Gossypium aka Cotton In some societies there is no word for art because the creative experience is integrated with a way of life, in which its ritual use and form are purposeful and significant t the culture. Conversely, the material historicism of hand made objects d’art, not to be confused with craft, functions as the visual conscience of a people, representing a society’s history of values, hopes, dreams, triumphs, tragedies, joys and successes. Chaz Guest’s work, The Cotton Series: A Place of Reference invites the world to remember and reflect upon the universal experience of enslavement and the history of sharecroppers in America. Today in the face of leisure, the descendents of American sharecroppers of African and European descent have lost context of their traditions, culture, and interconnected histories. Like musical compositions, the creation of a series of images is an act of combining parts to form a whole.While one visual statement may be a variation on a theme. The Cotton Series: A Place of Reference provides both an intimate and larger whole capable of raising questions and making statements about a universal legacy. This Series symbolically marks time, respects perseverance, honors work ethic,empathizes hardship, cherishes love, appreciates sacrifice, and champions endurance. The Cotton Series: A Place of Reference is comprised of fifteen paintings and five drawings that examine an emotional and very human synthesis of many narratives, stories and histories. These narratives, stories and histories find expression in the meticulous and masterful use of pure sepia ink and hand mixed Egyptian blue and pozzulli reds and blues drenched in a visual cacophony of memories of a not so distant past. When asked to write about The Cotton Series: A Place of Reference I had to challenge myself to delve deeper into the meaning behind cotton and its historical impact on the contradictory complexities of popular American 21st century culture A culture that exists without consideration of a past or hope for a future. A society that unconsciously seeks instant gratification as it produces, consumes, and discards everything of value. How does 21st century popular culture relate to The Cotton Series while living in a society corrupted by mediocrity as a norm? What can be done about a society where selective amnesia concerning the history of the N word prevails as it is used as a social contrivance of an endearing etiquette, as well as functioning as a noun in music, film, literature and socio-political platforms? Who cares about cotton in an age where cosmetic surgery from eye color to genitalia is encouraged by capitalistic interests in a neurosis called narcissism? How can people relate to cotton when the majority of Americans live below the poverty line and $500,000 gold and diamond encrusted ‘grille’ (teeth) and $300 jeans are aspirations? How are we in an era where high school graduates are illiterate and not worried about only having the choice of picking cotton in order to eat? And why have those of this so called “educated society”, who benefited from the sacrifices of their foremothers and forefathers become comfortably and functionally unconscious of the date and plight of those who have significantly less? Clearly any understanding and respect for historical cultural legacies that impact the psychology of a healthy human being has been diluted by every recreational distraction from self. This distraction has been accomplished through idol worship of celebrity, drug and alcohol abuse, rampant sexuality through advertising, music videos and even Disney films. What does a series about Cotton have to do with 21st century popular culture? Have the economic impact and the history of Cotton made us dumber, less compassionate, or less humane? It was work hard, git beatins and half fed ... . The times I hated most was pickin' cotton when the frost was on the bolls. My hands git sore and crack open and bleed."--Mary Reynolds, Slave Narrative from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938 One of the first images of slavery that leaps into everyone's mind is the scene of the enslaved stooped over, picking cotton, and hauling huge cotton-stuffed bags behind them. Unlike many first reactions, this one is correct. At the height of the plantation system in 1850, when cotton had become the dominant cash crop of the South, 1.8 million of the 2.5 million enslaved in the United States (nearly 75 percent) were involved in the production of cotton. Yet, cotton was a relative latecomer in the story of slavery in America. Between the arrival of the first enslaved in Jamestown in August 1619 and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery (December 6, 1865), cotton only becomes a significant factor after the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Nonetheless, during that 72-year period, an estimated one million individuals were enslaved in the service of "King Cotton," either by transatlantic or by domestic slave traders. How did tiny little fibers ensnare Africans and their descendents and bind them to slavery? In addition, what part did that play in helping cotton to become, as the Cotton Incorporated slogan says, "the fabric of our lives," found in our blue jeans, bandages, tee shirts and bed-sheets? In retrospect, cotton manufacturing as an enterprise rose in the middle of the topical wilderness of the Yucatan peninsula, remote from market sources of capital and transportation infrastructures. This is a testament to the powerful attraction that cotton had for entrepreneurs all around the globe through the nineteenth century (1780-1914). The promises of cotton, there and elsewhere, captured the imagination of merchants, manufacturers, planters, and consumers. As a result cotton growing, cotton manufacturing and cotton consumption expanded rapidly in the early nineteenth century, turning cotton textiles from a luxury good, accessible only to a few in the West, into the first true mass-market commodity. Merchants, budding manufacturers, technically skilled workers, empire builders, government bureaucrats, enslaved Africans, spinners and weavers from all around the world were linked in new ways through plantations and factories, slavery and free labor in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Collectively, they built the dynamic and at times explosive empire of cotton and with it the world of nineteenth century capitalism. More than any other dramatic directors, they recast how people lived, produced and consumed in places as diverse as Mississippi and Lancashire, the Nile Delta, the plains of Surat and New York City. The most compelling factor about cotton’s history in the nineteenth century is that no manufactured good inspired so many revolutionary technical innovations, organizational improvements, domestic and international conflicts After Eli Whitney built the cotton gin, English, American, Brazilian and Japanese cotton manufacturers, among others, encouraged a global and unprecedented move of people from the countryside to cities. Although a great deal is written about Lancashire textile factories, Louisiana cotton plantations, Alexandria merchants and Surat handloom weavers, the writings vaguely address that it was the global reach as a well as the tight linkage of agriculture, trade and manufacturing that made the cotton industry so integral to the Industrial Revolution at the expense of humanity. In essence, the empire of cotton depended on the plantation and the factory, the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’, railroads and steamships. In short, this empire was a global network of supply, transport, manufacture, distribution, and sale. As the 19th century’s primary global commodity, cotton brought volatile opposites together in which contraries: slavery and free labor, states and markets, colonialism and free trade collectively contributed to the growers in the American South and the textile manufacturers in the American North, butting heads and igniting the Civil War, in which a river of blood was shed for a ball of white fluff---COTTON. Chaz Guest has been seriously engaged in art making since the early 1990’s and the works within can be viewed as a multiplicity of a single drama in art making. His painting is about truth without disguises, which invite audiences to reflect upon their own narratives within the history of humanity, which exemplifies how art, beyond the making of objects can provide a much more than enhanced aesthetic toward society’s consciousness. With respect to consciousness, I encourage you to pay attention to the detail and intimacy of this limited edition artist’s book. As you turn the pages take note of the layers of love and consideration for detail in the imagery and paper because this is visual art where superlatives are unnecessary. In this sense, creative expression and social consciousness go hand in hand in The Cotton Series: a Place of Reference. Halima Taha, Ph.D.
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