Modern Painters spoke with Amanda Coulson—director of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas and the VOLTA art fair—about Caribbean culture, experiential art, and which critic she’d have a Scotch with.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of your role at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas? What’s the most challenging or frustrating?
The most rewarding is easy: Everything I do has a direct effect on the community and can actually change lives in a meaningful way. The challenge is being in a country that does not yet fully realize the treasure it has in its cultural output, why it’s even important, and why anyone should care about it. It is slowly changing with the government sanctioning our participation at the Venice Biennale, for example, or “Creative Nassau” being launched after an application to UNESCO, which is developing a tourism model to ensure that by 2020 more visitors come for our culture than our sun, sand, and sea. But the most frustrating is a general lack of vision beyond the 21- by 9-mile circumference of the capital city/island of Nassau, New Providence, as well as not recognizing the importance of being aware of what’s happening in the rest of the world, or inviting the rest of the world in.
In general, what’s one misconception that people might have about the art scene in the Caribbean?
The misconception is clear: How can there be critical thinking? Conceptual art? Isn’t it all “tourist” or “native/naive” art? This rather condescending assumption is, however, something we are largely responsible for perpetuating ourselves due to what is close to idolatry of our massive tourism industry, which leads to our own self-stereotyping. Generally, the images that the Bahamas—and much of the Caribbean region—tends to transmit to the world confirms this. Maurizio Cattelan’s Caribbean Biennale, which offered “ten chosen artists a one-week vacation on the enchanting island of St. Kitts, with no art and no work to do” really didn’t help much and was, for a person of Caribbean descent, pretty offensive, because where else in the world do you, as a rule, sit around all day under a palm tree getting drunk and being nonproductive, right? The potential power of that platform, those people, the kind of publicity it generated, could have been used positively to actually uncover something of value that we, with our limited budgets, cultural visitors, and tiny populations, simply don’t have the press power to transmit. But we are not seen as a working, thinking, cultured people; we are seen—at worst—as stoners, drug lords, or money launderers and—at best—as bartenders or jolly fisherman taking James Bond out in our picturesque wooden boats.
Again, I underscore that we ourselves are complicit in perpetuating this image, so I don’t blame the non-“Belongers.” One curator, walking out of Tavares Strachan’s Bahamian Pavilion in Venice last year said to me, very innocently, “Wow, that was surprising. It was so conceptual…” and I just had to reply, “Yes, it really is surprising that we actually have concepts down there, isn’t it?” I started my own private project photographing work at art fairs and international galleries that, if I were to say it was Bahamian, would be laughed out of the art market: Day-Glo starfish on top of mirror-topped oil drums; giant metal flamingos; “conceptual” coconut, bone, and stone art. But if it’s produced by an artist in Berlin or London, then it’s conceptual or perhaps ironic. Meanwhile, I also come across lots of piles of abandoned crap on street corners here, or really clever MacGyver-style inventions—like some contraption for getting enough well water to your home in one trip—that would look amazing in a white cube. It’s very entertaining.
What is one trend in contemporary art that you celebrate? What’s one that you wish would gracefully be retired?
Celebrate: experiential art, whether it be about perception (Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell), scale (Richard Serra! Spiral Jetty) or ephemerality (Tino Sehgal). Retire: insider art, and by that I mean work that you can only possibly understand if you are deeply aware of the market and belong to a relatively small and exclusive group of people. It can be funny and very clever but, ultimately, is a little self-serving and almost masturbatory.
Which art world personality, alive or dead, would you want to have a drink with? What might you discuss (and what would you drink)?
Robert Hughes. His Jesuit education made him such a clear and muscular writer. He never resorted to the use of jargon as a crutch, which many critics do. Goya is one of the best art history books ever written, as far as I’m concerned. I suppose, given he was a macho Australian boy, we’d have to drink something equally macho, like a good Scotch with no ice.
A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
