Here is the last part: I will put up some individual photos of artworks next week: Enjoy!
It was a yam roast of a day when we left to go southwest a bit from Port Maria to visit Lloyd Atherton. The last time I had seen him was on a similarly sun-drenched day last summer and I had been very excited by what I had seen that day but was so distracted by the politics of trying to save our Jamaican show in the artworld that I felt I hadn't paid enough attention. Although he is a second generation carver Lloyd has marked out a distinctly different place for himself in the art world that seems to be more connected to the bush than his father. But even more significantly for me, I feel Lloyd's yard is a direct tie-in with the yard shows of the Southern United States.
Lloyd Atherton wastes no time pulling you into his visions. You cannot go into his yard without first crossing a stone laid into the ground at the gate marked with warding calligraphy. The gate itself is strikingly painted in black with punched out symbols and others created by laying on red tape. Crosses, numbers and any number of kalunga signs, circles with crosses are everywhere. On the gate is painted the words Dred Love (He is not a rasta though he does have neck-length locks, glyphs, and seals placed all around the yard with various types of offerings and arrangements on them. Much of his iconography and personal sense of writing recurs enough that future visits will be needed to focus on them and come up with some way of interpretation. There is nothing accidental or random in this yard.
We waited outside the gate for him and then there he was striding toward us looking like a lion in his kingdom from the Burning Spear song. Muscular, full bearded with just the beginnings of white showing through here and there, a cord around his neck with two mule teeth on it, plaid shorts worn well beneath his lean belly, blue plastic sandals and a big cautious grin. Had to keep telling myself that with his father passing in the last two weeks his life was in the midst of many changes.
"Did you see that?" He pointed up into the large tree that nearly abutted his gate. I looked up and there was a human figure hanging by the neck wearing a turban and an oversized shirt. Next to it in classic Yardshow 101 style dangled a truck tire slowly turning in a delicious breeze. We hadn’t even gotten inside the gate yet! The figure seemed to be fully carved under the clothes. He chuckled softly as he saw my surprise. “What do you call it?” I asked, cringing as the words left my mouth knowing I was going to get one of those expected and totally understated answers. “Oh, “ he said, “It’s a scarey crow.”
Of course it was more than that. Don’t fool yourself for a second. It isn’t like we were standing in a cornfield waiting for a murder of crows to swoop in picking off the crops. This was St. Mary, a parish known for its higher percentages of Revival Zion, Pukkumina, Convince, Maroons, balmyards, and some Kumina. There could be no mistake about the constant and never-ending presence of double valenced meanings here. In many ways this was a new beginning for us in initiating dialogue with Lloyd Atherton. His father had been buried three days before, the nine-night and other ceremonies performed to release and free the old man’s spirit were over and suddenly Lloyd was the one of the five Atherton sons who seemed to hold the old man’s legacy of herbs, power carvings and spirituality. In fact his knickname is ‘Powah”.
There was that feeling of beneficent tingling again as I realized that once again I had stepped into a place unlike any other known place on this island. Not even close to art for art's sake but art made for its original meanings and from an intentionality formed by culture and iconoclasm because it wasn't dictated by any sort of immediate traditional form. Yet it reached out in the world. Yet it connected with those yards in other places. For me this is the quintessence of what I mean by homeground. Some might call it the racial unconscious but to me it is very conscious in the sense of awareness and wakefulness. The spring that feeds creativity here is thousands of years old and is not dictated by materials or fashion but rather by deep interwoven genealogical needs and human hardwiring. The hand that puts the yard together is the artists and the creative talent that shapes the space is the artists and the language he speaks is his cultures. And when it is bigger than or more special than the ordinary we call it art.
As Paul Arnett says in Souls Run Deep there are many quiet yardshows as well. Lloyd Atherton’s yard is not quiet.
In fact Jamaica is not a quiet culture. Earlier in the day I stopped off to finally see if it was cowfoot day at the restaurant and Wayne went off to get a machine part and I stood waiting for him on the main street in Port Maria. It is a small town. But if I closed my eyes the place was a wave of sound. I could listen to it like musique concrete. Not so much traffic sounds but human. Arguments, laughter, children, higglers calling, jitneys calling for passengers, wandering merchants selling batteries and plastic bags of juice, men and women flirting, the babble of madmen and madwomen. Noisy and very much alive. And so it isn’t such a surprise to me that the spirit world reciprocates and echoes this noise with its constant presence on other planes. It is languages’ life without or beyond the written word. Mankind is always in a boisterous dialog with the ancestors. Word sounds have power.
