Shellyne Rodriguez

 Bio:

Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist, educator, writer, and community organizer based in the Bronx. Her practice utilizes text, drawing, painting, collage and sculpture to depict spaces and subjects engaged in strategies of survival against erasure and subjugation.  

Statement:

Baroque, Quebrao: The Unconquered Artist from the Periphery of Empire

My practice as an artist is situated within the contexts of history. A past which is not a past and continues to render the contours of the present. To speak about the what and the why of my practice requires placement and context. That placement is inside the empire of the United States on the margins of its financial capitol, New York City. The Bronx, like many other enclaves inside the U.S. constitutes what Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and Huey P Newton referred to as “Domestic”, “internal” and “dispersed” colonies.” These internal colonies on unceded indigenous land are populated by Black descendants of U.S. chattel slavery, peoples from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa and Asia.

 My historical subjectivity as a descendant of enslaved Africans by way of the Caribbean has placed me here. I am who I am and where I am as the result of many unfolding consequences or to put it in Marxist terms, because of the dialectical evolution of productive forces. Indigenous knowledges and African spiritual traditions rooted in ancestral worship would reiterate this point in saying, we are never only ourselves. We are the unfolding of many lives lived who have thrusted us forward to this very moment. We are the culmination of many grandparents and their grandparents and so on. The unfolding of an original seed which still blossoms and bear fruit. Art cannot be disconnected from the series of consequences which has led to now. This is true for the descendants of the Medicis or the Mayflower as much as it is for the descendants of the field negro in the antebellum south or the maroons in the Palenque foothills of Northern Colombia. How then does the artist whose life is shaped by imperial conquest, the emergence of capitalism, slavery, colonialism and genocide position their artist practice in relation to the Western canon they are in contentious relation to?

 There is no doubt that for those of us in the so-called New World, the imposition of The West has shaped us. This is what we inherit from the atrocity of colonial and imperial domination that reordered our world converting us into gardens and quarries for a hoarding Europa. But while we are historically shaped by subjugation not all of us are conquered. The unconquered among us have always undermined, subverted, bootlegged, remixed and revolted against these impositions. We have been an underworld. A hidden guerrilla stronghold. An impending reckoning. In this way, my practice is a strategy of survival against erasure and subjugation. My practice recognizes its inherited unfreedom and refuses assimilation to empire. It acts as a haunting shadow over the Western canon. An orisha hidden within the catholic saint. Its practice which understands that the power of art surpasses the aesthetic and is also located in how it holds what is to be remembered beyond the gilded frame.

 As an unconquered artist formed in the crucible of colonial conquest in the New World, I see in the Western European canon of art the history of subjugation and resistance. To behold the illustrious moments of art history and place myself in its context is to find myself beneath the blade of a sword, chained on a boat, on a sugar plantation or deep in a silver mine. I see the Spanish settlement of Borikén (Puerto Rico) in Michelangelo’s completion of the Sistine chapel in the same year. To encounter La Gioconda by DaVinci is to know that her genius foreshadowed the atrocities committed by Hernan Cortes, whose pillaging of the lands we now call Mexico introduced Europe to the rare saturated red dye made from the cochineal insect collected from local cacti.

The Nahua people who were not killed by disease or slaughtered during the conquest were worked to death to produce the vibrant red pigment found in paintings such as Caravaggio’s “The incredulity of Saint Thomas” (1601) and Rembrandt’s “The Jewish Bride, (1665–69). DaVinci’ s many subjects included Amerigo Vespucci, whose mappings of the so-called New World would give cause to name Abya Yala and Turtle Island, America.

My practice finds relation with the Western canon through those artists whose approach to making “opens up their way of looking at the world and their relationship to it in their time” as historian John Berger describes. This is an inquiry that requires more than looking at mastery of technique and form. Pieter Breughal the elder shows me Flemish village life at a time when the old European order was being replaced by a world economy brought on by the expansion and penetration into the new world. In his work I see life before the pauperization of European peasants driven from the land through enclosures and the creation of roving vagabonds rendered expendable that would be forced to sell their labor under the new capitalist order. I see the abandoned peasant wives accused of witchcraft whose property was systematically confiscated. Those who were not tortured and burned as witches who turned to sex work for survival at the ports of Amsterdam serving the sailors of the Dutch East & West India company; I see their indentured husbands, rural workers turned sailors for hire lost at sea or killed in the Caribbean by revolting Arawaks. I wonder how many of these men would be among those sailors who escaped their abusive shipmasters joining the seafaring class who mingled with slaves and maroons participating in the underground economy selling contraband and carrying news of the Haitian revolution across the Antilles.

The seismic rupture that was the Haitian Revolution and its unfolding consequences continue to shape our world today as The West has not ceased its collective punishment of the Haitian people for having led a slave rebellion and founded a state ruled by former captives. The Haitian Revolution launched a ripple effect of resistance across the Americas while having a significant economic impact on their French enslavers incited by the actions of the Third estate of the French Revolution who took the king’s head.

When I look at “Liberty Leading the People” by Delacroix I am looking for its relationship to Haiti and I find it in his precursor Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson would paint the portrait of Jean Baptiste Belley, the first Black deputy of Saint-Domingue to the French National Convention in Paris instrumental in passing the decree to abolish slavery. In 1802 when Napoleon Bonaparte reinstates slavery, black officials are purged from the army. Eight years after his role in the passing of the decree at the National Convention, Belley, a high-ranking officer was now viewed as a threat. He was arrested upon his return to Saint-Domingue by Napoleonic forces and held as prisoner for three years before his death in 1805.

