Carnival, from which, in Grenada the ShortKnee emerged, resulted from chaotic events south of the Sahara and on the streets of Europe played out in the Caribbean. My exploration of Grenada’s carnival icon, the ShortKnee, a masked carnival character wrapped in six and a half yards of vulgar fabric, mirrors, whistles, bells and baby powder – focuses mainly on translations. I use other artists’ works featuring pierrot and clown-like figures or those dealing with war, migration, desolation and isolation, as core references to assist with my research into this unique island masquerade.
In the search for ideas to brand our traditional cultural elements, I decided to mock up a Shortknee-in-a-Box, having at my disposal a discarded perfume box and card. The handle and spring are pending.
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| ShortKnee in a box |
A Jack-in-the-Box (JITB) is a basic child’s wind up toy: a box, a handle crank and a Jack, the leering character that springs out of the top of the box when the handle is turned. This toy theoretically has as its origins a 13th century English prelate Sir John Schorne, who once cast the devil into a boot to protect a village. That story inspired the toy’s invention by a German clock maker in the early 1500s – a wooden box with a pop-up ‘Jack’ (reference to the devil) – referred to as un diable en boîte (a devil in a box) in French. Sometime during the Renaissance, jesters and clown-like figures began to replace devils inside the box, but modern ‘jacks’ can be anything the imagination can supply, from politicians to puppies.
My version of the JITB use the ShortKnee (and possibly other Grenadian cultural elements which can be made into JITB), as another way of cultural promotion.
Of course there is the Jack-in-the-box effect, ie the catastrophic destruction of a turreted armored vehicle, where an explosion causes the top of the vehicle to be violently blown off. With the disappointing execution of this year’s carnival theme based on the ShortKnee, it could well be the beginnings of a traditional masquerade JICB effect, where the explosion comes from a long slow burning fuse of frustration, neglect and in many cases, a preference of imported bikini culture over historically relevant culture.
The devil is in the details…