Postmodern Caribbean Image-Text Correspondences: Visual Constructions from David Boxer and Christopher Cozier
p. 405-437
Résumé
David Boxer’s The Black Books, it is proposed in this essay, is an engagement in a “midrasic” form of visual exegesis, whereby the artist, in a formal visual sense, explores and deconstructs while at the same time illuminates upon the richness of Western cultural production as it co-existed with the cruelty and dehumanizing features of the human condition within the institution of British Atlantic Slavery. The artist achieves an ongoing commentary on fragmented and discursive narratives through the modern practices of mechanical reproduction and montage. Together with this proposition, my essay will argue that despite the differences in media (text vs. the image), The Black Books correspond more with features common to the neo-slave narrative novel than with the original slave narrative as a genre. Christopher Cozier’s work, like Boxers’ is conceptual and serial in nature. His work is defined around a signature subjectivity as observed in his “picturewriting”. I argue that Cozier in collaborating with writers, collides drawing with written ideas on the postmodern Caribbean scene that become visual, creating a kind of new genre which is very hybrid and close to the “memoir”. Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Route (2007) a visual novel/commentary/memoir, comes to mind. In this sense, Cozier’s recent works, like Boxer’s also shares features in common with the neo-slave narrative as opposed to the traditional narrative.
Texte intégral
Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on Philosophy of History
1My attempt, in writing this essay, is to introduce scholars, artists, critics and academics to the studio practices of influential Caribbean art historians and artists whose work have been significant locally and regionally in the English, French and Spanish speaking Caribbean archipelago. Although examples of their art may now reside in major museums and galleries in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, some of these artists have not had the critical exposure they deserve, due mainly to professional choices to remain full-time in their home territories creating art, teaching, writing about art or curating the legacy of their nation’s graphic and plastic cultures. This essay concerns two artists, one of whom has produced a body of work very relevant to the revisitation of the original historical Slave Narrative and its contemporary manifestation; the neo-slave narrative or slave novel.1
2Sometime in the early 1990s David Boxer began experimenting with the magnification of images on a photocopying machine. His interest then, was to make copies for further use in collage as mechanical reproduction was a visual technique that he had been practicing since his first year at Cornell University. The element of imagery’s magnification and diminution, produced from mechanical reproduction via the Xerox/Laser photocopier, has been a continual source of fascination for the artist. Not only because it allows for the “principle of variation” so attractive to the artist, but also because the work that this essay explores and comments on, has been created as an extension of this principle.2 The process of recopying and magnifying until the images of individual figures in the first photocopy is no longer recognizable because they are subsumed in an abstract pattern created by technology became the matrix on which David Boxer began superimposing other selected recopied images that he associated with slavery and the Middle Passage.3
3 As a work-in-progress over a period of ten years, The Black Books was first included in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1997 called “Black as Colour”. Pages were not bound at the time but were exhibited in three folders with a group of five main selected images. In that exhibition the catalogue entry read:
Three Black Books (The Slavery Chronicles 1494-1838)
Handmade book in progress
Original “photocopy” ink-jet prints
Total: 345 pages
Each 23.5 x 30 cm
4 The Black Books were recently displayed in the 2005 exhibition “Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art from the Caribbean”. This exhibition aside from David Boxer, exhibited works by Tony Capellán from the Dominican Republic, Kcho from Cuba and Marc Latamie from Martinique. It was an attempt to explore the continuum of contemporary Caribbean art as well as a chance to probe further into the cultural meanings of the sea as history.4 In this show, the catalogue entry for David Boxer’s work read:
The Black Books, 1992-2003
Bound digital images on paper 3 books, each 9 x 26in. (open)
5A third version of The Black Books will be exhibited this September at the Yale Centre for British Art in commemoration of the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (proper title of exhibition to follow). One of its more unique features is that The Black Books in three bound volumes contain no written texts. Volume I covers the period 1494 to 1613, Volume II, 1614 to 1733 and Volume III, 1734 to 1838. The visual “histories”, as the reader will realize, pay central attention to the impact of Spanish and British colonization on the geography and peoples of Jamaica. According to the artist, the whole purpose of doing a page for each year “is to show the whole process of Europe’s contact as a continuum of the subjugation of ‘other peoples’, the Taino, first, the African slave and their Creole descendents.”5 A fourth volume was originally conceived that would have carried the viewer from the colonial period of emancipation up to Jamaica’s Independence from Britain in 1962. This has been abandoned. All three Volumes have been bound in black Buckram instead of leather as the artist was unable to find the leather appropriate for the binding.6
6Yet, a range of discourses from various texts lie embedded in its 345 pages. If one were to quickly scan a selection of images from volumes I to III, what is apparent is that “texts” inform each visual fragment that is arranged and juxtaposed with, against and alongside each other conveying mainly narrative colonial histories, medical and art histories. These comprise: early print portraits of Columbus and his arrival in the Americas; Spain’s Christian missionary zeal in converting or exterminating aboriginal peoples; Western art history’s images of the early Renaissance’s “Madonna and Child”, the “Crucifixion” and the “Dead Christ” [the pietá]; the “Madonna and Child with donor”; 16th century anatomical illustrations of the human anatomy, taken principally from De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543 by Andreas Vesalius; the 1787 engraving of the Slave Ship Brooks produced for Abolitionists in London; William Blake’s engravings of tortured African slaves after Gabriel Stedman’s drawings for his Narrative; William Grainger’s engraving after Thomas Stothard’s painting of “The Sable Venus” created for Bryan Edwards’s History; further “texts” relate to notated music; 20th century X-Ray plates on areas of the human anatomy coming from the artist’s collection and Jamaican Taino Indian sculpture.7 What we behold, therefore, is a 3-volumed graphic picture-book, where the only colour is black and the entire project, to quote Erich Auerbach is “fraught with background”.8
7David Boxer’s The Black Books, it is proposed in this essay, is an engagement in a “midrasic” form of visual exegesis, whereby the artist in a formal visual sense, explores and deconstructs while at the same time illuminates upon the richness of Western cultural production as it co-exists with the cruelty and de-humanising features of the human condition within the institution of British Atlantic colonial slavery. Boxer, as well, stresses that the European works of art quoted in The Black Books were chosen for their content, contents capable of being appropriated for symbolic use carrying levels of meaning. For example: the four images of Elizabeth I, used for the years 1562/63/64 and 1565, establishes the entry of the British Crown into the slave trade as well as the ancestral connection between herself and Queen Victoria (who ‘set we free’).9 At the conceptual heart of his project is the historical and imaginative visual working-out of forms (the book) which give tangible expression to notions of hybridity and the vernacular. His selected images of Blake’s engravings after Stedman, The Sable Venus, the Noah and the New Seville carvings are all examples of Caribbean New World iconography and Jamaican images in particular, born from these historical contacts. The artist achieves an ongoing visual commentary on the fragmented and discursive narratives through the modern practice of mechanical reproduction and montage.10 Together with this proposition, my essay will argue that despite the differences in media [the visual vs. the verbal or written], The Black Books correspond more with features common to the neo-slave narrative or novel than with the original slave narrative as a genre.
