Chris Cozier Installation Art Attack of the Sandwich Men

Christopher Cozier,and to think he was such a polite boy; Ownerman or Winner Takes All; Going North, 1996, rubber stamps.

Christopher Cozier is running. I am running after him. The current of air is in our faces as I shout questions to him. He answers on the run, and I struggle to capture his words.Homo running between two not-specific points was the title of a piece in his 1998 bear witnessMigrate or Medal/Meddle. In the first ix months of 2002 Chris has been running between several points—Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Montreal, Port-au-Prince—so it has been challenging to conduct this email interview with him.

Though he is an accomplished artist, my first introduction to Chris came through his writings in theTrinidad and Tobago Review, where he introduced young Trini artists experimenting with new art forms and tried to tease out the unfamiliar ideas they were playing with. Eschewing what he and others had identified as the limitations of "islandness," Chris urged dissimilar modes of reception and viewership on the Trinidadian public. Over the years Chris has been instrumental in building a context for new works in new media to be exhibited in the anglophone Caribbean. At the same time he has also been a practicing artist, shifting amid installation, video, performance, and good old-fashioned drawing.

None of this has been easy. In that location has been a tradition in the Caribbean of artists, writers, poets, and even musicians operating in exile. Kamau Brathwaite put it nicely when he said that there seemed to be a persistent belief that it was only possible to "become 'real writers' away—rather than 'aboard' the Caribbean area." What is unique about Chris is that he has developed his creative practice very much "aboard" the Caribbean. He is emphaticallynot in exile, and the work he makes is rooted in the problem space of the Caribbean. He articulates local concerns but does so in contemporary lingos that resonate in other parts of the world.

You lot could think of Chris'south work as being a postmortem, in visual terms, of the Caribbean postcolony. The appurtenances of power, the signs and symbols deployed by it, its fetishes—the regimes not but of violence merely also of self-censorship that govern us—these are some of the issues Chris'southward penetrating eye lingers on. His framing of the nation equally a punitive, manipulatory entity devoid of humanity or humor is often met with hostility, if not outright rejection.

Christopher Cozier is a prime instance of what I want to call, extremely tentatively, the alternatives—that is, artists who are non interested in fostering a Caribbean aesthetic or promoting and supporting national agendas. The alternatives are the illegitimate children of the nation who by virtue of differing race, class, gender, or sexual variables find themselves on the incorrect side of nation stories in opposition to the majority groups that assert ownership of the national or Caribbean infinite. Alternatives are a kind of internal refugee and suffer a double illegitimacy when they go away because their creative practice is seen as elevated to a higher place or irrelevant to the realities of tertiary-globe countries by metropolitan critics. What, conceptual art in the periphery? Perish the idea. And thought does perish, under the circumstances. Chris talks of feeling "storyless" and "mythless." The modifynatives are natives without narratives, or possibly those with unpopular narratives. Often their talent is recognized away before information technology is accepted at dwelling. In this sense they guess the unassimilable Jamaican "rude bwai," the most famous of whom was Bob Marley. Ironically Marley'due south onetime alternative identity has now reinscribed the Jamaican nation in its ain image.

Annie Paul It'due south more than ten years since you've been dorsum in the Caribbean working as an artist. From your perspective, has the field of art undergone some change in that time, both in the anglophone Caribbean area and the region at large? What would you say some of the most significant developments have been?

