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The Primacy of the Eye

Posted July 21st.2006

By Eusi Kwayana

Rupert Roopnaraine, Primacy of the Eye , London: Peepal Tree ,2005, 224 pp. ISBN 1 900715 86 4 (Amazon.com)

In this path- breaking book, Rupert Roopnaraine, an academic professional in the arts, comparative literature and also a practitioner in film production reviews and evaluates the Art of Guyana's Stanley Greaves, one of the most committed and prolific producers of art in the Caribbean. The author pitches his review both in the Caribbean context and in the context of world art, to which there are many references Each continent and in particular the Americas, Written by a graduate teacher in the Comaprative literature, itis ideal for insitutionsof learning.

The book is historically important and establishes several linkages and findings of significance, which are part of contemporary art history and art criticism.

Greaves was pupil of the illustrious E. R Burrowes, founder of the Working People's Art Class in the late forties. This ER Burrowes, as a self made and gifted artist introduced the world of art and made it the property of scores of non elitists as well as better off individuals with the taste and interest. Stanley Greaves will go down as one human proof of Burrowes's foresight and deep understanding of the hidden talents of this fellow Guyanese. Burrowes was a tailor by trade and an intellectual by habit..Stanley Greaves's mother was Guyanse.. Both his father and his arts mentor were Barbadian,. Many of this later folk images are distinctly Barbadian, where Stanley went to reside some years ago. He is therefore not a parochial figure, having exhibited in various islands. He is organically Caribbean.

The book outlines the various steps, accidents ruses and staged by which the son of a. Sign painter and jack of all trades and his wife of the tenement yards of Carmichael Street, Georgetown, prepared himself, made use of facilities and mentors like E R Burrowes, dug deep into literature, some not directly related to art to find his potential. One of the books mentioned by Stanley Greaves is a reader made famous by the satire of no less a person that King Sparrow and I remember well the illustration in Nelson's West Indian readers which helped to awaken young embryo.

Roopnaraine is not only a practising artist. . He is a significant political activist and has known the experience of confinement, in numerous lockups, spent half a night in a cane field on the West Bank of Demerara after the breaking up in 1979 of a WPA meeting at Vreed en hoop and has been prosecuted in the course repression and resistance .

Watching Stanley Greaves work at work over a number of years, he once took me to his friend's studio on Lamaha Street Newtown, where we saw same interesting paintings, some of which are among those selected for reproduction and comment in The Primacy of the Eye., Roopnaraine had paid similar attention to Philip Moore, the much misunderstood sculptor and painter of rural Corentyne origin, a Jordanite and a Guyanese legend. Roopnaraine had written a full critique of Philip Moore's art for the BWIA in-flight magazine. I had done an early three part layman's critique of Philip Moore for the short lived Guyana Graphic at a time when Philip More had a permanent exhibition at ASCRIA;s's hall on Third Street.. Many wonder at the subjects on which I dare to write, Often I venture into areas in which I am completely dumb find I do it for or two reasons; first to demonstrate that everyone, and not experts only, is entitled to an opinion. Secondly I may write when I think something is worthy of comment or notice and is not receiving notice. It is away of keeping those qualified to write on their toes.

Symbols

The author of Primacy of the Eye takes us with Stanley Greaves through all the stages of his development, resting on each period and his activity, the mode of expression of his art, his techniques as he preferred them or improved them, his switching of modes of expression, the art forms, his grappling with himself, his wrestling with ideas. He calls quotes another as calling him a "painter of ideas", his exploration of the work of the ancients, even touching on Egypt before it became an imperative for a civilized artistic worker or intelligent student of world history.

Thus we are allowed to follow Greaves from his early paintings to his quest in sculpture for the third dimension, back to paintings, this time the Mazaruni paintings, again from there into a second generation of third dimension art, sculpture in a variety of materials, and into sculpture -like paintings in which a genetic merging of two art forms is achieved, and then ceramics and their tell tale tales, and most dramatically into pen and ink drawings of an elevated and learned quality. Even this is a false record of the artist's growth, since in reality it began with a not unfamiliar childhood sport of showing movies under stairs. Somehow Roopnaraine felt that he was carrying on the vocation or nurturing mission of AJ Seymour who had warned "We have seen brilliant lights go out in the darkness and clocks that stopped on the wall. With his slain companion Walter Rodney in mind, Roopnaraine could not ignore the challenge of Seymour's eloquent and disquieting call to arms [ tragic-epigram].

Introducing readers of literature and art to the world of Stanley Greaves, the author begins with a personally typical piece of imagery. "I remember almost to the day when a Stanley Greaves painting first burned itself into my mind." He recalls with arresting nostalgia the place, the time and the circumstances of that burning. What is more directly useful is what Roopnaraine reads into that painting. This very early painting: "Evolution" (1955) is a response to something written by HG Wells in his Outline of History. The composition brings together certain symbols, natural and spiritual, concrete and ethereal, a foetus with a large, green eye, a giant leaf turning brown,, a seed and a stem curving like the long neck of a gaulding, and diverse human, pre-human and post- human figures all inter-acting and inter related with one another. It is as early as this that Roopnaraine discovers, or thinks that he has discovered, the Greaves mind and imagination, his peculiar view of the mystery of life.