8To begin, I shall consider the title. The title, “The Black Books” has both a literal and a metaphorical meaning and so alludes to two discourses. “Black” referring to an actual pigment colour, or lack of colour depending on the definition’s source. One current manual on the theory and practice of art defines “black” as:
a neutral colour together with white and gray which reflect varying amounts of the colour wavelengths in a ray of light [...] Black, then, is usually called the absence of colour, because it results when a surface absorbs all the colour rays equally and reflects none of them [...] most blacks will contain some trace of reflected colour, however slight.11
9Metaphorically, “black” as a colour within Western civilization has resonated discursively in nearly all the disciplines of the humanities from the early modern period. But discourses concerned with human pigmentation as colour have associated “blackness” with theories or ideologies on race and the racialised subject particularly since the eighteenth century. The scholarship and historiography on this issue is quite large but I shall cite some of the artist’s views on “black” as a colour, as it illuminates upon some of his more arcane and private predilections. In an interview with another art historian, Veerle Poupeye, David Boxer stated that for himself, “white” as a colour is associated with annihilation, whereas “black” was “more symbolic of the unknown, and in another sense, of sensuality”. It is a colour that figures predominately in other serial works by the artist such as: Dialogues, sexual dialogues; Nottes, the colour of night; Nervfelds and the Second Incarnation, figures materializing from central blackness and the more recent Penny Blacks and Black Backs where the colour is given racial significance.12 How, then, do these kaleidoscopic graphic volumes correspond more with the neo-slave narrative or novel, and less with the historical slave narrative?
10In reading Revisiting Slave Narratives, the editor and several contributors concluded that, as there was a long list of original Slave Narratives, so were there many more fictional contemporary slave narratives dating from the 1960s. The general consensus appears to be that the original slave narrative is similar and different from the contemporary slave novel (Misrahi-Barak 2005: Introduction).
11Some of the earliest studies on the original slave narrative as a genre were written by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Charles Davis.13 Recurring conclusions on this early form include first-person narration, the autobiographical nature of the story and the use of rhetoric as a feature of the genre’s structure. I shall re-iterate a similar point, and that is that the slave narrative of the later eighteenth-century for instance, was written to ensure the maximum “affect” on the reader of sensibility; contemporary readers who were increasingly aware of the British Abolitionist machine after 1768. In short, the narrative written by Olaudah Equiano, one of the few more successful black Britons after his manumission, and the only known black within this period to have left a Will, was written to make the reader aware of his pride, ambitions, desire for freedom and agency.14 Points brought out by Misrahi-Barak about both old and new Slave Narratives are worth noting. Essentially the movement backwards, forwards and to the future, re-appropriating time and speaking in a past and present space are some of the literary features separating and binding both traditional narrative and new narrative (Misrahi-Barak 2005: 15). And what of the contemporary neo-slave narrative?
12 Again, contributors to the anthology including literary historians such as Bénédicte Ledent, point out the hybrid and experimental nature of the contemporary slave novel. Still, I would like to focus on three assessments and discussions in the Anthology that, in my opinion, present strategies which correspond with David Boxer’s The Black Books.
13The first, concerning recent novelists of Caribbean descent is Judith Misrahi-Barak’s observations that these writers use singular and plural voices, voices that are monophonic and polyphonic, “always dialogic, [...] preserving the memory and legacy, subverting and responding without conserving” (Misrahi-Barak 2005: 17). I shall add to this last sentence, “deconstructive and subverting as it creates anew”. The second, is the essay contribution from Isabel Soto Garcia under “Thresholds” and the third, written by Bénédicte Ledent under “The Anglophone Caribbean”.15
14I mention Soto’s proposition in which she postulates that the element organizing both traditional and new slave narrative is the “threshold” principle which shapes the narrative and textual strategic patterns (Soto, in Misrahi-Barak 2005: 104). The “Limen”, an anthropological term with a Latin root is understood to be a metaphor for the study of space/time/place transitions/process and genesis. The author regards it mainly as a tool of analysis and explication. Still, how is this metaphor relevant to The Black Books?
15The “limen” as metaphor, relates well to Boxer’s project because it is a “porus” metaphor that contains a “performative” dimension. In the case of The Black Books, single images and passages of imagery, separate, transmit and transform as well as translate, mediate and destabilise themselves and each other. In Soto’s reading, this particular form of transformative practice of which serial painters and cultural workers such as Boxer are examples, is connotative of “displacement, incompletion and destabilization” (Soto, in Misrahi-Barak 2005: 106).