Christopher Cozier The space has opened up. More than locals are making art and amalgam the soapbox on their own terms with greater confidence. A conversation is edifice. In the old days nosotros were merely a subject to exist rendered by someone who came from exterior with an alleged cognition of existent fine art. At that place was as well the hunt for and prospect of discovery of the Caribbean "Baton Budd" blazon of artist that still haunts places like Haiti. There is more happening within the islands themselves. When I was younger everyone had to leave. My friends and I used to call ourselves "Birdmen," from the motion-picture show about Alcatraz. Fifty-fifty today I still see new Birdmen. People are moving once more now considering we are at yet another juncture in terms of development merely the reasons may not be the aforementioned today. For people like myself, still living here (by the way, people really ask y'all that here, "You still here?"), alter has been nigh the shifting relationship to the "cultural." That projection was the lead-up to nationhood and somewhen became its byproduct. On my return to Trinidad, someone in charge of a collection called me on the phone and asked, "You does paint 'culture'?" I could not answer the question. I just had to say no. I knew exactly what they were asking, though. The artistic enterprise was near rendering or representing an inventory prescribed as Caribbean or as relevant to the Caribbean area. Art was supposed to be painting and its subject was "culture," the things that defined an "us" as separate from all the "thems" or other "usses" out there. Within that narrative was the story of "self-discovery," of mining and minding 1's space and self for "essential truths" and "national pride." Information technology had become a sermon with heroic figures. I grew upwards inside this narrative and I am not totally insensitive to it, but information technology had me asking, "Who am I? What is my ain story? What am I doing?" Few of the successful protagonists of those narratives still live on the isle, just they still speak in those terms from academy departments abroad. The big change is that things have reopened and I do not feel like I am speaking some kind of coded, private, undervalued language anymore.

Christopher Cozier preparingSet on of the Sandwich Men, 2002. Photo past Georgia Poppelwell.

AP Yes, information technology's true, as yous've hinted, that nationalisms and nationalist preoccupations accept been a yoke around the cervix of artists in the postcolonial Caribbean area. Some even talk of information technology as an albatross they are anxious to divest themselves of. Your work has grappled imaginatively with these issues. Your installationAttack of the Sandwich Men, 2000, in which you had rows of neatly arranged flag-toting, wax newspaper-covered sandwiches, is a case in signal. As I told you lot at the time, it reminded me of the novelty of sliced bread in Bharat. Modern Bread was 1 of two brands of sliced breads available in Abmedabad, where I grew upwardly. I later on found out that information technology was a state project like the Amul National Dairy ("Utterly Butterly Amul") and other homogenized, pasteurized, mass-produced consumables that ushered us into the modernistic world. You lot accept talked of beingness born into a earth "exterior history," into a space now lauded for its multiculti-ness but that was originally null more than an industrial site. I find that these are mutual concerns of artists working in different linguistic contexts in the Caribbean. For instance, in writing nearly the Puerto Rican artist Pedreira Dorian, Lugo Beltran talks of the land'southward "stammering ontological condition," that is, its seemingly permanent condition of beingness "an underdeveloped adult."

CC Before I answer the general question, I would like to say that I am very wary of the term "multicultural" in the context of the Caribbean. Multiculturalism as it manifested itself as a term in the late '80s in the US, for example, was a divisional enterprise of carefully delineated territories. They were designations, equally they were useful to the individuals who claimed them. But in the Caribbean area I was born into a world of differences; difference as a norm, not as something for an declared mainstream to swallow or accept prescribed like a medication. In that location was never enough space physically and economically to build thorough enclosures. Every other person was a complex, diverse office of a whole that we chosen our community. I do non know what I am. I only have my sensibility and my perception to guide me along. In fact the breakdown of gimmicky Caribbean area guild has to practise with politicians using those differences in a negative way. I measure ideas of "development" not by scale or infrastructure merely by how they function ethically in terms of its human resources. In that location is a constant slow-motion genocide happening every day to millions of people around the world, apart from the quicker, more sensational ones that disturb us or that nosotros see in the news.

