Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain 9780822386445

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shades of blac k

Introduction ■ i

shades of

ii ■ Introduction

assembling black arts in 1980s britain

black

David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom & Sonia Boyce, editors

Duke University Press Durham and London 2005 in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) and the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive (Aavaa)

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© 2005 Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Rebecca Giménez. Typeset in Meta. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Aa

vaa Published in collaboration with the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) and the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive (Aavaa). Rasheed Araeen’s essay “The Success and Failure of the Black Arts Movement” was originally published in Third Text 18, no. 2 (March 2004): 135–52. susan pui san lok’s essay “A to Y (Entries for an Inventionry of Dented ‘I’s)” was originally published in Third Text 17, no. 1 (March 2003): 63–71. These essays are reprinted courtesy of Taylor and Francis, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. Both authors retain the copyright to their essays. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Duke University Center for International Studies and the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University, both of which provided funds toward the production of this book.

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David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce Shades of Black: Assembling the 1980s

p a r t one 1

contents

texts Stuart Hall Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge—and After

21

Rasheed Araeen The Success and Failure of the Black Arts Movement

35

Keith Piper Wait, Did I Miss Something? Some Personal Musings on the 1980s and Beyond

41

Lubaina Himid Inside the Invisible: For/Getting Strategy

49

Kobena Mercer Iconography after Identity

59

susan pui san lok A to Y (Entries for an Inventionry of Dented “I”s)

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67

Zineb Sedira in collaboration with Jawad Al-Nawab On Becoming an Artist: Algerian, African, Arab, Muslim, French, and Black British? A Dialogue of Visibility

77

Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza CoRespondents

89

Judith Wilson Triangular Trades: Late-Twentieth-Century “Black” Art and Transatlantic Cultural Commerce

103

Dawoud Bey Collaborative Projects: Toward a More Inclusive Practice

109

Stan Abe Why Asia Now? Contemporary Asian Art and the Politics of Multiculturalism

115

Naseem Khan Choices for Black Arts in Britain over Thirty Years

123

Gilane Tawadros A Case of Mistaken Identity

133

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color pl ates

p a r t t wo

the conference

166

Conference Papers and Speakers

167

Jean Fisher Dialogues

p a r t t hree

time lines

199

Adelaide Bannerman Introduction

210

Time Lines

p a r t four

recommended reading

307

Leon Wainwright Introduction

309

Histories and Positions

312

Visual Practices

314

Exhibitions and Display

316

Institutions, Policies, and Reports

319

Contributors

327

Acknowledgments

329

Index

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shades of blac k

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David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce Shades of Black: Assembling the 1980s

In his concluding comments to “The Living Archive” conference, sponsored by the London-based African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive (Aavaa) and held at the Tate Gallery in March 1997, Stuart Hall issued a challenge to his audience. Responding to Rasheed Araeen’s discussion of the importance of producing a history (or histories) of the contemporary black arts scene in Britain and the danger, in generating such histories, of “ghettoizing” a diverse body of artistic works in a “minority enclave,” Hall stated: “I have to say that I think it’s time that those issues were more directly and extensively faced and probed. I think that there’s been a kind of slackness around notions of cultural diversity and ethnic arts, et cetera. We’ve been through a very intense period of reflection around that, and we’re now in a period when a variety of di≈erent formulations stand in place of really serious and rigorous thinking and I hope therefore that today’s debate, which opened up some of those positions, can really be followed through on some subsequent occasions.”1 This book, and the set of transatlantic conversations and conferences that preceded it, represents one response to that challenge.

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David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce Shades of Black: Assembling the 1980s

In his concluding comments to “The Living Archive” conference, sponsored by the London-based African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive (Aavaa) and held at the Tate Gallery in March 1997, Stuart Hall issued a challenge to his audience. Responding to Rasheed Araeen’s discussion of the importance of producing a history (or histories) of the contemporary black arts scene in Britain and the danger, in generating such histories, of “ghettoizing” a diverse body of artistic works in a “minority enclave,” Hall stated: “I have to say that I think it’s time that those issues were more directly and extensively faced and probed. I think that there’s been a kind of slackness around notions of cultural diversity and ethnic arts, et cetera. We’ve been through a very intense period of reflection around that, and we’re now in a period when a variety of di≈erent formulations stand in place of really serious and rigorous thinking and I hope therefore that today’s debate, which opened up some of those positions, can really be followed through on some subsequent occasions.”1 This book, and the set of transatlantic conversations and conferences that preceded it, represents one response to that challenge.

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Beginnings, however, as Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and numerous other critics have reminded us, are notoriously unstable things. And so perhaps another point of departure was a heated conversation that took place in the fall of 1997 between Ian Baucom, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, and Keith Piper several days before the opening of The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, cocurated by Baucom at the Yale University Art Gallery. “What do you think of doing a book about the black British art movement of the 1980s?” Baucom asked, setting o≈ a contentious discussion. Was there a movement as such? How might a volume on its history enable and limit the study and critical reception of individual artists and individual works? What, after all, did it mean for the Yale show to group Biswas, Boyce, and Piper together as “3 Black British Artists”? The conversation produced no definitive answers, but it did generate one shared conviction: if you raised the question, you would be sure to start a debate about whether that “movement” existed and what it might have consisted of. Baucom later repeated the question to Boyce, citing the importance of Ten.8 magazine’s final issue, The Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 1980s, as the impetus for developing a discussion on the period. The decision to proceed by organizing a set of conferences, one at Aavaa and another at Duke University, brought the project into conversation with an ongoing debate on transnationalism. During the 1980s a number of non-UK cultural critics were instrumental in ensuring that black British cultural theory was read, and the work of black British artists and filmmakers made visible, in a series of international spaces, particularly in the United States. During the same decade there were also several institutional projects that focused on the problem of a transnational dialogue on contemporary black British art. This was very di≈erent from the reception that black British cultural practice was receiving in Britain by the end of the 1980s. These projects were, however, almost exclusively American-led, particularly in the areas of photography (US/UK Exchange and SF Camerawork), independent film (Young, British & Black), and survey visual art exhibitions (Disputed Identities).2 By the late 1980s and early 1990s, in response to this arrangement of institutional power, a number of projects began trying to redefine the transnational boundaries of the dialogue, with organizations like Panchayat organizing black British exhibitors at the Havana Biennale in Cuba and the presentation by Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers) of black British photography at the Arles photography festival in

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France. The conferences and this book have sought to participate in this reorganization of transatlantic power dynamics. Organizing the follow-up conference at Duke in the spring of 2001 was, in the event, a fortuitous experience, and not only because of Duke’s long-standing history of dialogue with black British cultural practice under the initiative of Jane Gaines in the Film Department and Richard Powell in the Department of Art and Art History. The lineup for the conference, hosted by the newly opened John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, included scholars, artists, and curators from the United Kingdom and the United States and fit perfectly the Center’s dedication to cross-disciplinary collaborative exploration. It was a unique opportunity to bring together the generation that participated in the 1980s Black Arts Movement, to incorporate the new debates that emerged in the 1990s, and to engage the voices and opinions of a broad range of U.S.-based artists and scholars. The keynote speech delivered by Stuart Hall was followed by the opening of an exhibition produced for the conference, Objects in Time. The exhibition included a commissioned artist film, Chanting Heads; a chronological account of Afro-Asian art activity in Britain from 1935 to 2000 titled Timeline; a Stuart Hall/Autograph collaborative film, The Appropriated Frame; and a show reel of films produced during the 1980s and 1990s about the Black Arts Movement and individual makers entitled The Moving Cube. The conferees also visited and incorporated in their conversations the student-curated exhibition of contemporary Asian art Made in Asia? that had been coordinated by Stan Abe.3 The conference itself was organized to cover four main interdependent areas: aesthetic and artistic practice since the 1980s, curatorial debates during and since the 1980s, influential cultural criticism and art historical debates, and the influence of government policy on the arts and their dissemination. Behind all these arrangements, however, were those initial questions: What is, or was, this “Black Arts Movement” in Britain? And why the 1980s? What was it about this moment and this convergence of artistic and political allegiances that paved the way for a generation of “raised in Britain” practitioners and analysts to meet and to name a black British art movement? The title of both the conference and this book provides a preliminary set of answers, though perhaps only if appended with a question mark. For as much as the aim of this project has been to produce a series of accounts of this “critical decade” (as David A.

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Bailey and the other editors of Ten.8’s final issue have named it), it continues to ask whether it is in fact possible to speak of a semicoherent arts movement organized under the signs of “blackness” and “black Britishness.” It asks what it means for these terms to name the historical and conceptual site where a variegated array of artistic practices intersect. It asks what is gained, and lost, by gathering and organizing both practices and a history of practices in this way, and whether history is well served by such an impulse to collect and identify. The project thus implicitly constitutes an inquiry into the nature not only of a movement but of movements, particularly those sorts of “Renaissance movements” (the Harlem Renaissance in the United States, the Celtic Revival in Ireland, the Sophiatown generation in South Africa, to name but a few) that have proven so central to the artistic, cultural, and political history of the twentieth century. This endeavor proceeds from the conviction that such movements are made, not found, that they are shaped and patterned, that they are historically produced and historically productive, that movements, identities, identifications, and histories are concrete, if highly negotiable, assemblages. Like an archive, however, assemblages of this sort exist not merely to catalogue or contain the past but, as Jacques Derrida has recently reminded us, as openings to the future.4 For they exist not only as repositories to be guarded but as something to be disassembled, reassembled, and disassembled once more—at once shifting landmarks relating to what has been and intimations of what is to come. To “assemble the black British 1980s” is thus in a very real sense to produce an array of contemporary histories in which both past and future are made present. This work thus implies an investigation of what might be called the “liveliness” of history by examining the temporal coordinates of knowledges, concepts, institutions, and practices. To speak of a movement is also to speak of several interlocking moments: that of the movement itself, the moments from which it emerged, and the moment from which it becomes possible to look back in retrospect and forward in anticipation. Hence the title “Shades of Black” is chosen in part because, for many of the artists concerned, artistic practice has frequently been a sort of anamnestic labor. It is perhaps a conjuring art, an invoking and materializing of histories, subjects, and images that have been repeatedly unnamed, repressed, or assigned only a flickering, spectral visibility. “There are no stories in the riots,” the narrator of John Akomfrah’s film Handsworth Songs (1986) indicates, “only the ghosts of other, earlier stories.” That title is also chosen

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because to look back at the Black Arts Movement is to revisit something that has a sort of “untimely,” troubling, ghostly relation to the present, occasioning much debate for artists, curators, and art historians unsure as to whether this particular disappearing/ reappearing shade of “black” or “black British” art should be recalled or dispelled. It is to that uncertainty, to that ambivalence about what to do with the specter of black art haunting contemporary art history and art practice, that this book seeks to respond. As the obvious pun on “shades” indicates, it further seeks both to retain a primary focus on the visual and to insist that any apparent absolute has a multitude of incarnations. Any one history encompasses a multitude of stories, and a history of a black British arts scene cannot be monochromatic; black is not black but all the shades of black. This, obviously enough, constitutes an invitation to enormous labor, yet the outcome cannot be, in any sense, encyclopedic. Nor should it be. For it has been a central notion of this project that to attempt a definitive or exhaustive history is to work counter to the spirit of the artistic enterprises that the project seeks to engage. If those enterprises share anything in common, then, somewhat paradoxically, it is a suspicion of fixed definitions, absolute histories, encyclopedic knowledges. The di≈erence around which a British Black Arts Movement might be organized, as Hall argued at the “Living Archive” conference, is not the di≈erence of a preexisting essence but of a di≈erentiated set of “routes by which practicing comes to modernity.” By attending to such a concept of di≈erence, we have hoped to produce not a synthetic history of the black arts scene in Britain, but a collection of histories, a corporate and polyvocal genealogy, a lively and living archive of the present’s ability to assemble both its pasts and its futures. The book is organized in four parts. The first section collects thirteen texts developed from talks delivered at the Duke conference. The second consists of Jean Fisher’s “Dialogues.” Drawing on the video documentation and transcripts of the conference, Fisher was invited to give shape to and elaborate on the lively exchanges that unfolded over the four days for this publication. What emerges is a thorough and engaging sense of the complex debates. The third section comprises a revised text and image edition of the Timeline shown in the Objects in Time exhibition. And the fourth is recommended reading on postwar black arts in Britain. The text throughout is illustrated with individual works that the many contributors to this volume have identified as crucial to their unique trajectories through the archives of this moment. The volume as a whole is a record of

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those routes they have traced, an editorial curation, of sorts, of conversations, texts, and images that shade this “critical decade.” A few more words of explanation are due, on not only the matter of black British art but, also, the question of the 1980s, the moment we have chosen to posit as critical. Why select a frame that implies the priority of retrospection as much as it assumes the coherence of an (in many ways) artificial periodization? By way of an answer, some preliminary overview of the contributors’ own responses to such questions might prove valuable. In his essay “Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge—and After,” Stuart Hall traces some of the key positions, circumstances, and shifts that took place not simply in the 1980s but over a forty-year period, asking whether it is possible to assemble a definitive interpretation of the 1980s without taking into account earlier decades, international events, and social movements. Paying particular attention to the 1950s and 1960s, he argues that events that took place in these periods had an important e≈ect on the 1980s and 1990s, while also underscoring a crucial di≈erence in attitude between the two consecutive postwar generations. Indeed, he suggests that what made the 1980s unique was its convergence of two generations of black artists, together with their contrasting relationship to modernism, and the opposing anticolonial and postcolonial politics they articulated. Two discourses on black art ground his argument: Aubrey Williams’s “A Black Aesthetic,” a discussion with an audience of black artists organized by the Race Today collective in London in the mid-1980s, and Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers’s exchange in Third Text no. 5, “Black Art: A Discussion.” “Two visions or pathways for the black arts seem to be in contention here,” Hall suggests. “They are not diametrically opposed. Both are informed by a political critique; both want an art practice that is engaged with these larger political questions. But they register deep di≈erences of experience and political perspective, which plays through into the aesthetics [of the two generations].” Artists of the first generation, such as Williams, who migrated to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, were, he goes on to suggest, fully engaged with modernist ideas and the “international style.” They came to London, Hall notes, “in a spirit not altogether di≈erent from that in which early European modernists went to Paris: to fulfill their artistic ambitions and to participate in what they saw as the heady atmosphere of artistic innovation in the most advanced center of art at that time.” Artists of the subsequent raised-in-Britain

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generation, such as Chambers, however, did not invest in modernist internationalism. Instead, Hall indicates, they rebelliously embraced an ethnocentric aesthetic as a challenge to the endgame of late modernism and as a way of raising critical questions about identity and representation within the framework of an emergent postcolonial critique of history. For these artists, Hall argues, the problems of modernism had been displaced by the problematics of identity, but, in the process of sowing the seeds for a self-consciously “Black” Arts Movement, Chambers and his contemporaries left a crucial series of questions unanswered (or, perhaps, unanswerable). Hall inquires: “Black because the artists are black? Or because they are about a black experience? Or because they deploy a black aesthetic language? And, if so, of what does this black aesthetic consist?” For Rasheed Araeen—an artist, founding editor of Third Text, curator of the first survey exhibition of black art at a “major” British Gallery (The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, Hayward Gallery, 1989), and Chambers’s interlocutor in the Third Text conversation—the answers to such questions are necessarily indexed to the practice of a radical politics and the refashioning of the o÷cial institutions and knowledges of the art world as much as they are bound to representational grammars of identity and race. The purpose of his essay “The Success and the Failure of the Black Arts Movement” is, in fact, to chart what he sees as the rise and fall of the radicalism of the movement. The historical overview he presents signals 1979 as a key moment, one that oversaw not only the birth of Thatcherism as a political force, but the parallel emergence of artists like Mona Hatoum and Eddie Chambers, who began their public careers by asserting a critical challenge to the Eurocentrism of British art schools. Araeen supplements this investigation of arts school interventionism, discussions of founding black arts exhibitions (the Pan-Afrikan Connection at the Africa Centre, London, and the Thin Black Line at the ica, London), and the vocal emergence, in the early 1980s, of black women artists with an analysis of one of Chambers’s early works, The Destruction of the National Front. Araeen suggests that this piece fused together the modernist tropes of collage and cubism with a new radical language, and so helped to define the movement Chambers and his contemporaries were helping to establish. “[The] change from a paradigmatic critical process to the formation of an iconographic visual language,” evident in all these developments and visually signaled in Chambers’s work, Araeen argues, “became somewhat the hallmark of the Black Arts Movement.” In Araeen’s view, however, the

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early promise of this moment was not kept. He sees a subsequent falling o≈, indeed a “failure,” that he attributes to the lack of an ongoing will to intervene politically within the art establishment. To his mind, artists became too happy to take their share of the “multicultural pie” o≈ered by public funding bodies and organizations like the Greater London Council and the Arts Council. He also suggests that the celebration of ethnocentrism, what he identifies as the “unwarranted interference from some black academics and cultural theorists,” and the rising tide of global capital in the art market led to the decline of the radical position that the Black Arts Movement had staked out for itself in the early 1980s. As a result, he suggests, the work of black artists has remained marginal to art historical discourse. Keith Piper’s “Wait, Did I Miss Something? Some Personal Musings on the 1980s and Beyond” is less pessimistic but equally cautionary, particularly regarding the retrospective impulse that risks recollecting a moment like the 1980s as something other than it was. He argues that the 1980s continues to be a “misread, misaligned, and misinterpreted decade” dominated by discussions on the use of public money, political correctness, and the frustratingly unresolved terms “black art” and “Black Arts Movement.” Despite these cautions, Piper does, however, o≈er his own provisional route through the decade. He notes the significance of the inaugural National Black Art Convention, which was held at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1982, as the first visible sign of an emerging Black Arts Movement. The convention sought to explore di≈erent uses of the term “black art,” to make visible the existence of contemporary black artists, to engage questions of gender (artists such as Claudette Johnson, Piper recalls, were crucial in this regard), and to discuss the formation of organizations like the Black-Art Gallery in London and the support of public funding bodies like West Midlands Arts, which could ensure that the black art agenda was firmly acknowledged by the art establishment. At the beginning of the 1980s, he reminds us, the visibility of black artists’ work in galleries was virtually unheard of, and greater access to mainstream art venues became a central rallying call for collective action. By the late 1980s, however, with Thatcherite policies firmly entrenched in Britain, public and independent art venues sympathetic to the concerns of black art faced a withering backlash. The broader closing down of liberal left institutions, Piper observes, led a large number of black artists to “hang up their brushes.” In the 1990s, things

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shifted once again. The decade saw the Turner Prize conferred on black artists such as Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili, and Anish Kapoor, but Piper asks whether these success stories have fulfilled or merely displaced the agenda raised by the 1982 convention. His answer is a fairly unambiguous, if not nostalgic, no. He sees the 1990s as dominated not by radical politics but by the influence of commercial galleries, a televisual culture that has fashioned a media-friendly presentation of art, and the rise of the yba (young British artist) generation. The di≈erence between the decades, at least in perception, is thus, for him, quite great. As he puts it: “Art in the 1980s has come to be mythologized as drenched and constrained by imposed notions of what came to be termed ‘political correctness,’ while the irreverent yba . . . could be celebrated as part of an unfettered, postpolitical Loaded generation.” In the changed political climate that sprang up in the 1990s, devoid of the political urgency that inspired the work of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Piper therefore wonders whether we have lost the ability to imagine viable alternatives to the stranglehold that the global commercial art world has on the production, packaging, and dissemination of contemporary artistic practice. Lubaina Himid’s “Inside the Invisible: For/Getting Strategy” is equally filled with discomforting questions. It is in fact a compendium of such queries. Originally presented as an interactive performance in which conferees were asked to open and read a numbered statement placed in an envelope on their chairs, to which Himid then responded, that performance piece is here reproduced in essay form as a catalogue of incisive and thought-provoking questions about what Himid also sees as the failures of the Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. The inadequacies of strategic action and thought, an overreliance on public funding institutions, the self-imposed marginalization of black artists from the mainstream, the sparsity of writing about women’s work: all these and other issues engage her attention. She is, in particular, highly critical of the ease with which gender discrimination continues to marginalize and erase the contributions made by black women, especially in light of the fact that, throughout the 1980s, there were intense and ongoing collaborations among black women artists who were responsible not only for making work but for numerous coorganized exhibitions and independently produced publications. Collaboration, she notes, was key to what happened in that earlier moment. She wonders how that activist collaborative energy might be reharnessed under present conditions.

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Like Himid, who further argues that critical theory and art history have served black British artists poorly (she berates theorists’ and critics’ failure to support artists by not writing enough about their work), Kobena Mercer also finds the art criticism on and of the period inadequate. Taking as his cue Jean Fisher’s “plea to attend to the work before us,” he argues that despite a recent “normalization” of diversity and di≈erence within what Sarat Maharaj calls the “multicultural managerialism” of the art world, a crucial art historical amnesia remains prominent. Amnesia here signifies not an absolute loss of memory but a matter (in the case of black British art) of forgetting the artistic object itself in favor of discussions that emphasize the ethnicity of the artist, the general problematics of race, and the relationship of practitioners to the art establishment. The result of this, he argues, inevitably deflects attention from the artwork and its relationship to the broader story of twentieth-century art and the histories of diaspora that, in their turn, are among that story’s crucial, if unacknowledged, frames. Within the general contours of this argument, Mercer does go on to praise what he sees as some of the exceptional works of historiography that “redress and amend previous omissions in the common understanding of the modern art narrative.” The research that has taken place among African American academics in particular (most notably, Richard Powell’s Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century and Sharon Patton’s African-American Art), together with the comprehensive chronologies in the exhibition catalogues of The Blues Aesthetic, The Other Story, and Transforming the Crown, all provide, he suggests, a model for the investigations that are now necessary. The concluding remarks of his essay “Iconography after Identity” summarize his concerns and his reformulation of Fisher’s plea: “[We must] begin to let go of the way in which the reading of the aesthetic autonomy of the diaspora art object has been continuously overdetermined by a discourse about identity and institutions whose time is now at an ending.” The cluster of essays that follow—susan pui san lok’s “A to Y (Entries for an Inventionry of Dented ‘I’s,” Zineb Sedira and Jawad Al-Nawab’s “On Becoming an Artist: Algerian, African, Arab, Muslim, French, and Black British? A Dialogue of Visibility,” and Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza’s “CoRespondents”—raise another, if related, set of questions, questions whose frame is not so much temporal as spatial. “I want to take a spatial turn,” Yong Soon Min indicates at the beginning of her collaborative piece on the labor of collaboration. “Artworks can be thought to have addresses . . . they can be

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located . . . they come from someone, who comes from somewhere.” That “someone” and that “somewhere”—as each of these three contributions stress—are, however, not so easy to locate as they might at first seem, and are certainly not innocently or e≈ortlessly situated within the ethnogeographic place marker “black British.” For even if “blackness” in Britain means something rather di≈erent from what it means in the United States—specifying primarily, particularly during the 1980s, an act of social and political identification, an alliance politics around common experiences of disenfranchisement—by a÷liating di≈erences it also threatens to elide them, or hierarchize them, or overdetermine them. “y(b)b(aa)c(yrwbw/m)a?” susan pui san lok slyly inquires, wittily demanding why one might want to be a yba in the manner of Damien Hirst and Co. Also implicit in the question is why the 1990s explosion of the fragile 1980s consensus on blackness seems to have made available to her the option to become a Young (Black) British (Anglo-Asian) Chinese (Yellow Red White and Blue Wo/Man) Artist? Zineb Sedira and Jawad Al-Nawab’s question is similar: “Algerian, African, Arab, Muslim, French, and Black British?” How did a 1980s politics of “black” solidarity situate within itself this seeming excess of ethnic, national, and cultural identifications? For all these contributors the question of “black British” art becomes a complex problem of elaborating and complicating filiations and a÷liations, structures of collectivity, and habits of collaboration. This applies both within Britain and the many diasporic communities it houses, and abroad, in France, Algeria, China, Korea, and the United States (to name but a few of the “addresses” to which their works respond). Indeed, if the meaning and coherence of “black” emerges from the 1980s as something less certain, less identifiable, and more global than it might at first glance seem, so too does “British” and the range of locations in which “Britishness” is itself under constant reconstruction. The United States is certainly one of those locations, hosting a number of the more recent survey exhibitions and explorations of black British art (the Duke conference included). But it is also one of the places in which artists continue to refashion figures of blackness and concepts of Britishness, frequently in collaborative ventures such as those described by Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza, and those that Dawoud Bey chronicles in his “Collaborative Projects: Toward a More Inclusive Practice,” and in the exhibitions Judith Wilson examines in her essay “Triangular Trades: Late Twentieth-Century ‘Black’

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Art and Transatlantic Cultural Commerce.” To exhibit, as Wilson indicates, is not only to show but to continue to make or remake what is shown, to acknowledge that artworks exist in a triangular circuit of production, distribution, and consumption. When the work that navigates the triangular routes of the art world is itself work that is engaged not just with blackness but with the black Atlantic and its triangles of history, identity, and commerce, then the art historian, Wilson argues, must be particularly attentive to the “transatlantic circulation and exchange of information and ideas . . . [that has] inspired exciting new [black] visual practices and critical discourses on both sides of the Atlantic.” In such exchanges, and in the exhibitions and shows that frequently allow such exchanges to take place, work does not merely travel from one side of the Atlantic to the other but recodes the Atlantic as an ongoing space of black cultural fashioning and refashioning. Like Wilson, Dawoud Bey, a U.S.-based photographer, has a long history of working on cooperative transatlantic projects; his street photography work on black urban communities in the United States, to cite a single example, was first exhibited in London at Camerawork’s 1989 US/UK Photography Exchange exhibition. As he suggests, the collaborative postwar production of polysemous, circum-Atlantic codes of blackness (in which the black British arts scene has played such a crucial part) entails more than the cooperation of individual artists or groups of artists. It also demands a delicate mix of working with and contesting the authority of those arts institutions (particularly museums) whose business is to display and so also to mystify and to fix “culture.” The type of art-making projects Bey has undertaken with American teenagers within the white walls of the museum are one way to demystify the ever more global codes of ethnicity and race that (as Wilson also suggests) museums habitually police. A rigorous attention to the money flows of late capitalism, Stan Abe suggests, is another. Reframing the sorts of problems raised by susan pui san lok in a global context, Abe suggests that questions of Asianness and Chineseness in the contemporary art world not only complicate the contours of blackness, but reflect a kind of multinational investment strategy in the commodity of multiculturalism. Race, nation, and ethnicity, he implies, are not the only codes subtending the post-1980s emergence of Asia in global grammars of multicultural, minority, or black art—so too is capital. Just as capital flows, particularly as it follows the movements of a cosmopolitan Asian elite, so too does the institutional

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art world’s desire and ability to capture and commodify the radical political energies that phenomena like the Black British Arts Movement helped to put into global circulation. Gallery, museum, and multinational capitals not only follow the arts. As Naseem Khan indicates in her essay “Choices for Black Arts in Britain over Thirty Years,” sometimes the money has to come first, particularly when that money comes in the form of governmental funding for the arts. But how to fund black art? Or, as Gilane Tawadros asks in the volume’s final essay, “A Case of Mistaken Identity,” how to curate what has been funded and created? For Khan—an ex–senior policy advisor to the Arts Council of England and the chief researcher of the 1976 report The Arts Britain Ignores, the first major study of “what were then called ‘ethnic minority community arts’”—any answer to such questions is double-edged. To fund “ethnic” or “black” arts or “cultural diversity” is to address the social and political realities of a long, long history of disenfranchisement and misrecognition, but it is also, potentially, to “ghettoize . . . [to] stereotype . . . [to] categorize people in ways they reject.” To refuse to fund art on such principles, to recognize “the inadequacy of ethnic categorization,” may be to free artists “from systems that take as their starting and end point the race of the person involved,” but it is also to leave the fundamental inequities of the system in place. The 1980s—a moment, she suggests, in which the born-in-Britain generation of artists turned from a practice based on cultural preservation (of the elsewheres of their immigrant parents) to one predicated on the desire to challenge prevailing forms of discrimination—forced policymakers to follow such paradoxes through to all their points of self-contradiction. The matter, she indicates, may not have been resolved in the 1980s, but its urgency could certainly no longer be escaped. As Tawadros argues, however, even when such questions are seriously handled, policymakers and government funding can do only so much. Taking as her point of departure two “infamous” late-1980s shows, Damien Hirst’s Freeze (in the London Docklands) and Araeen’s The Other Story, Tawadros asks why the careers of the Freeze artists were so rapidly launched into lucrative international orbit while the artists represented in The Other Story have frequently continued to travel beneath the gallery world’s radar screen. The “Cool Britannia” ideology and arts policy of the early years of the Blair government certainly had something to do with the more readily fashionable and marketable art of Hirst and his fellow ybas. However, it is the broader, global postnationalization of culture

