Event: an exhibition of art
Preview: Friday 12th September 2025
Open: Saturday 13th September 2025
Closed: Saturday 20th September 2025
THE GALLERY AT MORAY HOUSE
EXHIBITION TWO
BEYOND A BOUNDARY: WHAT IS ART?
September 2025
Once again, The Gallery at Moray House hosted an exhibition of art to coincide with the Caribbean Premier League cricket matches in Guyana. Last year the theme of the exhibition was bat and ball, the game played in yards, villages, roads and beaches across Guyana and the Caribbean.
This year we drew our inspiration from CLR James and his masterpiece, Beyond a Boundary. In it, James famously asked; “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?
” He also devoted an entire chapter to another question: What is art?
Is cricket, he asked, ‘mere entertainment or is it an art?’
James pronounced the game of cricket ‘structurally perfect’.
“Cricket .. is so organised that it is compelled to reproduce the central action which characterises all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own: two individuals are pitted against each other in a conflict that is strictly personal but no less strictly representative of a social group. One individual batsman faces one individual bowler. But each represents his side.”
In fact, James asserted, the batsman facing the ball ‘does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side.’ James also considered the arrangement of the game ‘structurally perfect’ as a dramatic spectacle. Each encounter between batsman and bowler is an ‘individual, isolated episode…completely self-contained. Each has its beginning, the ball bowled; its middle, the stroke played; its end, runs, no runs, dismissal.’ The game draws forth from its players ‘elemental human activities, qualities and emotions – attack, defence, courage, gallantry, steadfastness, grandeur, ruse… We never grow out of them, of the need to renew them. They are the very stuff of human life.’
In addition to its ability to conjure drama at so many levels, cricket was also, for CLR James, a visual art. Humans everywhere, he explained, are primed to seek ‘the perfect flow of motion’ or style. Whereas in the fine arts, this image was captured and rendered on canvas or in wood or clay or marble, in cricket it was constantly recreated: ‘the spectator sees the image constantly.’
The audience, cheering or applauding a ‘fierce hook or dazzling slip-catch’ was engaging in an expression of artistic emotion! James concluded the chapter, What is art?, with a meditation on democracy. The purpose of democracy, he says, is simply ‘a more complete existence.’ He ended the chapter with this statement:
‘The popular democracy of Greece, sitting for days in the sun watching The Oresteia; the popular democracy of our day, sitting similarly, watching [cricket] – each in its own way grasps at a more complete human existence. We may someday be able to answer Tolstoy’s exasperated and exasperating question: What is art? – but only when we learn to integrate our vision of Walcott on the back foot through the covers with the outstretched arm of the Olympic Apollo.’
Artists were invited to decorate homemade bats and cricket balls. These were exhibited and available for purchase. Admission to the exhibition was free.
In addition to hosting members of the public, The Gallery invited half a dozen school groups and provided a guided tour of the exhibition, interactions with artists and the opportunity for students to create their own bat designs.
The Gallery also conducted an outreach visit to a local orphanage to present a slideshow of the exhibition and to allow the children to respond creatively to this.
The Gallery acknowledges the kind support of Republic Bank for this initiative.