Dorsum to your question. My concerns now have more than to do with understanding my sensibility and the shape and construction of my voice or vision. I was quite haunted past the image of sliced bread wrapped in grease-proof paper. To me information technology represented that time in my childhood merely later independence, the hope of modernity and progress. I had this propaganda volume from North korea that showed soldiers marching in the neatest rows I had always seen. I almost could not breathe looking at the film. And then I had another overhead photograph of the construction of a middle-grade housing development in Trinidad only later independence, with its gridded streets and fiddling two-bedroom bungalows. A sense of the march of progress and the aspirations of that era came to me and I began to wrap sandwiches and identify them in rows on the ground with trivial national flags. A scene from Fellini'sAmarcord came to mind. I was also thinking of people like myself, of mixed ethnicity, whose parents were ceremonious servants in the "new nation" narrative. The other children with whom I went to school had admired my "modernistic" sandwiches. The others had homemade lunches related to their cultural/ethnic backgrounds, like "bakes," something associated with African roots, or "rotis," which were associated with Indians. I would take done anything to have roti or something other than potted meat or cheese-paste sandwiches with no pepper. My lunch was "practical" and "modern" and too easier to package and fit into myStar Trek orBonanza dejeuner box (I had both), the little ones fabricated of tin with the figures in relief, probably made in Taiwan or Hong Kong. I was asked recently to takeAssault of the Sandwich Men to Montreal. I plant an early radio broadcast aimed at children like myself of the newly independent nation. The championship music was from theNutcracker Suite and the broadcasters all had simulated BBC accents! They were attempting to correct all the wrong ways that people would have proceeded to sing the new canticle. The right fashion turns out to be a kind of Victorian parlor manner of singing. High-pitched with rollingRs. And then the contrast between Wonder Bread in keen rows and these instructions defined, for me, the relationship between those who had an American consumer template for "progress" and those with a British template for civility and guild. It said and so much about how much one had to process growing upward and living in places similar this. And so I had that broadcast playing on a little horn-shaped speaker over and over above the rows of sandwiches to suggest the kind of March Past music we all marched to at sports day in school.

Christopher Cozier, Assault of the Sandwich Men (detail), 2000, Sandwiches, paper, and woods. Installation view: CCC7/Carribean Gimmicky Arts, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Photograph by Christopher Cozier.

AP Chris, who do you make art for? Who do you imagine your public to exist?

CC I brand work to investigate or to effort to give shape to what I experience or sense or happen to find while looking. I see myself as having conversations. I come up from a item place. I am curious about what that means to me and to people from other particular places.

"Public" is a big word, like "cause" or "struggle." And then there is "audition." They are not quite the same affair; both are as real as they are imagined and can be quite distracting. After my experiments with performance and video I went back to drawing, though it was non fashionable to do so. I like the conversational investigative tone of drawing; like video and operation I saw it equally the contrary of the didactic and/or awe-inspiring. Random thoughts on paper to me are quite informal and ephemeral. What as well brought me back to drawing was the remove and the individuality. What I miss from performance and video is the instantaneity and the dissemination, and so I am at present hopping back and forth.

Christopher Cozier,Bend Downwards, 1998, Mixed-media drawing. From the seriesDrift or Medal/Meddle. Photo by Christopher Cozier.

AP The figure of the Running Man dodges in and out of your piece of work, whether in drawings, installations or rubber stamps. In your 2001 installation in Rotterdam,Cross Currents, you had ii figures running in opposite directions, at cross purposes near—in that location was the figure of the Delinquent Slave with a packet over his shoulder and in the contrary direction is a frantic man running with a briefcase in his paw. Do you have a proper noun for him? Another postage you ofttimes seem to use is that of the Ownerman, a rather rotund figure surveying his holding, as information technology were. He's not running anywhere, it seems.

CC The runaways were scattering or dispersing everywhere. The guys with the briefcases were running in a singular race trying to get ahead of one another. When I first got the prototype of the runaway from xix^thursday-century advertising stock images, I wrote under information technology in pencil "Going North," which was an obvious and broadly associative title referring to the past and the nowadays, and so I drew the human being with the briefcase myself and I was thinking of money laundering and majuscule flight and the new economical positivists. I wrote under the figure, "And to think he was such a polite boy." I was thinking about expose in economic and political terms so. My parents were ceremonious servants. I liked the calm "office procedure" type of indifference of making images and stories by stamping.