Introduction ■ xxiii

characteristic of our hypercapitalized turn-of-the-millennium moment, she argues, that has had an even more determinative impact on the world’s art markets and its curatorial practices. If hypercapitalism breeds postnationalism, then it also generates what Tawadros identifies as a new type of internationalism in the arts evidenced, in part, by the explosion of international exhibitions (the Istanbul Biennale, the Havana Biennale, the Cairo Biennale, etc.) challenging the hegemony of the Venice Biennale as the major international event of the art world calendar. As director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva), Tawadros might be expected to laud this development. And she does see signs of positive change in this new internationalist moment. First, it has given organizations such as iniva the paradoxical freedom to return to and query the now denaturalized category of nationhood; to curate black British art now, she implies, is not so much to investigate “blackness” as to probe the internationalism of “Britishness.” Second, it allows curators greater opportunity to interrogate the city (rather than the nation) and the urban articulation of global forms of cosmopolitanism. But the internationalization of the visual arts in general, and of black art in particular, is, she further suggests, a mixed blessing, for it comes in two forms: an external or long-distance internationalism and an internal or diasporic internationalism. External internationalism—the inaugural exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2001) of the Tate Modern in London supplies her chief example—seems predicated on the conviction that di≈erence is elsewhere, in Lagos, Rio, and Bombay in the case of the Tate Modern show. An internal or diasporic internationalism, on the other hand, locates di≈erence here, wherever here may be, but particularly in the metropolitan centers of the “first world,” in the diasporic reconstitution of London and Paris as much as in Havana or Rio. It is, her essay implies, by highlighting the constitutive internality of di≈erence that phenomena such as the Black British Arts Movement continue to play such a vital role, refashioning and reproducing our conceptions of the global and the international just as much as it has helped to reconfigure understandings of the nation and of race. The title of Tawadros’s essay, “A Case of Mistaken Identity,” refers to that curatorial error (or willed blindness) that mistakes alterity at a distance as the only authentic form of di≈erence, “relegating the cultural articulations of diaspora in the metropolis as secondary, inauthentic.” But the phrase, turned into a question, could also serve as a cautionary interrogation of the project of this book. The Black Arts Movement in

xxiv ■ Introduction

Britain—a case of mistaken identity? Perhaps yes, if to take the incredible variety of work gathered under the sign of such a movement is to neglect the artistic qualities of the work itself and treat it as only so much sociological evidence. Yes again, if it is to ghettoize, stereotype, or categorize the artists who produced that work in ways they would reject. And yes, yet again, if it is to confer a nostalgic coherence and authenticity on a moment that is inevitably more various, less unitary, and less easily contained than a lazy historiographic thought would like to admit. But also, no. Taking such a movement as a whole invariably risks a set of critical mistakes, but to refuse the risk of mistake—to surrender history purely to the skepticism of the nominalist impulse—is to ignore the extraordinary history of collective, collaborative thought and work to which the following pages testify. And it is also to abandon the very possibility of any politics but the politics of solipsism. To “take” a Black British Arts Movement as something worth knowing, to “take” the moment of the 1980s as in many ways “critical,” may be to risk any number of mistakes, but mistakes themselves are often our best chance for a better, more informed, less uniform “take” on history. To venture a take, to make a mistake, to take back or retake what has been (mis)taken—surely this is one of the collective impulses behind so much of the work considered here. The invitation of this volume (to its readers as to its contributors), like the invitation from Stuart Hall to which it in part responds, is to take that impulse on. Notes 1. Stuart Hall, keynote address, “The Living Archive” conference, Tate Gallery, London, 1997; transcript held at Aavaa. 2. UK/US Photography Exchange, curated by Kellie Jones, Jamaica Arts Center, New York, 1989, and Camerawork, London, 1989. Artists: Dawoud Bey, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Mikki Ferrill/Ingrid Pollard, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and Maxine Walker. Coco Fusco, Young, British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective (Bu≈alo, N.Y.: Hallwalls and the Contemporary Art Center, 1988). Disputed Identities: US/UK, curated by Rupert Jenkins and Chris Johnson, SF Camerawork, San Francisco, 1990. Artists: David A. Bailey, Sutapa Biswas, Lyle Ashton Harris, Roshini Kempadoo, James Luna, Yong Soon Min, Ingrid Pollard, Vincent Stokes, Diane Tani, and Carrie Mae Weems. 3. Made in Asia?, curated by Randi Reiner and Phil Tinari, Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, N.C., 2001. 4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, translated by Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Introduction ■ xxv

xxvi ■ Introduction

Stuart Hall Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge—and After

This paper tries to frame a provisional answer to the question How might we begin to “assemble” the 1980s as an object of critical knowledge? It does not aspire to a definitive interpretation of the period. Other contributors address this question with far greater authority. Not being a practicing artist, art critic, historian, or curator, mine is a strictly amateur view. What I try to do, instead, is to “map” the black arts in Britain in the 1980s as part of a wider cultural/political moment, tracking some of the impulses that went into its making and suggesting some interconnections between them. I “assemble” these elements, not as a unity, but in all their contradictory dispersion. In adopting this genealogical approach, the artwork itself appears, not in its fullness as an aesthetic object, but as a constitutive element in the fabric of the wider world of ideas, movements, and events, while at the same time o≈ering us a privileged vantage point on that world. In Di=erent: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity, Mark Sealy and I make the argument that contemporary black photography continues, in many ways, to operate on a problematic first defined by the practitioners who emerged in the 1980s.1 We may

Assembling the 1980s ■ 1

think of this as the first, genuinely “postcolonial” moment in black artistic practice. It witnessed an explosion of creative work by artists from places historically marginalized from the centers of power and authority. It opened up certain possibilities in art practice and defined an “economy” of themes and images with which contemporary practitioners are still reckoning. Though not a unified, coherent, or organized phenomenon, this “movement” (if something so loose can be called such) must be tracked, not only in the visual arts, film, and photography, but across music, literature, and the performing arts, popular culture and fashion. Broadly speaking, it is driven by the struggles of peoples, marginalized in relation to the world system, to resist exclusion, reverse the historical gaze, come into visibility, and open up a “third space” (between the weight of an unreconstructed tradition and the impetus of a mindless modernism) in cultural representation. It therefore belongs to that uneven, contradictory, and bitterly contested transformation of cultural life now in progress across the globe, which attempts to de-center Western models and open a broader, more transcultural and “translative” perspective on cultural practice and production. It challenges the institutional spaces, established circuits, and validated canons of critical achievement of the metropolitan mainstream. This “movement” has global significance. It refuses to be constrained by national boundaries, emphasizing instead a lateral, diasporic, transnational perspective. The project persists, despite being confronted on all sides by deepening inequalities of power and material resources and marked by a persistent racism. Unable as yet to stem frontally the tide of Western-driven, neoliberal globalization and its cultural agendas, this is globalization’s Other, transnational face—its subversive reverse side. As we argued, “Refusing, simultaneously, either to disappear into the global bazaar of the international art market or to be holed up forever in some ‘local’ ethnic ghetto, this movement is ‘located’ in, without being rendered motionless by, places of origin, skin colour, so-called racial group, ethnic tradition or national belongingness and is part of a new, emergent kind of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism.’”2 The 1980s, then, saw the onset of a “deluge” of creative activity. However, the “Shades of Black” conference also constituted the 1980s as a puzzle, an enigma. In the history of the postwar black visual arts in Britain, the 1980s remain a vigorously contested space. This may be because they have become an object of desire, weighed down by

2 ■ Stuart Hall

the projection of powerful but unrequited psychic and political investments. Thus, some see the 1980s as the moment when the dream that artists from the former colonial empires could enter the mainstream of modern art and claim their rightful place there was abandoned. Some see the 1980s as the moment when art as an essential weapon in the armory of antiracist politics surfaced—and was derailed. Some see the decade as the moment when the arts were harnessed to the expression of excluded cultural, national, ethnic, and racial identities—and became mired in the multicultural trap of “cultural di≈erence.” Some see the 1980s as the moment when what was progressive in modernism was subverted by the vagaries of postmodernism and betrayed by cultural theory’s so-called collusive relationship with global capitalism. The protagonists of these various positions are unlikely to agree—or even to agree to di≈er! Indeed, the old antagonisms are still pursued, sometimes with a venomous intensity. We are still in the post-1980s, living its turbulent afterlife, with all the heated controversy of an unsettled history in which everything is still urgently at stake. We need to bear in mind the transatlantic nature of the dialogue that “Shades of Black” initiated. Here, comparisons are useful, but closeness can also be a source of misunderstanding. The Black Arts Movement in the United States, which emerged during the post–civil rights period, was enormously influential for black British artists like Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper and the formation of the Pan-Afrikan Connection in 1982. However, the term “black” in the British context (and, incidentally, in this essay) always also references migrants from the Asian subcontinent as well as the African diaspora, a fact that makes the politics of antiracism significantly di≈erent on the two sides of the Atlantic. There are deeper historical di≈erences. For African Americans, the key factor has always been slavery, whose consequences continue to shape daily domestic American life. In the Caribbean case, in the 1950s and 1960s, the central issue seemed to be, not slavery per se, but colonialism. Certainly, the postwar generation of Caribbean and Asian artists who migrated to Britain were primarily motivated by anticolonialism and the struggle for national independence. Further, because Britain—unlike the United States—managed slavery and colonization at a safe distance, the migrations of the 1950s were the first time a black working population in any significant numbers had come to live, work, and settle in the white domestic space. These and other facts should make us wary of easy U.S./U.K. comparisons. The powerful impact of black American

Assembling the 1980s ■ 3

popular culture on black British culture in the 1990s and after has tended to obscure these historical distinctions. I attempt to treat the 1980s as a conjuncture, as Gramsci understood it: a fusion of contradictory forces that nevertheless cohere enough to constitute a definite configuration.3 Althusser called it “a condensation of dissimilar currents,” the “ruptural fusion of an accumulation of contradictions.”4 The forces operative in a conjuncture have no single origin, time scale, or determination. Like a symptom, conjunctures are always overdetermined. They have di≈erent time scales—“How long,” Gramsci asked, “is a crisis?”—and are defined by their articulation, not their chronology. Decades seem a convenient way of getting a handle on conjunctures but can be misleading because they tend to fetishize them, condensing them into easily assimilable blocks of time, giving them a sequential form and an imaginary unity they never possessed. Much the same can be true of “generations,” which, as David Scott argues, should be defined, not by simple chronology but by the fact that their members frame the same sorts of questions and try to work through them within the same epistemological, political, or aesthetic horizon, or as he calls it, “problem-space.”5 For example, did the highly politicized artwork of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the more figural and neoconceptual work of the late 1980s and 1990s belong to the same problematic because they were produced by the same generation? Did both belong to the same conjuncture? Perhaps, indeed, the di≈erences between them constitute something more like a profound rupture. If so, we need to know why this break occurs within what on the surface appears to be the same conjuncture. My argument is indeed that the problematic that frames this work did fracture decisively in the 1980s, leading to a profound “conjunctural shift.” Framing the discussion as “the 1980s” may therefore serve to conceal how deep and extensive these seismic shifts turned out to be. I therefore tend to see the decade as a period of breaks, as well as of continuities, setting in play a number of impulses whose directions do not necessarily, in the end, add up. Instead, I try to map them as a series of overlapping, interlocking, but noncorresponding histories, and the shifts and fissures they opened up. Bearing in mind the caveats above, we can still usefully divide the British postwar black art scene into two distinct waves. The first generation were born as colonial subjects in their countries of origin before World War II and, with one or two exceptions, came to Britain as practicing artists, with a body of work already behind them. They

4 ■ Stuart Hall

arrived on the crest of the wave of postwar decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1949 and 1966, Francis Newton Souza, Frank Bowling, Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Ahmed Parvez, Anwar Shemza, Avinash Chandra, David Medalla, Balraj Khanna, Iqbal Geo≈rey, Uzo Egonu, Saleem Arif, Ivan Peries, Li Yuan-chia, and Rasheed Araeen, among others, arrived in Britain. Incidentally, the only member of that generation who was a contributor to this symposium was Rasheed Araeen—painter, sculptor, curator, editor of Third Text—the last of that group to arrive and manifestly a transitional figure who spans both generations. The leading figures of the second wave, who surfaced in the late 1970s and early 1980s—including Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Mona Hatoum, Maud Sulter, Donald Rodney, Gavin Jantjes, as well as many later contributors—were all born in the 1950s or 1960s and did not exhibit work until two decades later. One immediate contrast is between the attitudes to modernism of these two waves. Broadly speaking, the artists of the first wave came to London in a spirit not altogether di≈erent from that in which early European modernists went to Paris: to fulfill their artistic ambitions and to participate in what they saw as the heady atmosphere of artistic innovation in the most advanced center of art at that time. The visual artists were not alone in this. In the 1950s and 1960s, London was a mecca for a whole generation of Caribbean writers, intellectuals, and artists who felt at that moment that they had to migrate to fulfill their artistic ambitions. The West Indian novel—of Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Wilson Harris—was in many ways the product of this migratory movement. They came, of course, to claim their place as artists in a movement from which, as colonials, they had been marginalized but to which in every other sense they felt they naturally belonged and that, in a way, belonged to them. The promise of decolonization liberated them from any lingering sense of inferiority. Their aim was to engage the art world as equals on its own terrain. In that sense, they shared much with, and were clearly part of, the rising optimism of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants, who came in the 1950s and 1960s to make a better life for themselves and their families, and whose jaunty self-confidence is so palpable in the images of their arrival published in the press and magazines at the time. They came because of the colonial connection, however deep their anticolonialism; because it was to many “the mother country,” as

Assembling the 1980s ■ 5

well as the “mother” of all their troubles. They came to see for themselves, to look it in the eye—and to conquer. The distinctiveness of this world and its anticolonial mentality may be di÷cult for younger contemporaries to imagine or inhabit. It may also be di÷cult now to understand the degree to which modern art was seen by these artists as an international creed, fully consistent with anticolonialism and its profound resistance to the imposition on colonial peoples of false European values. Contemporary art was regarded as essential to a modern consciousness. These artists shared with other colonial intellectuals of their generation an aspiration to destroy the feudal structures of the traditional world they inhabited as well as the foreign institutions associated with colonialism. But their dream was not to restore the ancient past so much as to issue in a new era of progress, change, modernity, and freedom. Critical of the mindless imitation of Western artistic models, they nevertheless saw, as Rasheed Araeen has argued, an engagement with “modern art” as “the only way to deal with the aspirations of our time.”6 They regarded the artistic vocation as a universal calling capable of transcending narrow cultural or historical conditions. They claimed art in the name of “humanity” in general. Many were already familiar with developments in contemporary Western art and already practicing what they saw as “modern art.” Some, no doubt, as Araeen remarked in his Black Manifesto, accepted “the ‘supremacy’ of Western developments in the contemporary field by following whatever styles [were] developed or produced in the major art centres of the West.”7 But others, certainly, in the spirit of those indigenous “modernisms” that had taken authentic root in the “periphery,” subscribed to the views of Herbert Read, one of British modernism’s leading apostles, who saw modern art as the attempt “to create forms more appropriate to the sense and sensibility of a new age.”8 These artists were, in that sense, “moderns” in spirit, if not specifically “modernists.” They had internalized the spirit of restless innovation, the impulse to “make it new,” which defined the modern attitude. Frank Bowling, who left London for the United States in 1966 and who has had an unswerving loyalty to abstraction throughout his career, said, “I believe the Black soul, if there can be such a thing, belongs in Modernism.”9 Rasheed Araeen put it clearly in The Black Manifesto, albeit with perhaps a stronger “third world” emphasis than many of the first generation would have adopted. He argued that some

6 ■ Stuart Hall

Third World artists have taken an entirely di≈erent direction, by accepting the challenge of this modern age. While conscious of their own indigenous cultural backgrounds (which they sometimes reflect in their work), they recognize the technological nature of various developments in the West. They consider it their legitimate right to make use of contemporary knowledge in their work . . . just as Western artists were able to benefit, and are still benefitting from their knowledge of Afro/Asian traditions. . . . What is singular about these artists is that they are innovators. Thus they contribute to contemporary developments in their own right, by their own original ideas, concepts and synthesis/antithesis; and more importantly they o≈er a challenge to Western domination by defying the hegemony of art styles perpetrated and promoted internationally by the transatlantic gallery circuit of the Western world.10 There are many parallels with this complex attitude to “the idea of the modern.” The Harlem Renaissance aspired to combine the formal mastery of European modernism with what Houston Baker calls “the deformation of mastery” through which the black vernacular could be expressed.11 There is that vibrant, heady, syncretic, urban culture that surfaced in the 1950s in the mixed areas in some South African cities, providing the matrix out of which the antiapartheid struggle emerged, including that astonishing company of black journalists and photographers grouped around the magazine Drum: Peter Magubane, Bob Gosani, Alf Kumalo, and others.12 More personally, I remember the young black intellectuals I knew in Kingston, Jamaica, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, dreaming of freedom to the subtle, haunting, but forbiddingly complex and uncompromisingly “modern” tonalities of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. The attitude today—that modernism somehow belonged intrinsically and exclusively to the West, was in e≈ect part of a wider conspiracy to entangle artists in the Western “grand narrative,” and that salvation lay in the return to neglected indigenous cultural traditions—is quite alien to this perspective. This is a question not just of di≈erent attitudes but of a di≈erent structure of consciousness, di≈erent conjunctures. The loss of confidence in the first approach was the cumulative result of a devastating critique which has proved historically decisive. Its complex history would have to include, inter alia, the critique of cultural imperialism developed by the intellectuals and leaders of the anticolonial and national liberation movements, the growing awareness of “the dark side” of the Enlightenment and the ways its universalistic promise has been particularistically appropriated by the West, the

Assembling the 1980s ■ 7

searching exposures of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, and the critique of modernism’s celebration of “primitivism” which simultaneously opened Western art to non-Western knowledge and appropriated the latter as an exoticized, subordinate support. The di≈erence in attitude between the generations, then, registers on the one hand as a profound epistemological shift from what we might call the anticolonial to the postcolonial, and on the other as a transformation in what Raymond Williams called “the structure of feeling.”13 This shift was inevitably reflected in the work of artistic production. The outlook of the first generation (like that of the Western political left of the time) was cosmopolitan and universalist. Think of the range, in content and style, of Aubrey Williams’s work (plate 1), combining as it does the Mayan-inspired figures and natural forms of his Guyanese and Latin American “continental” work, the swirling modernist abstraction of his “cosmologies,” and his struggle to find a visual correlative to the symphonies of the Russian composer Shostakovich. That of the second generation tended to be more relativist and particularistic. One way of posing the question about the 1980s, then, is How, when, and why did this shift from universalism to relativism come about? This involves our thinking through the connections and transitions between a series of overlapping histories, all of which come together around the shifting genealogies and topographies of race. Of special relevance was the actual experience of the first wave, which turned out to be a patchy and dispiriting a≈air. Many participated alongside British artists in the movements of the period, exhibiting and attracting favorable critical attention. They were perceived for a time as central to the British avant-garde, operating at what Guy Brett calls the heady interface between artistic innovation and transnationalism. But many had a di÷cult time, found the doors of recognition barred, and became progressively disenchanted. Some experienced isolation and lived in virtual self-imposed exile. At one point, Ahmed Parvez tore up his canvases and in 1967 left England for good. Anwar Shemza experienced a kind of artistic trauma at ignorant and patronizing attitudes to non-European art and totally changed artistic direction. Many followed the shifting index of significance in the international art world and emigrated to the United States. Even the best found their work increasingly sidelined, their place in modern British art progressively written out of the story (hence the title of Rasheed Araeen’s epic The Other Story exhibition). Araeen himself remarked:

8 ■ Stuart Hall

In the early Seventies, after I had been in Britain for almost ten years, I went through a personal crisis losing all hopes of becoming a successful artist. What really bothered me was not that I had not yet become a successful artist but the institutional indi≈erence towards a work that was central to the development of modernist sculpture in the mid-60s. I could not rationalise this indi≈erence, particularly when my understanding of the art institution was that of an enlightened institution keen to recognise and celebrate any historically important work—as it was doing in other cases. My first response to this crisis was to abandon making art for a while in favour of political activity, with a hope that it would help me understand this institutional anomaly.14 Hostile accounts of this shift attribute it to the movement from the anticolonial/ antiracist political critique of the 1960s and 1970s and its replacement by the cultural politics of the postcolonial 1980s and after—a shift for which so-called cultural theory is held largely responsible. This is, to put it mildly, a simplification. What it ignores or ruthlessly foreshortens is the fact that, in this period, the whole fulcrum of the political world as we knew it shifted fundamentally. To speak metaphorically, between the work of Souza or Williams and that of Eddie Chambers or Keith Piper falls the shadow. We can mark the transition by way of a series of iconic critical events: the Notting Hill race riots of 1958; the Smethwick election of 1964; the visits of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; the formation of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in 1965; the immigration acts restricting entry, with their second-class citizens and “partial” categories; the appearance of Stokely Carmichael at the “Dialectics of Liberation” conference; the sound of Bob Marley and the sight of locksmen on the streets of Handsworth; the new “sport” of Paki bashing; Enoch Powell’s 1968 “rivers of blood” speech. Rage and anger at the speed and depth of this racializing process “at home” explode across and literally scar the surfaces of work like Gavin Jantjes’s Freedom Hunters (1977), Eddie Chambers’s Destruction of the National Front (1980) and I Was Taught to Believe (1984), and Keith Piper’s Reactionary Suicide: Black Boys Keep Singing or Another Nigger Died Today (1982; plate 2). By the mid-1970s, race and racism had finally “come home.” There was a fully formed, popular black consciousness, a full-blown, indigenous antiracist British politics and a

Assembling the 1980s ■ 9

powerful grassroots mobilization against racism and racialized disadvantage, as well as a growth in visibility of racist grassroots organizations and police harassment using the “sus” laws in the streets.15 The “subjects” of this antiracist politics were identified by the single, collective signifier black—a generic term, a composite political identity, which deliberately eschewed any distinctions between Afro-Caribbeans, Asians, and Africans. When, in his Black Manifesto, Rasheed Araeen speaks in the name of a black “we,” he means, as he says, people of the third world, from “Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.” But, he adds, “we must also include in it all those non-European peoples (whom we shall collectively call ‘blacks’ or ‘black people’) who now live in various Western countries and find themselves in a similar predicament to that of the actual Third World.”16 This was actually part of the work of constructing a new collective black subject, though this identitarian language was not available or in use at the time. The implications of all this for cultural production and for the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s is beautifully captured in the struggle to connect, as well as the failures of connection between, two di≈erent generationally inflected conceptions of “a black arts movement” in two significant texts, loci classici for the British debate, which help us to ground the transition I am attempting to document. The first is the lecture by Aubrey Williams on “A Black Aesthetic” given at a “Race Today” seminar in 1987, followed by discussion. This document is interesting for at least three reasons. First, here is a distinguished member of the first wave addressing a problem in terms defined by the second. Second, it reveals Williams’s (and, I think, his generation’s) complex ambivalences toward the question of “a black aesthetic.” On the one hand, he a÷rms, “My work is dominated by my black roots. And I don’t have to express that verbally.”17 But he enjoins his audience to move away from the mere surface of the issue and “turn a little bit more inside and really face what we have inside.” It is not clear exactly what he means by this, but it is not hard to see that the idea of art harnessed to a militant, public, black politics is not endorsed by Williams, either in content or tone. Third, there is the gap of incomprehension between him and his younger black audience. The latter are not at all happy when he answers a question about “roots” by quoting the example of pre-Columbian influences in his Olmec-Mayan work. And when challenged directly about a new black British creative period, his response is: “I see it, but it’s very squeaky.” Even more revealing is the Rasheed Araeen/Eddie Chambers exchange in Third Text.

10 ■ Stuart Hall

“I would define Black art,” Chambers told Araeen, “as art produced by black people largely and specially for black audiences, and which, in terms of its content, addresses black experience.”18 As he put it in 1986, “It is black artists alone who determine the form, functioning and future of black art”;19 his artist’s statement to the Black Art An’ Done exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1981 describes it as “a tool to assist us in our struggle for liberation, both at home and abroad.” One problem with this formulation concerns the question of “separatism”: black art defined by black artists for black audiences about black experience. How, Araeen asks, does this relate to the Asian experience? Chambers acknowledges that his perspective has shifted since the early 1980s and that he has had to “take on board other people’s realities . . . working with all artists of both Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin.” But elsewhere he returns to “the cultural specificity of . . . contemporary [black] experiences.” Araeen expresses fears about “being separated from the main body of this society.” Shouldn’t black art address the whole society and fight to enter the mainstream? Then there is the issue of essentialism. Does the category “black art” include whatever a black artist produces, or is there something historically or aesthetically specific about it? Are paintings like Shanti Thomas’s The Roti Maker (1985) and Errol Lloyd’s The Domino Players (1986–88) black because the artists are black? Or because they are about a black experience? Or because they deploy a black aesthetic language? And, if so, of what does this black aesthetic consist? Eddie Chambers says it involves the visual arts using easily recognizably black languages and forms, as music does with jazz, reggae, and calypso. Araeen emphasizes the syncretic roots of jazz and the specificity of the black American experience from which historically it emerged. Two visions or pathways for the black arts seem to be in contention here. They are not diametrically opposed. Both are informed by a political critique; both want an art practice that is engaged with these larger political questions. But they register deep di≈erences of experience and political perspective, which plays through into the aesthetics. Araeen’s perspective remains embedded in a radical third worldist position, by which the black experience is itself framed. Chambers’s perspective is more rooted directly in the experience of being black and its practices derive from the cultures of the black world. From my point of view, understanding the 1980s involves explaining how both these

Assembling the 1980s ■ 11

perspectives di≈er from what we have been calling the anticolonial consciousness of the immediate postwar artists; how these two variants of a more politicized perspective on the black arts come to be on o≈er at the end of the 1970s; and why, in the event, the work that follows later in the 1980s, while maintaining significant continuities with both positions (Keith Piper is a good example here), charts, on the whole, a third, distinctive and di≈erent path. The new experience of racialized exclusion bore directly on the second generation born and schooled in Britain. Those separated by migration from their original homes but profoundly alienated by racism from any sense of belonging to, or recognition by, British society were haunted by questions of identity and belonging: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we belong? Questions of identity were particularly pertinent for postcolonials whose connections with their precolonial and ancestral cultures had been brutally interrupted by transportation, slavery, and colonization. West Indians were said to have a special problem with identity because of this fractured history.20 The question of identity, which surfaces in the work of black artists in the 1980s, far from being some apolitical subjective indulgence, related to what we would now call “the production of a new, black subject.” Rediscovering a language within which these fractured linkages could be understood and redeemed was essential to that “decolonization of the mind” for which writers like Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral had called, without which political independence would be an empty shell. Distinctive to the postcolonial moment, then, were issues of culture and identity—a÷rming an alternative to the degraded experience of colonization—and these gradually took their place not as secondary to but as constitutive of the politics of antiracism and social justice. Identity acquired a political meaning. Political struggle acquired a cultural dimension. This generated a new racial consciousness, which reshaped the critical debates, the political activism, the arguments—and inevitably the artistic work and cultural production—of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Here, we need to slot a set of histories into place. The identity question was overdetermined from at least three di≈erent directions. First, there was the way this question surfaced among second-generation blacks in Britain, where it tended to be answered, in the 1970s, in terms of a symbolic restoration of the African connection, for so long submerged and disavowed in the Caribbean itself. This is better described as the redis-

12 ■ Stuart Hall

covery of an African identity through its diasporic translation and dissemination. This is that Africa that is “alive and well in the diaspora,” as much a “country of the mind,” “an imagined community,” as a real, historical space: a sign of blackness, which connects with Africa through its New World displacements. This Africa began to be spoken at this time by young black British people primarily through the languages of Rastafarianism, resistance, and the symbolism of dreadlocks, which provided that symbolic identity they could not find elsewhere. Its iconography was evident everywhere in the black culture of the period—in the visual arts, perhaps, most splendidly, as celebrated in the photography of Vanley Burke, Horace Ové, and Armet Francis, and given erotic value in the images of Rotimi Fani-Kayode (plate 3) and Robert Taylor. They testify to the way a new Pan-African diasporic imaginary surfaced at the center of the black community, redeeming through image and sound the breaches and terrors of a broken history. This is the performative identity we find in the rhythms of Bob Marley and “roots” reggae: a syncretic, contemporary music masquerading as a traditional music of memory, transmitting ancient pulses by the most modern of technologies, and speaking as much of Kingston and London as of Nigeria or Angola. This whole formation that made black, hitherto a negative and degraded object, into a positive point of identification was grounded in the double and triple inscriptions of a richly metaphorical syntax. It condensed into one narrative or visual trope the dissimilar currents of the search for identity; the displacements of migration; the loss of Africa; the terrors of the Middle Passage; the trauma of enslavement and indenture; the su≈ering still in place, despite independence, in Kingston’s Trench Town; and the new kinds of su≈ering that had emerged in the “Babylons” of Handsworth, Brixton, Bradford, Toxteth, and Moss Side. Second, there was the impact of the civil rights struggle, especially the path the movement took from the integrated “black-and-white-unite-and-fight” civil rights desegregation struggles of the mid-1960s to the Black Power, Black Consciousness, “black is beautiful” phase, with its much greater emphasis on race as a positive identity category and its separatist, cultural, nationalist, Afrocentric, and essentialist emphases. This, too, was a seismic shift. It was from this that Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, and others picked up the idea of a black arts movement grounded in an Afrocentered black identity and a black aesthetic. Exhibitions like Black Art An’ Done (Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 1981) and Five Black Women (Africa Centre Gallery, London, 1983), organized by Sonia Boyce,

