This week’s column focuses on the visual arts with particular reference to an outstanding Guyanese artist

Jul 31, 2011 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

VICTOR DAVSON

By Carl E. Hazlewood

I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness.
– Frantz Fanon. “By Way of Conclusion”

For many years, the artist Victor Davson has been seeking a way through complexity to the visual heart of culture. This has meant finding the truth of personal experience that, for him, is an aesthetic truth as well as the unavoidable truth of history. This is a difficult, rather elusive location to inhabit in creative terms, as the question becomes how to communicate such formal truth without being ensnarled by didacticisms, visual and otherwise.
Part of the answer lies in Davson’s life as a young man in what was then British Guiana. Growing up there in the sixties was an intense experience: it was a turbulent world bounded all around by the political exigency of colonialism and an ongoing struggle to forge a unifying national identity. But practically from childhood the artist was aware that the poetical rather than political route was a natural and productive means for him to find a personal expression. He intuitively understood that art embodied nuanced forms by which, he could communicate whatever it was he had to say. Davson also recognized that his engagement with art in all its cultural manifestations could not be simply theoretical; he had to be involved. In the unstable and politicized Guyana of the time, it became a psychic struggle to find a generative sphere between blood and the tragic beauty that lay all around him. The Guyanese poet/politician Martin Carter has written:
This I have learnt;
to-day a speck
to-morrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!

like a jig shakes the loom.
Like a web is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed! 1
To be a good writer, poet, musician, or painter requires one to keep unobstructed that open door of consciousness of which Fanon wrote. For Davson as a young artist, also required was a constant intellectual engagement and dialogue with various world traditions in order to confront his own inherent cultural multiplicity. This heterogeneity of the soul and racial body is an affective condition one takes for granted as part of the complex Caribbean experience. Davson could not ignore that dissonant heartbeat he sensed alive and pulsing underneath the smooth modern rhythm of everyday urban life.
It is at Christmas time that this metaphysical fusion and fracture makes itself most evident: masqueraders erupt into the street and costumed dancers are everywhere, scaring and delighting kids of all ages. Long-legged stilt walkers shake and stomp and stretch far into the sky as if reaching toward some unknown god, and the sharp-horned ‘bad-cow’ masks invade private yards to dance and demand spare change. Barely out of his teens and equipped with all the proper middle-class values, even as Davson sought a way through art to participate in the important formal issues of contemporary modernity, the exciting beat of the drums, the strange thin tunes of the pipes and the unruly landscape of the vast Guyana interior were beguiling. The paintings and drawings he produced at that point reflected the lives of people and the quotidian reality of his environment. Bearing titles such as, “Old Woman Wid de Weary Eyes” and “Domino Players,” these works demonstrated his need to attend to the local on the way to discovering something much more universal in a formal and expressive sense.
It was the time of the summer of love in the United States and in Paris student uprisings were being fomented; indeed, it seemed that everywhere music underscored youthful passions and obsessions. In the late sixties and early seventies, Guyana was certainly not exempt from aspects of this international youth revolution. In cosmopolitan Georgetown, Davson and a collection of young artists and intellectuals banded together to found a literary publication called EXPRESSION. This youthful multitalented avant-garde—the Expression group—showed abstract art, published poetry and fiction and argued through the nights about pertinent issues. Around this period, in addition to writing reviews for the local newspaper and showing art, 21-year-old Davson illustrated a book for children entitled “How The Waraus Came”, that retells an ancient Amerindian legend of how the first people populated the earth. In hindsight, it would appear that by this time he had already internalized the nuances and lore of the local as well as the conceptual rhythms of what he calls the “Caribbean sensation.”
However, before Victor Davson could produce his first mature body of work, he would have to survive the cultural turmoil and emotional dislocation caused by his decision to immigrate to the United States in 1973. The political situation in Guyana had become untenable for him at that point. In New York, he immediately received an artist-in-residence position at the Studio Museum in Harlem, although he still had to struggle through the typical depressive personal situations immigrants often face. Davson toiled in a variety of sub-menial positions while putting himself through school at Essex County College in Newark and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where the strong academic skills he had acquired via a superb education in Guyana easily got him through to his college degree. Davson’s broad knowledge of art plus his acute skill as a draftsman, evident even as a teenager, is what continues to tie his various bodies of work together even when they appear on the surface to be completely different.
The first pieces to garner serious critical attention in his new American domicile were ‘Notational Works’, an extended series of large black works on heavy paper that straddle the line between drawing and painting. The carefully worked surfaces are structured with black and white lines and often barely perceptual proto-geometric shapes. At a glance, they seem quite reticent and reductivist in impulse, but on further observation one could see that the geometry of drawn forms and lines was felt— intuitive, rather than strictly Pythagorean. In the end, the varying densities of rubbed black pigments suggest folded fields of inflected darkness flattened into the lateral spaces of its support. It was one of these pieces that became Davson’s first work of art to enter an American museum collection. These totally abstract pigment-paintings are in a way the culmination of the artist’s investigation, begun in Guyana, of contemporary modernist style and form. The ensuing years have brought modifications to that severe-appearing method. Expressive color has gradually reasserted itself on paper and canvas and in the latest paintings has effloresced into brilliant conceptual evocations of the Guyana masquerade. Of course, Davson has always used line to full effect, as seen in the delicate portraits of children drawn when he lived in Guyana. The recent ‘Limbo-Anancy’ series inspired by Guyana-born writer Wilson Harris’ literary metaphor, employs a webbed vortex of line spun into a metaphorical web that is a poignant and symbolic attempt to reconnect long lost histories, peoples and experience, leaning back across the wide divide of time and place.
From the black pigment-paintings of ‘Notational Works’ to the urban influenced ‘Chain link’ series and now, the ‘Limbo Anansi’ and ‘Bad Cow Comin’’ sequence of works, the act of drawing into paint in Davson’s hands maintains its rhetorical value as a poetic and communicative device as well as a subtle allegorical power.
In his alternative occupation as the co-founder and director of ALJIRA, A Center for Contemporary Art, in Newark, Davson has long worked to develop systems to nurture artists. In his personal work as an artist, he reaches back into an uneasy history, unstable memory and myth in order to comprehend how we got to this place. And he continues to inscribe notes along the way on a journey that reaches from there to here, from the past into the present.
2006. REPRINTED WITH THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION
Notes:
1. Carter, Martin. “You Are Involved”, Poems of Resistance from Guyana. Guyana: University of Guyana, 1966.