Migration and movement have always been significant political and private strategies of being of and from the Caribbean. The land, for example, was once endemic past the Queen of England and a few families, and today it'southward endemic by the government. In the Caribbean people moved from island to island and to Southward and Central America, the Usa and Europe in search of opportunities. In the postindependence era, this movement continues between nation states, the holding of politicians, etc. A young Jamaican artist once told me that "the land now belongs to politicians and their gunmen. Jamaicans should jus' run away." The residue of the people just move around carrying with them the only things they can perchance call their ain: their skin, their skills, their vision, and their dreams. Home is wherever the prospect of fulfilling those dreams might be. At present words like "illegal immigrants" come up. These industrial sites began with an assortment of dislocated people and the politics of devaluation—of existence built-in into a world exterior "history," away from everything. Information technology makes ane quite anxious and often attentive and unable to easily trust circumstances. It can be both a positive and a negative affair. Information technology is more than "attitudinal"; it may even be a theoretical/critical vantage point or a way of being/surviving—ane derived from a response to historical circumstances. The "isolationism" (or nationalisms) of the postindependence era may have increased that anxiety. That is what my lilliputian flags running along the floor are nearly, and also my safety stamps. It was an endeavor to create narratives about who is moving and who is staying put and why.

AP What does "new internationalism" mean to yous? Increasingly we hear this term being used. You yourself participated in a testify recently in Copenhagen that bore this title. Also, how does your work translate in these different spaces?

CC The question is, to whom is it "new" and when will it go "old"? I can go to Port-au-Prince, Johannesburg, Montreal, Rotterdam, and Copenhagen and exercise projects and have further conversations that transform my work and how I see it by interacting with various discourses. This week I am moving myTerra Stories project from Copenhagen to Republic of haiti. The Haitian curator brash me that my sandwich piece of work, while being relatively acceptable for the Montreal leg of the show, may non be appropriate for Haiti. I could make an result of that or I could conform. So I switched my project and it opened new thoughts for me. I got to encounter how a projection initially intended to hash out ideas most history, country ownership, and migration in Denmark would function in a place like Haiti. It as well gave me something further to think about with the sandwiches, which I had also used in Havana. Even so, it was while rereadingThe Blackness Jacobins past C. Fifty. R. James that this thought nearly "belongings" and "ownership" came to heed. All of this implies that as long equally it remains economically possible I could remain in the Caribbean and make work rather than having to move to another identify to have those conversations about inclusion and exclusion and become a representative entity. To me that is an enclosure—a pre- and perpetually designated infinite. It'southward actually exciting when people desire to have an substitution and want to know how y'all see things instead of them saying to you, This is what you are about and this is where yous fit in. Or out. Perhaps that is new for someone like myself, the fact that people outside my own context are edifice a wider i and are now interested in what someone like myself has to say. I was in New York in the late '80s when a few blocks in lower Manhattan were the world. It was something amazing to encounter. I left there quite disoriented. And so on the flying to Copenhagen, for case, I was quite anxious wondering what I could possibly have to say to people or an audition at that place. Even though my project in Copenhagen,Terra Stories, was based on an idea that was in my work for quite some time: my conversation with an immigration officer on my way at that place, besides as an article nearly third- and quaternary-generation children of immigrants in United kingdom, which I had establish in a discarded newspaper while waiting in an drome, triggered something. I establish myself cartoon a little rostrum like the ones you see at sporting events, with beginning, second, and tertiary place marked on information technology. I had drawn one before while producing a print edition in South Africa. I noticed it while attending one of my children's sports meets just before traveling. At that fourth dimension I was thinking well-nigh baggage, anxieties about evaluation. At present I am thinking about how historical narratives are constructed. The podium is fenced off; does that hateful that i is left out or barricaded in? Should ane intermission downwardly the barrier and try to go in or should one just get on with one'southward life relieved of the brunt—as in myOriginal Injury series with the crutches, in which I had said "jus' walk." In other words, the idea of injury may accept been similar that of original sin in Catholicism. How would life be different if you decided to proceed without that formulation of oneself? Are you threatening if you expect assertive and contained or accept you lot become too comfortable being supported for your enactment of injury? What would happen if you only started to walk around as if null was ever incorrect with yous? Are you brave enough to give it a try? Similarly, the podium is my way of asking or offering the prospect of building other narratives. It is a kind of invitation. It asks u.s.a. to remember most where we are located.