Assembling the 1980s ■ 13

Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati, and Veronica Ryan, translated these vibrations to the British scene, opening the floodgates to the deluge of independent shows and exhibitions that staked out the terrain of the autonomous Black Arts Movement of the 1980s. The third set of histories has to do with the sea change that transformed the political field in the 1970s. This, too, is an extremely complex story, whose detail cannot be encompassed here. However, it is important to register it at this point, if only to dispel the illusion that the history of black politics can somehow be written and understood exclusively from within its own parameters and frame of reference. Here, we must include such general factors as the changing composition of social class in the postindustrial economies of advanced societies; the collapse of class as the single, master category of political change, into which all other contradictions (of race, gender, etc.) could be condensed; and the greater awareness of the specificity and “relative autonomy” of social divisions like race as a cross-cutting dimension in social conflict. With the rise of the so-called single-issue social movements, each with its own relative autonomy and “subject” defined in terms of the authenticity of those in whose name political demands were being made, we can trace the fragmentation of the political field, the complexity of building political alliances and new conceptions of the political subject. There was a loss of confidence in “objective” class interests to determine fully political involvement and a greater attention to “subjective” factors. Overarching all this was the “crisis” of Marxism (especially its economistic variants during the 1970s) as the general theoretical horizon within which all serious political struggles (including antiracism) had to be organized, and the lack of any alternative comprehensive framework of analysis or action. Thatcherism and free market neoliberalism were the forces that successfully hegemonized this crisis in the postwar settlement. This historic watershed in world history not only reshaped in its wake the New Right and New Labour but redrew the whole political landscape. The destruction of the social fabric, the assault on the welfare state and punishment of the poor and disadvantaged at home, globalization, and the deregulated market economy abroad together unbent the springs of social and political action, including antiracist politics. The racial upheavals of 1980–81 and 1985, though undoubtedly a response to the brutal impact of these developments on black and Asian communities,

14 ■ Stuart Hall

were in fact the last of their kind for fifteen years, until the racially motivated riots in northern industrial towns in 2001. Of course, racism and racial violence—casual, deliberate, and institutional—did not abate. But nor were black and Asian populations immune from either the e≈ects of the privatization of “the public good” or the seductions of the enterprise culture. The new political conjuncture a≈ected black politics very directly. But it also had a much broader impact on the thematic concerns of the Black Arts Movement. For example, the rise of gender and sexual politics, loosened from the iron grip of economic determinism by the same process that made race more visible and autonomous, was just as decisive for black consciousness. Gender and feminist politics and the sexual liberation movements were the revolution within the revolution—movements that exposed the structures of oppression and exclusion and the habits of “secondariness” within the ranks of the oppressed, exposing the unconscious practices of “male mastery,” which passed unremarked in the daily and sexual life of the subordinate, while never entirely supplanting the struggles against other forms of oppression. This introduced a necessary complexity into the political field: the complexity of a double inscription, because black women had to negotiate solidarity with their sisters (or gay people with their partners) against the heterosexual norm prevailing within their own side, while simultaneously finding ways of a÷rming solidarity in the common struggle against racial oppression and economic exploitation. And men had to bring to consciousness the unconscious habits and expectations of their privileged position within a wider subordination. The same problem emerged in the post–civil rights struggle in the United States, and African American women have written with great depth of feeling about the issue. This struggle on two fronts introduced the radical principle of di=erence into a political field hitherto constructed primarily in terms of a unifying, undi≈erentiated solidarity. It is di÷cult to underestimate the rupture that flowed from all this. For example, a whole continent of themes, issues, figures, and experiences, hitherto excluded from the political field proper because they were considered too personal, too emotional, too subjective, or too domestic, was opened up to the visual gaze in the work of the 1980s women artists. Until then, the black family album had remained, so to speak, a firmly closed book. It is not an exaggeration to say that, without this conjuncture of feminism and black politics, the outstanding work of the period by Sonia Boyce,

Assembling the 1980s ■ 15

Claudette Holmes, Lubaina Himid (plate 4), Maud Sulter, Mona Hatoum, Sutapa Biswas (plate 5), and others would simply never have appeared. The fact that black women artists were often organizing and exhibiting separately from men, the tensions that were obvious at the time between them, the powerful eruption of this unfinished question in an unexpected reprise at the time of The Other Story, and its continuing presence as an underground rumble in the debates around the “Shades of Black” conference are enough to suggest that its reverberations remain resonant. There were also significant theoretical issues at stake. Here we must map into place the theoretical deluge that swept, in a series of waves, across the 1970s and 1980s and that is often too polemically and simplistically corralled into the convenient term of abuse: cultural theory. In fact, the issues include often di≈erent, and mutually contesting, developments: new theories of language and discourse; the post-Bakhtinian attention to the way that the polysemic nature of language and the “slippage of the signifier” had sparked struggles over meaning, constituting the cultural field as a key site of political struggle; the growing importance of psychoanalytic and other theories of subjectivity, bringing into the visual field the inner landscapes of the racialized experience; feminist theorizations of gender, sexuality, and desire and their articulations with racial and other kinds of di≈erence; and the rise of postcolonial theorizing and the philosophy of the Other. In this space of renewed theoretical debate—registering a fateful (some would argue, fatal) historic, epistemological half-turn—there emerged what have come to be called the “posts”: poststructuralism, post-Marxism, postfeminism, the postcolonial. The prefix signaled not the passing of time but the waning of old paradigms: passage without supersession, dialogic movement without dialectical sublation, the condition of the postmodern as a state of permanent transition.21 The details of these debates matter less than their cumulative consequences for the politics of representation and their impact on the artistic practices of the 1980s. Broadly speaking, the main e≈ect was to undermine confidence in the ability of aesthetic languages to represent sociopolitical reality in a direct or literal way. Realism and naturalism in the visual arts and the documentary mode in photography were radically undermined in terms of their direct capacity to capture the political realities of racialized exclusion, exploitation, or otherness. These were not simple facts, whose complexity of meaning and experience were manifest immediately on the surface of things, or accessible—without

16 ■ Stuart Hall

mediation—to the naked eye. This is why the strategy of simply replacing negative racial imagery with “positive images” was quickly abandoned. In fact, the stereotypes and tropes of racism could not be subverted or overturned by a strong dose of unmasking reality—in part because it is not possible to live outside representation. A damaging system of representation can only be dismantled, not by a sudden dose of “the real,” but by another, alternative system of representation, whose form better approximates the complexity of the real relations it seeks to explore and contest. These developments radically problematized the question of race itself and what Fanon identified as “the fact of blackness.” Race o≈ered too simple and banal a surface to this analysis. Like gender, it was a di≈erence whose complexity did not immediately reveal itself to the naked eye. The racial gaze was itself a constructed one. Was black identity, then, to be defined historically or biologically? The historical product of living in a racialized world, or a genetic inheritance? If blackness was transmitted biologically, how did the antiracist case di≈er from the racist one, apart from the question of how positively or negatively this racial inheritance was evaluated? Did race transcend time and place? Such issues connected directly with the shift in practice in the 1980s from the binary of pure abstraction or pure documentary realism to the more mixed or hybrid mode of the constructed image and the return to the figural. These questions about the distinction between an essentialist and a historical definition of race and the foregrounding of the racial signifier underpinned the growing preoccupation, in the work of black artists and photographers in the 1980s, with representations of the black body, with putting the abjected black body “in the field of vision.” The body became a space or horizon on or within which to explore the complexities of the black subject, the inner landscapes of black subjectivity, and the intersecting planes of di≈erence around which its social space is constructed. With this questioning of the black body, we come face to face with what elsewhere I called “the end of the essential black subject,” triggering that kaleidoscopic proliferation of meanings around blackness and the hidden connections between the racialized, the gendered, and the sexualized body—a site of convergence that for so long had been the privileged operational zone of racist discourse.22 The issues posed here are complex and profound and, in my view, remain unresolved. They have to do with how to think, in a nonreductive way, about the relationship between the work and the world, form and content, signifier and signified. They ask the question

Assembling the 1980s ■ 17

of whether identity has a full positivity of its own, self-present to itself, or whether it can only be thought through its “lack,” its di=érance (neither its absolute di≈erence nor its pure sameness) from all the other terms with which it is articulated. And what are the political and aesthetic and cultural implications of the answers we give to that question? Subsequently, these questions have been represented as falsely and illegitimately forced on artistic practices by so-called cultural theory, with the implication that it was part of some deliberate conspiracy to deflect the Black Arts Movement from its true objective. It would be hard to deny the heady theoretical climate that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s, as one French theorist after another took his or her place on the rapidly rotating conceptual stage. However, I hope I have said enough to show that, in my view, it was the di≈erent currents of ideas and events flowing into the 1980s, the seismic movements of the time, the profound political and other shifts they registered, in whose aftermath we continue to live, that were transmuted into the problematic of the work. With artists such as Sonia Boyce, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Sutapa Biswas, Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Roshini Kempadoo, Ingrid Pollard, Dave Lewis, Ajamu, Zarina Bhimji, Mitra Tabrizian, and Chila Kumari Burman, these issues were not so much blindly repeated as “worked on,” using the image as a kind of “problem-space” for conducting an investigation. These real political, economic, and cultural shifts are, in my view, what really defined what we might think of as the agendas of artistic practice in the 1980s. To represent them as the result of intellectual bad faith or artistic naïveté, or to suggest that black art practice could or should somehow have ignored them, is to trivialize history, because it requires us to simplify the connections between politics and cultural production. It misses the significance of conjunctural change and encourages us to indulge in a form of idealism, in a strategy that is ultimately unlocated in the materiality of historical circumstances. Such an approach to the question of “assembling the 1980s” no doubt feeds the spirit of sectarian animosity that too often animates critical discourse but falls woefully short on analytic or explanatory power. Despite the sophistication of our scholarly and critical apparatus in art criticism, history, and theory, we are still not that far advanced in finding ways of thinking about the relationship between the work and the world. We either make the connection too brutal and abrupt, destroying that necessary displacement in which the work of mak-

18 ■ Stuart Hall

ing art takes place. Or we protect the work from what Edward Said calls its necessary “worldliness,” projecting it into either a pure political space where conviction—political will—is all, or into an inviolate aesthetic space, where only critics, curators, dealers, and connoisseurs are permitted to play. The problem is rather like that of thinking the relationship between the dream and its materials in waking life. We know there is a connection there. But we also know that the two continents cannot be lined up and their correspondences read o≈ directly against one another. Between the work and the world, as between the psychic and the social, the bar of the historical unconscious has fallen. The e≈ect of the unseen “work” that takes place out of consciousness in relationship to deep currents of change whose long-term e≈ects on what can be produced are, literally, tidal, is thereafter always a delicate matter of re-presentation and translation, with all the lapses, elisions, incompleteness of meaning, and incommensurability of political goals that these terms imply. What Freud called “the dream-work”—in his lexicon, the tropes of displacement, substitution, and condensation—is what enables the materials of the one to be reworked or translated into the forms of the other, and is what enables the latter to “say more” or “go beyond” the willed consciousness of the individual artist. For those who work in the displaced zone of the cultural, the world has somehow to become a text, an image, before it can be “read.” I have tried to present some of the tumultuous currents flowing into the 1980s. But what happened to them—in terms of the work—as they fed into the visual imaginary? We certainly cannot say that the work resolved them. They are as yet unresolved in any final sense, which is why the period is so contentious, and why we keep returning to it. We know that, somewhere during the 1980s, the world—our world—changed dramatically and decisively. How, remains to be specified, in all the rich conjunctural detail we can assemble. The very intensity of the deluge produced an extraordinary creativity from the most marginal spaces. What it did not produce was answers. Instead, the work itself became a kind of “problem-space,” in which, literally, our “troubles” were given form.

Assembling the 1980s ■ 19

Notes 1. Stuart Hall and Mark Sealy, Di=erent: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (London: Phaidon Press, 2001). 2. Ibid., 34. 3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971). 4. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Over-determination,” in For Marx (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969), 99. 5. David Scott, “Conscripts of Political Modernity: C. L. R. James, Toussaint Louverture and the Making of the Caribbean.” Unpublished paper. 6. Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story, exhibition catalogue (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), 60. 7. Rasheed Araeen, “The Black Manifesto,” reprinted in Making Myself Visible (London: Kala Press, 1984), 1. 8. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 11, quoted in Araeen, The Other Story, 16. 9. Frank Bowling, “Frank Bowling and Bill Thompson: A Conversation between Two Painters,” Art International (December 1976). 10. Araeen, “The Black Manifesto,” 10. 11. Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 56. 12. Hall and Sealy, Di=erent. 13. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1961), chap. 2. 14. Rasheed Araeen, “Re-thinking History and Some Other Things,” Third Text, no. 54 (spring 2001): 95. 15. The “sus” laws were laws of suspicion that permitted the police to arrest individuals not only for crimes that had been committed but for crimes the police believed a “suspect” was about to commit. They further permitted the police to designate entire areas as “criminal” and so to arrest anyone in those spaces. 16. Araeen, “The Black Manifesto,” 1. 17. The unpublished transcript is held in the Aavaa archives, University of East London, Docklands Campus, London. 18. Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers, “Black Art: A Discussion,” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988): 52. 19. Eddie Chambers, “The Marginalisation of Black Art,” The Race Today Review 1986 (1986): 33. 20. On a personal note, it was to explore this issue that, in 1956, I turned from my doctoral research on a literary topic to pursue the question, raised in the anthropological debates of the time, about Africa survivals and syncretism in the New World, a deviation that led me into cultural studies and the much abused “cultural theory.” 21. See Stuart Hall, “When Was the Post-Colonial?” in Lidia Curti and Iain Chambers, eds., The PostColonial Question (London: Routledge, 1996). 22. Hall and Sealy, Di=erent, 101–103.

20 ■ Stuart Hall

Rasheed Araeen The Success and the Failure of the Black Arts Movement

In this essay, my aim is first to give a brief history of the Black Arts Movement in Britain in the 1980s, describe its aims and objectives—and indeed its true vision—and then to assess its success. Finally, I would like to ask how and why a movement, which began with a historically important radical position and agenda, failed and collapsed into what has now become “anything produced by nonwhite artists.” Although this movement had become widespread by the mid-1980s—comprising and encapsulating visual art, film, photography, poetry, theater, and more—my concern here is specific to the various forms of visual art. What is particularly significant about what was described by its first practitioners in the early 1980s as “black art” was its ability to respond critically to the social and political forces of the time and to set an ideological framework for a militantly radical arts movement. Its aim was to confront and change the system that, though centered in the West, encapsulated and dominated the whole world. In Britain, and in the United States in particular, it was a time when the political leadership turned to the right, explicitly to reestablish and reinforce its antisocialist and imperialist agendas, with dire

The Black Arts Movement ■ 21

consequences for the liberalism of the mainstream art world. It was in this sociopolitical milieu—when most mainstream artists, deprived of their role as the progressive conscience of Western liberalism, turned to their inner selves, cynicism, and language games—that the Black Arts Movement in Britain gave us “a voice of humanity,” as I wrote in 1982, “that refuses to be brutalized and insensitized.”1 It all began in 1979, not long after Margaret Thatcher had come to power with her racist anti-immigrant speeches, when a young black art student of Afro-Caribbean parents, doing his foundation course at Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic, tore up a printed image of the Union Jack and reorganized it into an image of a swastika (plates 6–9). His name, of course, is Eddie Chambers, and what he then did was remarkable. But he did not stop with this deconstruction of the Union Jack, foreclosing the possibility of further transformation. He did not want to say that fascism lurked behind the Union Jack, but to remind us what happens when a national flag is appropriated by a racist nationalist ideology. He then began to tear up the Union Jack-turned-swastika into small shreds so that it was no longer recognizable as either an image of the Union Jack or the swastika. Soon after he finished laying down his first work, Destruction of the National Front (1980), as a foundation stone for a radical agenda, Eddie Chambers met Keith Piper, in whom he found a kindred spirit. They became good friends, but also pioneers of what we today know as the Black Arts Movement. This partnership was extremely important in transforming the work of two individual practitioners into an artistic movement, which brought into its fold many other artists. They issued joint statements and organized exhibitions and conferences. It was at their first exhibition in London in 1982, appropriately at the Africa Centre, that I first saw their work. The exhibition included five artists who described themselves as the descendants of “Africans dispersed during the Atlantic slave trade” and explicitly identified themselves with the struggle of African people all over the world: “We feel for our brothers and sisters throughout the world who are the victims of racial injustice. . . . In developing our sense of ‘some bodyness,’ we try to avoid blind mimicry. We are trying to recreate and develop our humanity.”2 As soon as I entered the exhibition, I was overwhelmed by its visual impact. It was unique. Nothing similar had I seen in the mainstream art world. I immediately decided

22 ■ Rasheed Araeen

to write. “What is really significant is the presence of tremendous energy, the sense of full commitment and definite direction. . . . The work may be loud and noisy. But then, it is partly deliberate. The attempt is to express anger and frustration. . . . The furiousness is about the world in which hypocrisy, smugness, cynicism, self-exaltation, self-righteousness, etc., have become norms.”3 These artists, who now called themselves the Pan-Afrikan Connection, were involved not only in producing works of art and exhibiting them. Their program and radical agenda extended to conferences and workshops so that the nature of their art practice could be discussed and debated in the larger context of the community. Soon after their exhibition at the Africa Centre, a conference was organized in Wolverhampton that attracted a large gathering of black artists from all over the country, including Frank Bowling, who had been involved in a “black art” debate in New York ten years before. For the first time, we saw there Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce, who in their own way were developing a black art perspective. Their presence at the conference was extremely important for black women wanting to get together and discuss their own specific positions, and gave a new dimension to the Black Arts Movement. They all took part in a special workshop organized by Claudette Johnson, one of the artists from the Africa Centre exhibition. My own contribution to this debate was a paper entitled “Art and Black Consciousness,” in which I tried to define the notion of blackness outside and beyond what was, until then, seen to be an experience and expression only of black people originating from Africa. My point was that if we argue that the basis of black experience is white racism, then this experience was not confined only to African and Afro-Caribbean people. Racism was a legacy not only of slavery but also of European colonialism, which subjected all nonwhite peoples throughout the world. It was therefore appropriate to use the term “black” for peoples both of African and Asian origins. Although my paper was then received with coldness and indi≈erence, it became clear by the end of the 1980s that I was not indulging in a fantasy. Although the women artists I have mentioned were of African and Afro-Caribbean origins, there were also Asian women who were independently developing black feminist perspectives. It is important to mention them here not only because of the importance of their work but because they also helped define black experience beyond its essentialist association with the African origin.

The Black Arts Movement ■ 23

In 1979, Mona Hatoum, a Palestinian woman, entered the Slade School of Art to do her postgraduate degree, followed one year later by Chila Kumari Burman. Both Hatoum and Burman developed their radical positions independently, without any knowledge of what Chambers and Piper were doing up in the Midlands. In her early work, Hatoum explored her position as a Palestinian woman in exile, but in Them and Us . . . and Other Divisions (1984) she clearly identified herself with the black struggle. Burman, while still in college, began to depict heroic black women in her silkscreen prints and in a visual work of 1982 she inscribed “Solidarity with our Sisters in South Africa.” It is important to highlight the role of Lubaina Himid in bringing black women artists together by organizing not only group exhibitions but also workshops and conferences in which issues related to black women were debated without the interference of men. The group exhibition she organized at the ica (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in 1985 called The Thin Black Line was particularly important because it brought black women artists of both African and Asian origins together. In Himid’s own words, inscribed within one of her visual works, We Will Be (1983): we will be who we want where we want with whom we want in the way we want when we want and the time is now and the place is here + there and here +there + here now now now now now now here here here now here now + now here now now

24 ■ Rasheed Araeen

It was the militancy of the young generation of black artists, who were born and brought up in Britain and who had experienced racism from childhood, that defined their work. Although some people believe that the Black Arts Movement still exists, it is no more than a fantasy. There are individual artists, such as Keith Piper, who have managed to maintain their militancy, but the strategy and ambitions of the generation of artists that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s are not only di≈erent but actually oppose the idea of confronting the system. This decline in militancy is due to a variety of complex reasons, and I come to this in my final section. It is important, first, to evaluate the success and achievement of the movement. The main success of the Black Arts Movement lies in its ideological commitment, in its agenda to confront and change the prevailing system and achieve full humanity. This was not a paper tiger, a verbal rhetoric to push the careers of the artists involved in the movement, but aimed to develop and produce art that was radically di≈erent from its predecessors. To understand this radicality we must return to Eddie Chambers’s first work. Its importance lies in its ideological position against the forces of oppression, forces that not only were and are patently against the humanity of black peoples but also constitute an a≈ront to humanity as a whole. This position was expressed not only verbally, in his frequent statements and writings, but more important, also through a radical artistic language that posited a process of destruction and transformation. It was a language of self-expression that went beyond what was known to be already defined by traditions, both old and modern. The modern tradition of collage, however—which involves cutting up an existing image and reorganizing it, or putting di≈erent or incongruent images together to make a new image—was not new. It goes back to synthetic Cubism, and its revolutionary use was established by John Heartfield in his opposition to Nazi fascism. But unlike Heartfield’s work, which by 1979 had become a subject of co≈ee-table books, Chambers’s work suggests a continuous process rather than a static form or an end product open to reified commodification. What emerges from Chambers’s work is a dynamic process, based on the dialects of change and transformation, which begins with an antithetical position but continues to become synthesized both conceptually and semantically. However, it seems Chambers did not grasp this paradigmatically himself, and he subsequently abandoned the pro-

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cess in favor of a critical discourse that visualized the e≈ects of oppression rather than deconstructing objects of oppression. Although this constituted a regression, returning to the earlier forms of collage in his subsequent work, the spirit of defiance and militancy is maintained iconographically by depicting the victims of racial oppression. This change from a paradigmatic critical process to the formation of an iconographic visual language became somewhat the hallmark of the Black Arts Movement. It is di÷cult to say whether the movement’s main preoccupation with the victimized subject—not without irony and humor, in some cases—was due to the shift in Chambers’s own work or whether it was Chambers who came under the influence of what others were doing. However, what is consistently sustained by the group, and subsequently by the movement, was a sense of discontent and frustration expressed through an angry opposition to the system. This was a legitimate anger of the people who were subjected to not only economic exploitation but also racial abuse. Dominic Dawes, who was included in the exhibition Black Art An’ Done (Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 1981), says, “In our towns and cities, on your subway walls, etc. and just as much in our minds, there is racial abuse: wogs go home, n.f. rules, black bastards, etc. but who made us the so-called ‘bastards.’”4 Talking about her own work in the catalogue of The Pan-Afrikan Connection, Claudette Johnson says, “My work is about the conflict and growth that has been the experience of the African women born and raised here in the West. . . . It attempts to express the myriad aspects of oppression, racist and sexist, that have shaped us. It deals not with specific events but with our responses: anger, frustration, fear and depression. . . . It charts the move towards . . . relating to one another that we have devised for our own survival.”5 I am trying to establish here the legitimacy of the anger which gave rise to an oppositional discourse; it is an artistic phenomenon that has historical precedents. In fact, history is full of movements that resulted from a discontent with the ruling system, often with an anger against its human oppression, deaths, and misery. The response of the great Spanish artist Francisco de Goya to the su≈ering caused by the Napoleonic invasion of Spain is well-known. Goya did not produce a radically new language, but provided a new role for the prevailing language. He made the language express a historical event and the human su≈ering it caused. In the case of Dadaists, whose anger was directed at the inability of the bourgeois ruling class to prevent the deaths of millions of people

26 ■ Rasheed Araeen

in World War I, the very language sanctioned and legitimated by bourgeois values was made the target of critical deconstruction. What happened in postwar Britain as a result of the arrival of peoples from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean was a historical event. Britain, which considered itself to be a white society, suddenly had to come to terms with a large immigrant population that was racially and culturally di≈erent from its indigenous citizens. It was a useful population, in terms of doing the jobs the natives either could not or did not want to do, and was initially welcomed, but only on the condition that it did not enter Britain’s social space or demand equality. To accept those who were racially di≈erent as equal citizens with full rights in every sphere of British social life would demolish the very structure that gave white people their sense of superiority and supremacy. To maintain this structure, racism had to be maintained one way or another. Although racism a≈ected all generations of black people in Britain, the children who were born or brought up in Britain were particularly sensitive to it. It was this sensitivity that produced a radical opposition to what stood against human equality and that became fundamental to the Black Arts Movement. It is not unusual historically for a minority of people in a society to realize its oppressive nature and inhumanity. If it were only a few black artists who felt and responded to the human predicament, both physical and psychological, caused by racism, their response could not be reduced to only an ethnic or racial experience. The Black Arts Movement not only felt that this predicament was unacceptable to human dignity, but also realized that its expression was not possible through the niceties of the aesthetic values promoted by the system. What di≈erentiated these artists from the mainstream was not the invocation or enunciation of their race or ethnicity—nor a desire to go back to their African or Asian cultures and reconstruct them in the light of what some black academics call diaspora experiences—but their uncompromising modernity, a modernity that was given a new role as the avant-garde. If the function of the avant-garde is to question and challenge the established order, the Black Arts Movement did exactly this. They not only used verbal rhetoric, which has always been part of the avant-garde, but also created a visual language which, as I pointed out in my review of 1982, “questions the very foundation on which we normally base our critical judgment.” The Black Arts Movement firmly locates itself within the twentieth-century modern

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tradition, with its unique way of looking at and articulating the world. However, it also radically redefines this tradition through an experience that was not only socially unique but also historically important. If we dismiss and remove from history the specificity of what is experienced by some racially distinct groups, then we should do so for all races and cultures. It goes against all logic to accept the experiences of the white race alone as the expression of universal humanity. The achievement of the Black Arts Movement should therefore be seen in terms of its attempt to intervene in and disrupt the established order of the avant-garde based exclusively on its white genealogy and its repercussions for the reconstruction of the history of modern art. This may appear to be an overstatement. However, if we look at the history of interventions in the modern mainstream by artists from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America—not forgetting the work of the original inhabitants of the New World as well as of Australia and New Zealand and the people of the Pacific—it becomes clear that I am locating the Black Arts Movement in a larger historical context of the cultural processes of decolonization. This intervention may not register very high on a quantitative scale, but we should not forget that a single individual, Constantin Brancusi, put a marginal country like Romania on the map. We must therefore recognize the position of the Black Arts Movement within the dialectics of decolonization, as part of the worldwide struggle for liberation, not only of the colonized and oppressed but also of the colonizer, from its Eurocentric racist assumptions and perceptions. Although black experience or consciousness gave the black community in Britain an awareness of its own position in society as a whole and its creative potential, this consciousness also represents a new vision of the world. Although the Black Arts Movement highlighted the problems that human oppression can cause, it was not only about the so-called black problems. It also tried to give the world a new consciousness, a vision of the world with true and greater humanity for all. It is not enough, however, to look at what the Black Arts Movement wanted to achieve in terms of its interventions and its vision. It is also important to examine its failure to maintain its radical position and the cause of its eventual demise. But why, I ask myself, are its protagonists now meekly accepting whatever is o≈ered by the society they wanted to change? Has anything altered, except that some black artists have now won

28 ■ Rasheed Araeen

the Turner Prize? Is this what the Black Arts Movement wanted to achieve? If so, why was there talk about white oppression? Has the oppression ended? What is important for me is to salvage and reiterate the radical aims of the movement by looking at its confusions and contradictions. It su≈ered from its insu÷cient knowledge and understanding of history, its lack of intellectual maturity, and its infantile egoistic self-importance that ignored and undermined the earlier achievements of black artists. The Black Arts Movement emerged from a gut feeling, an anger produced by an oppression and injustice. It was a genuine feeling, which made some black art students rebel against the system and its art institutions. They did not realize, however, that they were up against a mighty power, and its highly complex institutional system could not be changed by merely shouting at it and making appeals to its liberalism. The movement failed to understand that art is not just a self-expression producing images but a complex discourse that involves, incorporates, and is dependent on other things to realize its full significance. You cannot change the system without penetrating and confronting its discourse, which requires an understanding of history and how one deals with it and how one is located within it. When black art emerged in the early 1980s, it was ignorant of what it was against in terms of art history. It did not even know its own past history. All it knew was that “white art” was not good, and it therefore wanted to produce “black art.” The significance of its slogan that black art was produced by black artists for black people collapsed when it faced its own contradiction. This is what Chambers, at the end of the 1980s, says: “The struggle to build a bridge between black artists and the black community is not an exclusive struggle. It does not exist at the expense of other things. I do recognise the validity of the struggle vis-à-vis white institutions. My own approach now, which may be pragmatic, in curating exhibitions is to place Black art in white gallery spaces. There is a kind of duality to the whole situation, but unfortunately there is no correlation between the two. It may be dangerous to generalise, but the fact remains that the black community is not interested in what goes in the mainstream galleries.”6 Chambers does not ask why the black community is not interested in “what goes in the white galleries.” Is it just the galleries or art in which the black community is not interested? Did it help when black art was shown in the galleries run by black people themselves? By the mid-1980s, there were two galleries funded by the Greater London

