Henry Muttoo (MBE), a wise arts-man of the Caribbean, in August said as he accepted a Guyana Cultural Association of New York Lifetime Achievement Award, “Give the people not what they want but what they should want.” Everything he had said leading up to this statement dissipated from my mental registry. And for a while, my thoughts lingered there: Give the people what they should want! Are artists in Guyana giving Guyanese what they should want? Have I given the people what they should want through my own art practice? Do Guyanese have expectations of artists? I wished our arts-people could be unanimously motivated by a similar sentiment as was uttered by our recently honoured arts-man.
My ears welcomed Muttoo’s utterance not only because of his seniority, authority, and prominence, but also because he is a man of our soil, who has excelled labouring on the soil of others (as do many others in the arts who make us proud today) offering a powerful directive to our arts-people. Will his simply spoken words register? Too often, to bolster my similar line of thought, I revert to the ideas of a long-gone, aged man of Europe: Plato. In a more roundabout fashion, Plato argued the same thing. According to this long-gone man, the poet should only write that which celebrates the heroic deeds of men of civic virtue and that which would inspire the citizen to right conduct. Give the people what they should want. Plato, however, saw no redeeming virtue in visual art because of its mimetic nature. For him, in mimesis (imitation) there is no truth, there is no possible elevation.
But September is here and my thoughts turn to an arts-man who gave the people what they should want and left them longing for more. George Simon (1947-2020) gave the people elevation of status of their culturally determined aesthetic and informing systems of thought and cultural practices. Through his oeuvre (body of work) he celebrated the interior landscape and the Indigenous people of Guyana, the mytho-spiritual beliefs of his Indigenous communities, and he at times integrated these with systems of thought that reflected the individuality of his syncretic belief system. As a consequence, separating the Tao from the Voodoo, the Indigenous from the Hindu in his late oeuvre is not always possible as they are in varying degrees present and layered upon each other.
Simon’s 2012 painting Homage to Wilson Harris: Secret Ladder, currently in the Guyana National Collection, housed within Castellani House is a case in point. The painting is predominantly of a muted blue-green with yellow, yellow-ochres, and brown. Immediately evident in the area right-of-centre of the picture plane is a slithering serpentine form that appears to come from within the depths of the painting’s mystical landscape toward the viewer. As suddenly as it advances, it changes course, raises its head, and turns back into the landscape with its mouth open bearing sharp carnivorous teeth. The destination of this open and threatening orifice appears to be a slumbering giant – a jaguar, sleeping despite the obvious display of its ferocious fangs. The repetition of the lines and other defining features of the head of the serpentine form suggest dynamic movement traced on the surface of the canvas and an attack unfolding. But it also proposes the unification of serpent and jaguar; their heads merge and where one begins and the other ends is obliterated. At this point, the body of the jaguar appears more serpentine than feline.
To the extreme right and along the edge of the painting, a creature that reminds us of a white-faced capuchin monkey peering from a high perch looks out of the canvas with what can presumably be a look of curiosity and intrigue. Interestingly, the monkey’s face shifts with added physical distance from the canvas, to appear like both the head of a wild cat and a serpent seen frontally. Upon close physical inspection, the shapeshifting head sits on the broad shoulders of a man. His neck is barely discernible because of the low hang of the head. The rest of his body is lost to the undulations and the subterranean layering of the land. We see slight indications of the vest he wears. Our shape-shifting creature is, in fact, the Shaman – barely perceptible, but nonetheless part of all that we see.
Beyond the voracity and shapeshifting dynamism on the right of the canvas, a serene and welcoming landscape is visible elsewhere. There are undulating mountains in the background. These evoke the Pakaraima mountains and they give way to what is reminiscent of iconic vistas of the Kaieteur Falls and its environs. Through the appearance of the majestic falls, we are taken back in time to Simon’s tour de force Oriyu Shikaw (Kaieteur, House of the River Spirit, 1995) also in the Guyana National Collection. Unlike in Oriyu Shikaw, in Secret Ladder the land reveals its contents. Buried in the earth are more feline and serpentine forms which become more evident with increasing physical distance from the canvas and through the lens of the camera. The subtleties of the canvas seen in person are diminished when seen through the photographed image.
In characteristic fashion, Simon’s painting is an archaeological site. He allows us to see the layers within the land. He also allows us to see beyond the skin and patterns of the serpentine form. Within this creature, the bulging eyes of (perhaps) a frog look up to the serpent’s attacking/shapeshifting head. A fish form is also evident. The fish, frog, and serpent are all symbols of fecundity in different systems of thought. The serpentine stands out in Voodoo and Hindu chakra philosophy. Meanwhile, the jaguar is clearly of Indigenous Guyanese significance and it relates to the kanaimà – the fear-inspiring shapeshifting character whose human identity may be suspected but is never definitively known. The spots that appear on the jaguar also appear on the left of the canvas in the area that reads like the sky. Together the presence of the spots in the sky and the elongated body of the jaguar on the left evoke swift movement, a characteristic of kanaimà. Questions are raised: who is the barely discernible shaman to the extreme right of the canvas? What is his relation to the jaguar? Is this Simon, the journeying-man who embraced shamanism along his healing path (see last week’s article)? Or is this another – the lesser known kanaimà-shaman who exists alongside the enduring cultural figure of the kanaimà for the people of the Pakaraimas? Clearly, in Homage to Wilson Harris: Secret Ladder (2012) we also have an anthropological oasis.
For Plato, visual art offered no elevation. Were he to see Secret Ladder, perhaps he would change his tune.
Akima McPherson is a multimedia artist, art historian, and educator