Girodet’s portrait of Jean Baptiste Belly with the bust of Abbé Raynal then acts as an anchor of memory. Considered a pre-Romantic painter, Girodet would conjure the Baroque in his work “Scene from a Deluge,” a year after Belley’s death. The central figure struggles with horror in his eyes. He hovers over flood waters, using all the strength of his body to hoist his elder on his back while lifting his companion and children to safety from a broken tree limb. The weight of the past and the future is upon him as he hangs on the precipice. Such were the cards on the table for those revolting across plantations in the Antilles and the Americas or traversing underground passages to relative safety in the North. While Girodet would capture the weight of such a feeling, Goya would unravel the psychic space of defiance and martyrdom in the atrocities of war. In Goya’s The Third of May 1808, the central figure kneeling with hands up among the cornered rebels in the glowing yellow light transcends geography. Madrid becomes Saigon, Luanda, Havana, West Bank, Buenos Aires, or Ferguson. As an unconquered artist whose history is defined by rifles aimed at their ancestors and dead comrades at their feet in perpetuity, my relationship with Goya’s The Third of May 1808 is intimate.  

The why in choosing a subject or subject matter to say more than what’s on the surface within the confines of unfreedom is a familiar terrain for an unconquered artist working within empire. My antagonism to empire is ontological and is a precondition as a steward of memory. I find kinship with Caravaggio’s decision to turn Roman streetwalkers, drunkards and prostitutes into saints, disciples and gods emerging from the dark gullies and hoods of his time. I am in solidarity with the twink hustler turned into Bacchus with a fuck you in his eyes and whose dirty fingernails and offering of rotten fruit give you a hint of his reality. These are decisions that indicate a disloyalty to power. The Vatican may have been employing Baroque artists to produce propaganda for its Counter reformation campaign, but the artists were also attempting to convey the inner life of the person, to deepen and intensify the interpretation of feeling and emotional life. In painters like Caravaggio and Rembrandt and sculptors like Bernini, psychological interpretation and the sense of presence was not solely a religious endeavor even if that was the paid assignment. It is visible in the contrast between the rigidity present in aristocratic portraits versus when the artist was seated before a peer as subject. There is a feeling of being off the clock in the paintings of Diego Velasquez when he is not acting a court painter. A kind of freedom which his slave, the artist Juan de Pareja would not experience for twenty years under his command.   

How then does the Baroque appear in the New World, which in the same breath is to ask, how was the power of the Vatican enforced? In The Andes the propaganda of the Catholic Church to convert the indios was in full effect and the influence of older Flemish engravings and medieval imagery brought to educate “the savages” in the newly established churches across South America are felt in Andean Baroque. If the Baroque in Italy was contemplating the psychic and emotive inner space of the human hidden in catholic propaganda, in the colonies the propaganda was a colonial counterinsurgent psy op.

The manual Ritual Formulario written by Franciscan priest Juan Perez Bocanegra provides a window into the ways they sought to meticulously dissect indigenous spirituality from the people. Violent interrogations that criminalized indigenous practices are made visible in questions such as, “In the Capac Raimi, Inca Raimi, and the other festivals of your past, have you performed dances, adoring the huacas, that in the time of the Incas you used to adore?” Bocanegra would however incorporate many spiritual and philosophical concepts from indigenous spirituality in his text and in the images displayed to win over the pueblos de indios who were now colonial subjects of Spain. In Peru, on the ruins of the Inca empire, churches would be built and baroque painting in the Andes would be in the form of murals which also incorporated aspects of indigenous concepts which the church saw as a pathway to conversion. Syncretism played a significant role in reeducation and assimilation. But as in the case of “Death in the House of the Rich and poor” by artist Tadeo Escalante, there is hidden condemnation of the colonial masters and their lackeys as well as an acknowledgement of the slain rebel leader Tupac Amaru. Syncretism is a double-edged sword that cuts both ways. The subjugated are required to remember the ongoing historical assignment to get free as an obligation handed to us by our ancestors. When this task is abandoned, syncretism collapses, and the babalawo becomes an evangelical preacher. The rebel training in capoeira becomes cultural performance.

There is much more to say regarding the relationship to the Western art historical canon and conquest. How do we think through Van Gogh, Manet and Cezanne who are painting during the cannibalism of the Berlin Conference? What are we to make of Clement Greenberg’s insistence on formalism in his 1955 essay “American Type painting” in the same year as the Bandung conference? Questions produce more questions. As an artist, my ongoing engagement is with the emotive and psychic conditions of unfreedom. In what ways does power reproduce indifference, exhaustion and melancholia, creating perceptions of powerlessness at the service of subjugation? In this way my work aligns with the baroque to investigate the ever-present despair, what might be defined as a spiritual apathy. These are political questions as much as they are aesthetic.

And so I linger here. A Baroque from below which I call Quebrao, a haunting shadow as anagram which translates to “broken” in Spanish in a spelling that removes the intervocalic consonant and rebukes the colonizer’s tongue. The work seeks to create an emotive psychological space to draw the viewer into a moment where they encounter the trappings of chicanery and witness the collapse or the triumph of these devices as they are put in friction with a stealth and insurgent will to live and to thrive. The ongoing inquiry in the work is how we sway, collide, confront, evade, weep, break, mend, weave and push forward. How we sample and remix. Here is a record, mostly through drawing, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and assemblage. And what does that look like? On paper? In an object? As a narrative? As an action? To steward, to think and to make. This is how an artist statement becomes an art historical essay.

As we collectively bear witness to the fall of the Western imperial project established in 1492, such a survey feels necessary.