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Council (glc): one exclusively for African and Afro-Caribbean artists and the other for Asians. Despite his own subsequent shift toward acceptance of artists of Asian and African origins as part of the Black Arts Movement, did Chambers question this separation? Not only did he not raise any question about this division based on ethnic and racial grounds, but he also failed to recognize the aspirations and ambitions of the majority of African and Asian people, who were not interested in questioning or confronting the system but only wanted to share its multicultural pie, whatever color or shape it came in. They were quite happy to enter the system on the basis of ethnic and cultural di≈erences. When the Black Arts Movement began to draw institutional attention in the late 1980s, the institutions no longer represented a white establishment. The system had already recognized the absence of black people and had opened its doors to those who were happy to help it implement its own cultural agenda and program. These people were able to enter art institutions, not on the basis of their knowledge of arts and the history of black contribution to the mainstream, but as an institutional response to the rhetoric of complaints and appeals. Their ethnic or racial identity was enough, in most cases, to enter the citadel of power and join in the celebration of its newly acquired cultural diversity. It was therefore not the traditional power of institutions that black arts faced when they tried to enter institutional space but artistically ignorant and illiterate black functionaries. What they encountered was not a body of institutionalized mainstream discourse, which they wanted to confront, but its multicultural façade. In fact, the discourse of black art was stopped at the threshold and its power defused by mixing it with other things of an ethnic nature. The radicality and militancy of black art was reduced to the discourse of ethnic cultural identities, but even more extraordinary was the pioneers’ lack of realization that the Black Arts Movement could be so easily disarmed. Although the main player in this game has been the Arts Council, the role of the glc during the mid-1980s was critical. The glc got everything wrong, right from the beginning, by reducing the specificity of art and its problems to the problems of ethnic minorities and their traditional cultures. With its antiracist polemics, the glc leadership assumed that black people would be the best equipped to solve the problems of their own cultures. It also assumed that because black women were the most oppressed

30 ■ Rasheed Araeen

section of the society, they should be put in a position of power to deal with what was seen to be specific to their own communities. But an oppressed body’s mere awareness of its own situation cannot deal with the causes of its oppression. This awareness has a radical potential, which can be realized only when it is reinforced by the knowledge and understanding of the specificity of that oppression. The discourse of art cannot be dealt with by antiracist rhetoric alone. A solution requires full knowledge of the subject, its dominant discourse, and what can be done to remove the causes of this oppression, as well as being able to produce a counter- or an alternative discourse. Imagine what happens when an oppressed person with no knowledge of art and its history, who cannot di≈erentiate one picture from another on the basis of their qualities, let alone their historical formations and significance, is put in charge of the art section of an important institution. What can you expect from him or her in this respect? This is exactly what happened in the glc. Ignorant and intellectually deficient black men and women were appointed to implement the glc’s art policies and funding. The result was a disaster. Millions of pounds of public money were wasted by supporting phoney projects and organizations. The glc appeared to support the Black Arts Movement and provided money in many cases, but for wrong reasons. First, it did not understand fully what constituted black art, except that it was produced by black artists. It was also unable to understand that you cannot look at the discourse of a committed professional artist dealing with ideas of historical importance in the same way that you treat children’s drawings. In 1985, one of the glc’s black art o÷cers organized and curated what was intended to be a major statement of historical importance. It included some professionally competent artists but also drawings of black children. It turned out to be a disgraceful display of black mediocrity and third-rateness. The exhibition was shown in a tent-like structure built inside the Royal Festival Hall and was opened by the mayor of Lambeth, who declared the exhibition a great achievement of the black community whom the system had been ignoring. In the face of such spectacles, the Black Arts Movement became helpless in its radical agenda, allowing itself to be manipulated by the system for its own purpose. The problems the movement faced were not just ideological, but were also due to a lack of both material and intellectual resources. The only way for black artists to survive was

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to get whatever they could from the system. Eddie Chambers, its main protagonist, abandoned making art in favor of curating, particularly when some institutions were prepared to give him a job. He knew he could not earn his living by making art, but curating would provide him with a means of survival. I had no objection to this shift, so long as he maintained his radically confrontational position. But his institutional entry brought with it a change of view that was contradictory to the aims and objectives of black art. By the end of the 1980s his view of black art was not much di≈erent from that of the establishment, which by now has accepted the term “black art” in place of ethnic art. The Black Arts Movement also faced unwarranted interference from some black academics and cultural theorists. As I said before, black art su≈ered from a lack of intellectual resources, by which I mean the absence of a rigorous theoretical formulation to place it within the history of the mainstream. Instead of art historians and theorists who would develop a discourse in support of black art as a new avant-garde, we had sociologists whose cultural theories of ethnicity removed black art from its historical context. With the idea of cultural identity, which was accepted by the 1990s generation of black artists supported and promoted by the establishment, black art has now ended up as manifestations of facile deconstructions of history painting, silly jokes, ethnic bu≈oonery, and self-mockery. However, it is not right to blame the new generation of black artists for this situation. Every generation emerges with its own ideas, and I am glad that they have received a degree of attention that the older generations were denied. The success of young black artists is not a problem, but the kind of work being produced today conforms to their status as Others, even when the work deals with Otherness in an ironic manner. Without the development of a theoretical discourse that would help the artists maintain the radical position of black art, they had little choice. What they instead received were muddle-headed theories of cultural di≈erence and ethnicities which reinforced the colonial idea of Otherness and which also influenced the work of young artists who emerged in the 1990s. The success of these artists’ work thus also provided a shield by which the system can now protect itself against the attack of radical ideas. It is also important to recognize that black artists today are part of the situation produced by the globalization of the art market whose main demand is for salable

32 ■ Rasheed Araeen

cultural commodities. The value of such commodities depends not on their intellectual discourse or radical ideas that question or confront the established order, but on their ability to produce scandals or sensations for mass consumption. In the decadent culture of today, what artists do reflects what the consumer society has become. But it is not enough for art to reflect, even when this reflection is of a critical nature. Art has to go beyond and o≈er a di≈erent and positive vision for the future. This responsibility lies on the shoulders of all artists, but more so on the artists whose roots are in the oppressed peoples of the world.

Notes 1. Rasheed Araeen, “Paint It Black,” City Limits, no. 45, reprinted as “Art for Uhuru,” in Making Myself Visible (London: Kala Press, 1984). 2. Pan-Afrikan Connection: An Exhibition of Work by Young Black Artists, press release, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England, 1982. 3. Araeen, “Paint It Black.” 4. Black Art An’ Done exhibition leaflet, unpublished. 5. Claudette Johnson’s artist statement is in The Pan-Afrikan Connection: An Exhibition of Work by Young Black Artists, exhibition catalogue (Coventry, England: Herbert Art Gallery, 1983). 6. Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers, “Black Art: A Discussion,” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988–89): 51–62.

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34 ■ Rasheed Araeen

Keith Piper Wait, Did I Miss Something? Some Personal Musings on the 1980s and Beyond

When I first heard about a conference whose specific and particular aim would be to reexamine the various trajectories taken by what has come to be described as the 1980s Black Art Movement, I was filled with a mixture of dread and excited anticipation. In many ways, I feel that the 1980s has emerged in our contemporary consciousness as a misread, misaligned, and misinterpreted decade. Trapped somewhere behind the heat and light of the 1990s, when the strategic intervention of marketing moguls created an environment within which to be young, British, and an artist was to be conferred almost instant celebrity status, the 1980s has become a decade consigned to the murky shadows of prehistory. I do not feel that this is an overly bleak appraisal. In many ways, part of the dominant text of the 1990s was an expression of happy release from the dreary preoccupations of the 1980s. Art in the 1980s, it seemed, as with the art of the preceding decade, only ever generated mass media attention as the subject of bemused derision and of complaints about the profligate use of public funds (as pitiful as they were). Art in the 1990s reflected the sheen of private money, and television cameras were happy to drool

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over its sexy celebrity. Even more important, for us, is that art in the 1980s has come to be mythologized as drenched and constrained by imposed notions of what came to be termed “political correctness,” while the irreverent yba (young British artist) could be celebrated as part of an unfettered, postpolitical Loaded generation. I therefore welcomed this as a decidedly rare opportunity to go back and subject the 1980s to careful scrutiny, to unbury the many currently obscured and forgotten incidents and debates that gave the decade a set of particularities, many of which seem to remain excluded from our current discussions. The 1980s, however, remain for us a di÷cult decade. They seem to be presented as the source of a fully formed and uncontested narrative package—a dominant and repeated charting of a linear history that defined the decade, a narrative complete with its key players, its historical trajectory, and its agreed legacies—which we happily bring into contemporary space, assured of our collective understanding of its meanings. Much less common is a presentation of the 1980s as a historical space that has yet to be fully narrativized and appraised by drawing on the multiple remembrances of those who were there and lived the decade. Particularly disturbing for me is the easy and profoundly unreflective use of two grand narrative terms: black art and the Black Arts Movement. Here, I pause for breath. I can almost detect an irritated sigh ushered from those who, like me, have recollections of sitting in countless rooms during the decade, listening in on irritable discussions and speaking to irritated artists about what, who, when, and how this thing called “black art” could be. Do not worry, I am not about to contribute another line to that unresolved and perhaps unresolvable quest for definition. My point is that we left the 1980s not only without defining what had become a deeply contested term, but with a widespread weariness toward the validity of such a term, and whether it could be necessary or useful. A decade-plus later, the term rolls easily o≈ the tongue with an assured air of art historical authority. We now seem to accept, without too much discomfort, that a relatively diverse and eclectic range of artists working from and within an array of theoretical contexts, but nominally sharing the commonality of being to some degree ethnically Other, have come in retrospect to constitute a movement. And that movement is prefixed with the term “black” even before it is acknowledged to be about “art.” Maybe this is no bad thing. I remember many verbal fistfights and many artists who

36 ■ Keith Piper

refused the term and its perceived attendant baggage, but who are now, in retrospect, firmly positioned in the narrative arch of the movement. But this is entirely as it should be. One of the few indulgences that we allow artists is the comfort of their temporarily refusing labels as a way of inspiring the notional illusion of creative freedom. Critics, art historians, and other empowered agencies will soon move in to quash such idiosyncrasies as they smooth the individual artist into grand historical continuums. The benefit to the artist of this industrial processing of art is a notional visibility, a place on the list of names when the grand narratives are described—if they are described. And herein lies the first of many rubs. There is a grand narrative about what Rasheed Araeen termed the act of “making oneself visible.” In many ways, the clearest outcome and perhaps the most tangible legacy of the Black Arts Movement is the partial assertion of its own visibility. In support of this, I would trace a time line back to the First National Black Art Convention, held in Wolverhampton Polytechnic in October 1982. The readable subtexts of the event are many and varied. First was the formation of early alliances around gender politics stemming from the contribution of Claudette Johnson, which would grow and consolidate throughout the decade into a major and ongoing debate around black women’s creative practices. Second was the vocal presence of individuals who would emerge to provide the core of the cultural nationalistic countertext to the instinctive racial pluralism of the emerging generation of artists; they would soon go on to open the Black-Art Gallery in Finsbury Park, North London. And third were the early attempts by the establishment to control and curtail the scope of the debate through the interventions of the then funding body, West Midlands Arts. But beyond these and other rich portents of things to come, there were two contributions that have stuck in my mind. One was from Frank Bowling, who declared words to the e≈ect that the term “black art” is important in order to establish the fact that black artists exist. The other was the first of many lucid declarations from Eddie Chambers that our aim was to make the majority and the minority aware of what the minority was doing. Therefore, the strategic use of the term “black art” as a tool for launching interventions into the various debates around contemporary practice—and eventually to ensuring that the contributions of black artists were fully acknowledged as an integral part of contemporary art practice—gained early reference.

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It can be seen that artists, both individually and collectively, ran with that agenda into the 1980s. It was, however, also the deep winter of Thatcherism, and along with many of the liberal left institutions that allied progressive practice, we also were largely decimated. Many of the most interesting artists of the period had hung up their brushes by the end of the decade, and their work, which had scarcely been documented, was lost forever. Other artists were able to continue working into the 1990s through a series of shifts and realignments, but the historical moment was evolving into something entirely di≈erent. The new epicenter of contemporary art activity was already beginning to form far away from the debates around public funding and accountable practices which had informed our interventions. Scroll forward to 1998, and Chris Ofili, in a tailored suit to die for, steps up and collects the Turner Prize. The following year, Steve McQueen performs the same feat—but without the suit. Both artists are black. Despite their frequent protestations, in unguarded moments some sloppy commentators refer to them as “black artists.” With or without the label, the grand narrative of contemporary art practice in the United Kingdom can, from this point (we hope), never absent a black face. Is it possible to argue, therefore, that part of the initial agenda for black art, as voiced in the early 1980s by Bowling and Chambers—to create an awareness of the fact that black people made art, and that art made by black people could, should, and would form an integral part of our global notions of what constitutes contemporary practice—has been fulfilled? Maybe. But let’s come at this from another angle. I am sitting in my apartment in Pittsburgh watching the Fox News Network. On screen the devil and all his works are on full display. George W. Bush, ultraconservative leader of the twenty-first-century Republican Party, is onstage, savoring a visual and symbolic moment, which, until recently, would have been utterly unimaginable. To his right stands U.S. National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice. To his left stands Secretary of State Colin Powell. No doubt skulking somewhere in the background is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Here are three negroes who, through the embrace of the political right, have been ushered to the very core of national and therefore global political power. Question: Are these the three most powerful black people on the planet? Perhaps. Another question: Is this what Huey P. Newton meant when he called for “black power”? Hell no! Now, far be it from me to attempt to draw parallels between the flat earth funda-

38 ■ Keith Piper

mentalists of U.S. political ultraconservatism and the slick-fingered custodians of the commercial gallery system who have succeeded in providing a handful of key artists with rare visibility and even rarer payment in full. It is still pleasantly rare to encounter an American negro willing to argue that the pathway to power followed by the good Dr. Rice, for example, is the only possible pathway to power. And yet it sometimes seems that, in the visual arts sector, we seem to have lost the ability to even imagine alternative models of success and value for our practice that lie beyond, and in opposition to, the evaluations of commercial dealers and the arts mainstream of which they now form the core. It is perhaps in the not quite fully formed and not quite clearly articulated themes, debates, and ideas that sloshed around during the 1980s that we can look for the seeds of these alternative models. Let us cast our vision back to a time when it was not only rare but almost unimaginable to find the paw print of the commercial dealer anywhere near our doors; had they ever ventured into our neigborhoods, they would have been the subject of hostility, distaste, and distrust. If we had thought about the commercial sector at all in that era, it would have been to dismiss it as the space in which rich individuals sold art as rarefied collectibles to other rich individuals. To us, it was an elitist space, far removed from the themes, audiences, and structures of value and appraisal that—if the written and spoken rhetoric of the time was to be taken at face value—gave a political core to our practice. Hindsight is a comfortable perch from which to view the past as the subject of either cynicism or nostalgia. On the rare occasions when one is able to flick through old pamphlets, catalogues, and flyers for exhibitions—from Creation for Liberation, the Black-Art Gallery, the blk Art Group, and so on—one is often caught up in a tidal wave of both emotions. Much has been said elsewhere, and much more can and needs to be said about the many rhetorical strategies that gave much of the work of the 1980s, and much of the commentary about the work, its lingering and often caricatured impression of youthful political posturing. However, we often make the fundamental error of viewing the work in isolation from the broader cultural and political climate of the time, from the contemporary music that was being listened to, from the books that were being read, from the real-life social unrest that was being played out on the streets of urban Britain, and from riots and rumors of riots.

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A broader appraisal of these epochal cultural, political, and aesthetic influences that impacted on and permeated radical thought in the early 1980s will have to wait for another, more expansive text. However, an attempt to view the politicized work of the era in isolation from the politicized interventions of contemporary reggae and new wave music, and from texts originally written in the maelstrom of the 1970s Black American and other local and international struggles, will inevitably be to misread and misalign the complex codes that gave the work its source and value. You would also miss the absolute assertion of the possibility of alternative views, value systems, cultural aesthetics, aims, politics, and organizing principles and economies, which gave a core to much of that activity. The music, the writing, the art, and the filmmaking all imagined viable alternative spaces away from the values, judgments, and power reach of the political center. It strikes me as particularly ironic that in an epoch of technological development, which has provided us with new productive tool sets and new channels of distribution, alternative models of practice have become increasingly marginalized and ignored. We have, as artists and as arts communities, fixed our gaze more and more upon the mainstream, with its rigid and ritualized hierarchies of endorsement and empowerment, as the only marker for creative excellence and success. This is partly because, on the one hand, we have witnessed the grand theater of mainstream endorsement taking place and being conferred on artists of color who, in the past, would have been marginalized and ignored. At the same time, on the other hand, we have been forced to witness the painful process of spaces that provided alternative patterns to the mainstream being progressively and aggressively decimated. What we are left with is an increasingly centralized system of key players and key spaces, within which we can be, at best, celebrated guests. I am therefore left, perhaps unfashionably, to celebrate the 1980s, not for its array of glittering successes—by the end of the decade there were apparently none—but for the fact that during that decade, as cultural practitioners, we were still able to imagine, even as we placed our work into mainstream galleries in the hope of encouraging and engaging with nonmainstream audiences, the possibility of building viable alternatives to the hegemony of the center. January 2002

40 ■ Keith Piper

Lubaina Himid Inside the Invisible: For/Getting Strategy

Did we let it go? Did we think we had won? Why did we invisibilize each other? What was the strategy? Did the women write enough? Why did we trust the Arts Council? We created something, named it, and then allowed it to be un-named and thus defunded. It certainly does not exist now. All of us destroyed it. We cannot revisit it except as a dead thing to worship or be nostalgic about. Our theorists never bothered to look at the work or talk to the practitioners. We allowed the Arts Council to un-name us. We watched while our own critics ignored, invisibilized, or trashed us. We were on panels and did not fight to get our fellow artists bought and funded. We set up archives and then did not record vital and important shows. We left the center to hide at the margins. Some artists have since died very young, while at the very same time others who distanced themselves from the very idea of black art donned clowns’ clothing and won the prizes. There was no strategy, just a maelstrom of naïve ideas about fame, political intervention, and the integrity of curators, funders, and publishers. The black British artists movement may well “have played a vibrant part in the British

Inside the Invisible ■ 41

and global arts scene over the past several decades,” but many people in that scene spent a great deal of time with their eyes o≈ the ball. As a consequence, being black in arts education is still a lonely existence. Having exhibitions in establishment venues is still rare, underfunded, and kept very quietly away from press scrutiny. Being historicized in monographs is almost unheard of. Having a multiplicity of histories should have been a strength, but we left it to people who did not really understand what it is to make art or to speak about it. We left it to those that made the stu≈ and remained ignorant about what the real agenda of the dominant institutions might be. We were used to bring government money into the arts and then were forced to watch, open-mouthed, while it was handed out to publishers, galleries, and projects that ignored the brilliant and focused on the mediocre. I could have started this paper by asking why we are talking about the 1980s as if it happened a hundred years ago. Or I could have started this paper by saying that I now teach people who were born in the year I curated Five Black Women at the Africa Centre in 1983, a show featuring the work of Sonia Boyce, myself, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati, and Veronica Ryan. Instead, I will start by asking if anyone here believes in the art of art? Does anyone believe in the electricity of making things out of something that seems like nothing into something that is real and to be experienced? Does anyone here think about talking about this, writing about this, buying this, promoting this? Yes, of course. The artists do. We do it, but who is listening? Who wants to take us on as we shift and change? If we had a greater presence, as artists, on the bookshelves, in the galleries, in the universities, on the television, and in the press, would we spend time talking here? We should do, but would we? Will we continue to do so when we are experimenting with di≈erent ideas, new collaborators, new museums, new journals, and new publishers? Will we talk about the 1980s then? Will we be able to if there is no documentation? Is this true? I thought—foolishly perhaps—that because I have an archive, we all have one. Anyhow, when we are receiving awards, buying each other’s work, putting it in each other’s spaces, encouraging new practitioners, will we be talking about the 1980s? In those days, women artists were talking to each other, putting on shows, and making new work. None of us wrote it down to be put into the public domain until Passion: Discourses on Black Women’s Creativity was published, edited, and funded by Maud

42 ■ Lubaina Himid

Sulter, with a small amount of help from one or two of the contributors. It was popular and useful, but it did not make money, and we are still paying for that in all sorts of ways. We cannot wait for someone else to document what we do. Whatever the cost, we have to do it ourselves. I must mention here that Claudette Johnson was in the blk Art Group, so that when this paper is published, that fact will be in the public domain. It was Claudette Johnson who decided to take the women at the Black Art Conference into another space, in order for us to engage with the issues most important to us. Unless I say it here, it will not be said. Stuart Hall never mentioned her. Rasheed Araeen did not talk about her. Keith Piper did not speak her name. Her presence in the blk Art Group was pivotal. In visual terms, she said things about black women’s bodies, experiences, and aspirations that changed lives. She introduced the idea of collaboration, which women like Maud Sulter then ran with. I will now try to do what many of us do every day, but could do even more if the baili≈s were not knocking at the door, if our friends were not dying decades before they should, and if our other friends were not just packing it all in, in despair. I will now try to do several things at once. I will shout out numbers at random that are written on Ping-Pong balls in this bag. You will open the colored envelope with the corresponding number, which was placed on your chair earlier, and read out the statement on the sheet of paper therein. I will respond from a list of answers I thought up over a period of twenty years or so, while changing the slides on the screen. If you are not reading a statement because you avoided the seat with an envelope on it, feel free to reflect on that decision while assessing your strategies in the past several years and how they could impact on the next several years. These are your strategies for collaborating and participating in the success or failure of the history of the so-called 1980s. As if this is not enough, could I ask everyone to think about how many pieces of art made by black artists they have actually seen in the real? How many would you recognize? How much money do you have in the bank? How much art can you make this year? How much art can you make possible this year? How much?

Inside the Invisible ■ 43

Statements (Read statement, then response) 1.

I have organized an exhibition of black artists’ work in the past fifteen years.

2.

I have written several articles about a black artist’s work.

3.

I have asked a fellow black artist to write in my catalogue.

4.

I have recommended in conversation that a black artist receive a grant.

5.

I have served on an arts-buying panel and encouraged my colleagues to buy the work of black artists.

6.

I have recommended a black artist for a grant to an arts panel.

7.

I have helped another black artist to get a job in my organization.

8.

I have been active in getting an exhibition for a black artist at a gallery or museum.

9.

I have encouraged a television producer to include a black artist in an arts program.

10.

I am a friend of a black Turner Prize winner.

11.

I have suggested the names of black artists to speak at conferences on a range of art issues.

12.

I have spent my own money promoting the work of other black artists.

13.

I have spent my own money buying the work of other black artists.

14.

I have written accurately about other black artists for an art history book.

15.

I have persuaded a collection to buy the work of a black artist.

16.

I have insisted that a museum bring the work of a black artist that they own out of the storeroom.

44 ■ Lubaina Himid

17.

I have helped fund a catalogue of the work of a black artist.

18.

I have been rigorous when proofreading texts about black artists.

19.

I have persuaded critics to write about black exhibitions.

20.

I have complained when artists have been written out of history.

21.

I have sent a publisher an idea for a book about a black artist.

Responses 1.

Your name must be Eddie Chambers, Maud Sulter, Gilane Tawadros, Rasheed Araeen, or David A. Bailey.

2.

Did you place these in Art Monthly, Frieze, or the Journal of Art Historians?

3.

Good, so you did not worry that they were not as famous as Mel Gooding, Griselda Pollock, or Whitney Chadwick?

4.

Did you have to explain who the artist was? Did this take long?

5.

Did the panel want to visit the artist’s studio, and were you worried that the artist made his or her work at home?

6.

Did the panel discuss the work, the artist’s contribution, and how much he or she had influenced British art in two, three, or ten minutes?

7.

Did you give him or her every piece of information you could about the place, the interview, the department, the sta≈, the facilities, the wage structure, and the buzzwords. Did you provide a brilliant reference?

8.

Have you already shown at that gallery? Is the curator about to leave, having been there nearly five years?

9.

Make sure it is an arts program and not a fly-on-the-wall documentary about discovering your roots, defying your parents, or going bankrupt.

10.

I wonder if he ever talks about how influenced he was by The Thin Black Line, the blk Art Group, and discussions about the politics of representation. Give him a subscription to Third Text from me.

11.

A good idea, because we all know and can speak about making films and television programs, running art departments, selling work at auction, collaborations with writers, how art and science can dialogue, European site-specific projects, city regenerations, and so on.

12.

I hope we thanked you enough.

13.

I hope the price was fair and that you encourage your friends, family, and business contacts to do the same as often as you can. Start them o≈ with prints and small drawings, then lead them gently toward a major purchase. Artists need to eat and have somewhere to live.

14.

Good, because being slipshod in your research—by describing artworks as if you had seen them when you have seen only a slide—drives artists crazy, especially

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when they see the misdescription repeated and repeated in publication after publication, year after year. 15. You must have either suggested places from which the collection could get funding, been an advisor for the collection, or known how the artwork could be used by the education or general curators in the very near future. You have participated in a serendipitous agendas game. 16. You must have used one of three methods: a.

There is a book coming out.

b.

He or she is eighty-five next month.

c.

You know some collectors who will donate a free work by X if they see you support the work of Y.

17. To have persuaded a gallery to allow a black artist to have a catalogue is one thing, but then someone (not usually the gallery, if the artist is black) has to pay for it. Who was it? a.

A university research panel.

b.

iniva.

c.

A regional art board (unlikely).

d.

Or did the artist sacrifice his or her hanging fee to pay for most of it and write to a charitable organization to match funding, and then not pay the gas bill so that it could have perfect binding?

18. If you are a research assistant and helping some professor write his or her “definitive” version of how it was for us all in the 1980s, or even the 1990s, check the facts with the artists: ring them, write to them, fax them, e-mail them. Please do not leave them out by accident, and if you make a mistake on purpose, pray for forgiveness. We know who you are. Lives depend on accurate histories. 19. You must have called them on the phone, written to them, owned the newspaper, or given them a show. You obviously know that critics often make work in secret. Perhaps you helped to write the press release knowing that critics will—if it is well-written—rewrite the press release and then add bits. Oh yes, and I assume

46 ■ Lubaina Himid

you included a good black-and-white and a clear color image of the artwork to reproduce with the article. 20.

I know you have never complained, because no one I know has ever received an apology, either in a letter or verbally, or seen a correction in a reprinted edition. Be brave, complain. Next time, it could be you who is left out.

21.

Was the publisher Phaidon? In which case, you must have been a very good friend of Iwona Blazwick, who is now running the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Or if it was Thames and Hudson, there must have been a major show at a major venue about to happen. Or if it was Manchester University Press or Routledge, you must have had to write about more than one artist. Or was it iniva? In which case, I hope the answer is yes, and that the books sell well all over the world and all over the British Isles. How many copies did they say they will give you to send to the important shakers and movers?