Terra Stories was an outdoor work consisting of 2 enclosures. 1 of the fences enclosed a public demote in the foursquare exterior the Nikolaj Tower in Denmark. It had a gate and a key, and the typical "No Trespassing" sign from Trinidad hung on the contend. One had to apply for the key to become in to have a seat. The key came with the image of a colonial landowner. The application form asked a range of spurious questions, from personal things to whether one visited museums in various parts of the world like London or Paris. The form required that one answer truthfully and without corrections or errors—fifty-fifty though the initial sign, "No Tresspassing," had a spelling error. At the stop of the class in fine print information technology said that if ane told a really good prevarication, one could get a key anyway. It was an invitation to see the world from the perspective of people who come from places where one does not wait the organisation to be off-white or orderly or to really work and they begin wondering what the hustle would be. Information technology also asked, "Why does i want to be isolated?" The other enclosure had no gate or entry point, and inside it was the sports-award rostrum. The third part of the projection was called400 Yearsbecause it was role of my narrative about varied histories. I hung 400 "Made in China" rulers amidst the buttresses of the sometime church building tower. Within that area the sound of my vocalisation could be heard through a small speaker, above the sound of the knocking together of rulers blowing in the breeze, proverb, "Man running between two nonspecific points," and also, "and to remember you had me believing that all this time." That concluding part is likewise the championship of the enclosed podium/rostrum. Mayhap the person who makes the effort to get into that game becomes enclosed; out hither the prospects may exist wider, more open.

By the time my work was developed and installed, there were newspaper debates near farther tightening immigration laws in Denmark. If I had been in another location at some other time I might have responded to other things and produced another work.

Christopher Cozier,Terra Stories, Installation view: Musee d'art haiten, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2002. Photo by Christophe Chat-Verre.

AP Yous mentioned earlier that moving yourTerra Stories projection from Copenhagen to Haiti required some rethinking, some real rearranging and reformulating. What form did the projection take in Haiti?

CC Sure things that were relevant to Copenhagen may have no meaning in Haiti, like the rule of police and a sense of one's rights or borough entitlements. In Copenhagen the piece of work was done outdoors; in Haiti the project had to be indoors equally no 1 could guarantee that it would exist at that place the next twenty-four hour period. In Copenhagen the worry was vandals after a soccer match. In Haiti it was people's need for merely those materials with which the piece of work was made. I did non want to have anyone guarding my work and intimidating poor people for the sake of fine art. Instead I placed what would exist eye-class garden furniture, a table setting with flowers, vino and croissants in an enclosure inside the gallery. Y'all then had to take a chance with me by choosing a card with the prototype of the plantation owner from among those of the runaway to get a key to get into the enclosure. It was quite a lot of fun, as people of course tried to crook and I had to cheat also to hold back on giving out all the keys besides quickly. We were all trying to hustle one another. In one case someone got a cardinal they entered the enclosure, locked themselves in and had some wine while looking out at the rest of us. I left thinking of many things—like why did people not merely open the gate and let all their friends in, for example.

Christopher Cozier,Ownerman, Key chain fromTerra Stories. Photo by Nell McClister.

AP In Rotterdam you did a audio installation calledAudio System: Open Your Ears and See. What is interesting nigh your work is that it is profoundly influenced by music. Music after allis the Caribbean's strongest cultural production, and then this would seem obvious. Simply your connection to music seems more profound; your work is permeated by fragments of musical notation, past snatches of song and lyrical phrases. How and why?

CC Music in the Caribbean has been predominantly nearly language—the "languageing" of things, giving shape to the space we inhabit both mentally and physically. Information technology's a kind of oral history that keeps shifting to remain alive and open. As soon as governments and cultural officials and the international music industry try to co-opt it, it goes on to something else. Information technology is a means of processing, owning, and defining experiences. I wanted to see how to translate that into visual terms. I used to become underground DJ mixes in Port of Spain by the Downtown Outlaws, Papa Rocky, Chinese Laundry, and Dr. Hyde, consisting mostly of Jamaican mixes of dancehall. The mix, the mode things were put together, influenced me. My primeval work upon returning to the Caribbean area in the late '80s was near trying to construct disparate parts, to build fragile structures consisting of diverse materials each with its own history and associative aspects. My accent, the way I speak, is rife with inferences derived from the range of cultures that class the Caribbean space and likewise the historical circumstances.

