Contributed
Wilfredo Lam, 'The Jungle'

Part 2 of the interview with art historian Edward Lucie-Smith. Here he discusses his life and work with Dr Jonathan Greenland.

Your list of favourite works of art was almost all pre-20th century, and this list of poems is similarly classical: have your tastes always tended towards the pre-20th century? And, if so, why?

You've got to remember that 'classical' is a vague category. It can mean 'derived from Greek and Roman precedent'. It can mean just 'established at the moment when the adjective is used'. And quite a lot of other things in-between. I've never run after the new for its own sake.

One reason I like archaeological things is that they are often surprising. Some of the Chinese objects that litter my London apartment now would strike many people as totally weird, off the wall, even frightening. They are not comfortable art. They stretch my imagination more than things the current art world thinks of as novel.

One problem with today's art world is that avant-garde has itself become a convention. I notice that art-world professionals are often irritated and upset when they encounter something that is, in fact, genuinely new, in the sense of being unlike anything they've encountered previously, but which doesn't conform to the prevailing rules.

The contemporary art world is in a constant state of tension about the concept of 'newness': on the one hand, it wants to defend the scene chiefs of the moment, to proclaim that they are better, more important than anything that went before. On the other hand, it tries to look into the future, which it knows will be quite different from what is being worshipped now.

Two good practical reasons for citing established artworks from the past is that they are part of most people's culture, so it is easier to grasp the point that is being illustrated. And these works are not in copyright, so one is free to illustrate them if that seems appropriate.

In your autobiography, you recount a literary lesson that you learnt early on, which was to beware of the 'demon of hysteria and self-indulgence'. What exactly do you mean by that, and how has this affected your life?

All my life I've been surrounded by people who wanted to 'be' something - a famous poet, a famous artist, the director of a major museum, the art critic of a major newspaper. I think I've only ever known, at a given moment, what I probably wanted to 'do'.

The world changes so fast nowadays that one can't predict the future. The contemporary art world of the early 21st century is totally different from that of the 1950s and 1960s - no one then could have imagined the situation that exists now. You have to be humble enough and adaptable enough to go with the tide - or, to change the metaphor, to go through a tempting door if you see one open. Fame, and 'reputation', which is fame's little brother, are in the end straitjackets.

You find yourself performing a script that other people have written for you. I don't want to do that.

You were something of a prodigy in your later years in school. Was this a hindrance to you in later life?

Not particularly. I've always been quite good at reinventing myself. After all, I waited to invent myself as a photographer until I was in my mid-60s, and now I have a pretty substantial international track record. And I think I've shifted much more easily into the digital world than many photographers a great deal younger than myself. And, as I've just said, I'm deeply suspicious of fame as most people define it.

What do you think of the Jamaican art scene?

There are an amazing number of local collectors and an amazing number of Jamaican artists, but it's rather shut in.

Do you mean insular or isolated?

Both, I'm afraid.

Do you have any advice for the younger Jamaican artists? Who or what could they be looking to outside of Jamaica?

Basically, they have to look outside Jamaica if they are going to get anywhere. Latin American countries, even the truly corrupt and disorganised ones, have long had a tradition of sending promising young artists abroad to study.

Wifredo Lam is a good example. After studying at the Accademia di San Alejandro, which was the oldest art academy in the New World, founded in 1808, he was sent to Spain with a living allowance. His first mentor was the then director of the Prado. In Spain, he began making the connections, for instance with Picasso's old friend, the sculptor Manolo Hugué, that eventually made him into an international star. Jamaica has no such mechanisms at the moment and it really needs them.

This sense of geographical containment is very important in the Caribbean context as a whole, but to what extent has Caribbean art become an indefinable and unfixed concept? I am thinking of comments made by Stuart Hall that one cannot talk of a territorially bound Jamaica anymore (and also the exhibition Infinite Island at the Brooklyn Museum that incorporated many artists working in the Caribbean diaspora in New York and London etc).

Of course, it's unfixed, for several reasons. One is that the different Caribbean art worlds look to their 'home' countries, in the old colonial sense, as much or more than they look to the rest of the region. Thus, French-speaking islands like Martinique look to France, Spanish-speaking territories look both to Spain and, even more, to the rest of Latin-America, English-speaking ones have a choice - America plus Canada [where so many Jamaicans now get their higher education] or the UK.

This is at least partly due to the fact that inter-Caribbean transport is more difficult than direct transport to the American mainland or to the different regions of Europe. To fly from Jamaica to St Kitts, for example, you have to go through Miami, and that includes going through US immigration.

