Sculpture Key West, Key West, FL, 2011
Group show
Carmel Buckley & Mark Harris, collaborators
For Sculpture Key West 2011 my husband, Mark Harris and I proposed installing a sound work, with ceramic commemorative plaques, to celebrate the half-century anniversary of the finest music made by Sparrow, the leading Trinidadian singer, widely acclaimed as the greatest practitioner of calypso. The work imagined a summons across the Caribbean, in a great arc over Cuba and Jamaica, down the long string of Leeward and Windward Islands, to reach the music of the Trinidad carnival. (Trinidad is the island furthest away from the Florida Keys, just off the coast of Venezuela.) The installation was programed to play intermittent snatches of songs by Sparrow, fading in and out of earshot as if drifting across from the Caribbean on the breeze. In between the songs were periods of silence interspersed with field recordings of natural and environmental sounds from Trinidad. A listener would, at any one time, only hear passages at varying volume and distinctness, so that it was not always clear where the sound was coming from, nor what temporal structure it possessed.
Ceramic plaques depicting Sparrow LP record covers surrounded the location in an area of the Martello Tower botanical gardens. Speakers were placed in this area, so when viewing the plaques the sound could be heard. The images were printed and fired onto ceramic squares approximately the same size as the original records.Although music from Cuba, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico has long been well known and widely distributed in North America, the best calypso music remains underappreciated here. Because the lyrics are often topical, covering local and sometimes international politics, some calypsos have also become relevant as historical documents.
Mark Harris is half-Trinidadian and as a child spent periods of time in Trinidad, where he first came across Emory Cook’s (Cook Laboratories) calypso recordings through his family.
Most of the music was taken from vinyl records in our collection and accompanied by the usual atmospheric crackling, static, and scratches associated with that medium. On seeing images of the project Andy Stillpass, a collector wrote “I kept thinking about Deleuze's and Guattari's Toward a Minor Literature and the section on birds and music in A Thousand Plateaus. In this sense, calypso could be thought of as a minor art. These somewhat faded record covers can be read as signifying not only the pushing of this style of music to the margins and with it small independent record labels such as Cook. It also speaks of the superannuating of vinyl by the digital and by extension the local by the global. Relatedly, the unplayable records rendered in ceramic tiles a medium derived directly from the earth suggests the silencing of the corporeal by the corporate.”
The show was reviewed by C. S. Gilbert for Solaris Hill, “Sculpture Key West Could Delight but Disappoints,” February.