16I should point out that Boxer has often referred to the iconoclastic aspect of his practice. In speaking with Veerle Poupeye about his Renaissance Transformations, he pointed out from diary entries, key words common to his studio practice at the time. These were: transformation, masking, obliterating and defacing (Boxer interviewed by Poupeye, 18). Although that series was produced in the 1970s, these features are still current today in projects such as The Black Books. We see this process at work particularly in the “Madonna and Child” imagery throughout the three volumes.16 Further, Soto adds that the “threshold” provides a site where a multitude of discourses, Western and non-Western converge. In The Black Books discourses are mainly Western, but the entire 3-Volume kaleidoscope encapsulates narratives about Western contact with a geography, [Jamaica], its people and their descendents, and, the creation of the vernacular or hybrid as a result. The notion of convergence and encounter as articulated in Mary Pratt’s study on the “contact zone” is applicable to The Black Books.17 We see eliding activity and, “vernacular” imagery signifying upon dominantly Western imagery. In the actual geopolitical and historical arenas these activities created admixture. In The Black Books they are visually expressive of creolisation, métissage and hybridity concluded in the actual creation of the three volumes; a new hybrid signifyier.18 The page for the year 1644 from Volume II, depicting the crucified image of Christ/Boxer we may consider a “vernacular” image. The artist has substituted or imposed his features/self portrait for that of a more recognizable “Western” Christ;19 a visual conceit practiced from the days of Albrecht Dürer. The countenance or head of this vernacular image dominates the background Slave Ship Brookes of manacled bodies as well as the medical anatomical figure illustrating the pattern of musculature in the human anatomy. Boxer’s work in this sense may be said to show a visual strategy common to the literatures of both historical and contemporary slave narration.
17 The Black Books appropriate one of the main canonical images in the iconography of slavery, visual culture and black diasporic studies; that of James Phillip’s copper engraving after a drawing by Thomas Clarkson’s Plan of the Slave Ship Brookes of Liverpool (1788-9). In this way, it is defined to an extent by the historical abolitionist debate which became the raison d’être behind most, if not all historical slave narrative. How is this so?
Fig. 1. — Year 1644. The Boxer/Christ vernacular image. Permission the artist.

18The central background image for most all pages in each volume on which is superimposed other images is that of the Slave Ship Brookes of Liverpool. Magnification and diminution of the ship and its human cargo form the basic warp and weave of the three volumes of visual text. When magnified to a great extent, images become fragmented and broken up giving the viewer a sense of looking at shifting water. Within these abstracted forms on selected pages, for instance, we may see fish and black bodies; living and dead fixtures of the Ocean or Sea. The Slave Ship Brooks, then, is the glue upon which all other images become affixed. The viewer, knowledgeable about the history of Transatlantic Slavery should instantly sense a leitmotif on “The Middle Passage”. At this point a note on the Slave Ship Brookes is in order.
19This copper engraving print was produced after a drawing done by Thomas Clarkson, one of the leading names within the pantheon of British abolitionism. It was drawn after research into the practices of concealment of numbers defying the Parliamentary “Dolben Regulation Act” came to light. My doctoral thesis in Chapter One brings to light the work done by MPs such as Sir William Dolben (MP for Oxford University) who, upon inspecting a Slaver in the Thames, with the intention of restricting the numbers carried, described the horrors of slaves chained hand and foot stowed “like herrings in a barrel” and stricken with “putrid and fatal disorders which infected crews as well”.20 This new Act passed in 1788 and regulated capacity by fixing a ratio of 5 slaves per 3 tons, up to 200 tons. The Act reduced slaves per ton by about 44 % and became known as the Slave Regulation Bill (Smith McCrea 2001: 7). First generation abolitionists took advantage of this duplicity by producing and circulating a print of the Slave Ship Brookes.
20Boxer’s The Black Books is additionally implicated in the historical slave narrative discourses through another discursive route. Earlier, in 1773, a poetic narrative titled The Dying Negro, A Poem was published by Thomas Day and John Bicknell. Literary historians now consider it as the first abolitionist poem published in England. I mention this poem not only because it was very popular and well circulated in its day, but also because in the Preface both authors would inscribe their indictment on slavery as a whole bringing forward just one of its many immoral and inhuman practices, that of concealment. The indictment reads:
How should I rejoice to see [...] that insolence, that successful avarice confounded, which, under the mask of commerce has already ravaged the two extremities of the Globe.21
21The metaphor associated with the phrase “the mask of commerce” is therefore also at the heart of The Black Books project which is discursively related through the copper engraving print to other forms of abolitionist literary production.
22Returning to Soto Garcia’s argument concerning the “threshold principle” and its performative composition, upon closer scrutiny of selected images in each volume what strikes the viewer immediately is the measured, precise and orderly way in which each image segment or passages of imagery have/has been placed. Take for instance the visuals for the first page of Volume I, the artist’s overall conception is a classical conception. Furthermore, we may regard separate images and passages of imagery as representing personae in a play, each with their own dialogue. If the viewer accepts my personal interpretation, [one of many] we are made to realize that each visual “character” appears to be stating a “visual case”. The point I make here is that each separate visual component is important. And, ironically, while they all clamour on the surface of the page to be heard, they seem to be making their separate cases in an “orderly” fashion. The artist may not realize this, but for some viewers such as myself, the element of bitter deconstructive critique [colonial vs. the postcolonial] is blunted due mainly to aesthetic reasons such as perhaps a concern for placement, harmony line and texture.