Another is that Caribbean culture is more and more multi-ethnic. Not just African - maybe - and European [English, Spanish, Dutch, French, diaspora Jewish], but also with a residual Amerindian element, plus an East Indian [Hindu] element, a Chinese element, and even a Lebanese/Syrian element. You can't really think of Trinidad as a proto-African country, for example. It has just over one million inhabitants, of whom 40 per cent are East Indian, 37.5 per cent are African, and 20.5 per cent are mixed race. Incidentally, these are the figures given in the online CIA Handbook.

Probably the most fully African territory in the Caribbean is Haiti, which is also the territory that has had the longest period of full independence. There is small risk in saying that it is currently the most culturally isolated, as well as the poorest economically.

Is this really the model that Jamaica wants to follow?

If you look at Jamaica itself, the majority of its so-called plantocracy families have surnames that suggest they were originally Sephardic Jews from Portugal. One of my own great-grandmothers was called Pi-ado, which is a Sephardic Jewish name, particularly common in Curac‹o. The Jamaican entrepreneurial middle class is increasingly Chinese. Contemporary Jamaican art can't profitably turn its back on these facts and retreat into a self-sufficient dream of Africa.

To what extent should Jamaican art look to its African roots?

Jamaicans need to believe in their African roots, for reasons I think everyone can understand. However, there are facts which have to be faced. The first is that the most directly African element in Jamaican culture is verbal - most of all storytelling, but also just in simple turns of phrase and in the social attitudes that go with those turns of phrase.

The two cultures are also, though not as directly as people in Jamaica think, linked through music. Where art is concerned, there was a decisive break in culture. The slave owners were concerned to suppress all aspects of African religion among the slaves, and tribal art in Africa was - and to the extent it survives still is - almost wholly concerned with religious practice.

My understanding is that very few Jamaicans, or indeed people from the whole of the English-speaking West Indies, have direct experience of contemporary Africa, and that those who have been there tend to find that they are treated as outsiders because they have no tribal affiliation, which continues to be important almost everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa. Tribal identity was another thing that slave owners were concerned to destroy, and they did so very thoroughly.

My observation is that the African element in Jamaican art is imagery borrowed from books published in London and New York, or seen in museums on visits to Europe and the United States. I cannot see it as something that rises directly, and without external influence, from the psyches of the artists concerned, though it may be important to them to believe that it does so.

One proof of this is that the art of contemporary Africa tends to be very different from the traditional tribal art Jamaicans admire - in Africa itself such art is now largely made as lifeless copies for tourists. Much of contemporary African art is urban and satirical - this is true of the paintings of one of the best known living African artists, Chéri Samba, who lives in Kinshasa.

Some of it is still concerned with animist religion, like the paintings of Cyprien Tokoudagba, whom comes from French-speaking Benin. These are translations of the wall paintings he used to make for religious buildings. His compositions are collections of symbols, each with a precise meaning known to the initiate. They do not resemble the supposedly African paintings made by Jamaican artists. Some, again, are to do with the contemporary African obsession with material wealth - I am thinking here of the coffins carved in the form of Cadillacs and Mercedes automobiles which have sometimes been shown in European and American galleries as works of art. A good example is the artist Kane Kwei, who was the most famous maker of figurative coffins.

The chief link between the art produced in Jamaica and the art made now in Africa is the Christian story. Both cultures are prolific in images which reflect varieties of passionately held Christian belief. And, of course, Christianity is neither generically African nor generically Jamaican, though some of its manifestations may be specific to a particular location. Many black artists, especially in South Africa, but also in Nigeria and Ghana, trained at Christian mission schools. That's why Christian imagery is so important in contemporary African art, even though Christianity isn't an indigenous African religion. Add to that the fact that evangelical Christianity preaches that all men are equal.

I am sure you are familiar with artists such as Petrona Morrison and the so-called 'African Vanguard' artists such as Omari Ra, K. Khalfani Ra, Khepera Hatsheptwa and Oya Tyehimba; how successfully have Jamaican artists incorporated and re-imaged forms, materials, processes, motifs and concepts from African art?

I know Petrona Morrison personally and admire her work. I think that, as a woman sculptor making large-scale sculptures, she has had a fairly tough time of it, and has shown great courage and perseverance in following her vision. But I don't see her work as being particularly African. For one thing, her sculptures are often assemblages using detritus from industry and things discarded by the consumer society, which tends to imply a basically western context.

I know she went to South Africa and made conceptual works there about the legacy of apartheid. However, it's impossible not to read these as the comments of an outsider.

The other artists you mention I am much less familiar with. What I have seen doesn't seem to have much relationship to the contemporary art now being made by African artists in Africa. Expressing a spirit of solidarity with Africa isn't quite the same thing as producing a genuinely African art. If you are looking for a close 'cousin' for Jamaican African Vanguard Art you'll probably find it more easily in the work being made by leading African American artists in the United States.

(Part 3 next week)