As we walked past the gate into Lloyd’s yard for a few moments I thought that I was actually seeing the spirits and hearing the sharp tiny buzz of their barely articulate voices. They were all around me and I could feel the wind of their passing against my neck and face.
Then Wayne said ‘bees’ and Lloyd said ‘bees’ and pointed over to the corner of the small yard where he had two hives both painted with symbols and faces. “Don’t wave your arms around.” And I’m thinking to myself little cynical thoughts like ok ok if it were too easy you’d be suspicious…there is always going to be something that reminds you of your human condition whether it’s the heat or mud or mosquitos etc. The bees were everywhere and I do have to say they animated the landscape in such a way that nothing was static. I cut back my artworld propensity towards grand sweeping gestures and joydancing.
Lloyd is the son most like his father yet very different as well. There are two other carvers. One is Raphael and I have not yet seen his work. He lives in Connecticut and was a policeman and somehow I just don’t think his work will be like Lloyds’ or his fathers. Then there is another brother who carves: Leroy. But Leroy is a carpenter he is more out in the world getting jobs and he is not a bush doctor like his father or Lloyd. His carvings don’t have the variety or intensity of the other two. His yard itself is more circumspect.
You walk through Lloyd’s gate and you are immediately immersed in spirit languages and spirit writing and iconography. It is tacked to the trees and painted on the buildings and scattered on the ground. I wouldn’t swear to the fact that Lloyd is literate but he has a very finely tuned in sense of the iconic power of inherent in the word sign. His shack is splashed with words, pieces of zinc are painted with what he says are the watchful faces of ancestors making sure the yard is under cosmic scrutiny.
There are certainly larger and more elaborate yard shows than Lloyd Athertons’. But the intimacy of the space has the effect of making the whole thing seem more shrinelike even though he lives in a small elevated shack about eight or nine feet square. The first thing you se when you get in, after you reach mental equlibrium from the bees, is a loose almost basketlike structure where he keeps a group of his larger carvings willy nilly mostly open to the elements and insects. I was instantly reminded of the Yupik masks or the Zuni War Gods slowly returning to the earth.
I peered out between the bees and forced myself to slow down and contain my excitement so I wouldn’t miss anything. I of course felt a buzz that went way beyond the teeming apiary. My disappointments about the Jamaican exhibition falling through were gone and one year later I could see things much more clearly.
Lloyd was excited we were there and Wayne and I both picked up a new openness to our presence in him. It wasn’t so much about the selling of carvings and because of his father’s presence in our book Redemption Songs and the mention of it at the funeral. He seemed to have just as much need to tell us things as we needed to hear it. Later on Wayne and I agreed that it seemed he was taking his role as his fathers’ successor and cultural gatekeeper very seriously.
On atable off to the side were an altar-like arrangement of plants, bottles with liquids in them, a mesh basket covered with one of his fathers sculptures. In a few words Lloyd opened a major discourse about Jamaican religion and about the intentionality behind his work and his father’s work. He called his fathers sculpture a seal. Bang! And he called the table a Bongo table thus situating himself firmly in Convince or Kumina tradition. Bongo is Kongo influenced. I don’t want to get into it more till I thoroughly research the implications of his use of the word Bongo. But him calling the sculpture a seal answered volumes on why and what he and his father carve. Seals are spiritually enhanced offerings that beckon and invite the spirits in. We had known that Atherton senior considered his pieces attraction and repelling devices for spirits but calling them seals placed them in a Jamaican perspective and added depth to those words. It also opened up discourse on other carvers and this absolutely New World manifestation of older forms.
I am still deciphering and weighing the experience of Lloyd Atherton’s yard in my head but will end this for now and put some of the pictures up. Any organization interested in a groundbreaking and neverbeforeseen exhibition of Jamaican work in this country (there is much more material now since the Diggs exhibition) can contact me at Mysteries@aol.com. These few artists I hve briefly mentioned are only several of many for several generations back. This is American art and an important part of our understanding of the African Diaspora. It is time that serious attention be paid to it.
Thanks for reading thus far.