23Where we consider Soto Garcia’s analysis on the “limen’s” power to destabilize as well as to transform, it is, for example, Boxer’s fictional year 1762 from Volume III. In this year and for this page the artist has selected image-texts that bring together historical activity recorded in the 16th, and 19th centuries. The title Septima Musculorum Tabula refers to a text detail of a plate from a 16th century edition of Vesalius’s Anatomical Drawings. While the nineteenth-century steel engravings of the young blacks at the bottom right are appropriated from an 1857 Jamaican photograph of young black Jamaicans at Fort Augusta; freed Africans from a captured Slaver on its way to Cuba.22 The entire page therefore, is an example of the rupturing of time as well as space and place. I now turn to Bénédicte Ledent’s arguments, placing them alongside some of my own thoughts and applying their relevance to The Black Books project.23
24Ledent’s essay raises very interesting hypotheses and questions regarding the old and the new slave novel. One singular difference between the two, she points out, is the aspect of “polyphony”. In musical vocabulary, this word has naturally been associated with Baroque counterpoint as heard in some of the music of Bach. Boxer continues to uphold that visual polyphony is a stated principle in his montage methodology and that he repeatedly uses words such as ‘fugal’ and ‘contrapuntal’ in discussing this and other works. The Fugues of Bach and the thick contrapuntal textures of some of Beethoven’s late works have been highly influential. Boxer continues to uphold that visual polyphony is a stated principle in his montage methodology and that he repeatedly uses words such as ‘fugal’ and ‘contrapuntal’ in discussing this and other works. The Fugues of Bach and the thick contrapuntal textures of some of Beethoven’s late works have been highly influential.24 Ledent writes that it is one of the main characteristics of new slave novels from Caribbean writers. She mentions Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips in particular and as a literary historian asks whether the reader may detect or delineate a tradition in its usage. In her essay, she carefully teases out the way D’Aguiar and Phillips flaunt their multi-vocal characters. Both novelists present men/women, blacks/whites, masters/slaves as well as a variety of styles and genres from different media such as diaries, letters, logbooks, prose-poems or extracts from the press (Ledent, in Misrahi-Barak 2005: 285). [Again, we should remind ourselves that The Black Books are a kaleidoscope of various genres and media, Xeroxed images of photographs, x-ray plates, sculpture and engravings, and paintings of landscapes, history paintings, portraits and so forth]. Whether woven from the perspective of several voices [the Table of Contents for The Longest Memory for instance] or from one voice on an opening page [Crossing the River], the reader is made to hear and experience the choric element of “restless voices” of a “common memory” perhaps from the deep. Ghosts and their echoes [my viewpoint] seem to be a natural aspect of the slave narrative genre (See also Ledent, in Misrahi-Barak 2005: 284).
Fig. 2. — Year 1788. Magnification of images from the Slave Ship Brookes with superimposed detail from The Crucifixion based on The Christ of San Placido by Velasquez ca. 1632. Permission the artist.

25Correspondingly, the dead manacled bodies of slaves on the Slave Ship Brooks of Liverpool within the sea, which, as a backdrop permeates all The Black Books, I argue, represent this “choric” element in the work, one falling individual figure appearing and re-appearing several times on pages for separate years.25
26 “Slavery Revisited Through Vocal Kaleidoscopes” recalls some of the theories argued by Bakhtin in relation to Dostoievski’s polyphonic conception of the novel.26 But in her analysis of this mode, one of the interesting paradoxes which she detects in new novels by Caribbean writers who create polyphonic characters, is, for Ledent, the call to internationalise literature, that is, acquiring a cross-cultural facility that is asked of the reader as opposed to the awareness of local knowledges only (Ledent: 282). This, in my opinion seems to be almost taken for granted in Boxer’s project and given political attitudes in the Caribbean, may be read as being “elitist”. Furthermore, Ledent goes on to point out differences between “surface” polyphony and “deep” polyphony adopting the distinctions made by Wilson Harris, who, in an interview with Fred D’Aguiar suggested that in order for literary polyphony to come alive, there should be an opening up to universal variety and a blending of parts; that despite the fact that we can never encompass all the parts, it is sufficient that we are aware of them and strive perhaps for open unity.27 Whether separate images or segments of imagery in The Black Books interact meaningfully with each other in order to allow for “deep polyphony” in a visual sense to occur, is up to the viewer to decide. The fact, however, that despite the fragmented structure of the montage process we observe a level of harmony within sections on each page-year suggesting that a kind of “dialogue” or visual connectedness has been achieved between sections. As to the question posed by Ledent concerning the possibility of a tradition being established unwittingly by Anglophone Caribbean novelists, this can only be fully answered by literary historians. When the question is directed to the visual arts and correspondingly with Caribbean visual culture and specialists in this area, I will only say, that as an art historian, more work needs to be done on this very interesting and significant question. The present analysis of Boxer’s work that is concerned with the taxonomy of “Slavery” points to the likelihood of there being such a tradition which is capable of transcending media. A further question we might ask ourselves is: does this capability for polyphonic treatments in Anglophone cultural expression (visual as well as verbal) tend to occur only under the rubric of “Slavery”?
