Skoto Gallery as a Venue for Liberation
Haiti Liberte
At first, you hardly realize that Skoto Gallery, nestled in Manhattan’s Chelsea art district, is a space of resistance against neocolonial oppression. But as you reacquaint yourself with the many well executed works presented on its walls over the years, the words “Exprimez-vous!” (Express yourself!) echo in your head. This was the peremptory command reminding you, even when away from your school bench, that you had to “express” yourself in the Master’s tongue. So, it now becomes evident to you through this conflation of art and language mastery that the gallery, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, has been contesting Western dominance since its founding in SoHo back in 1992 through its re-presentations of the would-be universalist lingo of modernist art.
What are you to make of its preoccupations, rarefied and indulgent as they might be, vis-à-vis an eventual liberation from the Master’s control, you who have been lapping up for decades on still foreign soil as many new words and ideas as you could ingest?
You do recall some of the shows you’ve seen at the gallery over the years. For those you haven’t seen, you’ll simply fill in the blanks once you’ve delved into its edifying website. Although there are exceptions (South Korea and Peru, for instance), the artists shown at Skoto are mostly African-born, or hail from the African diaspora, including the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean. The predominant themes in their work are Nature, Self, and linguistic as well as socio-cultural and spiritual traditions, usually couched in modernist art styles. Aesthetically, by no means a homogeneous grouping, there are hardly among them card-carrying Duchampians, absolutist abstractionists, or irrational anarchists. Taking your cue from Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ long sidelined 1805 constitution, and simply for the purpose of this abbreviated and empowering exercise, you could say that all of the gallery’s contingent of artists, even Caucasians, are Black or African.
Indeed, Tout moun se moun! “Everyone [on Haitian soil] is a [black] person!” Encapsulated in such words, Dessalines’ relatively ultra-liberalist agenda seems pertinent.
“Exprimez-vous!”
Clearly, much of the art that Skoto has exhibited places due importance on formalist concerns — lines, color composition, etc. This is also evident in the press releases, without the gallery eliding its artists’ individual and socio-cultural motivations for making art. It has a soft spot for often color-rich and, especially, all-over abstract expressionist-like approaches to picture making. But a whole gamut of styles are exhibited, ranging from at times deliberately quirky (semi-) representational sculptures to forthrightly raw, lyrical, or kitschy works that often enough include readable or undecipherable texts and (photographic) images. In this ambience, one of the Master’s fancy phrases easily insinuates itself in your consciousness: “Oh, the pleasure of the text!”
Of course, contrary to how this phrase is often parroted, pleasure derived from processing a literary or visual text (from reader-spectator back to creator and vice-versa) is not a passively acquired skill and readily accessible sensation. It’s learned through study and exposure. You could acquire this rewarding ability right from the Master’s actual pronouncements or in the sanctum that are His great books, to the point where you can finish His sentences or convincingly formulate them yourself.
There’s a crucial problem, however. It’s the Master’s ears, or those of arbiters more or less formatted by Him, who can best decide your degree of fluency. For it’s axiomatic that you and the Master cannot occupy simultaneously the very same (types of) space, even if you were co-conspirators. Therefore, the two of you at least potentially must be of different worlds. Besides, there’s the obvious issue of deliberate, unequal opportunities to access the Master’s immediate domain. Consequently, perhaps your ability to express and indulge in your vaunted high art and in the “pleasure of the text” — or, analogously, in the all-important panache of some of Skoto’s artists’ execution of modernist mark making — stems from what you’ve partly experienced, half-heard, half-digested outside the Master’s window as you work in the field or even in His dining room, through the clatter of His utensils as He gabs and gorges himself. So, all along you’ve had to make do with simply filling in, joining and rejoining the unheard or imagined parts of His discourse.