Inside the Invisible ■ 47

48 ■ Lubaina Himid

Kobena Mercer Iconography after Identity

The “Shades of Black” conference is a welcome opportunity to begin the process of mapping that very brief black British moment in the 1980s onto the much broader story of the changing relationship between art, politics, and culture in the twentieth century as a whole. This opportunity is important because it gives us the chance to take account of some of the following features of that moment, among them, the di≈erent mediums of emergence in which black British subjects came to voice. For example, in the early 1980s, it was definitely painting, in the work of Sonia Boyce, Keith Piper, Lubaina Himid, and others. In the mid-1980s, it seemed to shift to film and video, with the rise of independent filmmakers, and then, in the late 1980s, it was photography, particularly the challenge to documentary realism by such practitioners as Joy Gregory, Dave Lewis, Ingrid Pollard, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Another significant feature was the di≈erent forms of agency that arose in the 1980s, particularly collectives. We have already heard about the formation of the blk Art Group by Donald Rodney, Keith Piper, and Eddie Chambers in the Midlands in the early 1980s. There were also the film collectives: Sankofa, Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo, and

Iconography after Identity ■ 49

Retake. Collaboration was also important, such as that between Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter, and the kind of work that I did with Isaac Julien. And then, third, there were animateurs, those individuals who took on more than one role: artists who curate, write, advocate, and do archival work as well. Finally, I think it is interesting to observe a broader generational shift in the 1980s that could be understood as a follow-through to the ruptures of the social movements of the 1960s. In 1986, for example, there was a great deal of interest in an article that the journalist Great Tate wrote in the Village Voice, entitled “Freaky Deaky Meets Cult Nats.” Although Tate was talking mainly about music, performance, and poetry, the article registered an important sense of both rupture and follow-through from the Black Arts Movement era. Another example, which was perhaps less influential, was the idea of a “New Black Aesthetic” by Trey Ellis. In other words, on both sides of the Atlantic there was a sense in which black identities were changing and that the arts were the key cultural arena in which these shifts were being registered. Having said this, my main point is that I believe it is simply too early to try to define the 1980s as a closed or finished period. This is particularly so given that the broader fifty-year history of Afro-Asian artists in postwar Britain has not yet been written in any definitive sense. It is not closed. It is not finished. It is not over. It is still unresolved and very much ongoing. To be clear, in saying that it is too early to define the 1980s as an art historical period, I am not suggesting that we should give up altogether, but that we need to clarify and even discipline our expectations as to what we want such stories or narratives to deliver. If the 1980s exist in a kind of twilight zone that is neither part of the historical past nor part of the here and now, then from the point of view of cultural politics, we need to take two things into account. First, there has been a major reconfiguration in the relationship between art and politics, or, more broadly, in the relationship between art and culture. The fine art realm has become part of popular culture, with tabloid newspapers reporting the goings-on of young artists and galleries in London, which is a very di≈erent situation compared to fifteen or twenty years ago. Second, we have experienced massive reality shifts that have resulted in what could be called “the normalization of di≈erence.” One could look, for example, at the advent of the Tate Modern in London as being indicative of culture’s response to globalization in the 1990s. It is also symp-

50 ■ Kobena Mercer

tomatic of Britain’s rather skewed relationship to modernity and modernism. Whereas most of us are taught that modernism begins in Paris in 1863 or 1907, it is not until the year 2000 that British institutions begin to embrace the internationalism of the high modern. Go figure. In relation to these huge reality shifts, I would pick out three points to consider. First, the way the so-called yba (young British artist) defined itself against the culture and politics of the 1980s, particularly with its regressive evocations of trashy, cheesy Britishness that were pitched against the emphasis on “di≈erence.” Second, we might also want to take account of how the very ground and goal posts of artistic practice have shifted as a result of these reality changes. The aims and objectives of artists like Steve McQueen, Yinka Shonibare, and Chris Ofili di≈er radically from those that were achievable twenty years ago, although there are actually some interesting continuities as well. Third, we might consider what could be called “multicultural managerialism,” a managerial outlook that says that in a culture of diversity, no one can play the minority card because we are all individuals now. Although some see this outlook as part of a formalist backlash against identity politics, the normalization of diversity can also be regarded as a di≈use e≈ect of wider global shifts in the relationship between politics and culture across the board. So, against the background of these shifts, another particular feature to take note of is the insidious and pervasive hunger for minority success stories. In my view, this is essentially a wish that exists both among institutions who have an interest in perceiving that issues of race and ethnicity are resolved, that such “issues” are finally finished and are now part of the past, but also, more important, this hunger for success stories exists among the minorities themselves, who may want to perceive that their presence in the society is acknowledged, recognized, valued. My concern is that what results is a double-sided pressure to pass judgment on the recent past in evaluative terms that are redefined by the present. It is as if the goal is simply to push the 1980s into the realm of nostalgia—there was a recent popular Saturday-night television series in Britain called I Love the Eighties—or, worse, to arrive at a balance sheet of successes and failures that will inevitably result in a roll call of names on the where-are-they-now list. I suggest that it is important to resist such pressure, or at least to step aside from it, because there is a problem in the way such an exclusive focus on the present leads

Iconography after Identity ■ 51

to a kind of “contemporaryitis.” Such a blinkered concern with the contemporary moment, which is often driven by curatorial frenzy over pinpointing and then packaging the next big thing, is a double-edged danger that covers over and conceals the political problems of shallow institutional memory whereby minority formations, such as black British art in the 1980s, remain unintegrated with our broader knowledge of twentiethcentury art. The opportunity to stand back allows one to reflect on the overall tone and quality of the discourse of criticism surrounding black artists. In my view, there is a strong tendency in much of this discourse to shuttle between two extremes, between a sort of low-grade celebrationism of multicultural murmuring and a highly charged, explosive, and divisive controversy, both of which deflect attention from the work of art itself. We are all aware of the Chris Ofili controversy when the Sensation exhibition traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York (1999), and Mayor Giuliani threatened to withdraw funding on account of the artist’s portrayal of the Holy Virgin Mary as a black woman. Similarly, when artist Kara Walker was attacked by senior generations of African American artists who saw her silhouettes as pandering to racist stereotypes, the controversy generated more heat than light. Although audiences may be aware of such artists, the question is How has the controversy helped us to understand the art itself? This oscillation is indicative not only of the problems of art historical amnesia which cannot relate black British or African American formations into that broader story of twentieth-century art, but also of the conceptual chaos and confusion as to what the primary object of attention actually is. Is it the background information about the artist’s cultural identity, or the foreground matter of the aesthetic work performed by the object itself? I find such confusions highlighted in a recent book, Black Visual Culture (2000) by Gen Doy. The author is obviously inspired by the passion that Afro-Asian artists bring to their practice, but she treats the work instrumentally, as if the art is a means to an end, and in most cases, the end seems to be a general discourse about identity. I characterize this tendency as the “optical wobble,” for this elision of backgrounds and foregrounds continually recurs across the prevailing discourse on a whole range of minority formations in twentieth-century art and culture. Writing about art entails a continuous reflection on the circuit and interrelationship

52 ■ Kobena Mercer

between three very di≈erent sorts of things: artists (who tend to be human beings); art worlds (which are contingent sociological structures); and artworks (which are usually physical objects). In the discourse of so-called criticism surrounding minority formations we tend to see an overemphasis on the first and the second, which overshadows, if not completely obliterates, the third. As a result, the dignity of objecthood is very rarely bestowed on the diaspora’s works of art, on the actual art objects that black British artists have produced, for instance. The emphasis on the artist’s identity and on the institutional policies of the art world has, I think, significantly deflected our attention away from the relative autonomy of the art object itself. Because so much of the writing concentrates on the artist’s biographical identity or the experience of exclusion in institutional practice, the more interesting problems and questions of interpretation concerning iconography and iconology tend to be continually pushed back and deferred. I would argue that critics and those directly interested in writing about art have now arrived at a point where you can no longer actually carry on like that. Hence my second theme. My interests lie in calling upon the concept of diaspora not merely to describe, but to interpret and to analyze the interactive relationship between major and minor strands in the story of twentieth-century modernism as a whole. And this, I think importantly, entails a conceptual revision of art historical precepts as well as a revision of the dynamic relationship between modernism and modernity. Seen in historical perspective, black Britain is constituted as a space of three overlapping diasporas: South Asian, Caribbean, and African. A moment’s reflection shows that such complexity demands a careful response in terms of historical writing or historiography. Looking at artists from the New Commonwealth era of the 1950s, such as Uzo Egonu, Aubrey Williams, or Francis Newton Souza, one option would be to relate them to a set of originating national or regional traditions in Nigeria, Guyana, or India. However, this nation-state model has obvious limitations, as it would not work for subsequent generations born in Britain. Another option would be to relate artists of diverse ethnic backgrounds to Britishness as their chosen location, their elective context. This approach has the virtue of including artists like David Medalla, Mona Hatoum, or Mitra Tabrizian, thus revealing the cosmopolitan character of postwar Britain. However, the problem remains that British art itself has always had a fairly provincial and tenuous

Iconography after Identity ■ 53

relationship with modernism. The third option, that of an internationalist perspective, seems the most plausible and the most open-ended. But ever since the high modern era of the so-called international style of the 1930s, the price of the ticket to this discourse lies in the erasure of cultural di≈erence as a significant factor in interpretation. The fourth option, I would suggest, lies in adapting the diaspora concept so as to reveal the ways that works of art talk to one another across the boundaries of space and time. The idea of a Black Atlantic, which actually originated with Robert Farris Thompson in terms of an ethnography of African art, has been theorized primarily in relation to literature, then secondarily in relation to musical and vernacular cultural forms. I am suggesting a way of adapting the concept of the diaspora so that the idea of a Black Atlantic can be conceptually related to the major breakthrough in African American art historiography that has taken place in recent years. The value of such books as Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century by Richard Powell (1997) and African-American Art by Sharon Patton (1998) lies in o≈ering comprehensive chronologies that redress and amend previous omissions in the common understanding of the modern art narrative. These are valuable and important surveys that give a firmer sense of shape to the story of how African American artists participated in each of the key modernist paradigms following the Cubist revolution. Indeed, I would add that in terms of this developing mode of study of the interactive relationship between African American culture and post-Cubist paradigms, a work that was ahead of its time was Richard Powell’s innovative exhibition and catalogue entitled The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989). Relative to previous studies in the field—by Samella Lewis, David Driscoll, and even the encyclopedia that Romare Bearden did with David Henderson—this breakthrough in African American art history is important because the field of study was hitherto seen as merely a separate or fairly marginal minority story. Having said this, however, one of the consequences of these broad-based surveys is to highlight some of the underconceptualized areas in the field that are in need of further attention, such as the need for viable models and methods of cross-cultural study of iconography. Relating black British art to African American art history through the mediation of the diaspora concept is not about hooking up a little story to a bigger story. Instead, it is part of a broader revision of our understanding of modernism, which seeks to unlock what Michele Wallace called “the problem of the visual.” In her landmark 1990 essay,

54 ■ Kobena Mercer

Wallace was the first to relate the exclusions of Western canon formation in the fine arts to the broader realm of visual culture in terms of Ralph Ellison’s metaphor for a black subjectivity that was felt to exist in a general condition of “invisibility.”1 Against the background of Panofsky’s three levels of art historical interpretation, I would suggest that we are midway between the first level of pre-iconographic description and the second level of iconography proper. At the first level, one thinks of the crucially important survey exhibitions, such as The Other Story (1989) and Transforming the Crown (1997), which provided the necessary historical data about who did what, where, and when. In relation to black British art history, the second level examines how individual artists position themselves in relation to black diaspora culture as both their subject matter of choice and as a source of stylistic inspiration. You could say that such recent monographs as Lynda Nead’s book on Chila Kumari Burman (1999) and Gilane Tawadros’s book on Sonia Boyce (1996) have set the standard for work at this second level of iconographic study. What interests me is getting to the third level of iconology, where aesthetic matters of style and form are interpreted as symptoms of the deeper structures of diaspora subjectivity. As you can see, I am “translating” Panofsky on the hoof. I am not suggesting that we can find a whole set of ready-made conceptual tools in the work of a group of German art historians from the turn of the century. There is not enough time today to talk about how postcolonial theory or cultural studies might be able to “translate” those precepts. Rather, I am simply taking the need for “translation” for granted in putting forward an argument for iconology, which is really about studying the work of art by exploring the deeper structures of diaspora subjectivity that it opens onto. I am using the word “subjectivity” as opposed to “identity” in this context because it allows us to think about art’s relationship to the constitutive outside and to that realm of otherness in which the ego and its so-called identities become undone. The importance of reaching this level is that, from here, we can begin to analyze the imaginative connections whereby works of art talk to one another: we can enter into the dialogic networks that reconfigure what Wöl◊in once called “the action of picture upon picture.”2 My argument for an iconology of the diaspora artwork, then, addresses the necessity of interpreting the work as a document of the human imagination that exists as an object of aesthetic attention in its own right.

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Coming from this position, I therefore tend to agree with those accounts, in the African American context, that place the work of Romare Bearden at the interpretative center of the story of African American modernism. This is partly because Bearden’s restless practice and his individual artistic choices cut a slice through the story of twentiethcentury modernism and its relationship to the black vernacular. It was the interactive nature of this cross-cultural relationship that both accounts for the richness of Bearden’s work and also accounts for the blindspots whereby o÷cial institutions of modernism always denied recognition to cultural di≈erence as a significant factor in the unfolding of various modernisms. For example, in his 1946 article “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Bearden pinpointed what people in the 1980s called “the burden of representation.”3 The interesting thing is the way Bearden went about resolving obstacles he encountered in realism and abstraction by turning to collage in the 1960s. There is an interesting time gap between the beginning of his career in the late 1930s and the resolution of the problems that he addressed artistically and intellectually some thirty years later during the civil rights era. Bearden’s cut-and-mix dialectic between aspects of post-Cubist painting and key motifs from the diaspora imagination—the house, the train, the guitar, the mask—created a sort of double voicing in his photomontage projections of 1964, such as Pittsburgh Memories. In my view, the dialogic quality of Bearden’s iconography bears a very close relationship with the multivoiced literary strategies of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, which was published in the same year as Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). All three contributed to a breakthrough in the understanding of the constitutive interaction of “race,” vision, and representation. Before finishing, I would like to talk quickly about two things. One is the importance, art historically, of looking at how images travel, and the other is the importance of thinking about how images survive time. The fifteenth-century Iyoba pendant mask (which is actually in the British Museum) that is in the window of the tenement in Romare Bearden’s Black Manhattan (1969) reappears transatlantically in Keith Piper’s banner-like painting The Black Assassin Saints (1982; plate 10). The ostensible starting point for Piper’s work was a text by Ron Miller, a playwright active in the Black Arts Movement, whose views on art and politics were being translated into the British context by Piper’s stylistic choices, which often involved a revision of 1960s Pop. We see a process of quotation,

56 ■ Kobena Mercer

not of the African mask as it is, as some sort of authentic source of identity, but as it is reproduced photomechanically and as it is received photographically, as being always already in quotation marks. Another such link regarding how images travel can be seen in the “dialogue” between a work such as Bearden’s Work Train (1966) and Sonia Boyce’s Talking Presence (1988). The motif of the broken wall and the cross-cutting of boundaries between inside and outside concern the iconography of home, and of finding one, which is a crucial matter to the diaspora imagination, and which is central to themes of exile and exodus that cut across the cultures of di≈erent ethnic diasporas. I am going to end with an echo of Jean Fisher’s plea to attend to “the work between us,” the title of her catalogue essay for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale. Art is not an act of communication or representation, she states, it is an occasion for aesthetic experience. The object is important not only as a document of the human imagination that survives time—whose survival, however, is not guaranteed, but instead relies on the object being curated, being cared for. Art’s condition of objecthood, as it were, is also as a permanent opening onto those aspects of thought or perception or feeling that remain “other,” that are part of the constitutive outside and that can never be fully grasped by reason or consciousness or by the intellect alone. For me, it was the opportunity to work with Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs (which, amazingly, constitute a body of work that was produced in a three-year period, between 1986 and 1989) that o≈ered a valuable lesson in time, patience, and translation, in terms of being able to sit with the object, to stay with the work as the primary object of attention, as opposed to rushing o≈ to chatter about the ever-changing nature of identities or institutions. Last, there is the question of death, which represents a test case as to whether the object is cared for, or whether it is going to be used as a means to an end that will disappear after it has been made to serve a purpose. Reflecting on the depth of feeling in Donald Rodney’s work, In the House of My Father (1997; plate 11), in which the iconography of the house, held out in the palm of his hands, was actually made out of his own decomposing skin, one feels that death will test the mettle of any identity. I am not sure how the black British artists have risen to that challenge in terms of wanting to go beyond the politics of identity and institutional recognition to that realm of experience where the encounter with death delivers you to the “otherness” or the constitutive outside that is said to make us human.

Iconography after Identity ■ 57

On the other hand, there are good grounds for optimism in terms of writers and art historians—Margaret Van Drys at Princeton, James Smalls at Rutgers, Jennifer Gonzalez at Santa Cruz—who are helping to put us in a position from which we can rise to that challenge. From there, we can begin to let go of the way in which the reading of the aesthetic autonomy of the diaspora art object has been continuously overdetermined by a discourse about identity and institutions whose time is now at an ending.

Notes 1. Michele Wallace, “Modernism, Post-Modernism and the Problem of the Visual in Afro-American Culture,” in Russell Ferguson et al., eds., Out There: Marginalization in Contemporary Culture (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 39–50. 2. Heinrich Wöl◊in, Principles of Art History, 7th ed. (New York: Dover, 1950), 230. 3. Romare Bearden, “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” Critique (November 1946): 16–22.

58 ■ Kobena Mercer

susan pui san lok A to Y (Entries for an Inventionry of Dented “I”s)

Asian Flew A dense configuration of lines makes tangible the delicate creases and soft folds of a pair of wide trousers. Abruptly emptied of volume, they fall barely delineated toward sandal-clad feet. At the same point, but in converse rhythm, the edge of a just-visible flowery sarong skirt, hanging loosely over bare feet, acquires a sudden richness of tone and texture. Rectangles of color interrupt upper and lower planes, their patterns monochromatically echoed in the fabrics of the clothing. On the former, a cartoon-like stereotype of a mustachioed colonizer sporting dark glasses and white hat repeats, while the latter picks out several flowers in bright, flat colors. The title of this 1990 work by Lesley Sanderson is He Took Fabulous Trips (plates 12 and 13). Feet point to concepts of travel, journeying, and movement across land.1 Respectively bare and shod, they might hastily be read as oppositional signs of primitivism and civilization, the “he” of the title representing the progressive masculine subject of exoticized narratives of colonialism, the unacknowledged “she” an embodiment of supposedly backward feminine territories, orientalized and colonized. Simultaneously present and absent, these figures occupy di≈erent spaces. Can the one come into vis-

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ibility only at the cost of the other? If it is he who has undertaken the “fabulous”—extraordinary and fictionalized—journeys to the subtropical climes inferred by their mode of dress, what and where is her part in the stories and their telling? Already relegated to a past tense, this temporal lapse adds an ambiguity to their relationship, now not so easily polarized. Separated and subdivided within the same frame, they nevertheless share a posture, an attitude, appearing to collude in their anonymity. To what tall tales, what undisclosed, unreconciled narratives, fabulous and sedate, are we in turn invited, intruding upon, or denied? Between the “bold omissions and minute depictions” (Trinh T. Minh-ha’s allusion to a mode of representation that exceeds the “real” and “legible,” to encompass growth, change, and movement, the “never static”) are mere hints of/at uncertain histories.2 Despite the intimacy—we are sat like children before adult feet—incommensurable distances prevail. Proximity does not bring with it the truths and identities of strangers. Who is speaking? Who is spoken to? How to listen to and translate these silences? Whom does it “help” to describe the artist as “Malaysian-born, British-based, of Chinese and English parents”? Scant biographical details gesture toward a narrative of identity as a deceptively straightforward unified and dualistic equation: Malaysian British, Chinese English. However, simple consideration of the mere ordering of these terms (which should come first?) stirs questions of origins, “home,” and belonging to an unsteady brew of identities, nationalities, and ethnicities. How do the untold stories of travel and migration of He Took Fabulous Trips relate to the axes of di≈erence that constitute the artist’s brief biography and the narratives by which her work has been framed? How in particular might they be negotiated not only in relation to the critical and curatorial frameworks of the black art of a dis/assembled 1980s but also to the so-called British Chinese art that began to emerge in the 1990s? Black/British/Chinese. On the page they alternate neatly, fairly, and squarely between forward-slash swing doors, but the meanings, histories, cultures, and geographies evoked and disputed are not, of course, by any means even or discrete. In the 1980s, Sanderson’s inclusion in a number of so-called black art shows in Britain is indicative of the historical mobilization of “black,” to cite Stuart Hall, “as a way of referencing the common experience of racism and marginalization in Britain” and of “provid[ing] the organizing category of a new politics of resistance, among groups and communities with, in fact

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very di≈erent histories, traditions and ethnic identities.”3 A decade on, in Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, the displacement of the term “black” by several others nonetheless invokes the same groups and communities with which “black” continues for many to be identified.4 Where Sanderson figured as “black” in one context and moment, she became “Asian” in another—a reminder of the instability of both signifiers. It is worth noting, then, the di≈erent ways in which the Asian in “African, Asian and Caribbean” is broadly understood on either side of these waters. In a North American context, Asian includes Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese—peoples from Central, East, Southeast, and South Asia—whereas, in Britain, Asian is usually taken to mean people from the Indian subcontinent. The suggestion that the use of “black” in Britain might be politically analogous to “people of color” in the States must be considered with caution. Although the two seem to refer to the same groups and terms of definition, meriting comparison in terms of the intensity of the debates that have arisen around both, those who might come into visibility under one broad stroke risk invisibility under the other. If black can be Asian, but Asian is not always Asian, Chinese—among others—does a disappearing act. As the third largest minority in Britain, Chinese has often been positioned as the “unspoken and invisible ‘other’” of black as well as white aesthetic discourses. Uncertainties around the relationship between black, Asian, and Chinese are evidenced by moves made by arts organizations and curators to address the emergence of a new generation of artists by shifting existing parameters or inventing them anew. At least one regional funding body has expanded the category of black to include Chinese; another has distinguished between the Chinese and East and Southeast Asians while awarding them a collective category of their own. Meanwhile, two recent large-scale exhibitions at London’s Hayward and Whitechapel Galleries, respectively, Cities on the Move: East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now and 000zerozerozero: A Celebration of British Asian Culture, (fail to?) raise again the question of boundaries. With some but by no means all the artists migrating from one context to the other, what and when are the slippages between? As Chinese gains visibility as a category distinct from black, the same and other designatory bodies begin to express distaste for so-called single-ethnicity projects. Not necessarily a bad thing, although cynics might say that they are simply recycled

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as multiethnicity projects. What merits concern is that the term Chinese should be dismissed or subsumed without adequate consideration for how it has been mobilized, what it might signify and for whom. From the mid-1990s, the countdown to the return of Britain’s erstwhile colony, Hong Kong, to Chinese sovereignty was accompanied by a colonial nostalgia manifested in the vogue—in culture, couture, and cuisine—for all things Chinese. For a short time, exhibitions of Chinese art seemed to proliferate in a hitherto disinterested climate. Some drew poorly considered distinctions between the traditional and the contemporary. Others consisted of hastily thrown together surveys that o≈ered uncritical juxtapositions of works by artists brought together irrespective of di≈erences in practice, politics, generation, history, or geography, superficially united by a casual reference to the Chinese diaspora. For what audiences and by whom were these spectacles of Chineseness being presented? The Chinese diaspora needs to be thought less as a means of unifying disparate elements than as a loose paradigm whose emergence inevitably magnifies the already present di÷culties of describing, interpreting, and understanding China and Chineseness as coherent and unified entities.5 As such, it should occasion the bringing into relief, rather than leveling out, of historical dispersals and cultural di≈erences, not only beyond but also within its borders, reflected, for example, in the multiple “mutually unintelligible forms of speech” covered by the abstract notion of a single Chinese language.6 As Ien Ang says, “The view from the diaspora has shattered the convenient certainty with which Chinese studies have been equated, quite simply, with the study of China.” The same might be said of the equation of Chinese art with art from China. If “being Chinese outside China cannot possibly mean the same thing as inside,” it is also worth remembering that being Chinese inside China no more means the same. Not only does it “var[y] from place to place, molded by the local circumstances in di≈erent parts of the world where people of Chinese ancestry have settled and constructed new ways of living,” such that we may acknowledge “many di≈erent Chinese identities, not one,” but these many identities and subject positions are emphatically on the move.7 Unsettled, resettled, determined not by locale per se but as much through journeys and traversals, literal and metaphorical, small and large, tame and fabulous. It is these that are suggested by both the title and image of Sanderson’s work, which invokes, between broad caricaturistic strokes and sober details, both generalized and heterogeneous narratives.

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The subtle complications and twists to a tale or tales involve movements—geographical, cultural, and linguistic—in at least two directions, and the contingent negotiation of the ambiguities of positioning between traveller/tourist/colonizer/emigrant/colonized/migrant. Fanciful stories of adventures east come into tension with those less-heard-of migrations south, north, and west, toward such equally fabulous destinations as England. In the words of Salman Rushdie, England has presented for many “as wonderful a prospect as Oz,” and, like the Kansas of the film, it is “no more real.”8 Here, the Yellow Brick Road’s precarious passage through an imaginary land might resonate with the racialized stereotyping of Chinese as the Yellow Peril, as well as the immigrant-assojourner’s hopes of returning home and the laborious work of rebuilding a way of life overseas.9 For the majority of first-generation Chinese immigrants arriving in Britain from Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s, England’s postwar and postausterity interest in exotic foreign cuisine opened up an economic niche—the restaurant and takeaway trade—which saw its greatest boom in the 1970s and with which Chinese immigrants in Britain continue to be identified. Exceeding this oversimplistic yet dominant frame of reference, He Took Fabulous Trips o≈ers an oblique glimpse into unfathomed archives, its blanks and omissions pointing to the narrative gaps, complexities, and departures in so many ongoing, fragmented stories of the so-called Chinese diaspora that, in Britain—behind and beyond the one-dimensional public face—might also be stories of not-Chineseness, not-Britishness, not-blackness, not-Asianness. From bare feet and sandals to ruby slippers and home, Rushdie writes, “The real secret of the ruby slippers is not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ but rather there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began.”10 For Sanderson, this not-home might be Malaysia, signaled in a more recent work, Fabrication and Reality, by the stylized doubled form within a double image of Kuala Lumpur’s landmark Petronas Twin Towers, further twinned with a meticulously rendered yet indeterminate expanse of skin (plates 14 and 15). Made in collaboration with Neil Conroy, Sanderson’s practice too has split and doubled, her already hybrid positionings further multiplied, literally irreducible to one. Based in She÷eld in the North of England, which half is Eastern, Western, or Northern? Which part is Asian, when Asian can be

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Chinese and Chinese can be black, but black might not be Chinese, and Asian is not always Asian? And if Chinese is not black, nor white, but yellow, is it the new black or a jaded o≈-white? All such variations—so reasonable and ridiculous—threaten to return us to categories and the specter of essentialism. And yet, as the Vietnamese-Americanpostcolonial-feminist-artist-intellectual-filmmaker-theorist-hybrid11 Trinh T. Minh-ha has said, “Categories always leak,” an idea reflected in a 1994 mixed-media installation by Sanderson, These Colours Run.12 In the face of the apparent redundancy of terms, the question for a new generation of so-called British Chinese artists and other imaginary groups is not of the e≈ectivity of playing the race card, but rather of how the moment, and with it the game of alignments, di≈erentiations, and possible tactics, has changed. As “de-originated” subjects,13 it is necessary to claim careful contingency to so many historical, cultural, and political legacies of the marginal, and yet to insist on the indiscretion of unnatural denominations. Ien Ang again: “If I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only sometimes Chinese by consent. When and how is a matter of politics.”14 Given the right timing, as an opening—though never closing—gambit, is it possible to play a false hand? To consent, sometimes, to several names, always at least and not quite yellow and British and Asian and white and Chinese and black, but never curtailed to a single one?

y(b)b(aa)c(yrwbw/m)a? So why be a y(b)b(aa)c(yrwbw/m)a? Somewhere inside or between, attempting to enter/ disrupt/bypass partitioned terrains, we might (fail to) identify those subjects struggling or juggling, to di≈ering degrees, with or against some such awkward, ill-tasting mouthful of a Name-In-Capitals (or no caps?) as Young (Black) British (Anglo-Asian) Chinese (Yellow Red White and Blue Wo/Man) Artist. An oversized kitemark of identity—a stamp of approval validating the object’s attainment of often contradictory criteria, authenticating the goods as “good,” confirming fidelity to the label on the box. A kite, a mark—a precarious toy of skins spun and sewn, stretched and pinned to a light frame of words and cast into short-tempered crosscurrents. A thing that flies, trailing fraudulent letters, sign, stain, and scar of a dishonest person, signature-seal of a subject untrue. What is this untidy name/category of “unfinished identities,”15 leaking its subject(s)

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left, right, and center, up, down, and under? A random sequence compelling endless shifts and expansions? Cut up into manageable pieces—easier to get one’s mouth around, easier to swallow—we might be able to discern some of the more familiar variations along the often invisibly gendered, color-coded themes of nationality and ethnicity: young British artist, black British, Anglo-Asian, Chinese woman artist. We could abbreviate it, but the immediate acronym—y(b)b(aa)c(yrwbw/m)a?—is somewhat dysfunctional, clearly as much a twister for the tongue as the expanded designation it might displace. Not outside the parentheses but in between, the words British and Chinese. What is she getting at? There is no thing to get—no object or condition to understand, possess, obtain, or contract—only something to get at, to hint at and taunt. How might we criticize, undermine, bully and nag16 at British and Chinese as signifiers in tandem? Mindful of forgetting—I am for getting no thing, no fixed object/event, but for re-member-ing my/your partiality, my/your imbrication in the making/unmaking of (claims to) knowledges, the specificity of experiences and ligature17 of histories, languages, generations, and cultures. Between speech and silence, the trajectory and possibility of their mutual un/translatability in transit/transition, risks erasure under all-naming no-names. Some of us, sharing like motifs though not, perhaps, like motives, may appear to be searching for the same, but are in fact looking for sameness: homogeneity, fixity, and unity. If upper-case letters suggest Proper Names and generic representative types, each standing alone in a sequence of seemingly steadfast and stalwart natural/ized Monoliths, what happens if we divest them of their Capital(s), unpack and lower their cases, displace Proper with improper names? Made variable, capricious, as adjectives that name only in part, transitorily, that modify and describe, that transform the subject and situate her or him erratically, emphatically in process. As pivotal, provisional terms contingent to history and geography, they must throw and be thrown into hyphenated-motion, in tandem with/as the subject at stake.18 Played tactically, in/appropriately, as oxymoronic acronyms with meanings borne not in nor on the skin but as sometime adornments, accessories to performance, or crimes of fraudulence/inauthenticity, these are words to bear or bare tentatively, in speechmarks, for they can hook like burrs, and kitemark you. Akron (end) onoma (name)19: (end)names not to end with, nor articulate with finality an object or purpose, but rather—for akron also carries the meaning “tip”—to lean toward, hint at, a subject becoming, beginning again.