It is well that the reader -viewer, for the book is riddled with replicas of the works, should get hold of the theory of Stanley Greaves at an early stage. Even if grasp of theory is incomplete, or if readers later find answers of their own, yet a shadowy guidepost will help to enrich the appreciation of the sometimes plain-seeming, sometimes complex and complicated models of Greaves's works. And rather than stifle the viewers' imagination and freedom to explore, it will be found to be most liberating, giving wings to reflection and the search for meaning

Roopnaraine, after going through a host of Greaves's works and going back to this path breaker, Evolution is of the view that the artist taking into account the wide and extending variety of subjects, forms and materials employed by him, "can be seen to constitute a world, with its own internal rhythms, its own codes its own distinctive aura, an imaginative universe, renewing and enlarging itself in a restless dialogue with the real world of men and women and nature."

With such assistance, and at the critic's own risk, not theirs, art lovers and readers may now regard this book 'The Primacy of the Eye as a Stanley Greaves Art Exhibition capable of the greatest mobility and flexibility. One may view it at any time of the day or night, at one's own convenience, alone or in a small company, and as much of it at a time as one cares, without worrying when the doors close., the bus stops or the last train home whistles. .For us in the Caribbean and from my own limited experience, the exhibition marks the use of old technology, printing, to achieve many of the benefits of the new technology, the wondrous web in cyberspace. It will be no surprise if the web artistic entrepreneurs pursue the publishers for rights to configure the whole of this book for their virtual galleries, hopefully for a fit consideration, which will afford this unemployed lecturer in literature and critic something of an income and take the artist's work to places it may not reach on foot. With his curiosity about the labour process, Roopnaraine can see Greaves's artistic activity clearly for what it is, artistic production. I have withheld the bulk of the author's bold, original gems and findings of this hyper -mobile exhibition and ventured only a reviewer's views of The Primacy of the Eye The results of the author's diligent and sensitive scrutiny are best read in the original.

My singling out of this book as a candidate for this treatment hangs on two pegs. First, The Primacy Of the Eye presents 102 reproductions of Greaves's works and one of the fountainhead, pioneer and teacher E R Burrowes. The reproductions seem to maintain the colors of the originals In listing them he arranges them for the laid back reader into groups, serially titled, "The World of Stanley Greaves, " " Extending into three dimensions" sculpture, "Crisis and Renewal The Macaroni Paintings", "Extending Into Three Dimensions 11" , (indicating a second spell of sculpture) , "Tradition and Technique in Ceramics."

"Grids of Order: Explorations in Symmetry," "Between the blot and the line: Pen and Ink drawings." "Frontiers of Consciousness: Explorations of Scale," "Caribbean Folklore: Caribbean Ikons " and the tenth, "Politics of Desolation"

In addition there is a summary of Greaves's life and glimpses of his thought from his early boyhood, his education, the schools sat home and abroad he was able to attend, his presence in various countries and his fascination with ancient civilizations .The author has not only studied his production piece by piece and theme by theme. he has swatted over his journals and read his writings, including poetry. It is the most thorough study of a Caribbean artist ever done, a model for art schools and for art lovers alike. Moreover, It is among other things a case study in the formation of a Caribbean artistic icon.

Greaves's early paintings could not help attracting attention Reflecting his experience they were produced under the theme The People of the Pavement These paintings remind Roopnaraine forcefully of the attitude of another city artist, Martin Carter, whom he elsewhere calls the walking poet, recalling his simple, joyful, famous famous lines, "As I walk the seller of sweets says Friend" from Carter's "Tomorrow and the World" -

Here to seal the kinship he re names Carter and called here a poet of the pavement.

The pavement paintings come in two interrupted volumes, first in the form of kindred groups, Roopnaraine resurrects the name of Basil Hinds, the arts teacher and jazz enthusiast of the radio programme 'Just Jazz" and the person who coined the phrase, "The People of the Pavement" series came after he had ventured into mundo- mystic works such as Evolution, noted above and Askari, a woodcut in colour probing the ancestral presence in East Africa Swahili speaking cultures from which the word Askari ( soldier or guard ) was taken. As always, Greaves reserves the right to affirm his own artistic- visionary 555 on of what he is contemplation...

The pavement series delighted his interpreter, as it showed a definite class awareness, not to say bias, although Stanley Greaves has no portraits of corporate or State executives flowing from his art instruments. The preacher, the Beggar, the Urchin is all not only popular but in their ways dominate figures about the city, most noticeable on the pavements. British governors eyed them with apprehension. Much of the peculiar energy and fascination of the Georgetown Street came from these human economic and cultural monuments interacting with the passing human traffic.

It is as easy to confine Stanley Greaves to a period and to techniques of that period as to make him into a Class One clerk in the colonial public service.