27“Intertextuality”, writes Ledent, is another strand of polyphonic treatment observed in Caribbean new slave novel writers. Ledent suggests that this is evident in the way the literary characters created by Caribbean writers dialogue or reference outside texts from earlier centuries in the broadest sense, sometimes including even music and painting. I have already brought our attention to the level of appropriation from earlier written and visual archives involved in this work by citing a glossary at the end. Still, an illustration of this kind of intertextuality which has been transformed into the visual, is the inclusion of portions of torn, fractured musical scores in Volume I of The Black Books for the year 1518. Glimpses of reproduced notated music in Boxer’s work should be understood as an autobiographical reference to a private passion; the fact that from his adolescence Boxer had studied music formally, and, at one point of his life, thought of becoming a concert pianist. His understanding of the works of Beethoven in particular and the dominance of “Theme and Variations” a recurring subject in his studio practice, has been an influence on much of his oeuvre. Bach’s Kunst der Fugue which is both polyphonic and a set of themes and variations is a key guide as well as all of Beethoven’s Variations.28 Like the reader of the neo-slave novel who becomes a “shifting entity” in time, place and space, so too does the viewer browsing, looking or scrutinizing these volumes become a “shifting” entity within visual kaleidoscopes. For, to take one page only, the viewer will have traveled to Genoa, Rome, Amsterdam, Mexico City, and Port Royal. The entire visual experience takes us backwards (Europe’s past and its religious imagery) from the Old World into the New World (European colonial arrivals and contact with aboriginal peoples) through the movement and depths of the Atlantic Ocean (dead African manacled slaves) into the present (autobiographical reminders from the artist in terms of music the collecting of art and medical x-ray plates).
28In this final section I turn towards the work itself as an experience, stylistically and iconographically. Stylistically, The Black Books are indebted, (and not slavishly so) to two former artists: Dada characteristics as professed by the French modernist conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp and the British modernist painter Francis Bacon. Then too, after looking or ‘reading’ the volumes, viewers may be reminded of looking through a neo-Surrealistic frame. As a body of work, The Black Books convey a sense of emotional claustrophobia, a horror vaccui contained by an acute aesthetic formal awareness. On this score, I point out that although the selected images from which this essay has been written did not include the entire number and sequence of images for all the years, Boxer maintains that his selection of Pre-Columbian Taino ‘quotations’ occur seven times throughout, while, ‘quotations’ for African sculpture occur at least fifty times throughout the volumes. He specifically asserts that they were utilized for aesthetic and symbolic reasons as they represent ‘presences’. According to Boxer, the specific meanings of the African art works are not particularly important, rather, it is for their expressive qualities that they have been drafted into serving The Black Books.29 The three volumes, as well, bring forward the richness of Europe’s visual culture [sacred and secular] and written archives. The artist, by the montage process, has created a postmodernist allegory that goes beyond the “local”. I shall briefly explain what is meant by this.
29In 1936, in an influential and one of his major works on new forms in modernity such as the technology of mass reproduction, Walter Benjamin would argue that the “aura” of an original unique work of art is lost to reproducibility; still, it is far from being something to mourn; that progressive possibilities are opened up in the process.30 Have “possibilities” been opened up in The Black Books due to mechanical reproduction? The answer is decidedly “yes”. However, the scope of this essay does not allow for a discussion on the theoretical question as to loss of power (aura) contained within an “original” as opposed to the copy when applied to Boxer’s project.
30In an essay in 1980, following on the work of Benjamin and other writers, Craig Owens, art historian and critic, revived the question and importance of allegory in contemporary culture.31 An essay now regarded as seminal for cultural workers, Owens’s treatment of “allegory” as a traditional literary mode revises its usage by arguing for allegory as an attitude, a technique, a perception and procedure. Two main points from this important essay stand out in regards to Boxer’s project. The first, is that for Owens the allegorical impulse and image, is appropriated imagery. This imagery may range from film still, photograph or drawing and often is already a reproduction “emptied of resonance or claim to authority” (Owens, in Harrison & Wood 2005: 1027). Despite the fact that allegory is seen to be attracted to the “fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete” and finds its true expression in the ruin, which, for Benjamin, was the allegorical emblem par excellence; ruins thus connoting history as an “irreversible process of dissolution and decay, a progressive distancing from origin”, images in The Black Books remind us once more of those ignoble origins within slavery, bringing them into forward vision. Boxer is not interested in “returning” to, or “recovering” this past; a desire that is futile for Stuart Hall. Hall writes that in these contexts one may only gain understanding of traumatic histories through actual experience.32
Fig. 3. — Year 1518. Emphasising the Taino male figure from Jamaica presently in the British Museum, London as well as torn, fractured sections of musical scores. Permission the artist.

31Rather, his work expands and comments upon the state of ‘hybridity’ as mentioned earlier.
32The second point concerns allegory’s disregard of aesthetic categories. Owens argues that the allegorical impulse pays little heed to essentialist genres or media; that the visual is often offered as a text to be deciphered while the verbal is often treated as visual phenomena. This reciprocity therefore creates synthetic crossings and a confusing of genres that appears today as hybridization which according to Owens was anticipated earlier by artists such as Marcel Duchamp (Owens, in Harrison & Wood, 1028). I should also point out that due perhaps to this reciprocity, it has been easier to discuss The Black Books in relationship to the literary texts compiled in Judith Misrahi-Barak’s Revisiting Slave Narratives.
33David Boxer’s project is particularly suited to the technique of montage. For like canonical works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, this strategy, so dependent on the fractured, multi-voiced and metatextural, best articulates emotional states of anguish, trauma and displacement. When seen against the background of other Caribbean postmodernist expressions work from “iconic” artists in the region such as Chris Cozier from Trinidad, The Black Books represents a work of an immense epic imagination.33
34Christopher Cozier’s studio practice in relationship to David Boxer’s aesthetic, embodies a similar and dissimilar strand in contemporary Caribbean visual formation. Like Boxer, the artist has not migrated to the North but has remained in his home territory “meddling” through cultural production in the local affairs of Trinidad & Tobago. Born in Trinidad & Tobago of Barbadian parents, Cozier is the owner of an impressive curriculum vitae and it is clear from its contents that as a conceptual artist, he has, engaged with a wider audience in the Caribbean and internationally.34
Fig. 4. — Year 1654. Illustrating the recurring “falling African” and a medical X-Ray plate from the artist’s collection. Permission the artist.