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Notes 1. Jane Beckett, “Displacements,” in These Colours Run, exhibition catalogue (Wrexham: Wrexham Library Arts Centre, 1994), 14. 2. Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), 155–166. 3. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), 441–449. 4. Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, Caribbean Cultural Center, Bronx Museum and Studio Museum, New York, 1997–1998. 5. Ien Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the Diasporic Paradigm,” in Rey Chow, ed., Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 281–300. 6. Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” in Chow, 8. 7. Ang, “Can One Say No to Chineseness?,” 282. 8. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: bfi, 1992), 9, 19. 9. See Jenny Clegg, Fu Manchu and the “Yellow Peril”: The Making of a Racist Myth (Sta≈ordshire, England: Trentham Books, 1994). 10. Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, 5. 11. After Gayatri Spivak: an elaboration of her reference to “the academic/intellectual/artistic hybrid.” See Outside the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), x. 12. Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 94. 13. “Alongside each utterance, one might say that o≈-stage voices can be heard . . . in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is lost in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance.” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), cited in Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 50. 14. Ien Ang, “On Not Speaking Chinese: Diasporic Identifications and Postmodern Ethnicity,” in Ang, ed., On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001), 21–36. 15. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993), 1. 16. See Irit Rogo≈, “Tiny Anguishes: Reflections on Nagging, Scholastic Embarrassment, and Feminist Art History,” Di=erences 4, no. 3 (1992): 38–65. 17. I use this term in a discussion of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work in my essay “Staging/Translating: Surname Viet Given Name Nam,” in Third Text, no. 46 (spring 1999): 61–72. 18. “Adjicere, adject: throw to, add, attribute.” See Delia Thompson, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 19. Ibid.

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Zineb Sedira in collaboration with Jawad Al-Nawab On Becoming an Artist: Algerian, African, Arab, Muslim, French, and Black British? A Dialogue of Visibility

I was invited to discuss “The Thematic and Aesthetic Shifts in Practice since the 1980s” at the conference, and, in response, I articulated how I had become an artist and drew attention to a sense of invisibility as an Arab in the Black Arts Movement. These themes were part of a continuing dialogue between myself and Jawad Al-Nawab, 1 a diasporic dialogue of imagined communities: Algerian, French, Iraqi, British. Similar and yet di≈erent. An artist communicates. Photography, video, words, installation, and sounds are my media of expression and inscription. Art—a site of the personal and the collective. The academy is not my home. Yemma and Bouïe—Mum and Dad—children of the vast African continent. Too many generations to count. One hundred and thirty-two years of French colonialism: humiliation, exclusion, and denial. A brutal war of liberation: death, rape, tortures. The consequences are still with us. All in the name of la mission civilisatrice. The civilizing mission—a myth of a French Algeria—demanded that Bouïe see his brother tortured to death. Yemma’s father, Djedd, was also tortured. Their teenage years fractured by the threatening presence of rape and violence at the hands of the

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myth makers, their languages and cultures ruptured and bleeding, yet resistant and enduring. In the wake of liberation, such is their/our fate. Leaving home, their African hills of Bordj, bringing wounds of their country’s torment. Vive l’Algérie! Al-djazair. They came, as they had been doing for decades, along with a million more to the heart and home of a myth, à Paris, à Lyon, à Marseille, à. . . . Labor in their factories. Peripheral. For this we were expected to be grateful. The colonial twist that so many of the colonized have traveled. Into this world I was born, this is my beginning. The cité dortoir,2 the banlieue, our home. Emerging from the edge, from the périphérique—outside of consciousness—we encountered an amnesiac Parisian gaze. Ominously absent. Disturbed and disturbing, too much a reminder of a nation’s impotence? Forget Algeria, forget the pain—their legacy to us. We were admitted on the condition of amnesia: Tu es française maintenant! Mais beurette.3 “Beurette?” To be a beurette is a political statement about cultural mélange in France. The word beur or beurette is a double inversion, a deliberate mixing up of the word arabe. Beurs and beurettes are French born of North African immigrant parents. To be beurette signifies di≈erence, a particular history and context, and is a sign of cultural ambiguity. A language of mixing, remixing, translating, and transforming helps to articulate the dissonance of a particular time and place: to be Arab and French and Muslim. A France bereft. A France in mourning. The colons4—three million or more—vanquished. We victors inhabiting residues of anger, their loss, displaced in animosity and hatred. Arabs, Maghrebis,5 amorphous, never speaking. To challenge their story was to commit “arabicide.” Arab lives, unaccounted, died along the back streets and in the stairwells. The 1970s, my teenage years. Di=érence confined to home, the banlieue, kept private. Enduring collective stories. Bouïe, tell me about the liberation? Did you really hide from the lynch mobs in Paris?6 Stories yet to be told, awaiting audiences. In this French imagination, the nation is central. The nation, the state, their project.

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Infused with the myth and collective stories of universality: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. The public mythically equal and uniform: La République est indivisible. We Arabs, we Algerians, we beurs, confined to our cité dortoir. Containing their nightmares and our dreams, our impoverishment. In France, the language of race, of di≈erence, is said to help the handmaiden(s) of the ghetto. So we are all French. Di≈erence, highly charged, politicized. Again, resistant and enduring. Again beyond their reach: a new story of immigrants inassimilables.7 “Are these contested spaces articulated? Resonating entanglements? Spaces mapped and located but not easily exchanged?” Arriving in London, it was 1986. A further displacement occurred. Zineb—an Algerian, Arab, Muslim, French, African, Maghrebi, beurette. I started to be very much aware that Britain, compared with France, entertained a di≈erent sense of di≈erence, born from its own historical experience of Empire building and closely aligned to notions of race and color. Coming from France, it felt alien to encounter monitoring of race, ethnicity. Filling in forms created a mixture of unease. Was this a form of surveillance? I came to learn that the British postwar system of racialization reproduced a particular dualistic white/black colonial code of subordination and domination. It came in the wake of color-based exclusion, discrimination, and so on. I could not place myself in this binary black/white racialization. Growing up everyday: “Les arabes, ils sont dégoûtants.” (Arabs, they are disgusting.) Crude, humiliating, painful. Now white? Privileged? My new home.8 And what about these laws to help challenge race discrimination in fields of employment and education? This was also novel to me and at the time I naïvely associated this with a greater commitment in Britain to tackling racism. I have come to appreciate that it is not quite so simple. “Codification. The races must relate: 1965, 1968, 1976—relate, relate, relate damn you! Enduring colonial idioms: restrict, control, and relate. Part and parceling of imagined Britain. Reconstructed, yet tainted and discolored by Empire. Black or white. Don’t look back.” I came to understand that the subsequent reinscribing of black was in part a strategy

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to organize resistance and I understood it as the referent for coalitions of Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain: black as a political category signifying these coalitions. Yet, equally, black continued as a referent signifying those of sub-Saharan Africa descent. The Black Atlantic diaspora inspired by the success of Afro-Americans mapped a di≈erent identity of blackness. It was during the 1980s that artists of Afro-Caribbean and Asian descent initiated the Black Arts Movement. A component of wider mobilization. Debates about inclusion, about who should or should not be admitted into the black artists’ groups. The fact that “black” was a shifting and contested signifier was readily apparent to me during my initial art training at Central St Martins College of Art and Design. “Marked di=erences mirror and echo disparities. Experiences of England. Contoured neither black nor white, Asian nor African. Subjectivity. Marked out as di=erent. Invisible. Like yours, entangled. Mixed? Dual? British? Arab? Iraqi? Native? Foreigner? An identity relational and dependent, experiences mixed and racialized. Where are my people? What of gender? Class? Other pieces of a jigsaw, your jigsaw.” Gender? Class? These are such important questions which I can see in my work. I believe they are aspects of our lives that have been neglected. One of the recurrent themes in my practice is the veil and the representation of the Arab female body. She didn’t seem to mind really. She did not seem unhappy. She was very happy, in fact. She was very at ease, and seemed to like it. She felt protected by it. It was part of a home, her home, my home. And I just accepted it.9 Whether I use the veil literally or as a metaphor for issues of gender, it becomes a device to embrace not only my mother’s history, but that of all women. When working with the veil, I am challenging and disrupting populist stereotyped images and ideas about women and Islam. Again I would say that class is integral to my art practice as it reflects my personal experience. My late entry into art could be understood in class terms alone! My parents

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are illiterate in both Arabic and French. This is in part due to racialization and French colonial strategies, but also poverty. They were denied an education. Their voices did not have a space to express themselves (plate 16). From mother to child, from child to mother, generations unfold. She cried her first cry in this fair land.10 It is the twenty-first century now. I feel that visual black culture(s) is/are changing. New debates emerge and others deepen. The cultural politics and race of globalization shift and change relationships, creating new dialogues and spaces between the mainstream art world and black artists. The demand for di≈erence is problematic. A new generation of black artists like me are aware that black art has been institutionalized. This situation creates dilemmas, working for and against my practice, a practice pigeonholed and stereotyped, though consequently marketable internationally (in the West). To a certain extent, black art has become a commodity. Did we create a form of ghetto? By practicing under this umbrella, we inherit a legacy. Is our work located mainly, sometimes solely, by this di≈erence? Is our work seen reductively in terms of issues of cultural identity and black politics? Has it narrowed possibilities of doing work outside this framework? Has it limited the chances of some artists reaching mainstream galleries? I wonder whether the notion of black art fixes the black visual practitioner—Zineb—as an exotic artist? The ethnic or Other? Commodified and essentialized. “Ghettoization? Recalling an imagined France departed. What space for Zineb to emerge without black art?” I do not have an answer. The politics of location weigh heavily. It is hard to imagine my work developing in France. It is in Britain, London to be precise, that I found the space to explore my identity, in part assisted through my art studies. It was only then that I became aware of postcolonial discourses. “Revisiting a politics of location. The place of the Arab(s)—the mother-tongue Arabs— from Mauritania to Iraq: African and Asian; black and white. Eluding a binary. No neatly fitting race to find its place in the racialized universe that was Britain. A disrupted typology, paralleling mixed-race lives.”

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What is relevant is that the Arab Muslim, although quite clearly not white in the British construction, is too heterogeneous to be black in this world of color. “Rendered invisible. Who are they? How many here? Outside of theory.”11 Arabs partially excluded, partially erased. A place unclear, almost invisible. Even in visual culture. “Di=erent histories fractured by an entente cordiale. One for England, one for France, one for England, one for France—apportioned. A di=ering relationship. Not the Caribbean nor India. A long history of presence in these isles. Al-Mansur’s overtures to the Elizabethean state erased. Almost forgotten Victorian migrations: Manchester’s Levantine merchants and Yemeni seamen waiting, listening for the roar of Tiger/Cardi= Bay boats. Drifting in and out. Hundreds, thousands—who knows for sure—students, engineers, doctors, chefs, and cleaners. Lo! They are buying up Mayfair. With war and strife, another chapter—asylum—calls: Iraqis, Sudanese, Somalis, Palestinians. Di=erent histories.” This was a striking di≈erence between France and Britain. We Algerians occupied a position quite similar to the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities in Britain. We were brought over to do the manual work, owing to the labor shortages in France and Britain. Yes, the pattern of migration is interesting. “Numbers unknown, invisible, yet present. Terroristic and oh so mysterious. The Invisible Arab. Anxiety seeps faceless and veiled, from time immemorial. Poitiers, Constantinople, the Holy Lands, Vienna—they haunt us in our dreams as they knock at the gates of Europe.” At the same time the mainstream British media continue to portray Arabs and Muslims—the terms are synonymous—as Oriental or the barbarous Other. The Muslim Arab is very present, almost archetypally so, with a long, chequered history. Remember those fifteenth-century fears of Europe Islamicized, an emerging England, Europe. Still, the Arab Muslim was the foremost enemy: fearsome, tyrannical and cruel, emotional, superstitious, libidinous. These enduring signifiers—exotic and barbaric—render recent events (racist violence, the Oil Crisis, the Rushdie a≈air, Iraq-Kuwait, Palestine, the civil war in Algeria) ahistorical. It conjures up a world that did not endure colonialism and Empire. Those grand projects, missions of civilization. “Sykes-Picot. Palestine settled. The catastrophe (nakba) created. Palestine erased through British amnesia. A remnant of colonial involvement not forgotten.”

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My work is partly a mirror of enduring decolonization, the legacies of the colonial project. This is a mixture of personal, family, and wider events: Palestine, Algeria, Iraq, France, and Britain. My work explores the paradoxes and intersections of my identity as a French Algerian, and also as an English resident. I use video, photography, text, computer technology and installation to investigate issues of gender, representation, family, language and memory. I question and reposition familiar Arab-Islamic and Western images, icons and rituals within my family’s remembered histories and, in particular, the motherdaughter relationship. The theme of representation forms the basis of my arts practice. The veil and the concept of the mental veil are negotiated within my own experience, but extend to the political and the personal, the historical and the contemporary, the Eastern and the Western. I use lens-based media to research traditional conventions of portraiture. This leads me to examine issues around visibility, censorship and self-censorship through image, narrative and spoken language.12 “Unreflexive constructions overseeing Arab/Muslim. Oppositional, conflictual, needing to be tamed. The very idiom of Empire lingers. Our resistance is implicated. Negotiating us? And them?” Dilemmas abound. Reflexivity is crucial. Acknowledging and contesting our a÷nities is in every sense a di÷cult project. Still, the idiom of Empire—witness some of the reactions to the World Trade Center—is pervasive and dominates. Another reinvention, the confrontation myth or clash of civilizations, worries me. My work with Arab Islamic patterning and images, such as Self-Portraits or the Virgin Mary, in Exeter Cathedral, articulates a response to this. It is a remapping (plate 17). Patterns woven, stitched lovingly, painfully. Static and dynamic. The waves and sea. No beginning, no end. Images cut and knowingly rearranged. Pixels, psychically invested, aesthetics implicated and burdened.13 A woman from behind wearing the haïk or Algerian veil. A Virgin Mary? I cannot help but note that it has been vandalized twice in less than a month of being installed. The globalization of Western identity seems to parallel the (re)positioning of a monolithic

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Islam-as-Threat. Can we see how it serves ideologically? Threat serves, cloaks, and obscures truths? Contested a÷nities, inherited sedimentations. Arab, France, England, Muslim, secular, civilization, justice—endless a÷nities. A÷nities to live by and die for. Refashioned, subverted, restored. Illusory contours tattooed in space and time. Blood and Glory! Imagined community/ies evoked: Bordj? Algiers? Paris? London? al-Qudds? Generations inscribed and amnesiac. The illusion of chronology tick-tocks away: 100, 200, 300. Lives lived, died and resurrected. Apparitions. Our lives lived as experiments with truth. Mon amour, ma mère, vite! Ya habiiti, yimma, yalla! Oh beloved, my mother, let’s go! We will return!14

Notes Editorial note: Zineb Sedira developed issues from the paper she gave at the conference in discussion with Jawad Al-Nawab; his voice appears in italic type surrounded by quotation marks. 1. Jawad Al-Nawab was born in London with an English mother and Iraqi father. Since the 1980s, he has worked as a community and youth worker and has been actively engaged with legacies of race and racial politics through writings, workshops, and work. He is currently writing An Estuary Boy about mixed-race Arab British experience. 2. The French housing estates, which became home for large numbers of migrant workers. In Paris, these are located outside the city center, in the suburbs. 3. Zineb Sedira and Jawad Al-Nawab talking aloud, 2002. 4. The French who settled in Algeria, all of whom left en masse following Algerian independence. 5. The Maghreb is the Arabic name for the region encompassing the modern countries of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Maghreb is commonly used in France to refer to North African immigrants and their descendants. 6. On 17 October 1961, two hundred Algerians were massacred on the streets of Paris as they marched peacefully against the curfew placed on them. 7. Sedira and Al-Nawab talking aloud, 2002. 8. Ibid.

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9. Extract from Silent Sight (2000), a 16mm film directed by Zineb Sedira. 10. Sedira and Al-Nawab talking aloud, 2002. 11. Jawad Al-Nawab, “Dual-Heritage: An Arab-British Experience,” paper presented at Arab Club of Great Britain, Third Arab Communities Conference, University of Westminster, London, 1999. 12. Zineb Sedira, extract from artist’s statement. 13. Sedira and Al-Nawab talking aloud, 2002. 14. Ibid.

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Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza CoRespondents

Yong Soon Min: Given that this room holds an incredible mix of people, a mix that has been profound in terms of all kinds of critical geographies, I want to take a spatial turn in how I talk about our work. Artworks can be thought to have addresses; that is to say, they can be located within a historic and aesthetic matrix, and they come from someone, who comes from somewhere. There are four primary addresses that formatively and politically situate my work. First is Korea, both as a place of birth but also as an imaginary homeland. Some of my work has focused on the ongoing divisions of the Korean peninsula, signified by the dmz. And here I feel indebted to Stuart Hall, for his disavowal of the end-ofhistory strain of postmodernism, as the Koreas are among many other countries in the developing world that are still grappling with the modernist project of establishing themselves as sovereign states. Another address for me is California, my immigrant home during the 1960s and 1970s. Los Angeles is my current dwelling, and home to the largest Korean diasporic community.

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New York City is another formative address, where in the 1980s I cut my political teeth in Asian American activism and coalition politics. I “became” Asian American at the same time that my artwork gained its greatest visibility during the multicultural heyday of the 1980s, of the late 1980s especially. I participated, for instance, in an exhibition that was held in New York City in 1990 called The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the Eighties. This exhibition, with its hefty catalogue, shared much in common—and some di≈erences, of course—with The Other Story held at the Hayward Gallery in London the previous year, in its attempt to assess the cultural shifts of the 1980s. Both served as markers, perhaps, of the end of that particular era. The Decade Show, with its multiculturalist framework, was fraught with all manner of problems. That this project was a valiant collaboration among three oppositionally situated institutions—the Studio Museum of Harlem, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art (which, incidentally, closed immediately after this exhibition)—also points to the fact that there was no Asian American or Native American institution in this coalition, highlighting the uneven and unequal development of cultural institutions in these various communities. The last address I will remark on is that of Cuba, where I went in 1989, ostensibly to see the only viable showcase, it seemed at that time, and perhaps even to this day, of contemporary art from the developing world. I encountered a group of black British artists whose works were curated by Shaheen Merali and Panchayat at the Havana Biennale. What was also very important to me at that time was that the black British artists caucused with the artists of color in the U.S. contingent to organize a symposium-type intervention at the biennale. It addressed issues of the “third world” within the “first world” that we felt were lacking in the presentation of the biennale itself. Allan and I first met there in Cuba, and then again two years later in New York City, where he came to participate in the Interrogating Identity exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery (1991). Our cross-Atlantic collaboration began soon after, with the recognition that we had parallel sets of addresses in terms of our artistic practice. Now, ten years later, we inhabit the same address, literally.

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Allan deSouza: Our collaborations stem from the coming together of our di≈erent histories. I should clarify that I do not mean that our histories merge, but that they run parallel, and periodically entwine to create a third narrative of collaborative work alongside our individual practices. One of my addresses is that of a second-generation Kenyan. As an aside, a number of South Asian artists in the Black Arts Movement, including the five founding members of Panchayat, were African-born, and yet we felt that we could not claim the space of Africa for ourselves artistically. Whether we chose to or not, our work was constrained by institutionalized dialogues within a politics of nation and ethnicity—often regardless of the work’s content—and was prevented from addressing multiplicity and internationalism. Collaboration for me has stemmed from particular histories of collectivity, and that is also how I imagined the Black Arts Movement. My first artistic collectives involved squats, where we would occupy buildings, make them su÷ciently habitable, and then organize exhibitions and music gigs. I also worked with an organization called Community CopyArt, which a number of artists here in this room used as a resource. We had a range of photocopiers and trained people to use them creatively, to make artwork, banners, flyers, and billboards. We produced exhibitions under the collective name rather than as individuals. At that time, I was also involved in theater and poetry collectives as a writer and performer. So I had a mixed background in terms of my “addresses” and disciplines. For me, collaboration is really a political decision, and is also to some extent utopian. To function collectively, you have to reassess questions of authenticity and origin(ality)—Who made what? Who made it first? And whose idea was it?—forcing a reconsideration of authorship. Of course, this too has its own problems, namely of individual invisibility, which was contrary to the Black Arts Movement’s underlying demand for visibility. Furthermore, the activities and groups that I was engaged with tended to privilege youth and were dependent on a politics of transience and opposition (heavily influenced by punk). Such politics, unsurprisingly, overlapped little with the quest for stability and political, if not cultural, assimilation that was sought, for the most part, by the African, Caribbean, and Asian communities.

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To return to an earlier discussion, I do not think we, as this loose a÷liation known as the Black Arts Movement, fully addressed the nature of alliance and of the inevitable antagonisms that arise when di≈erent groups occupy the same territory. We had not really learned to support each other’s di≈erence, especially di≈erence as a necessity to our own survival. In other words, we had not fully learned to collaborate. From an initial possibility of collectively generating a critical stance, organizing exhibitions and other activities, intervening into existing institutions, doing educational work, and so on, I feel that we settled for too little, too quickly. Having said that, I am also aware that it is in the nature of a utopian project to be disappointed or dissatisfied. And unlike other avant-gardist groupings such as the Dadaists, the Situationists, or Fluxus, we also had to contend with British racism. On the other hand, I think it was quite an achievement to place race center stage and to expose it as an ideological narrative within all art practice. Yong Soon Min: We began collaborating soon after Allan’s first trip to New York in January 1991, right at the end of the Gulf War. I had coorganized an exhibition at Art in General in New York about and against the war, and Allan had participated in a similar exhibition in London’s Citizens’ Gallery. The fact that we were both making work responding to Euro-American foreign policies set the tone for our future collaborations. We were already operating from similar political perspectives and, given our parallel histories of working within and from the margins, collaboration seemed a logical, even inevitable, step. Our first collaboration resulted in a series of photographs, including Nexus from 1992, which attempted to complicate the notions of sexuality and gender performance (plate 18). The two-sided image was designed for both sides of a condom packet that would be distributed in bars and clubs and aimed particularly at Asian Americans. One side has an image of Allan’s face in profile, with mouth open and about to receive an “erect” condom; the other side has my face in profile with the condom directed outward from my mouth. Together, the images confound any immediate presumptions of gay or straight or gender stereotypes, and instead celebrate safe sexual play and the possibility of a range of sexual practices. That same year we completed a video segment for Shu Lea Cheang’s collabora-

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tive installation, Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, shown first at Exit Art, then at the 1993 Whitney Biennale, both in New York. Playing o≈ peep shows and video booths, the installation was a series of viewing/phone stations; the viewer would insert a quarter and choose from a selection of videos by di≈erent artist teams. Our contribution again emphasized sexual play and gender performance, but against a more explicit background of colonial control. The camera slowly scans our two bodies that are separated by rolls of barbed wire, while a voiceover poetically recounts our journeys to the West and the need to remake ourselves, not simply in terms of the new nation but against expectations and stereotypes. Our next project was a site-specific installation, Geography of Desire (1993), at the Fourth Baguio Arts Festival in the Philippines. It was done with a third collaborator, the Filipino writer and critic Luis Francia. I would briefly characterize this work as like the gra÷ti on the U.S.-Mexico border, that states: “Yankee go home and take me with you.” It is that paradoxical language of repudiation and simultaneous desire that we were trying to address. Considering the Philippines’ history of colonization by Spain and the United States, the installation critiqued the American dream by creating an environment saturated by logos of U.S. multinational companies that generate an insatiable consumerist desire. A small room was converted into a “school of desire.” Viewers wiped their feet on a mat with the words “Welcome to Marlboro Country” (coincidentally also the name of a region near the exhibition site). They ducked to pass through a lowered entrance, which bore a curtain of dangling, cut-out paper figures reminiscent of kindergarten, but also suggesting a hierarchical ladder of human labor. Above the entranceway was the Philip Morris crest, with the legend “E Pluribus Unum” and the motto of the cia, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” Inside the “classroom,” the black walls were covered with gold-painted multinational logos and digitally altered photographic images relating to Filipino history and its relationship to the United States. A dividing wall was crowned by a row of fabricated books, titled Memories of Overdevelopment, and with a text by Luis Francia. Excerpts from the text, of a future nostalgia and ambivalent longing for the United States, were also written directly onto the walls in chalk. Three chair/desk combinations around the room also displayed fabricated books referring to di≈erent aspects

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of the American dream and its failure, such as images of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In each corner of the room was a stack of books that were canonical and/or critical of constructions of Euro-American civilization. Each bunker of books was guarded by a motorized toy gi, who sprayed machine gun fire into the room. Allan deSouza: We next made a gallery installation, alter idem/performing personae, at London’s Camerawork (1994), then under the directorship of Barbara Hunt. From outside the gallery window passersby could see the two of us wearing t-shirts, Yong Soon with “Native” written on the back, me with “Informant” on the front. From inside the gallery, the images were reversed, so you see the back of me with “Native” and Yong Soon’s front with “Informant.” We were playing with the idea that, as artists of color or as black British artists, we were required to work autobiographically and only about our own cultures; we were forced into the anthropological position of being the native informant. Wall texts taken from anthropology books described the qualities of what makes a good informant. These include access to the community, a willingness to divulge information, a certain facility with language, and a degree of honesty, although the anthropologist cannot fully rely on a single informant but has to compare the information from other informants. We thought of these as similar requirements for “minoritized” artists. Through a curtain in the gallery the viewer entered a dark space that suggested the field of anthropological research, but also a photographic darkroom. Inside was a tent, glowing red from within and acting as a photographic safelight. The tent became a panopticon, the point from which to view the natives, and also represented the Western space of safety and civilization that was relocated to the field of research. One side of the tent was printed with images of anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Michel Leiris, inside their tents. On the other side of the tent were prints of anthropologists with their native informants, for example, Margaret Mead dressed in a Samoan costume with her informant, and Leni Riefenstahl standing next to a Nubian man. We stretched the definition of an anthropologist to include Paul Gauguin surrounded by Tahitian women. On the front of the tent, almost acting as a bibliography, were the covers of anthropological books that we referred to

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and quoted. The supports of the tents were measuring sticks, invoking the pseudoscience of anthropometry. On the floor of the room was dirt or earth; lining the perimeter, and lit only by a viewer’s flashlight (which they had been given on entering the gallery), were negative photographs of native subjects. The gesture of shining the flashlight suggested the reenactment of discovery, thereby implicating the viewer in the role of anthropologist. In both anthropology and the practice of photography, the negative is regarded as the authentic document, whereas prints are unreliable in that they allow a high measure of manipulation, with anthropologists having notoriously doctored their prints to remove traces of the twentieth century—for example, a native wearing a t-shirt with the Coca-Cola logo, or telegraph wires in the background. Also, by owning the negative, one owned and controlled that document and, to an extent, its subject. Gallery viewers then walked through a black curtain into a long corridor where images of the two of us were projected onto three hanging clear polyester screens. In the images, we performed the anthropological roles of native and informant at various sites of our “native” habitat of Los Angeles. We posed in domestic and everyday settings and also in ethnically coded tourist sites such as Chinatown; Little Tokyo; Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood; Olvera Street, a primarily Mexican market; a car rental service in Beverly Hills proclaiming “Domestics & Exotics”; and the “Carpetería” man, straight out of an Arabian Nights fantasy. Though invited to partake of these spaces with us, the artists (as interchangeable guides and objects of curiosity), the viewer was also implicated in the colonial models of anthropologist and explorer. Walking through the screens in order to exit, viewers disrupted the images, with the native or informant texts on our t-shirts superimposed onto the viewers’ bodies. Following some ideas from this installation, in 1998 we created a participatory work in Portugal for the Lisbon Expo. Gallery visitors were divided into indigenas and assimilados, from the practice in Portugal’s colonies (primarily Angola and Mozambique) whereby natives were classed as indigena, but could become assimilado, or assimilated, by learning Portuguese, converting to Catholicism, passing a written exam, and so on. On entering the gallery space, visitors were confronted with a desk on which was a large poster in the form of the red and green Portuguese flag. The text required the

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viewer to acquire the appropriate documentation to enter the gallery fully. First, viewers had to match their skin tone to one of the color swatches on the flag; depending on whether they fell in the red or green zone, they received a stamp on their hand denoting that they were assimilado or indigena, respectively. They further received a passbook, fabricated by us, which provided fictional accounts of the indigena and assimilado experience. With this work, the viewer was made to identify as either of the two identities in order to reimagine the imprint of this colonial legacy on the present. Yong Soon Min: I want to make a slight shift to a couple of hair pieces (no pun intended). In 1997, we made a piece for an abandoned cage in the old Los Angeles zoo. Called Fray Wray (pun intended!), it consisted of a series of hair grips clasped onto the bars like animal claws and with human hair attached to them; the reference was obviously to King Kong and the fear of the black humanoid animal. It was as if the caged animals had leaped at passersby and grabbed snatches of their hair. Allan deSouza: Another piece is called Tress/Pass (1999) and was performed by Yong Soon, myself, and my two children (plate 19). The four of us wore blond wigs while traveling through Europe, trying to pass as a European family on holiday and failing dismally. We tried to play it as straight as possible, and at various tourist sites we enacted the tourist ritual of asking passersby to take our picture. We also had our portraits drawn by pavement artists. The piece was shown in di≈erent forms, as an installation including photodocumentation and the drawings and the wigs, and also in the form of postcards. Yong Soon Min: We want to end with a series of linked projects that develop the social interaction that was always at the core of the earlier work. Art is always a form of exchange, and the series foregrounds this exchange while setting up certain parameters and guidelines within which it can occur. The first was called FluxUs, made for the Nonzero Sum Games exhibition (at the Brewery, Los Angeles, 2000) about collaboration. That prompted us to think about

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something that I have always wanted to do: to the collaboration between Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Our piece is encapsulated in that time frame between their first collaborative album, Two Virgins (1968), and their last, Double Fantasy (1980). We wanted to do something quite funky and kind of cheesy, yet very a≈ectionate. As the viewers passed through giant beaded curtains (except that the beads, in this case, were vinyl records wrapped in shopping bags and strung together), they entered a room festooned with cellophane flowers (from the lyrics of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”) hanging from the ceiling. The soundtrack from Double Fantasy was playing backward as ambient sound. A rotating slide projector projected an image of Lennon and Ono, again from Double Fantasy. There are two versions of the album cover, one of which was censored, so that only their heads were showing. We reversed that so that only their naked bodies would be showing in the slide. The heads were then burned out, leaving it ambiguous as to whether it was the two of them or the two of us. Playing o≈ Yes (1966), the famous piece by Ono in which the viewer climbs a ladder to read the word “yes” on the ceiling—and the piece that initially aroused Lennon’s interest in Ono—we placed the slide projector on top of a wooden ladder. Also on the ladder, with a magnifying glass attached, was an image from one of the many visits that Lennon and Ono made to Japan, showing the two of them with a huge grouping of Ono’s family. It is a very domestic, familial image, and di≈erent from how they are popularly imagined. There were also three sets of text on the walls in Bellbottom font, invoking 1960s radicalism, but recasting it to the entrepreneurial 1990s: o≈thepigs.com, with the word dream in italics underneath; smashthestate.com with the word surrender; banthebomb.com and breathe. Another element was a male and a female doll suspended above a 1960s-style turntable playing an album whose label bore Walter Benjamin’s phrase “to brush history against the grain.”1 The central element of the piece was a raised platform that invoked the bed-ins, but it was covered with black thermosensitive paper. As people sat or lounged around on the platform, the heat from their bodies changed the color of the platform surface, leaving temporary body prints as traces of their presence.

