Ivanhoe Martin and the Hotel





General view of the lobby, with Laura Facey work at front











4 thoughts on “Ivanhoe Martin and the Hotel

  1. In the interest of time (lol) I would like to just highlight one small statement you made and how that statement can be recontextualized in different ways. The statement was “Paying dearly”. That was a sentiment that was also said some years ago about the issue of crime in Jamaica and it was uttered by none other than Reneto Adams, a former police officer in the JCf and a figure of much controversy in the history of our policing.

    In that statement Mr. Adams was saying that if he is not at the helm of our anti-crime front Jamaica will “pay dearly” for his absence because of what he has seen on the ground and what he expects to come in the not too distant future. He was the first police officer I have ever heard suggesting that their are Russian and Chinese gangs in Jamaica. He was the first officer to suggest, publicly, that the helm of the crime networks does not “look like” the foot soldiers that are often killed in our pursuit. In another rare feat, the musician Protoje produced a song titled “blood money” wherein the first line states “a nuff drugs money deh a cherry garden”. These very rear moments in the canon of Jamaican history are but mere droplets of water in the Sahara desert.

    Now, what responsibility does the image makers have? And what responsibility does the writers and curators that support/supported their work have? If the narrative has been sanctioned by the history makers then there could be culpability for all to share….be it if the Jamaican art narrative has been fixed this way for years or not. It is our responsibility to present everyone in the discussion on Jamaican art. Let me say without equivocation, many of us in the art game have been playing a dirty game of camouflaging our skins unto the subject of Jamaican art, knowing full well that there is an unbending chasm between the depicted subjects of Jamaican art and its artificers as well as it’s collectors. Things will continue in this way because the getting is too good to change…I have said on your blog many times before that there is something very wrong in how we have set up the narrative in this country and we cannot continue to put some people on the examination table while others pretend to be doctors, that’s not what art is supposed to be about.

    The French, during the late 18th and 19th century decided to create a movement they called “Realism”. It is funny how the term now means “plasticity”, but the real meaning is, “the depiction of the proletariat, as opposed to the depiction of Napoleon and his ilk”. What we have here in Jamaica pretends, in a very clever way, to be a kind of “Neo-Realism”, but there are some marked differences and they are varied and too many to name now, but the most important difference would be the Revolution. Those subsequent 19th century images were weaponized against the bourgeoisie, they were made to give people dignity in manual labor in one sense, but more over, many of those images were made to present the rapacious nature of the bourgeoisie and their exploitive manner. No such luck here…


    • Thanks, Phillip. Reneto Adams…I had not seen that one coming, but of course there is a point. For his Messiah complex, and questionable methods, he also spoke truths that others would not acknowledge, at least not publicly. As for the art world, yes, that is what I have been getting at in this and several other blog posts, the complicity of the art world to those social dynamics that keep in place what it appears to deny or critique. And the constant, unacknowledged co-optation of resistance, or what is presented as resistance. There is a need for a lot of soul-searching there, and for a level of frank self-reflexivity that is now sadly missing. Because that is the issue I have with the current social aspirational culture, that it does not foster social change, but reinforces social inequality, even though it lets a token few through the gate. But what is happening on the “other side” of the social divide is very real, and spills over already. What will happen when that dam breaks? We will all pay dearly.


      • Just resharing a quote I had used in a previous post, as it is entirely relevant here:

        “How can [art] participate in networks of power that its content wilfully rejects? Often, so-called ‘political art’ simply aestheticises protest or resistance. Sometimes, it has the effect of moral licensing – instilling in its viewer a false sense of having accomplished something. Art and power have always been begrudging bedfellows.”

        – Annie Godfrey Larmon


  2. Yes, I remember reading that. As you know, I have talked about the new strange moral, or more accurately, “virtue signaling” positions that art practitioners have been milking these past few years. With a kind of “bonfire of the vanities” hysteria and righteous fervor. Art’s new army of Girolamo Savonarolas, protesting museums and their affiliation to blood money all over the world. Anyone who has picked up a book on the Medici family knows the relationship art has to power, they often go hand in hand. Anyone simple enough to think that art hasn’t been weaponized since the Vally of the Kings is not seeing the enormity of the meaning of art outside of its aesthetic value. The question here is a simple one. Are art practitioners willing to include their patronage as part of their overall scrutiny? There is a reason the Second World War is referred to, in some circles, as a war in aesthetics and it is clear that both the Third Reich as well as the “Allied Froces”, who aren’t all that allied today, had to involve art as part of the war front. Today, we can clearly see that different states treat artists differently based on how they interpret the artist’s responsibility to the state in question. This is why, for example, the Taliban has been destroying works that are thousands of years old. Or, the Chinese government has set their sights on Ai Weiwei’s production. I promise you, it’s not because of their “taste” in art but more so their politics in art, and those societies fully understand the potential art holds. In the west, and in “democratic states” institutions have another way of editing artists….ignoring them, while promoting the other artists folks may want to weaponize. And Jamaica is no different.

    I’ll tell you something, whenever I produce a work of art such as “upper st. Andrew concubine”, I cannot tell you how many times people have asked me “who exactly are you talking about?”. And I have always found the question very curious and funny, here is why. We are so used to talking about a mass of people in our art discourse that we have grown accustom to “the nameless and faceless” in our art. When a model in any Jamaican work of art is a person that we all know and recognize, that model is often used to represents the “huddled masses”. Interestingly enough, if you change the direction of the gaze, and start to investigate upper middle classed life in Jamaica, then the most generic figure in a work of art comes across as specific, even personal, in some instances. This is why, it has to do with the intended audiences, and the institutions that attract them. The danger of Dawn Scott’s “A Cultural object” is that it runs the risk of fetishized nationalism, or at least the expectation of it. The expectation of “brand Jamaica”, in my estimation, is more powerful than any individual subject of Jamaican art across genre. When Robert Hughes said “the art economy is the most powerful subject in contemporary art”, he was talking about the very ways in which money dictates pace and taste. For us, “brand Jamaica” affects/infects all of our cultural expression. Now, while that is to be expected from an ethnographic point of view, we must take some responsibility for much of its one dimensionality and however the “market” responds to such nationalized products…..when one traffics in national brands one inadvertently suggests the power of authenticity. We must come to terms with the fact that authenticity begets homogeneity and that creates a whole other set of problems when one deals with our internal bigotries.


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