If carnivals represent our indigenous arts, our ways of imagining ourselves, Peter Minshall articulates both the “natural nobility” we have as a people (the subject of Carlisle Chan’s Independence mural at Piarco) and our tragic tendency to self-degradation, as evidenced by the destruction cynical of that mural in 1980 by the state. Through his medium of mass, the artist Minshall presents himself to us and himself to the world.
Creativity, pleasure, surprise, togetherness, competition, trampling, exhilaration are all at the heart of carnival. Minshall captures or rather unleashes these values in his creations. A passionate storyteller, his images have fueled the public imagination, defying convention and creating narratives that reflect our nation in a mass theater.
When Minshall presented his first work to Stephen and Elsie Lee Heung’s group in 1976, the country was in the throes of an oil boom. Paradise Lost unfolded a narrative that, not only for its stunning designs, but as a reflection of our moment, gave viewers pause. His iconic “Humming Bird” costume, portrayed by his sister Sherry-Ann Guy Coelho in 1974, had already signaled that he would be a factor in the revolutionary change that would take place in the carnival arts. This theme of evanescence, the destruction of beauty, would be one he would return to often, especially in his 1983-85 trilogy of sets, The River, Callaloo, and The Golden Calabash, which dramatized this conflict in an apocalyptic one. ladder. In its narrative, this trilogy unfolded our moral, economic and environmental struggles at the end of the oil boom.
Minshall’s dark series in the late 80s, culminating in Danse Macabre with his haunting Midnight Robber, was as powerful a prophecy as any for the events of the 1990s. His measure is never about t ‘give people ‘what they want’, much less what we expect, but to discover his interpretation of who we are. He would leave us, however, with images which, when touched, will lead us to our truest selves as a nation. The irrepressible joy of the now iconic ‘Tan Tan and Saga Boy’, ‘Merry Monarch’ and the unforgettable title story ‘I Saw the Bird of Paradise, It Spread Before Me and I’ll Never Be the Same Again’. .
What is constant about Minshall is that his measure always tells a story about who we are to the world. As he explained at the 1995 Carifesta symposium during his project to design the opening of the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics:
“It’s not that I’m special. It is the island that is special. There is a rich soil that produces strange, rare hybrids. It causes a different kind of growth. By its very nature, it gives rise to a different way of seeing, a different way of looking at things, a different perspective, a perspective that can only have been formed here.
“The rules have been broken and changed. Ideas of scale and function change. Speech and thought patterns change. Basic concepts are gradually shifted and reversed. An oil drum becomes a musical instrument.
“A suit is no longer a suit. The suit becomes a sculpture. A human being wears the sculpture, dances the sculpture and performs it. A human being gives life to the sculpture. Likewise, sculpture brings a human being to life. Human energy is unleashed at an astonishing rate. The heart beats and trembles. You see the music. You hear the dance.
“This is massive. There is nothing to compare it to or measure it against outside of the natural environment of the island. It is in itself what it is.”
