The MoBay Underground Arts Movement

“We live in cities you'll never see onscreen, Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things, Livin' in ruins of a palace within my dreams, And you know we're on each other's team”
Lorde: Team

“Don't you think that it's boring how people talk, Making smart with their words again, well I'm bored, Because I'm doing this for the thrill of it, killin' it… It's a new art form showing people how little we care (yeah), We're so happy, even when we're smilin' out of fear”
Lorde: Tennis Court

I know the word underground cued you in to this article! So you wanna know what is “the underground”? Well it is the cutting-edge output of writers, musicians and artists linked to together by the zeitgeist (spirit of the times) of Montego Bay today and operate more or less outside the margins of what mainstream artsin Montego Bay and Jamaica has come to be known. Now during the last century, the vast majority of music you heard and bought was controlled by a small number of companies: record labels, radio stations and other dominators of the media. So too with the art you see, it is run by a small cabal of tastemakers and custodians. Artists need them to reach the public and the public’s choice was prescribed by what these gatekeepers believed could best turn a profit or suited their inclinations. Today, however, a networked world is giving artists and audiences the tools to reject those companies forever.

The arrival of illegal filesharing on Napster  at the turn of the century changed everything: it was a collision between a new format (MP3) and a new distribution system (the internet), both of which sat outside of the control of the traditional music business. It made the first dents in the arts and culture cartel and gave the underground a hotline to a global audience for the first time. Social Media platforms learned from this and focused on doing one thing well: community (Facebook, Twitter), video (YouTube), audio (SoundCloud), sales (Bandcamp), ticketing (Songkick, Dice), self-serve distribution (TuneCore, CD Baby), alternative funding (Pledge, Patreon, Kickstarter) and so on. In time Google image searches,Deviant Art, Flickr, Instagram and Pinterest would do the same for visual art. For the last two decades, if not even longer, modern Jamaican art has been trapped in the vicious circle of pastiches and appropriations. The art world was full of neo-somethings, post-isms, and meta-artistic phenomena. Conceptual art, minimalism, the revival of the abstract, all these movements were more concerned with conditions of their own existence, self-referential and approachable only through art theory. Modern Jamaican art spoke only to a limited circle of educated people and even they are getting tired of its senselessness.

Today’s underground in Mobay is an eclectic mix and hybrid of intellectualism and energies ignorant of academic discourse and theory, immersed into our real and current everyday reality which contemporary artists ignored, naturally has become a movement attractive to many. Also, it is the only movement that emerged in the last 15 years or more that wasn’t just a revival of some other historic art traditions. What we have here is not a harkening back to Barry Watson or Claude Mckay, not a reggae revival as the artistes in Kingston have engineered but a kind of Afro-Caribbean Futurism. Furthermore, the aesthetic diversity of Mobay’s art practitioners is welcomed in the art world dominated by monochromatic canvases and empty spaces.

Music and art today are highly democratic because of its rootedness in public, communal spaces and social media spaces. The social, political aspects and critical connotations sre to be praised owing to the fact that contemporary art has lost its sense of the social surroundings. When on display at the National Gallery West has on display Art like “How to Kill a sound boy” and “We should keep her”, it seems contrary to what artists and artistes on the ground in Montego Bay Jamaica are doing. Kill a sound boy seems an assault on the musical artist and begs question of sexuality. While a piece that would suggest we have kept the Queen, seems a slap in the face to all the street poets and artists that believe in our ability to govern our own destiny and chart an Afro-Carribean future. It would seem a reneging on the zeal of our predecessors.

“The mass media and mainstream are too expensive and soul sucking for the underground artist. Renting a gallery for exhibition isn’t cheap. There are too many compromises. Too many people telling you how you should be doing things.” Hence, the greatest painters and musicians and poets are rarely on TV as to be invisible, never ever in daily newspapers, and not even in the same universe as advertisers.

Montego Bay’s Underground art is emerging as rebellious owing simply to its exclusion, so expect it be connected to subculture lifestyles, hostile toward art institutions, with anti-capitalist, social and political undertones. The flowering of Montegonian underground art is strongly dependent on the communities and local reception. It originates on a neighborhood and community level, addressing local issues and communicating messages in-situ. Globally, urban art like no other movement in recent art history gained praise and recognition everywhere and the most intriguing thing about it is that it was equally appreciated by the large art loving audience, elite collectors, and art professionals. It is a puzzling fact then it is left behind as Montego Bay presents itself to the world?

About the author: Yannick Nesta Pessoa B.A. is Jamaica’s first blogger, a Community Activist and Law Student. Follow Yannick on Twitter at @yahnyk | yannickpessoa@yahoo.com