35Cozier has remained committed to drawing, performance, installation and video, media associated with him that have created barriers and discomfort amongst the citizens of postcolonial and now national Trinidad & Tobago. In an interview with Nicholas Laughlin, the artist described Trinidadian society as “a world with two coups, murders, kidnappings, wrought iron and queen shows”.35 Cozier’s work, as in Boxer’s case is understood and appreciated by a small number of their respective populations only. This paradox and dichotomy allows us to see that whether wittingly or unwittingly, artists of Cozier’s and Boxer’s calibre have for sometime been directing their art to a wider international “visually literate” audience. It is safe to say that for quite some time, the more specialized English speaking Caribbean viewer and collector have had great difficulty with conceptual art, these trends are however changing, while the wider and majority non-specialist audiences are far more comfortable with the ease and lack of mental rigor involved with traditional media and representation.
36Still, what are the correspondences between Christopher Cozier’s practice and themes which allude to “Slavery” or reference the literary media in general? Cozier explores “Slavery” as a capitalist institution mainly in synopsis as well as in its significant relationship to its post-modern consequence and form. His Crosscurrents Project and his Terra Stories Project are examples of these explorations in installation form.36 The main images in Crosscurrents are: the eighteenth-century image of the runaway slave, a slave-owner (perhaps appropriating Blake after Stedman) and Cozier’s postcolonial version of a migrating businessman ‘running away’. They are framed images or drawings from private conversations the artist carries out with himself about the aftermath of the trauma of slavery wreaked on populations in the Caribbean at large. He is particularly concerned to investigate slavery and its effects on the post-colonial Caribbean condition as it translates into migration and Caribbean diasporic cultures globally. A leading question asked is: why have postcolonial societies such as Trinidad & Tobago or other islands in the archipelago (my addition) failed to deliver meaningful states of independence for their citizens?37 In this, his work is a conceptual enterprise linking it with Modernism as in Boxer’s case to Marcel Duchamp, who, earlier had revised traditional ways of artmaking in his approaches to collage, or his privileging the everyday object or readymade/modified artefact. The abundant note-taking, scripting of visual/verbal ideas by Cozier may be understood as being the creation of pictures and writing or picturewriting which is at the heart of his practice. One of the artist’s leading critical interpreters, Annie Paul, refers to his methodology as a “visual stenography” in which he “sketches his location and state of mind”.38 I would like to see this also as a type of “hieroglyphic” or “ideogram” which, as in ancient contexts, stood not only for symbols of things and sounds of words, but also for thoughts and concepts. This is clearly seen in his recent Tropical Nights (2006) which is about the very act of drawing:
Drawing is my handwriting, my thought process [...] notes on little pieces of paper. I often use the word note-taking. Note-taking to me is conceptually very important. This has to do with notions of being sure and unsure [...] I feel an empathy with the ephemeral [...] When I make those marks, there’s a sense of being alive. It’s a domain of possibility.39
37In the case of The Black Books, Boxer’s tools have been the archives of the historical past, modernity’s mechanical reproduction and postmodernist appropriation. In Cozier’s Tropical Night series the tools have been the colliding of the literary imagination itself; pieces of text reminiscent of “Harris, Naipaul and Lamming”40 with his personal visual hieroglyphic glossary of forms. These visual forms are discursive and intertextual as well, some speculating on local Trinidadian polemical political and economic culture, which, hopefully for the artist, will take him beyond his familiar vocabulary arriving at new syntaxes. After the recent busy years of traveling, giving workshops and exhibiting, Cozier began this nine x seven inch series in 2005 in order to rid himself of the rhetorical.
38Nicholas Laughlin, it should be pointed out, begins his article on this series by quoting passages from Cozier’s imaginative text (Laughlin 2006: 21). The writer observes that Cozier’s visual images call up “questions of property ownership and contested space”. As he sifts through the drawings, he senses a “narrative struggling to emerge” [...] I feel like I am still on the outside of the story trying to get in—it is very much like a literary enterprise” (Laughlin 2006: 21). Viewed en masse, the drawings for Laughlin associate with a state of being that is “unresolved”, or at a crossroads (my word), “snapshots of a stream of consciousness, things felt more than understood” (Laughlin 2006: 26). After reading the quoted passages, my own view is that the artist is in search through writing, of another facet of the creative spirit, the poetic and powerful, created by his delineation and image of water, an island, human loss and a protagonist in the process of making “a small story about hunger and survival in a small place”.41
Fig. 5. — Christopher Cozier Detail from “Tropical Night” series. Ink, pencil & stamps on paper. Size variable 2005 - ongoing. Permission the artist. http://tropicalnight.blogspot.com/Courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.

39In conclusion, therefore, questions as to how rich and unexplored the theme of “slavery” is for Anglo-Caribbean artists, or, for that matter, correspondences and treatments between literary media no matter the genre, and, contemporary Caribbean visual culture, awaits extensive research and enquiry. Future writers may want to focus on the small but growing number of conceptual artists of David Boxer’s and Christopher Cozier’s generation some of whom, for example are: Petrona Morrison, Roberta Stoddard and Laura Facey from Jamaica, Annalee Davis, originally from Barbados who has now relocated to Trinidad and, Joscelyn Gardner from Barbados. More notable names from Jamaica’s younger generation include: Christopher Clare, Charles Campbell and K. Khalfani Ra.
Glossary of Some of the Images Referenced and Appropriated
401. Vol. I—Year 1496: Images of the Madonna and Child with Donor - an engraving after Mantegna’s The Madonna della Vittoria, Louvre, Paris.
412. Images of Indians being burned at the stake top right 1496 is an image of an Indian being burned on a spit by Conquistadores by Theodore DeBry for Bartolomeo da Las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies 17th century edition.
