a review of "Cosmo Whyte: Wake the Town and Tell the People”

Cosmo Whyte
“Wake the Town and Tell the People” (19 March - 1 April 2015)
Russell Industrial Center
1600 Clay Street
Detroit, Michigan 48211

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey envisioned a shipping line that would transport goods and ultimately people throughout the African diaspora, mobilizing an Afro-centric global economy and means of transit from one hub to the next. The Black Star Line operated from 1919-1922, during which it was repeatedly undermined by powerful entities who understood the breadth of its potential. J. Edgar Hoover's fledgling Federal Bureau of Investigation cut its teeth on The BlackStar Line, prosecuting Garvey for mail fraud and, rumor has it, sabotaging the Line's fleet. In recent times, The Black Star Line was resurrected as a symbol of defiance, and deliverance, in Jamaican Reggae music.

Seven miles of Black Star liners coming in the harbor
Seven miles of Black Star liners coming in the harbor
It's repatriation
Black liberation
Yes, the time has come
Black man, you're going home

From Black Star Liners by Fred Locks, 1975

I learned about The Black Star Line through a chat with Cosmo Whyte as we strolled around “Wake the Town and Tell the People,” Whyte's formally taut, lyrical thesis show that was up for a too-brief handful of days at The Russell Industrial Center. Cosmo Whyte's subject matter spans flight, groundlessness, nostalgia and loss. Every image he makes floats on either a light or a dark void, or upon water, the ultimate void. Water made its presence felt again and again throughout “Wake the Town and Tell the People.” I was reminded of the strip of water one glimpses on the horizon of every card in the Ryder/Waite tarot deck—a visual binder as well as an indication that each image represents one step on a continuing journey. The subject of migration, of disintegrating borders and identities, is one Whyte engages with a graceful, almost ironic stillness. Just as his “Keloid” drawings (fig. 3) (as Whyte describes them, a visual distillation of “the body registering an event”) turn and flex upon white voids and his photographs sink into dark voids, his sculptures float in the charged space of the gallery, rendering it another sort of void—a snarled coil of weathered rope (fig. 1) , a pushcart made from shipping pallets (fig. 2). The ocean, and its transitory potential, evoked again, through some of the humble tools with which we attempt to manage and profit by it.

figure 1

Cosmo Whyte Punch Drunk Love- Shipping Rope, Sugar Bowl, Rum, 2015 1 ft x 2 ft x 4 ft photo courtesy the artist

figure 2

Cosmo Whyte The Well Traveled African- Shipping Palettes, 4 Bicycle Wheels, Steering Wheel, 5 Speakers, 3 Car Batteries, 2015 6 ft x 3.5 ft x 4 ft photo courtesy the artist

My impetus for wanting to talk with Whyte was an interest in how grounded even the concept-heavy three-dimensional objects in his thesis show seemed in the formal language of painting, which Whyte discusses in terms of poetics. His ideal poetic structure is the haiku.  His goal is to pare each idea or form down to its essentials and then put it into a sensible dialog with other, similarly minimal pieces that aim to bind together into what seems not so much an installation as a sharply curated string of visual, formal and conceptual rhymes. The strengths possessed by one medium bolster the weaknesses of another- thus all become symbiotically woven taut. The formal rhyme that binds the sculpture made from coiled rope (which Whyte installed spontaneously, like one lyric bridging to the next) to the large, pulsating Keloid drawings morphs into a conceptual tie between the photos and sculptures. The risk of dissolution unto death skims the incisive paring-down process of all Whyte's work- fluidity and global transit carry physical and emotional risks, as well as economic, political and environmental ones.

figure 3

Cosmo Whyte Keloid Drawing 1 & 2 , 2015 Charcoal on Paper 144" x 53" photo courtesy the artist

One aspect that helps to bind the work visually—a primary concern of Whyte's—is that all of his projects begin as drawings. The finished drawings on display are, he indicates, the result of a long process of building up, erasing, redrawing, tearing down and scraping away. Though he does not think of the scraped down voids in his drawings as erasures, his frequent references to poetics invites comparison with current writer's practice. The other common aspect is the desire to not only re-write history, but un-write it—expose the ideological void in which we find ourselves at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In Whyte's practice, the essence of the refugee's experience is turned and twisted and examined via a sharp dovetailing of materials, forms and methods of making. Water is symbolic of death and renewal, and the oceans are the source of all life, as well as gateways of global transit and flight. To measure the distance to new shores, one is drawn look to the horizon. This is also how Whyte describes the experience of place and identity in his native Jamaica. “No one in Jamaica has indigenous status,” he explained. “Everyone is oriented to looking far afield.”

That groundlessness is, for Whyte, an appropriate position from which to pursue a studio practice in our increasingly global society. The notion of transit as politically and economically disruptive is an element in Whyte's work. Stasis encourages identity, of nation, of faith, of gender- migration is viewed by global powers as a major threat to stability because, Whyte reflects, it is. The fluidity that ensues—of movement between continents, ethnicities, beliefs—is the total antithesis of what used to define a person's identity; thus identity becomes less and less definable, which was already the case for those living in many places in the post-colonial world. Whyte sees this as “...an organic process. Really it's always been the case.” The FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and his ilk, powerful, frightened men at the twilight of the West's colonial supremacy, understood that allowing free migration to only certain groups was essential to maintaining the cultural pecking order that had held sway since the Renaissance. We see echoes of this mindset today in the virulent opposition many political conservatives evince toward the slightest attempt at easing immigrant's access to our shores. Turns out, for Hoover as well as for his antecedents, it's like trying to stop the ocean's tides.