Carl Hazlewood was born in Guyana and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is a visual artist, writer, curator, and is the co-founder of ALJIRA, A Centre for Contemporary Art in New Jersey. Currently an associate editor for NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art (Duke University), he has written for other periodicals including Flash Art International (Rome); ART PAPERS Magazine (Atlanta); NY Arts Magazine (New York); and The Arts Journal (Guyana). Since 1984 he has organized numerous curatorial projects for ALJIRA, such as “Modern Life” (co-curated with Okwui Enwezor). Hazlewood’s project, “Current Identities, Recent Paintings in the United States”, was the US prize-winning representation at the Bienal International de Pintura, Cuenca, Ecuador in 1994.
As an independent curator he has organized exhibitions for The Nathan Cummings Foundation, NY; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Hallwalls, NY; Artists Space, NY; P.S.122, NY; among other venues. His art is in private and public collections including the Guyana National Collection, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana; the Museu Brasileiro de Escultura, Sao Paulo, Brazil; and the Schomburgk Centre Collections, New York.

The editor of THE ARTS FORUM Column, Ameena Gafoor, may be reached on e-mail: [email protected] or telephone: 592 227 6825.

VOLUME 6 NUMBERS 1 and 2 of THE ARTS JOURNAL can be obtained from all leading bookshops in Guyana; the Metropolitan Bookshop in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; from the editor or from Bernadette Persaud (592 220 3337).