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Allan deSouza: The next project in the series, Will **** for Peace, was a three-day performance in February 2002 in Minneapolis at the Mezzanine Gallery at the University of Minnesota. It was a recreation of Lennon and Ono’s original bed-in. Whereas their bed-in was a protest against the Vietnam War, we used ours as a way to focus attention on the then-recent bombing of Afghanistan. Holding court from our bed and donned in wigs and pyjamas, we had lengthy discussions with our audience of mostly university art students. Subjects ranged from the vital—the war itself, as well as U.S. foreign policy in general, the roles of art and activism—to the gossipy: What did I (as Lennon) think of Paul McCartney’s current musical ventures? While sitting in bed, we also were painting copies of the U.S. flag. When we had completed several, we distributed them among the audience and asked them to tear them up. The torn fragments were then used to form a large peace sign on the floor of the gallery. Unsurprisingly, this was a di÷cult and fraught action to ask of U.S. citizens. Yong Soon Min: In May 2003, we reperformed the bed-in at Oboro Gallery in Montreal, following the invasion of Iraq and on the anniversary of Lennon and Ono’s bed-in, also in Montreal, in 1969. We knew that what had been challenging to a U.S. audience would be almost reassuring to a Canadian one. Consequently, we decided to pose a di≈erent challenge to our audience: What did it mean to be “at peace,” in its widest sense? Again, the focus was on individual exchanges with gallery visitors, but in a highly mediated environment. Sound and installation features occupied the front areas of the gallery, while the bed was situated at the back and around a corner, so it was not immediately visible. The bed was backed by a large mirrored wall and the space and interactions were digitally recorded and simultaneously projected onto the opposite gallery wall. This created a constant “feedback loop” as the mirror reflected the actual and projected space, while the projection recorded the actual and reflected space. Allan deSouza: In e≈ect, the piece was the setting up of certain conditions for an exchange to take place, with both artist and viewer being transformed by that exchange. It is an exchange—which we hope has expansive repercussions—that can serve as a model for a politicized art practice.

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These are just a selection of our joint works, which, to varying degrees, reference race and draw on our personal histories. What we resist, however, is a simplistic notion of the autobiographical, so that while our references and exchanges with audiences might stimulate individual memory, we draw these together as collective memory or as forms of generative, living history. Because of our di≈erent but parallel histories of internationalism—from our respective migrations across continents, to our first “internationalist” meeting in Cuba, to our continuing practices—it is inevitable that our collaboration (from the kitchen to the bedroom to the studio) functions counter to the confines of nation and nationalism. The (f )act of collaboration is, by nature, a discursive one. It also reveals and foregrounds the social (and highly socialized) process of art making. It is a practice of negotiation, sometimes of compromise, but mainly of a joint exploration that can lead us in many di≈erent directions that we, working individually, would not otherwise have taken.

Notes This text was revised summer 2003. 1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256–257.

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Judith Wilson Triangular Trades: Late-Twentieth-Century “Black” Art and Transatlantic Cultural Commerce

Prologue There is no archimedean point outside the system from which to view historic “reality.” The only antidote to this dilemma is . . . triangulation. janet abu-lughod, “On the Remaking of History”1

Originally, I planned to look at the transatlantic circulation and exchange of information and ideas involved in and resulting from the 1980s Afro-Asian British arts movement. My premise was that the triangulation involved in filtering diasporic notions of identity through the additional lens of Afro-U.S. experience, in the case of black Britons, and of black British experience, in the case of African Americans, inspired exciting new visual practices and critical discourses on both sides of the Atlantic. I hoped to document this claim by consulting the literature on three U.S. exhibitions staged during the 1990s in response to the Afro-Asian British arts movement: Disputed Identities: U.K./U.S. (SF Camerawork, San Francisco, 1990), Interrogating Identity (Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 1991), and Transforming the Crown: African, Asian & Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996 (Caribbean Cultural Center, New York, 1997). Eventually, though, I have become aware of several major conceptual flaws in my original scheme. Chief among them was my failure to take into account my own position(s) within the various social systems and culture industries I wished to consider. Having written for the catalogues of Disputed Identities and Transforming the Crown and lectured

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on Interrogating Identity at one of its venues, I clearly had professional investments in these shows that ranged from admiring and wanting to promote many of the artists whose work they included to sharing both the artists’ and curators’ interest in exploring the nexus of race, visual representation, and cultural identity. Less apparent perhaps, but no less significant, are the ways my own identity is contingent on both the debates associated with these exhibitions and my (various) locations inside/in relation to their historical landscapes. For me, as an Afro-U.S. observer, the most striking feature of the 1980s Afro-Asian British art movement was its mobilization of blackness as a multiracial sign. Yet, in focusing on transatlantic cultural commerce, I had initially limited my own view of the explanatory potential of the triangulation of diasporic notions of identity to the African diaspora. What about the migrations that brought significant numbers of Asians to the Caribbean, East and South Africa, as well as to Britain? Clearly, it is not only racialized binary notions of identity that need triangulation. Diaspora, too, needs to be viewed from more than one cultural perspective in order to approximate “historic ‘reality’” with respect to contemporary transatlantic artistic exchanges. Finally, the presence of Canadian artists in Interrogating Identity and Canadian art criticism on Disputed Identities disrupts the neat juxtaposition of U.S. and U.K. perspectives, forcing us to triangulate both “American” identity and routes of transatlantic travel. So, with these problems in mind, I now want to return to my original project.

(Mis)translations: Black British Art in the United States While they were not the only U.S. exhibitions of the 1990s to feature black British art, Disputed Identities, Interrogating Identity, and Transforming the Crown were distinguished by their scope, scale, and circulation. Each show was larger than its predecessor, suggesting that U.S. interest in Afro-Asian British art snowballed during the decade. Disparities of cultural capital with respect to exhibition venues and critical forums, however, complicate this initial impression. The shows di≈ered, too, in their general content. While Disputed Identities and Interrogating Identity both juxtaposed art by Afro-Asian Britons with work by Americans of color, Transforming the Crown was devoted to developments in Britain.

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When Disputed Identities opened in October 1990 at SF Camerawork, a San Francisco alternative space, it had two distinct faces. In-house curators Rupert Jenkins and Chris Johnson had assembled a selection of photo-based work by five U.S. and five U.K. artists of color: Lyle Ashton Harris, James Luna, Yong Soon Min, Diane Tani (plate 20), and Carrie Mae Weems; David A. Bailey, Sutapa Biswas, Roshini Kempadoo, Ingrid Pollard, and Vincent Stokes, respectively. A complementary film and video program, guest-curated by local African American filmmaker Portia Cobb, featured work by six Americans (Ayoka Chenzira, Sharon Jue, Alfonso Moret, Marlon Riggs, Valerie Soe, and Malaika Williams) and four Britons (Martina Attille, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, and Ngozi A. Onwurah).2 Aside from Chenzira, the Americans in Disputed Identities were all California-based, living in the San Francisco Bay Area.3 But, if we accept the show’s declared parameters, it juxtaposed art by Afro-Asian Britons with art by Americans of African, Asian, and Native American descent. Although both groups included artists labeled “black,” “Indian,” or/and “Asian” in their respective homes, the “blackness” of Palestinian exile Mona Hatoum and an African American like Carrie Mae Weems is no more synonymous than the “Indianness” of India-born Sutapa Biswas and Luiseño Indian James Luna. The exhibition Interrogating Identity relied on a similarly deceptive set of analogies and added a third nation, Canada, to the mix. Curated by Kellie Jones and Thomas Sokolowski, it opened at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in May 1991. Video was not included, but the show encompassed painting, sculpture, photography, mixed-media assemblage, and installations. Eight Afro-Asian British artists (Rasheed Araeen, Allan deSouza, Mona Hatoum, Roshini Kempadoo, Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard, Donald Rodney, and Yinka Shonibare) vied with four indigenous, Chinese, Lebanese, and Filipina Canadians (Rebecca Belmore, Nadine Chan, Jamelie Hassan, and Lani Maestro) and a six-person U.S. contingent of African, Asian, and Latin American artists (Albert Chong, Glenn Ligon, Whitfield Lovell, Lillian Mulero, Ming Mur-Ray, and Gary Simmons). While the nonelectronic media artists in Disputed Identities operated on shared stylistic turf that might be broadly classified as postmodern, postconceptual, and photobased, Interrogating Identity suggested a loose weave of cross-currents and connections rather than any one overarching mode or practice. Although Allan deSouza’s acrylic and collage triptych and Whitfield Lovell’s three large-scale drawings displayed a shared sense of intense engagement with traditional modes of graphic representation made

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strange by deSouza’s obsessive patterning and Lovell’s obsessive marking and by both artists’ surreal use of displaced, dreamlike imagery, there were obvious di≈erences in content and medium. In Jamelie Hassan’s mixed-media installation, Prove It, and Rasheed Araeen’s London billboard in the form of an Oriental carpet, The Golden Verses, Islamic decorative motifs operate disparately, as signs of displacement in the former and sites of miscommunication in the latter work. Similarly, the use of text in Roshini Kempadoo’s sendup of black women’s magazines, Presence, yielded e≈ects quite unlike that of Glenn Ligon’s blurred, overlapping stenciled texts about the young male defendants in the Central Park jogger case. While this stylistic diversity probably reflected the range of practice among contemporary artists of color more accurately than Disputed Identities’ tighter focus, it also made Interrogating Identity a less coherent show. Curated by Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd, the third exhibition, Transforming the Crown, opened late in the decade, in October 1997 (plate 21). Considerably larger than either of its predecessors, Transforming the Crown filled three New York venues (the Caribbean Cultural Center, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Bronx Museum) with works by fifty-six British artists in media ranging from photography and video to painting, sculpture, and mixed-media installations. By focusing exclusively on Afro-Asian British artists, Transforming the Crown implied that U.K. artists of color represented something unique and of interest in their own right. And because its title referenced a specific thirty-year period, one was led to expect that the exhibition would historicize the movement’s distinctness. Instead, after a brief homage to the 1960s Caribbean Artists Movement, the show jumpcut to the plethora of Afro-Asian artists at work in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s. Meant to convey the movement’s stylistic and thematic diversity, the show’s potpourri approach obscured not only the movement’s history, but also its artistic significance. Despite its multisite installation, Transforming the Crown involved only minimal collaboration among the three New York ethnocultural or community arts institutions at which it was staged,4 and the show itself did not travel. The two earlier shows had each toured opposite coasts,5 and these disparate circulation routes mirror an enduring mode of cultural identity that is often overlooked in contemporary debates: regionalism. Indeed, the content of these shows, especially the ways cultural identity is conceived and functions within them, seems to reflect configurations of race, ethnicity, and nationality specific to the regional location of each exhibition’s originating institution.

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Unlike the black and/or multiethnic institutions at which Transforming the Crown was displayed, both Disputed Identities and Interrogating Identity were organized by and circulated exclusively to majority-operated art spaces. While it can be argued that Transforming the Crown’s massive scale made it unfeasible to travel, the fact that the one show organized by a minority art space lacked either the financial resources or institutional networks to mount a tour is revealing. And because it alone attempted to convey the range and diversity of Afro-Asian British art practice, Transforming the Crown’s failure to travel seems especially unfortunate. Given how unlike the circulation, scale, and content of the three exhibitions were, it seems foolish to try to read the general nature and extent of transatlantic artistic dialogues from them. Instead, I want to focus on some of the (cross-)cultural assumptions involved in their discursive frames and critical reception. When I turned to the three exhibition catalogues and the sundry reviews I was able to find, I was initially struck by the extent to which both curators and critics of the first two shows failed to grasp the significance of disparities between British constructions of race and their own. The fact that “black” in the British context encompasses artists of African, (primarily South) Asian, and Middle Eastern descent does not make it synonymous with the U.S. phrase “people of color.” On the one hand, British conceptions of blackness represent the intersection of England’s colonial past with English nationalism and racial hierarchies. On the other, Afro-Asian self-designation as “black” during the 1980s represented a strategic act of antiracist coalition and symbolic resistance. By contrast, in the United States, a “onedrop rule” for defining blackness signals the enduring stigma of slavery and its crucial role in shaping ongoing racial hierarchies, and although other nonwhite groups mimic black liberation strategies, this rarely includes calling themselves “black.” Torn from these historical frames, the transatlantic juxtapositions on which Disputed Identities and Interrogating Identity were based seemed merely to reinforce, rather than dispute or interrogate, U.S. and Canadian habits of thought about race. When I tried to survey these shows’ critical reception, it was sobering for me to find not a single reference to Disputed Identities in Art Index, the annual guide to articles and reviews in U.S. art journals.6 The small cache of exhibition reviews, advertisements, and notices that the show’s Canadian venue were able to send consisted of a page-long piece in Parachute, in which Disputed Identities is paired with an international show

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of protest art, Goya to Beijing; a listing in Vancouver magazine; a single-paragraph newspaper review on current and upcoming photography shows; and a six-paragraph Vancouver Globe and Mail review that pairs Disputed Identities with an exhibition of Asian Canadian artists. The shorter newspaper review claims, “The exhibit addresses the main issues confronting those who, because of ethnic origin, face society’s prejudice as they assert their individual identity.”7 Clearly, the author was too busy meeting his deadline to note the challenge to identity foregrounded by the show’s title: Disputed Identities! But the reviewer’s archaic language is not inconsistent with a conceptual stasis invoked by the exhibition’s curators, who, in a text for the issue of SF Camerawork Quarterly that served as the exhibition’s catalogue, write, “The concept of two worlds, separate and distant from each other, is central to the exhibition.”8 Ellen L. Ramsay’s Parachute review of Disputed Identities is far more thoughtful. At times, Ramsay seems to be groping for a new language with which to embrace the shift in conceptual terrain mandated by the work on view. Ultimately, such an urge seems to account for her ability to notice one of the most radical aspects of this and the other two exhibitions. Ramsay’s recognition that Disputed Identities “generates new questions about the legacy of modernism” is an insight I found nowhere else in the critical literature on these shows.9 While Disputed Identities rated no mentions in Art Index, Interrogating Identity was the subject of three short reviews in (U.S.) national art publications, Artforum, Arts Magazine, and High Performance. These reviews vary considerably in their assessment of the show’s value in both aesthetic and sociocultural terms. For example, in Artforum, Lois E. Nesbitt claims that Interrogating Identity “pandered to [the] trend” of a “politically correct” celebration of multiculturalism. “Much of the work seemed removed from lived experience” and most of the artists failed “to examine the . . . moral dilemmas” stemming from the problematics of inclusion/exclusion, according to Nesbitt.10 Writing for Arts Magazine, Joshua Decter was more measured in his criticism. While he admits that “it is important to reflect real diversity of cultural production,” Decter is troubled by the suggestion “that ‘artists of color’ should be engaged in an examination of their sociocultural/racial identities . . . so as to produce critique.” He perversely concludes that Interrogating Identity “might have been more interesting” if it had included artists who didn’t interrogate identity!11

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Rachel Weiss’s review in High Performance strikes me as the most interesting commentary on this show. Initially, apparently misled by the fuzzy logic of the curators’ introductory essay, Weiss misidentifies the exhibition as a display of “the work of eighteen ‘black’ artists from Canada, the US and Britain.” Ultimately, though, Weiss redeems herself by critiquing another curatorial gambit: the mainstream art institutional pose of paternalistic inclusiveness. While in a radio interview Grey Art Gallery director and Interrogating Identity’s cocurator Tom Sokolowski claimed, “Making the museum ‘more accessible to people of color’” was “a primary goal” of the exhibition, Weiss reveals that Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the first stop on Interrogating Identity’s tour, sits on an avenue that is “a virtual dmz between the white, developed city and the black- and Latino-occupied projects.”12 The museum’s persistent “refusal to deal with the other side of the street” makes it “more akin to a border guard than an open door,” she contends. Even its wall captions, according to Weiss, assumed an audience that was white and uncomfortable or unfamiliar with discussions of race. “The work’s eloquence only underscored the urgent fact that the other identity in desperate need of interrogating was that of the museum,” she concludes.13 What intrigues me here is Weiss’s recognition that the critique of identity by artists of color invites a related set of questions about dominant culture institutions. Changing the margin requires remapping the center. Much like Ramsay’s observation that Disputed Identities “generates new questions about the legacy of modernism,” Weiss’s insight pinpoints the radical shift of cultural perspective that the art in Interrogating Identity embodied. The artists in these shows were challenging several widespread assumptions. First, refusing to play “primitives,” they deployed modern media and postmodern sensibilities; second, despite their insistence on making marginalized communities and histories visible, they shunned familiar racial paradigms that reinforce myths of immutable or inherent di≈erence; and third, eschewing both “native informant” and ethnic agit-propagandist roles, they demanded to be taken seriously as artists and as critics of dominant culture arrangements at the same time. Misreadings of works’ discursive frames violently skewed critical judgment when American reviewers were faced with the products of unfamiliar artistic milieux. Thus, for example, none of the reviews of Interrogating Identity noted the essay of the same name by Homi Bhabha, which had appeared in a U.S. anthology the year before and

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articulated a postcolonial, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and deconstructive theory of identity that was key to black British cultural debates at the time.14 As a result, when Nesbitt condemns Keith Piper’s Altars of Commerce (1991) as a “univalent depiction of black bodies as victims of economic and social exploitation [that] rehearses a simplistic good guys/bad guys scenario,” she seems oblivious to the artist’s strategic and varied use of fragmentation and metonymic juxtaposition to produce a profoundly mediated, historicized, and multiple image of the black male body.15 Although it received generally favorable reviews from U.S. critics—writing in the New York Times, Flash Art International, and African Arts, for example—Transforming the Crown was harshly condemned by black British critic Niru Ratnam in Third Text, the British Black Arts Movement’s journalistic hub. Reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic lamented the show’s failure to deliver the historical survey suggested by its title and its structural incoherence. Two of the three American writers also objected to the show’s silence about U.S. black political and cultural influences and one noted the uneven quality of curatorial selections. But ultimately these critics lauded Transforming the Crown for its “salutary breadth of vision” and for bringing so many previously unknown artists to their attention. Coming in the wake of at least a decade’s worth of American art and exhibitions about identity, power relations, and representation, this show’s preoccupations with those themes was much more easily assimilated than the early 1990s black British shows. Nevertheless, as Ratnam’s blistering critique demonstrates, a huge gap remained between black British conceptions of the Afro-Asian British art movement and American critical reception of it. Charging “critical innocence and naïveté,” he contends that Transforming the Crown ultimately “reinforced the impression that exhibitions of black artists are merely celebratory rather than serious, and hence implicitly confirmed marginalisation from the wider artworld rather than breaking down any barriers.”16 Why did the show’s American reviewers regard it so di≈erently? Were they shamed into leniency by the conspicuous absence of Afro-Asian artists from the current U.S. celebrations of “the New British Art”? Or were U.S. critical standards simply lower than British ones? We must survey the intensely polarized U.S. cultural landscape of the late twentieth century for answers.

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Black Art and the Myth of the Multiculti 1990s The question of aesthetics is always a non-dialogue between those who subscribe to the conditioned world order and those who stand to gain from a reconstructed forum. clyde taylor, “Black Cinema in a Post-Aesthetic Era”17

With the conservative ascendancy of the past few years, it has become fashionable in the United States to dismiss the 1990s as the “identity politics decade.” Like so much reactionary cultural rhetoric, the e≈ectiveness of this ploy depends on repackaging a liberatory project as its opposite and capitalizing on widespread historical amnesia. My own recollection of the decade is of a culture war on a scale not seen in the United States since the post–World War II “Red Scare” with its attendant crusades against leftliberal elements in higher education, Hollywood, and the arts. Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1990s version of this battle raged across U.S. arts and editorial pages, engulfed college campuses and local school boards, inflamed religious congregations, launched judicial combat, and prompted congressional tirades. In retrospect, it seems striking that this new Armageddon centered on the convergence of what had once been two distinct senses of the word “culture,” that is, culture as a specific group or society’s characteristic way of life, and culture as an exalted and supposedly universal realm of human intellectual and artistic activity. For the challenge of identity politics in the 1990s (or, what some might call its “insult”) to both the arts/ intellectual and corporate/state establishments was its insistence on the interconnections among people’s ways of life, self-understandings, and expressive products. Not only claiming the interdependence of the personal and the political, 1990s feminists, gay rights advocates, and activists of color denounced the myth of culture’s autonomy, exposing its mediation by subjectivity and power. Rejecting Western patriarchy’s universalist claims, they threatened the philosophical foundations of a “civilization” synonymous with elite monoculture. Hence the fury of the ensuing backlash, already evident by 1991 when the back cover of an issue of Transition advertised an article by Michele Wallace “on the new reactionary chic.”18

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In her essay, Wallace reminds us that the rightward tilt in U.S. cultural politics had multiple, at times opposing, faces. While defenders of the dominant culture attacked multiculturalism as “the new tribalism” and condemned its initiatives as “victimology,” she notes a parallel shift in the form of U.S. mass black culture’s retreat into “the prison house of ‘Afrocentric’ thought.”19 In the U.S. artworld, this dual retrenchment was illustrated most vividly by resistance to Black Male (Whitney Museum, New York, 1994). Denounced by dominant culture mandarins like Hilton Kramer and Robert Hughes, the show simultaneously outraged black cultural nationalists and nonnationalist black artists who simply were not attuned to curator Thelma Golden’s postmodern take on race representation. When it traveled to Los Angeles, where geography, demographics, and local institutional politics have all conspired to marginalize culturally African Americans to an even greater extent than their East Coast counterparts, the show was greeted by public protests and a counterexhibition by local black artists.20 Framing the Black Male controversy were two Whitney Biennials, in 1993 and 1995, that respectively marked the zenith and abrupt demise of U.S. art establishment interest in cultural pluralism. The 1993 show had triggered a firestorm of criticism by combining an unprecedented number of women and artists of color with a preponderance of politically charged, issue- and/or theory-oriented work. Journals across a political spectrum ranging from the New Criterion on the right to October and the Village Voice on the left (with publications like Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times occupying the New Democrat/Old Republican version of the “center”) published breathtakingly vituperative reviews. Clearly, the dragon’s lair had been trespassed and required purification by fire! Brutally punished by the press, the museum assigned the 1995 biennial to a curator known for his exquisite “taste” and touted its emphasis on painting. As Matthew DeBord wrote in a lengthy review of the show for Nka, “‘Painting’ . . . has become the keystone of formalism’s ideological lingua franca.” This calculated move away from the previous biennial’s plethora of photography, video, mixed media, sculpture, and installation art signaled a “disavowal of intellectualism” to DeBord, for whom much of the show’s selection of nonrepresentational painting registered an aesthete’s belief that art “shouldn’t try too hard; it should just lie there and think of pleasure.”21 This preference for complacent formalism coincided with a precipitous decline in the number of artists

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of color included in the biennial, leaving viewers with only a faint sense of the richly cosmopolitan flavor of contemporary U.S. art at its best.22 By the end of the decade, the strains of ahistoricism, anti-intellectualism, and bornagain Eurocentrism detected by DeBord at the 1995 biennial had mushroomed into a full-blown, transatlantic neoformalist trend with especially dire consequences for artists of color. Writing about the public fanfare and private controversy surrounding Chris Ofili’s fall 1998 Serpentine Gallery show and paintings in the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize show in London, U.S. artist and critic Coco Fusco deftly outlined the problem: “The current neoformalist backlash in art criticism that reduces all questions of the relationship between Black art and identity politics to ‘political correctness’ forecloses the possibility of contextualizing Ofili’s practice as part of a history of aesthetic inquiry by Black artists into blackness’s relation to modernity and to modernism. . . . many of the critics and curators supporting Ofili’s work detach his artistic project from its rootedness in actual Black artistic discourses.”23 It was in this context, then—of antipluralist backlash in which all considerations of identity were tarred with the brush of (presumably essentialist) “identity politics” by advocates of an ahistoric/anti-intellectual neoformalism, while members of the beleaguered black masses clung to cultural nationalist romanticizations of ghetto life and African identity, and many black artists, regarding contemporary theory as just the latest brand of white intellectual flimflam, rejected new, theoretically driven forms of culture critique—that the 1980s Afro-Asian British art movement was introduced to U.S. museum and gallery audiences during the 1990s. Little wonder, then, if, in the heat and clamor of the U.S. culture wars, the reception was a bit fuzzy. Notes 1. Janet Abu-Lughod, “On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past,” in Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History: Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Number 4 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989). 2. While videos by five of the Americans (Jue, Moret, Riggs, Soe, and Williams) could be seen daily at the exhibition site, films (including a 16mm animation by Chenzira, the 16mm original of Jue’s video, and work by the Britons Attille, Julien, and Onwurah) were screened only once, mixed into either one of two evening programs that also presented videos by the Americans along with a lone British example by Hatoum. “Video & Film Screenings,” SF Camerawork Quarterly 17, no. 3 (fall 1990): 16.

