Still Ringing: A project unrealised
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This is a project that wasn’t realized.
It sat in the walls of the museum for weeks before it found its home elsewhere.
It was uncomfortable in space.
It was the one of many orphaned to the institution, yet it is still sounding,
resounding.
A warning and a battle cry.
Bodies are no longer held in check, here they run . . . they make noise and are unafraid.
Here, they know you are coming.
John Beadle. ‘Still Ringing’ installation. 2018.
“Beadle calls on us to think about the present conditions under which we live. Are we still succumbing to the weight of this collar and shackle? Have we figured out how to unlock it? Or have we disposed of the weight in search of another kind of glory, another kind of distraction?”
Bahamian artist John Beadle locates his art practice somewhere between him being an engineer, a tinkerer, Junkanooer and maker of things. He struggles with the label of "artist" as he feels that it burdens the conditions under which his work is known, thought about and contextualised. This kind of tenuous relationship to language and its parameters is something that I continue to witness in this space. Some would say it is a kind of insecurity or deflection, but I like to think of the fluidity and ways in which we navigate our cultural terrain more like the action of a rhizomatic root system. Dig a piece up here and there, it springs with new growth elsewhere. Silence a word, and it emerges a guttural scream that keeps on resonating, echoing and reverberating.
Beadle is no stranger to institutions. A survey show was produced in 2013 at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB) which Beadle called a self-portrait, yet even though the show was an intimate and telling story of how walls—personal and physical—populate our space, ‘Still Ringing’ emerged as quite a surprise for myself and certainly for Beadle. Earlier in 2018, Beadle began talks to develop a response to Scottish artist Graham Fagen’s ‘The Slave’s Lament’, as a part of the ‘We Suffer to Remain’ exhibition, the third and final part of the ongoing ‘Difficult Conversations’ series of regional exhibitions supported by the British Council.
Beadle went ahead using a very familiar material—cardboard—to craft archetypes and figures that reinforced the shackles of our postcolonial condition. In ‘Cuffed: Held in Check’, Beadle reinforces and diversifies the figures, including gendered figures—portraying women in this fashion is a first for the artist—that move between the maternal/mammy figure. He comments on the hierarchical structures within our society and the placement of the woman as a site of production, a contemporary site of excellence and a figure that has come to represent strength and resilience: the long-suffering matriarch.
It is here, in this figure, that lies a discomfort and the seed of the project that is ‘Still Ringing’. After numerous emails and conversations with Fagen to distill the discomfort Beadle felt, it became almost impossible for him to rely on the body of work to be his only response—not only creatively, but ethically—from his position as a Black Caribbean man. Conversations about a mash-up started to occur, and out of it all, the cowbell—the symbol that translates between both projects—was the unifying entity.
As a man of the shack, Beadle is an avid Junkanooer (a long-standing participant of Junkanoo) and is a principal designer and sculptor in the One Family shack. The Bahamian national festival of Junkanoo is a kaleidoscope of colours and sound. It is the strongest remaining African tradition in the Bahamas. In the times of slavery, Christmas time was the only free time the enslaved had, so they used this time for celebration. The parades are characterised by spectacular costumes made of crepe paper, and masks consisting of coloured cloth and leather. The stilt dancers, street dancers, clowns and acrobats are accompanied by powerful rhythms beaten traditionally on goatskin drums, cowbells, bugles, horns, whistles and conch shells.
And out of the cowbell, things started to connect for Beadle. An interruption was needed, something nuanced and biting, something poetic and mournful. Some sound that would accompany a procession honouring the legacies and the collective trauma of Slavery. This is not a task for the timid. Using the central female figure from ‘Cuffed: Held in Check’, Beadle abstracted the cowbell and started to think about new ways to see this loaded cultural object. What emerged from his thinking and reconfiguration is essentially a slave collar with bells, otherwise called a punishment collar, with a rotating arm that tugs a gathering of strings.
The series of cowbells sound off as the arm makes a revolution, pulling the string and making them ring. Historically, the punishment collar with attached bells alerted all those nearby of the presence of an enslaved person who attempted to run away. The bells also helped to locate the enslaved should he/she be successful in their escape, and the collar had the additional impact of making it difficult for them to sleep.
The incorporation of sound elements using the cowbell, as one of the primary instruments used in Junkanoo, to develop rhythm and syncopation is a new artistic and conceptual device for Beadle. The tense and provocative adaptation of the cowbell in tandem with these figures is a signal to the noise that one can also hear in Fagen’s lament. The resonance and constant ringing of the cowbells are used here as a metaphor for those that have been institutionalised, and those that still feel the yoke of oppression.
The freedom that we all exist under is examined and scrutinised by Beadle; what remains ever present is the brutal force and system of repression and racism, one that turns back onto itself and consumes its condition by eliciting the same kind of behaviours. With the collar, we are left to question if this imagery and reality really is in our past.
Instead of freeing the body, it further restricts its presence and intention. It narrows the possibilities and perpetuates the shackles by which society and the system take advantage of you, whether that be power dynamics affecting relationships or the more widespread fact that colonialism has left an indelible mark on who we are as a people and our behaviours.
Beadle calls Fagen to account for his gaze. He also calls on us to think about the present conditions under which we live. Are we still succumbing to the weight of this collar and shackle? Have we figured out how to unlock it? Or have we disposed of the weight in search of another kind of false glory, another kind of distraction?
The entire structure is automated with a sensor to automatically start the rotation as viewers enter, enlisting viewers as witnesses and complicit in this engagement.