-size video of a performer in a version of the helmet being pushed through the nighttime streets of Port of Spain, Trinidad, this past April during mas. Even in the safety of the gallery, the “Overseer” character, as it was referred to here, felt threatening, thus succeeding in temporarily and somewhat grotesquely inverting the social hierarchy. Griffith, who was born in the city, trained as a “mas man” and now lives in Nagoya, Japan. The “Overseer” not only resembles police towers set up around the capital of Trinidad during carnival but also conjures the facelessness of 21st-century methods of control and warfare.
“En Mas’” comprises nine commissioned works that were created by Griffith, John Beadle, Christophe Chassol, Charles Campbell, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Hew Locke,
Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson and Cauleen Smith—artists from the Caribbean or its diaspora—during the 2014 carnival season. Each artist focused on a place with which they are affiliated. The show was co-organized by Claire Tancons (an independent curator born in Guadeloupe and based in New Orleans, who has devoted much of the last decade to researching the intersection of public processional culture and performance art) and Krista Thompson (an art historian who focuses on Caribbean studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.).
( . . . ) Lorraine O’Grady’s video Looking for a Headdress teases a great deal out of a simple act: watching footage of Brooklyn’s West Indian American Day Parade (as well as YouTube videos of Brazilian carnivals) in her Westbeth studio with Andil Gosine, an Indo-Canadian Trinidadian professor of sociology and gender studies. Known for her early-career public appearances in costumed personas, O’Grady is preparing a new character, whose outfit combines a Western garment and a carnival headdress. She tells Gosine about this process as the two of them comment on the parades, while we see what they are seeing. A computer monitor on a desk with a chair was an understated invitation to pause, rewind or fast-forward, giving visitors a degree of control over the ordering of the 30-minute video, which is remarkable not in its appearance but for what it accomplishes so efficiently. As MoMA curator Thomas Lax observes in the catalogue, Looking for a Headdress not only “mimics the way diasporic communities are built—through an intimacy at a distance” but also serves as a “historic condensation of O’Grady’s career.” ( . . . )