Gilane Tawadros, 'Foreword'
In: Annotations 4: Steve Ouditt: Creole-in-site. Edited by Gilane Tawadros. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1998, pp. 4-5.
'A post-independence American/English-educated Christian Indian Trinidadian West Indian Creole male artist'. This is how Steve Ouditt described himself in a playful but poignant comment on the complexities of diasporan identities which have become so resonant in the so-called post-modern world. Profoundly aware of the limitations of language which is a once too literal and too clumsy to describe adequately our identities and our experiences, Steve Ouditt's art and writings navigate the difficult terrain between the visual and the verbal, between insightful wordplay and devastating insights into the 'poetic, plots and phobias' of what he describes as 'sucrotopia' - a neologism coined by Ouditt to describe the space of the subaltern, a space of 'sweet pain'. This is the pain which 'the subaltern feels emotionally or physically when subjected to many structures of institutionally administered legal and illegal injustices'.
In this first publication of the artist's writings, we have brought together Steve Ouditt's on-line diary writings 'Creole in-site', written and published on inIVA's website over a period of twelve months (www.iniva.org/creole), and the 10,000 word text which he wrote as part of his MA in the History and Theory of Art in the Modern Period at Goldsmiths College, University of London. The book also contains documentation of the artist's work and, in particular, of his residency at the 198 Gallery in Brixton, London in 1997.
During this residency, Ouditt transformed the gallery into an oppressive space, intersected by metal wires strung across the gallery at different heights. Every visitor was implicated in the work; snared in the artist's elaborate mesh of wires and texts. You had to duck and dive and weave between the metal cables to view the different elements of the piece which contained and constricted your movement, threatening to trip you up or decapitate you at every turn. The work - entitled Works (on Process) - speaks volumes (literally since language and the artist's negotiation of language lies at the heart of this piece) of the cul-de-sac of spaces and identities which operate as closure and as full stop. In this piece, Ouditt reflects upon the limitations of both 'home' and 'away' and the oppressive nature of parochial narrow-mindedness on the one had and simplistic internationalism on the other.
It is this theme, together with the tense and contradictory relationship between the visual and the verbal, which is the thread connecting the artist's texts. Like his artworks, Ouditt's writings are the traces of the artist's footsteps as he navigates a path out of the entrapment of 'sucrotopia' and out of the entrapment of writing itself. Like the 'viewer' of Ouditt's installation, the reader negotiates a treacherous route through a series of beautifully-crafted sentences and passages which eloquently articulate the pleasure and pain of the diasporan experience.