I congenital the structures forWhy Does He Always Whistle That Tune While Washing the Car andBad Bluish Blazer Bay in a kind of makeshift fashion, consisting of parts of antiquarian buildings that were existence demolished also as parts of my older piece of work, which I had begun to destroy. It was a mystery to me how they managed to concur together; they ever made me nervous, the unwieldy shape of them. The way they threatened to fall over or apart. For me it was an investigation of my Creole or hybrid sensibility. It was almost it existence more of a verb than a noun. Creole is not a affair, really; it is a process, a condition or fashion of seeing or being that keeps changing according to circumstances. In a give-and-take nearly urban spaces in Montreal, I began to retrieve of audio in places like Alexandria Township in South Africa, or parts of Kingston, or parts of Brooklyn, or the Bronx equally I knew it in the '80s. My most recent work,Audio System, has moved dorsum to the idea of "phonation." For now I am more than concerned with how it functions in time and space rather than its configuration in physical terms. It began when I placed speaker boxes in each corner of a drawing, referring to how the thump of the bass track (the legacy of calypso, soca, reggae, and dancehall) defined an arena or space. The championshipAudio Organization arose because I was thinking near1990 by David Rudder, in which he sings about an "un-sound organization" that blows the children away. I've been recording my own voice in a professional studio, narrating the fragments of text that have been in my drawings for the last ten years or so. Some of the phrases when repeated are like a bass rails and others become a counter rhythm. I'm working with a basic call and response calypso structure that remains from the Roaring Panthera leo era of the '20s and continues with the Rasta-revival "consciousness" stuff like Sizzla today. The embarrassment, though, of hearing my own vox is a stark reminder of the idea that "West Indians" are supposed to take natural lyrical skills and rhythm. There is such a tradition of oratory and literary skill in the Caribbean that information technology is difficult to express oneself unless it is in one of the accepted ways. In 1 work I try unsuccessfully and with much discord to whistle a very sentimental and now sacred nationalist vocal. The thought that I could take five sequences on a CD and that they could be dealt with in a public and individual situation or in multiple locations intrigues me. While the work remains continued to the drawings it starts to take on a life of its own. Music in the Caribbean delineates a physical besides every bit psychological space via its beat, its volume, and its lyrics. There is a politics to that.

Christopher Cozier,and to think you had me believing that all this time, 2002. FromTerra Stories. Installation view: Nikolaj Udstillingbygning, Copenhagen. Photo by Christopher Cozier.

AP You are an unusual creative person in that part of your practice has involved playing the role of curator and critic/theorist in relation to developing the field of art itself in the Caribbean. In fact my first introduction to yous was through your writings in theTrinidad and Tobago Review in the early '90s; it wasn't until your i-person show in 1998,Drift or Medal/Meddle, that I was introduced to your creative output. How have y'all managed to juggle these different and sometimes alien practices?

CC I think that fine art is a critical procedure. I do not write reviews, merely more so things that reflect on fine art and artists that involvement me for various reasons as a beau practitioner. The few curatorial things I have managed to do also ask questions—they were not comprehensive or definitive projects. Similar my piece of work they were unself-consciously speculative, hoping to initiate a conversation. But like when I might hit on something in my own work. Things occur to me while looking at other people's work or while talking to them nearly it. I get just as excited and think of sharing that feeling with others. I begin to imagine, What if this were adjacent to that; what kinds of conversations would that create? People often want me to take an authoritative posture; that is how they see curatorship and criticism. But my approach has been as an creative person, one who admits to a critical betoken of view to the point of having a easily-on human relationship with the artists, the work and the context.

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Source: https://bombmagazine.org/articles/christopher-cozier/