No wonder then that his cherished "Old Time String Band" conceived in the time of the pavement paintings, was executed only in 1977, after Mr. Greaves, the artist's father had died and in honour of him and his colleagues, whose names were all painted into the picture. How typical were such bands? Every self respecting working people's division of the city and every self respecting village and estate most often boasted one of these bands composed according to the cultural resources of the people.

The book for al its exploration and depth lacks tedium, in the forms of artistic activity in which the author is fully at home and comfortable, curious and competent. References abound. Where he does not draw his own inferences or justify them by citing well-known art commentators, use his own insights he quotes from conversations with Greacves or from his prolific journals. In which he works out his philosophy made explains to himself what he is doing and why.

The range and variety of the reproductions are stunning .The colours are true in reproductive and though it is not a DVD or a CD it lacks nothing in the benefits of technology, with the advantage that it disturbs no one near, or far, if you happen to take this art exhibition out of your bag and visit whenever time allows.

ER Burrowes and Stanley Greaves were among the most remembered artists to make the people of the city a subject recognized by the muse, not the people in portraits, but the people in their daily rounds. When Webber published his (1931) his Centenary History of the joining of Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice to form British Guiana, it carried as illustrations along with photographs "six water colors by RG Sharples. .Each of them represented what the Georgetown white and near white middle class saw as exotic, Peoples special Amerindians a rural cultivators on rivers and the painting of a Tapir in the forest. Burrowes's Guyana, Land of the dolorous guard (1951) and Greaves Pavement series were perhaps the first lasting sally by artists into the field of social comment and reflection..

Not surprisingly, Greaves was a poet. He must not only find links between painting and sculpture, but between poetry and. Roopnaraine notes in the Chapter "Extending to Three Dimensions 11" o the sculpture head of the Jaguar, a transfiguration of a 1980 poem of much charm and mystery, the mystery being deeper and in the ceramic version .In this series of works greaves also explored the jaguar cult of Mesoamerica. He then produces a whole class of works in an -effort to find out more about the techniques of Africa sculpture. One of these groups is titled Man and Bird vastly different in mood and form from Philip Moore's Birdie and the Boy

The Primacy of the Eye relies no less on the author's eye than on Greave's eyes. It is hard to think of a more restless artist, restless in production, restless in seeking out, restless in experimentation with form and materials, ever commenting on his own work and revising, setting himself new goals.

Like Martin Carter in his own spheres, poetry and philosophy, this younger, trained both in the Working People's Art Class in his native Guyana and in several universities abroad. In each of these he found unique concerns not fitting in with what his interests were. He quickly switched to what fell in with the schools' prtogrammes and held own self-driven compulsions back for when he was free. Although they allowed him to acquire range, of knowledge experience and exposure to multiple techniques, he could at another level say with Bernard Shaw that his education was interrupted by his school days.

Greaves mature art, and it is increasingly so from his early days, is informed by the artistic and mythical influences of the Americas the Caribbean Africa and in Asia. He was exploring Egyptian experience long before it became popular and the hallmark of Afro -centric rectitude, but he did not stop on the achievements, in the Mesoamerica, in Egypt, in the Caribbean or any where. His imaginative curiosity ticks

By his rime too he had achieved balance between the urban pavements, the Mazaruni forests, between painting and sculpture, between water colour and pen and ink drawings, between them and water colours and between the potentials of materials and the potential of ideas and curiosity. Most fascinating though was his assignment of new roles to materials. He was the alchemist the graphic artists.

The critique Primacy of the Eye brings out the revelation that Greaves, like Carter in poetry and philosophy had developed an atomic theory of thought and phenomena,, which made them intolerant of what they saw as man made barriers to the unity of all things.

It is impractical to review too many aspects of what is itself a masterly review .of an artist's review of his world , so expansive as to include tenement yards, city streets, political deeps and shallows, surrealism in a unique mode supposedly Caribbean, thought and iconology of ancient civilizations in Africa and Asia and Caribbean search for the mystery in Wniti ( Comfa ) ,Pocomanis Vodun and

Fortunately the author of the art review with a Guyanese and European education without his own ethno centricity, had with a thorough experience and facility in Caribbean and liberation politics , reads much that is hidden in the artist's series " There's a meeting here tonight" in which the artist casts his vote against many of our antics and gestures. It is in his interpretation of Greaves's treatment of the political economy of the Caribbean that the author's perceptions may be most original and keen. In the Banana productions Banana manna and Magus with Reverend Bananas ,lies a reflection in the world of art of the clash between external oppression and all the great spiritual certainties so deeply embedded in the Caribbean psyche from Haiti to the betrayal of the banana growers.

Roopnaraine early slips into the European trap of describing non European religions from Africa older than Europe's as "cults" although merges later that it is a verbal rather than ideological. And it reminds us that Stanley Greaves did not spend gifts founding a a canvass cult of celebrities, but, if anything a Court of the wretched of the earth.