423. Vol. II—Year 1654: X-Ray image of the femurs are the x-rays of broken bones from a mid-20th century manual on medical procedures in the artist’s library collection.
434. Image of the “Falling African” re-occuring several times throughout is taken from a study by Theodore Chasseriau, a 19th century French artist of colour.
445. Vol. III—Year 1762 the reference title Septima musculorum tabula is a detail from a plate in Vesalius’s Anatomical Drawings.
456. Vol. III—Year 1762 Images of young black slave boys are taken from an engraving after a Jamaican photograph of 1857. The photographer is thought to be John Savage of Kingston, Jamaica [Identification by David Boxer].
467. Vol. III—Year 1788: The image of The Crucifixion is based on the Christ of San Placido ca. 1632 by Velasquez, Prado, Madrid.
478. Vol. III—Year 1790. The kneeling engraved figure represents Jonah [the whale’s tail is barely visible] from a cover illustration of The First Oratorio published in the New World, 1775 composed by the Jamaican Samuel Felsted, organist of St. Andrew Parish Church. The artist commissioned to do the illustration was Benjamin West and the engraving was done by Francisco Bartolozzi [both artist and engraver from the Royal Academy, London].
Bibliographie
Des DOI sont automatiquement ajoutés aux références bibliographiques par Bilbo, l’outil d’annotation bibliographique d’OpenEdition. Ces références bibliographiques peuvent être téléchargées dans les formats APA, Chicago et MLA.
Format
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- Chicago
- MLA
Works Cited
10.1515/9781400847952 :Auerbach, Eric. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. German publication, 1946. English Translation, 1953.
Bakhtine, Mikhaïl. La Poétique de Dostoievski. Traduit par Isabelle Kolitcheff. Paris: Editions du Seuil, n.d.
Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. “Three Words Towards Creolization”, in Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity, Kathleen Balutansky and Agnes-Marie Sourieau eds. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998.
10.4135/9781446269534 :Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, H. Arendt, ed. London, 1973.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Charles T. Davis. The Slave’s Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Hall, Stuart. “The New Ethnicities”, in Ethnicity, John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith eds. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
10.4000/books.pulm.11280 :Ledent, Bénédicte. “Slavery Revisited Through Vocal Kaleidoscopes: Polyphony in Novels by Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips”, Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves. Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed. Montpellier: Service des publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III, 2005.
Misrahi-Barak, Judith, ed. Revisiting Slave Narratives / Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves. Montpellier: Service des publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III, 2005.
Ocvirk, G. et al. Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice. Tenth Edition. New York and Boston: McGraw Hill, 2006.
Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmod-ernism”, in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Poupeye, Veerle. David Boxer Interviewed. March to June 2000. Privately printed publication of Limited Edition.
10.4324/9780203106358 :Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
10.4000/books.pulm.11280 :Scharfman, Ronnie. “Africa Has Her Mouth On Moses: Zora Neale Hurston Rewrites The Exodus Narrative”, in Revisiting Slave Narratives: Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed. Montpellier: Service des publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III, 2005.
Scott, Sam. Thresholds: Contemporary Art From the Caribbean. Exhibition catalogue. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Massachusetts, 2005.
Smith Mccrea, Rosalie. Antislavery and British Painting of the Black, 1760-1841. Unpublished doctoral thesis. The University of Manchester, England, 2001.
Soto Garcia, Isabel. “The Threshold as Organizing Principle in Neo-Slave Narrative”, in Revisiting Slave Narratives: Les avatars contemporains des recits d’esclaves, Judith Misrahi-Barak, ed. Montpellier: Service des publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III, 2005.
Thompson, Della, ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Ninth Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
**E-mail letter with attachments from Christopher Cozier to Rosalie Smith McCrea dated Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th March, 2007.
Notes de bas de page
1 David Wayne Boxer was born in Jamaica in 1946. He was educated in Jamaica and in the United States (Cornell University, A.B. 1969 and the John Hopkins University, M.A. 1972 and Ph.D. 1975). He is currently the Director Emeritus and Chief Curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica. He lives and works in Kingston. His works are in private collections in the Caribbean, throughout the Americas and Europe.
2 One of the earliest examples of the ‘theme and variations’ procedure is the Thirty Variations on a Renaissance Youth produced in Jamaica in 1977 (the Thirty-Six was edited down to Thirty)
3 David Boxer to Rosalie Smith McCrea in an e-mail letter dated Thursday, May 11, 2006.
4 See Island Thresholds: Contemporary Art From The Caribbean. Exhibition catalogue. Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Massachusetts, February 19-June 5, 2005. Sam Scott, Assistant Curator was the organizer of this exhibition.
5 David Boxer to Rosalie Smith McCrea in an e-mail dated August 10th, 2007.
6 David Boxer to Rosalie McCrea in an e-mail dated Friday, March 16th, 2007.
7 The works referenced in this project will be located in a glossary at the end before “Works Cited”.
8 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (German publication, 1946. English Translation, 1953). Written while living in Turkey and published in German in 1946, the first English translation came out in 1953. My usage of the term “midrasic” to follow, is indebted to Ronnie Scharfman’s meaning as applied to her essay, “Africa Has Her Mouth on Moses: Zora Neale Hurston Rewrites the Exodus Narrative” in Revisiting Slave Narratives: Les avatars contemporains des récits d’esclaves, Judith Misrahi-Barak ed. (Montpellier: Services des publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III, 2005): 40. I shall often hereonwards be referring to this publication.
9 David Boxer to Rosalie Smith McCrea in an e-mail dated August 10th, 2007.
10 Meaning a technique of producing a new composite whole from fragments of pictures, words, music and other sources. See Thompson, Della, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Ninth Edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press): 881.
11 Ocvirk, G. Otto et al., Art Fundamentals: Theory and Practice. Tenth Edition. (New York, Boston: McGrawHill, 2006): 148.
12 Poupeye, Veerle, David Boxer Interviewed March - June 2000. (Privately printed publication of limited edition): 21.
13 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Charles T. Davis, The Slave’s Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
14 Smith McCrea, Rosalie, Antislavery and British Painting of the Black: 1760- 1841. Unpublished doctoral thesis (The University of Manchester, England): Introduction and Chapter 4.
15 See Soto, Isabel, “The Threshold as Organizing Principle in Neo-Slave Narrative” and Bénédicte Ledent, “Slavery Revisited through Vocal Kaleidoscopes: Polyphony in Novels by Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips” in Misrahi-Barak 2005: 103-118; 281-293 respectively.
16 The Madonna and Child with Donor motif is an image after an engraving after Mantegna’s The Madonna della VIttoria in the Louvre. Please see the Glossary for further references.
17 See Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992): 6.
18 Two relevant studies on “hybridity” are: Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Bénitez-Rojo, Antonio, “Three Words towards Creolization” in Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity, Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnes Sourieau, eds. (Gainsville: UP of Florida, 1998).
19 This image references the Christ of San Placido ca. 1632 by Velásquez in the Prado, Madrid.
20 Smith McCrea, Rosalie, Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, 2001, Ch. I: 7, fn. 8.
21 The quotation is taken from a fragment of a letter on the “Slavery of the Negroes” in Day and Bicknell’s poem. The London 1773 publication was reissued in 1793 by John Stockdale of London.
22 David Boxer in an e-mail to Rosalie McCrea February 13th, 2007. David Boxer has an extensive and rare collection of 19th century Jamaican photographs. He has identified the photographer as having been John Savage of Kingston, Jamaica.
23 Ledent, Bénédicte, “Slavery Revisited Through Vocal Kaleidoscopes: Polyphony in Novels by Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips”, in Revisiting Slave Narratives, Judith Misrahi-Barak ed. (Service des publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, Montpellier III): 281-293.
24 David Boxer to Rosalie Smith McCrea in an e-mail dated August 10th, 2007.
25 This image first makes its appearance in Volume II for the year 1646. It is appropriated from Theodore Chasseriau’s work, a 19th century French artist of colour of Caribbean ancestry.
26 Bakhtine, Mikhaïl, La Poétique de Dostoïevski, traduit par Isabelle Kolitcheff (Paris: Editions du Seuil, n.d.): 83.
27 D’Aguiar, Fred, “Interview with Wilson Harris”, Bomb 82 (Winter 2002/2003): 75-80; 70.
28 David Boxer to Rosalie Smith McCrea in an e-mail dated Friday, March 16, 2007.
29 The main exceptions where original meaning is important are the Fang reliquary figures which are tied to ‘Ancestor Worship’. David Boxer to Rosalie Smith McCrea in an e-mail dated August 10th, 2007.
30 Originally published in the Frankfurt Institute Journal Zeitschrift für Sozial-forschung, V, no. 1 (New York, 1936). Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is taken from the English translation by Harry Zohn in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, H. Arendt ed. (London, 1973): 219- 53.
31 Owens, Craig, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmod-ernism” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Charles Harrison & Paul Wood, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005): 1025-1032. The essay was originally published as a two-part article in October, Cambridge, MA, no. 12 (Spring 1980): 67-86 and no. 13 (Summer 1980): 59-80.
32 Hall, Stuart, “The New Ethnicities” in Ethnicity, Hutchinson, John, and Smith, Anthony D., eds. (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
33 The word “epic” is used here to mean: an imaginative work of any form embodying a nation’s history. See Thompson, Della, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 453.
34 The artist received his early education in Port-of-Spain. He obtained a B.F.A. from the Maryland College of Art, Baltimore in 1985 and a M.F.A. which included studies in Florence, Italy, in 1988 from Rutgers University, New Jersey. Cozier ’s installations, performances and videos have been shown in the Caribbean in the following countries: Trinidad, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Guadeloupe, Curacao, Haiti, Barbados. Internationally, he has shown in Spain, the USA, France, South Africa, Holland, Canada, Norway and Mexico. His works have been reviewed in many prestigious journals and magazines and he is on the editorial collective of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, published and distributed by Indiana University Press. Cozier has acted as editorial advisor to BOMB Magazine for their Americas issues, 2003-2005. In 2004 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has taught at many institutions and works closely with younger generation Caribbean artists, illustrators and designers.
35 Laughlin, Nicholas, “Discomfortzone: How do you make contemporary art in the contemporary Caribbean? View from Trinidad” in Modern Painters, 102-103. Mimeograph copies sent in an e-mail attachment from Christopher Cozier to Rosalie McCrea Tuesday and Wednesday, March 3rd, 4th, 2007.
36 Christopher Cozier to Rosalie McCrea in an e-mail dated Wednesday, March 14, 2007.
37 Paul, Annie, “Framing the Postcolonial: Annie Paul on Chris Cozier 2002” in e-mail from Christopher Cozier to Rosalie McCrea, Wednesday, March 14, 2007.
38 Paul, Annie, “Framing the Postcolonial: Annie Paul on Chris Cozier’s 2002” in e-mail dated Wednesday, March 14, 2007.
39 Laughlin, Nicholas, CRB: The Caribbean Review of Books, No. 9 (August 2006): 21,26, Cozier to McCrea, Wednesday, March 14, 2007.
40 Laughlin, Nicholas, “Taking note” in CRB, 21.
41 These are some of my thoughts after reading Cozier’s imaginative pieces which are integral to the Tropical Night series.
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