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3. The exhibition o≈ered an asymmetrical comparison, pairing the disputed identities of one of a diverse nation’s most heterogeneous regions with those of a relatively homogeneous nation in the midst of major demographic change. As Rupert Jenkins and Chris Johnson note in the catalogue essay for Disputed Identities, the population of the United States is expected to be majority nonwhite by the middle of the twenty-first century. Rupert Jenkins and Chris Johnson, “Disputed Identities/Photography,” SF Camerawork Quarterly 17, no. 3 (fall 1990): 5. Various sources rate the San Francisco Bay Area as either the most diverse or one of the most diverse regions in the nation. See Alejandra Lopez, “Executive Summary,” in Racial/Ethnic Diversity and Residential Segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, Race and Ethnicity in California: Demographics Report Series No. 1 (Stanford University: Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, September 2001), 1. Writing in 1990, a New York Times reporter observed, “The past three decades have seen a dramatic growth in the ranks of African and West Indian people who have moved to England—so much so that London today [overall population six million] has more than a half million black residents.” Jonathan P. Hicks, “London’s New Cultural Beat: Neighborhoods That Glow with the Art, Music and Cuisines of Africa and the Caribbean,” New York Times, Sunday, 30 December 1990, p. 8. 4. Produced exclusively by the Caribbean Cultural Center, the exhibition greatly exceeded the physical capacity of that institution and thus had to be shared with the Bronx and Studio Museums. 5. Disputed Identities: U.K./U.S. was seen 18 October–24 November 1990 at SF Camerawork in San Francisco; 10 May–16 June 1991 at Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, British Columbia; 7 September–23 October 1991 at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, California. Interrogating Identity appeared 11 March–18 May 1991 at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York City; 10 August–3 November 1991 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; 23 November 1991–23 February 1992 at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; 14 March–10 May 1992 at Madison Art Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison; 30 May–23 August 1992 at the Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, Florida; 18 September–29 November 1992 at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio; 22 January–14 March 1993 at the Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina. 6. Although an artist’s résumé subsequently yielded a reference to a review in a San Francisco newspaper, I have been unable to obtain it. David Bonetti, “Artists Explore ‘Otherness,’” San Francisco Examiner, 2 November 1990, c-2. 7. Martin Millerchip, “Arts Events Abound on North Shore throughout the Summertime Season,” unidentified newspaper, Vancouver, British Columbia, June 1991. 8. Jenkins and Johnson, “Disputed Identities/Photography,” 6. 9. Ellen L. Ramsay, “Goya to Beijing: Disputed Identities UK/US,” Parachute 65 (fall 1991): 59. 10. Lois E. Nesbitt, “Interrogating Identity,” Artforum 29 (summer 1991): 115. 11. Joshua Decter, Arts Magazine 65 (summer 1991): 91. 12. Tom Sokolowski, paraphrased and quoted in Rachel Weiss, “Interrogating Identity,” High Performance 14 (winter 1991): 55. 13. Weiss, in ibid.

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14. Homi K. Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative,” in David Theo Goldberg, ed., The Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 183–209. 15. Nesbitt, “Interrogating Identity,” 115. 16. Niru Ratnam, “Reviews: Transforming the Crown,” Third Text, no. 41 (winter 1997–98): 88. 17. Clyde Taylor, “Black Cinema in a Post-Aesthetic Era,” in Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989), 90; quoted in Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Mbye B. Cham, ed., ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992). 18. Transition, no. 51 (1991). 19. Michele Wallace, “If You Can’t Join ’Em, Beat ’Em,” Transition, no. 51 (1991): 216, 225. 20. Susan Anderson, “The Artistic Void in the Collections of L.A.’s Museums,” Los Angeles Times, 19 December 1999, p. 1. 21. Matthew DeBord, “Back Against the Wall,” Nka (fall/winter 1995): 64, 66–68. 22. Ibid. 23. Coco Fusco, “Captain Shit and Other Allegories of Black Stardom: The Work of Chris Ofili,” Nka, no. 10 (spring/summer 1999): 45.

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Dawoud Bey Collaborative Projects: Toward a More Inclusive Practice

I would like to talk briefly about the notion of collaboration and the ways it figures conceptually and practically in my own evolving practice as an artist. I hope I can raise a series of questions that not only reflect the issues that I continue to grapple with, but also illuminate some of the potential problematics, pitfalls, dilemmas, and issues inherent in trying to devise an art practice that seeks a meaningful engagement with the larger social world while also attempting to push and stretch the boundaries of art making. My own work as a photographer has marked an evolution in art-making strategies. From 1975 to 1979, I made photographs in the streets of Harlem, New York, seeking to reestablish my own connection to this neighborhood that had been a part of my family’s life and history. I was trying to make pictures that would stand in opposition to some of the more pathological and stereotypical representations of black communities. From 1980 to 1987, I then practiced a form of what has been called “street photography,” making photographs in which the subjects were usually unaware of their own appearance in my pictures. Moving through the urban environment of New York and other U.S. cities, I sought to describe both the social and the aesthetic tensions inherent in casual

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chance encounters. Questioning the conceptual and ethical issues inherent in this kind of work, I began in 1988 to make photographs of people in various black communities using a large-format camera that brought me into a more direct relationship with the subject. At the same time, I began using black-and-white Polaroid material to facilitate a more consensual and dialogical experience between myself and the people I was photographing. The positive/negative film that I used enabled me to produce an instant print, which I gave the subjects, as well as creating a reusable negative, which I kept. These photographs were first shown in London at Camerawork Gallery as part of an exhibition project, U.S./U.K.: Transatlantic Dialogues, in 1990. This exchange project, in which three black British photographers—Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ingrid Pollard, and Maxine Walker—and three black photographers from the United States—Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Mikki Ferrill, and I—were brought together by curators Kellie Jones and David A. Bailey in an exhibition that traveled, along with the artists, to sites in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is that exhibition and project, and the series of relationships that it began, that established a dialogue that clearly brings me to the moment of this conference. From 1992 on, all my work has taken place in the context of various collaborative projects, undertaken with a range of institutions, most often museums. Among those institutions have been the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy (Andover), the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College (Chicago), the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven), and the National Portrait Gallery (London). These projects, and others that are planned for the near future, seek to address a range of issues and challenges. First, there is an aura of exclusivity surrounding the museum. In most cases, this is a conscious part of how these institutions seek to situate themselves in relation to the larger world. It is a relationship based on power, privilege, and money. As the museum goes about manipulating notions of history and culture, and who does or does not play a part in constructing that history, it constructs a benign façade that suggests that history and culture just happen, and that the museum’s role is merely to display it. My choice of the museum as a point of entry into the collaborative process is, among other things, an attempt to challenge this position of seemingly benign authority. I want to

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open it up to examination and participation. All of my projects have involved working with teenagers, as I feel that they are the sector of the museum-going audience most likely to engage in a potentially reciprocal cultural experience (plates 22–25). The projects have varied according to the particulars of each institutional situation, but they do have some things in common. First, I attempt to deconstruct and demystify the institutional space itself by opening up the museum to these young people. I create a situation that allows them to experience the museum beyond its white walls. By going into the various departments, the students see how these departments function in relation to the larger entity and also gain a sense of the human dimension of the institution. Certainly, a great deal of institutional power is derived from the illusion that is created by not being able to penetrate the white walls. The hidden doors disguised as walls found in most museums further this sense of a nonhuman environment. The young people are encouraged to ask—sometimes di÷cult and probing—questions of the sta≈ that they then meet behind these walls. In one case, a director declined to meet with the teenagers for fear of facing potentially embarrassing questions. One student inquired as to who the highest-paid person in the museum was. Another wanted to know how the value of the objects in the museum was determined. And yet another inquired as to whether security existed in the museum to protect the people or the objects. In addition, an ongoing critical dialogue is begun in which these students begin to ask questions about curatorial decisions and practices. How does the museum choose what to acquire and exhibit? Such questions have historically been part of a litany of taboos that museums have been unwilling to confront and address publicly. Along with aiming to open up the institutional space, I have also attempted to shift the nature of the museum from a site where art is displayed to a place where art can be made. Art is most conventionally thought of as something that is created in the privacy of the studio and then displayed. Appropriating a gallery or other room in the museum for a period of days or weeks, I have made photographs in these semipublic spaces, carrying on a dialogue with the students that I intend will also somewhat demystify the art-making process. Certainly there is an element of mild subversion in turning the production of art into a semipublic experience, because a good deal of the aura surrounding art objects is at least partially connected to the mystery of just how they come into being. These photographs that I have made of the students in this semipublic fashion

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are then, at some future date, exhibited in that same institutional space. In a number of projects, I have then requested that the museum train a number of the students in their docents program. In this way, when visitors attend the exhibition, it is the students who are the subjects of the exhibition—and who appear in the photographs—who are the very ones articulating the experience of the work and providing a critical context for the viewers. Along with this, I have sometimes found other ways for teenagers to engage with the institution, using it as a space for screening and talking about music videos, films, and other popular forms through which their experiences are articulated. We have also gone into the museum’s collection storage to look at various objects that might in some way be related to these discussions. In several cases, students have been given an opportunity to author their own images though making photographs of their friends, communities, and classmates. The subjectivities of public display are then used as a critical framework for examining their photographs and the possible meanings, readings, or misreadings that could conceivably be brought to them when they are exhibited. In this way, the beginnings of a critical examination of visual culture is begun and continued. These collaborations have met with varying degrees of success, but they also continue to raise issues that I would like to outline briefly. First, there is no escaping or otherwise denying the roles that museums play in the art marketplace and the process of commodification. The recent collusion and subsequent prosecution of two of the auction houses for price fixing and the ongoing debate over museum ownership of artwork looted in World War II, among other squalid controversies, are but two examples that suggest how potentially corrupt this marketplace can be. My projects and interventions do not change that. I can only hope to infuse that culture with another agenda. But certainly I am continually faced with the question of how to function most meaningfully within that arena as an artist. Indeed, I am aware that a good part of the reason I am invited to do these projects relates to the museum’s notion of my own viability as a commodity within that very system. Second, I have become increasingly aware of the ways context shapes the meaning of the work that I do. For the past ten years, I have been working exclusively through projects. During that time, all of the photographs that I have made have been produced as part of these larger projects in which my photographing the students is but one of

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the many activities that the students are engaged in. Showing these photographs in the spaces in which they were made produces a very di≈erent meaning, I believe, from when the work is taken out of that context. During the project, the students have seen the institutional space change from a place that they are unfamiliar with—and perhaps intimidated by—to a space that is now inhabited by images in which their likenesses appear. The fact that these photographs are given the same degree of prominence as other objects in the institutional space creates a further perceptual and experiential shift for the students. The exhibiting of these images usually precipitates visits to the museum by the students’ friends and families, who are often coming to the space for the first time. In this way, a changing set of relationships is put into play. When that initial exhibition and project is completed, however, and the photographs enter the world as autonomous objects, freed from the mooring of context and meaning that the project framework provides, something changes. And though I believe that the photographs retain their own interest, both formally and psychologically, I remain mindful of how the context of commercial galleries and museum spaces creates a potential shift in the meaning of the photographs. Additionally, I have some concerns about the long-term changes that I or any one artist can e≈ect. Ideally, my projects lay the groundwork and provide a model for how museums can address a larger and more diverse audience, while also expanding the parameters of art practice. In each case, I hope that this investigation continues after my own engagement with the museum, and that museums will go on to invite other artists to devise projects that will then continue this dialogue. In some notable cases, this has been true. Among the institutions I have collaborated with, a number have continued and expanded on this work through other artist residency collaborations. In just as many cases, however, the projects have not been as meaningfully integrated into the fabric of the institution, serving instead as a means for the institution to score a few quick “diversity” or “community outreach” points with their funders. I can sometimes tell if things are heading in this direction if the first meeting is attended by the education o÷cer and not by a curator or upper-level administrator. Given the hierarchy in the museum, it is sometimes di÷cult even to get a curator to sit with an education sta≈ member for a meaningful discussion, as narrowly inscribed notions of these relationships still persist in many institutions.

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Fortunately, I have been able to work with more and more institutions that are populated by directors, curators, and sta≈ who have a more progressive agenda, people who themselves have gotten into museum work with the intention of making those spaces more inclusive. In the midst of all of the lingering contradictions, struggles, and ongoing questions, such people provide for me the possibility that we might, indeed, be able to make some inroads toward creating significant changes in how artists, institutions, and communities can forge mutual agendas.

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Stan Abe Why Asia Now? Contemporary Asian Art and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Allow me first to o≈er a disclaimer. I am not a professional curator, but a novice who has been able to dabble in the role of curator. My position on the issues that I am concerned with, in other words, does not directly involve my livelihood, as it does that of many curators and artists alike. In addition, I will not be directly addressing the topic of black British art in what follows, although the issues raised are related to the circumstances of Asian art in Britain. I begin with a painting of 1988 by Chinese-born artist Hung Liu titled Resident Alien (plate 26). The image is a defiant self-portrait in three-quarter view of Ms. Fortune Cookie on a reworked resident alien card that captures nicely the historical circumstance of Asians in the United States: that is, resident but always alien. The alien and the exotic are the constants in what has been a long-standing interest in Asian art in this country. Asian art in the United States, as the Made in Asia? exhibition demonstrates, usually means the arts of Japan and China, and more recently Korea.1 The period of the 1980s to the present has been one in which the visibility of Asian contemporary art, with

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increasing participation from artists of South and Southeast Asian as well as of Pacific Islander descent, has dramatically increased. This is explained, in part, by the expanding economic and political stakes of the United States in Asia, and vice versa. Asia and the United States are more integrated in terms of culture and economics than ever before, the extent of which is indicated in a recent New York Times article on a booming industry in India, namely “back-o÷ce support” for foreign companies.2 The story, titled “Hi, I’m in Bangalore (but I Can’t Say So),” details the operation of supermarket-size phone banks erected by major corporations to handle their daily barrage of customer inquiries. The Indian workers, often young women, pose as North Americans and speak idiomatically authentic English which they learn in training programs based on current films and television programs. The workers invent appropriate American names, hometowns, and other background details in order to banter with customers. Even though such centers are the low end of the corporate support industry in India (the high end would be software and Web-related support), the workers seem to be genuinely having fun pretending to be North Americans in their typical American o÷ce environment, complete with Southwest U.S. motifs such as cacti. The inexpensive labor of Asians now appears to be exploitable without the necessity of immigration or residency. This is not to say that there have not been important changes in the demographics of Asians in the United States. When I came of age in the late 1960s, the Asian American population largely comprised elderly immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren. The range of national backgrounds was narrow—primarily Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos—and there was a strong trend among young people to intermarry with non-Asians. The situation has been radically transformed from the 1970s onward. Today, a new wave of immigrants and their children dominate, still heavily Chinese but now far more diversified, with large Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian components. In contrast to the majority of Asian Americans of my generation, who were born in the United States and raised, for the most part, away from their nation of origin, a majority of Asian Americans today maintain close ties to their homeland. They are often fluent in their native language and far more at ease with their self-identification as Asians. Many are still relatively invisible, laboring in the service industries, sweatshops, or small businesses, a class of immigrant that is seldom discussed (in contrast to the much

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publicized transnational), except in terms of tragedy. I think, for example, about the fifty-eight smuggled Chinese who su≈ocated in the back of a lorry entering the United Kingdom in summer 2000. For the privileged, however, higher education at places like Duke University opens doors to professional careers, including those in which Asian language skills and cultural background have become an asset. The growing importance of Asia in a global economic sense has produced a multicultural, transnational, and cosmopolitan corporate and entrepreneurial elite composed of Asians and Asian Americans, as well as many non-Asians and the now adult o≈spring of multiethnic parents. This is a class of elites that share an economic stake in Asia—whether it be pools of cheap labor, high-end manufacturing, or collaborative management—and the wealth produced has not been lost on the art world: museums and their development o÷cers, curators, and dealers. This is, of course, not a new class but one that has gained significantly in visibility and economic power in the last decades of the twentieth century. Just one dramatic example is the transformation of Vancouver, Canada, in the 1990s as Hong Kong emigrants and money poured into the real estate market in anticipation of Hong Kong’s 1997 reversion to China. Unsurprisingly, cultural activities in Vancouver reflected these shifting conditions. Museum exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art proliferated and new art galleries with locations in both Hong Kong and Vancouver opened to sell works by various Asian artists. From this point of view, the emergence of Asian contemporary art—from Asia to Australia, to Venice, Berlin, Paris, London, and the United States—is less the result of the struggle against exclusionary and Eurocentric art policies and more a necessary institutional response to shifts in the demographics of money. This, it seems to me, is the foundation of multiculturalism, the doctrine of inclusiveness in the age of global capital. The increasingly integrated, transnational forms of economic production require imaginative, sensitive multicultural interaction. This is, for many of us, a baleful consequence of the long campaign at great human cost for racial equality and for economic and social justice. At the same time, bigots and racists, institutional barriers and inequalities, police brutality and surveillance have hardly disappeared. We are thus reminded of the contradictions fundamental to the development of multicultural capitalism in a liberal democratic nation-state born and nurtured on racism and genocide. This is also, to paraphrase Stuart Hall, the terrain of contradictions necessary for

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capitalism to advance.3 Multiculturalism thus represents not simply a triumph of “the logic of capital,” but a contradictory, uneven field of engagement for all of us—artists, curators, and critics—involved in the production of surplus value in the art industry.

Value Production It seems to me that art produced by earlier generations of Asian Americans in the 1980s and early 1990s was largely invisible on a global and even national stage.4 Today, artists such as Diane Tani have little place in the current explosion of Asian contemporary art in the States. A major reason is that the problematics of the earlier generations—identity, racism, and alienation—are still alive but in very di≈erent forms. We were not really Asians, even though we were treated as aliens. We spoke nothing but English, knew little other than American culture. In other words, we could not even perform the role demanded by the stereotype that we were seeking to resist. I am not at all clear about how to relate the dominance of the new generation of “real” Asians in the United States to the rise in prominence of Asian contemporary art. All I can say is that the shift in the profile of Asian Americans, the visibility of Asian monied elites in the art world, the increase in transnational business, and tourism all coincide with the new attention to Asian contemporary art. The artists who occupy the upper echelons of the category of contemporary Asian art readily fulfill the role of native informant even though most seem to live in New York or split time between their homeland and places like New York. Of the artists represented in the Made in Asia? exhibition, only the elderly C. C. Wang is a long-time resident of New York.5 All of the others are relatively young new arrivals with careers that are based on the booming transnational circuit of biennials, museum exhibitions, and gallery shows. None, I suspect, would identify as Asian American. Even in the rare case of a self-identified Asian American exhibition, such as the Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art show organized by the Asia Society Galleries, New York, in 1994, none of the twenty participating artists was born in the United States, and only one, Yong Soon Min, had come to the United States before their late teens or twenties.6 Even more telling is the exhibition Across the Pacific: Korean and Korean American Art mounted at the Queens Museum of Art, New York, in 1993. The show

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was divided into sections for Korea-based and North America–based artists. The latter included three artists born in the United States, but their presence did nothing to undermine the theme of the continuities between Korean and American-based Korean artists.7 To put it another way, Asian Americans seem to be more Asian than ever. In contrast to the earlier generation of Asian Americans, the newer immigrant and transnational population are well suited to represent their nations of origin, which has become especially important with the rise of multiculturalism and its demand for ethnic purity and di≈erence. It should also be noted that the emergence of the Asian native in the United States puts a new twist on one fundamental characteristic of American racism: the unwillingness to distinguish between Asian Americans and Asian nationals. The earlier U.S.-born generation’s disdain for the new immigrant fresh o≈ the boat (fob), which is the flip side of that generation’s pain at being excluded from the mainstream despite their strenuous attempts to assimilate, now seems comical. The stereotype that anyone who looks Asian is a foreigner still remains, but the willful misrecognition of the stereotype has now been strangely confirmed. The other side of this is that any international tension—the recent espionage plane crisis with China, for example—brings forth a virulent anti-Asian sentiment, with radio talk shows in particular reverberating with expressions of rage at Asians of any stripe: chinks, slant-eyes, send them to those Japanese camps, and so on. So what of contemporary Asian art? I have argued previously that contemporary art by diasporic Chinese artists such as Xu Bing (plate 27) is successful to the degree that the works lend themselves to appropriation for a variety of liberal, self-congratulatory political readings of Chinese tyranny and despotism.8 It would probably not be too strong a statement to say that the success of contemporary Chinese art has been a direct result of an unsubtle desire on the part of Americans to transform such art collectively into a “howl for freedom.”9 Even today, over a decade after Tiananmen, there seems to be little room in the United States for a Chinese art that can resist such a self-serving interpretation. It would be tempting to suggest that other works by Asian artists such as those in the Made in Asia? exhibition are similarly positioned to be appropriated. Yet, if a work of art is not simply a result of historical circumstances but a space where questions of identification may be interrogated, as Stuart Hall suggests, we may find even in works such as these an opportunity to put the euphoria of multicultural recognition and inclusion under critical pressure.

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Notes 1. Made in Asia? was a student-curated exhibition showing at Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina, at the time of the conference (6 April–10 June 2001). 2. Mark Landler, “Hi, I’m in Bangalore (but I Can’t Say So),” New York Times, 21 March 2001, Business/ Financial section. 3. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Anthony D. King, ed., Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 4. One exception is Irene Poon Andersen, Mark Johnson, Dawn Nakanishi, and Diane Tani, With New Eyes: Toward an Asian American Art History in the West, College of Creative Arts, Art Department Gallery, San Francisco, 1995. More typical, however, is another exhibition, Asian Traditions, Modern Expressions; although it includes an earlier generation of artists, I would argue that it does so on the grounds that they can be subsumed under abstract expressionism. See Je≈rey Wechsler, ed., Asian Traditions, Modern Expressions: Asian American Artists and Abstraction, 1945–1970 (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey, 1997). 5. Made in Asia?, curated by Randi Reiner and Phil Tinari, Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina, 2001. 6. Margo Machida, ed., Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, exhibition catalogue (New York: Asia Society Galleries/New Press, 1994). 7. Young C. Lee, ed., Across the Pacific: Korean and Korean American Art, exhibition catalogue (Queens, N.Y.: Queens Museum of Art, 1993). 8. Stan Abe, “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” Boundary 2 25, no. 3 (fall 1998): 169–192. 9. As illustrated by the cover “The Howl That Could Free China,” New York Times Magazine, 19 December 1993.

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Naseem Khan Choices for Black Arts in Britain over Thirty Years

The description of this session in the program promises a survey of thirty years of Arts Council policy toward black arts in Britain. But we are at the end of a packed and animated conference in which this area has been articulated superbly. There does not seem much added value in taking you back, yet again, down a path you know well, and, in many cases, will have little delight in revisiting. And for those of you who have not sampled the British arts funding system, I am far from sure that the ins and outs of policy would hold your attention. Although I shall give you some background, I want to use the time to consider the role of policy in general in regard to black arts, or “cultural diversity,” as the current term now has it. In the past few years at the Arts Council of England (ace), I have become increasingly fascinated by the whole matter of policy: what it can rightly try to do; what it should never attempt to do; what its inherent contradictions are; and where its limitations (beyond the fact that it is being operated by fallible human beings) lie. How is the regular interface—that is so vital—maintained between policymaker and art maker? As we in England contemplate a new system that unifies the currently independent regional arts

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boards with the central ace, how will central policy make sure it goes on being fed by the streams of information that it needs to support development schemes? I wish to give you a clear indication of where I am coming from. Stuart Hall quoted a colleague who admitted to being intimidated by Jacques Lacan and his like. My presentation today will not be sited in the world of Lacan. It derives from thirty years or so of engagement in the struggle to make Britain and its arts system more representative of its population. As such, it comes from practicalities and is proved on the pulse, or, at least, on my pulse. I am billed as senior policy advisor to ace, but my post as such is of relatively recent duration. I joined the Arts Council in 1996, but my involvement with the field goes way back, to the publication of a fierce community broadsheet called The Hustler. It was one of the earliest black newspapers in the country, and put together in my front room in Notting Hill. A tenuous paper with roots firmly set into the community development of the area and its politics (not so much Hugh Grant as the previous Notting Hill riots), it was a useful focus for a number of activists: writer Courtney Tulloch, who edited the paper with me, Amiri Baraka, Darcus Howe (who credits The Hustler for his start in journalism), and a floating population of other writers, cartoonists, photographers. We published poems by John La Rose and Edward Kamau Brathwaite and, I regret to say, lifted a feisty strip cartoon of a young woman activist called Serafina from a Paris political magazine. The paper was distributed through local shops and sold by young kids outside tube stations. And for a time, it did very well, with comments about it in the national press, like The Observer and The Times. Its mix—in the late 1960s—was very much of its time: a sharp examination of local politics, particularly vis-à-vis race, and a fierce anti-Americanism (it was the time of Vietnam), all mixed with substantial coverage of cultural developments. In 1974, I conducted the very first research study into what were then called “ethnic minority community arts.” Was there, asked the sponsoring bodies, the Arts Council of Great Britain and its partners, activity that should be considered under its funding umbrellas? It says much about the times and about visibility that that question needed to be asked. But indeed, it was not so surprising. For even the smallest investigation revealed an enormous chasm of ignorance. Virtually all local authorities denied having any relevant activity in their areas. The regional arts boards funded very little. The

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community relations councils across the country had the most to tell because they were in the habit of promoting mixed cultural evenings with spots from di≈erent ethnic groups—a mish-mash of classical and folk, aspiring children and frustrated professionals. The aim was to familiarize the local indigenous British with the new cultures on their doorsteps—colorful variety shows whose day has, I am glad to say, passed. The data painstakingly dug up by primary research—walking the talk, treading the city streets, finding the community centers, interviewing the elders, accessing the scores of associations, clubs, and societies that were there all the time—startled many. First, there was so much. Second, they had so little impact outside the communities by whom and for whom they existed. Third, their presence was in no way reflected in the structures and funding of the Arts Council and the regional arts boards. The final report came out in 1976 entitled The Arts Britain Ignores. The whole process was hugely strengthened by the presence of the consultative board with whom I worked, a mix of artists and theorists from di≈erent backgrounds: actors Taiwo Ajai and Norman Beaton, academic A. G. Hines (chair), painter Ossie Murray, musician Peter Blackman, Asian arts organizer Ravi Jain, dancer Shantu Meher, and, of course, Professor Stuart Hall. I could not have wished for a wiser and more supportive group. The recommendations made are, in many cases, as relevant today as they were then; indeed, they were probably a bit before their time. Over the next ten years or so, the system increasingly engaged with them. The one recommendation that had immediate fruition was for a central advisory body for all practitioners based in other cultural forms, whether as community artists or as classical ones, as folk or as animateurs. The organization that came into being and, astonishingly, lasted twenty-odd years was called maas (Minorities Arts Advisory Service), in a conscious reference both to the Spanish word más (meaning greater) and to the Caribbean carnival, or “mas” (short for masquerade). It was set up by my consultative group, who metamorphosed into the trustees of this new charity. maas grew rapidly, acquiring four regional branches, taking on a huge body of work, putting out a directory, reports, and a newspaper for which it recruited a gang of young would-be critics. The times were right, on the cusp of profound social change. Black arts were in the process of change. Till then, the urge to preserve memories of home had dominated. The people involved had been overwhelmingly first-genera-

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tion post-Empire immigrants, new from the Caribbean, the Asian subcontinent, or the Far East, or (because The Arts Britain Ignores spread its net wide) postwar immigrants from mainland Europe: Poland, the Ukraine, Romania, and other Iron Curtain countries. Their common desire was to maintain a culture and keep a community together. But time was passing, and children, British born and educated, were emerging from higher education with very di≈erent perspectives. Both generations of black Britons knew about discrimination, but the younger generation refused to accept it as their elders had done. They were reinforced by the politics of the time: the independence movements in the Caribbean and Africa, the antiracist and civil rights movement, and the immense increase, due to the postwar baby boom, of the student population. The emerging arts had a di≈erent perspective, challenging rather than preserving. However, it is at this point that an extremely interesting discovery became apparent. In theory, the Arts Council of Great Britain (as it then was) was behind change. It approved The Arts Britain Ignores and set out to open its doors. The argument over the rights of di≈erent cultures to be part of the overall beneficiaries was won without many shots being fired. But did things change? Interestingly, no. The arguments were there. The will was there. The resources were there. How was it, then, that the Arts Council’s books did not show a steep upsurge in the number of black and Asian artists? The central reason came down to mismatch. There was a mismatch of characteristics, values, and aspirations. The focus of the Arts Council at that time was still largely on the “high arts.” Under pressure, it had started to reflect the new voices on the street via experimental and fringe theater and community arts. But they were poorly funded and still marginal. Phenomena such as Notting Hill Carnival did not fit anywhere. The flamboyant and very polished Indian bhangra group, the Great Indian Dancers, were, strictly speaking, amateurs, so they did not fit into the equation. Work in di≈erent languages, like the huge Urdu and Punjabi poetry events or mushairas, that brought together peoples from all walks of life with those languages in common, mixing music and dance and theater, did not fit the strictly delineated categories of the Arts Council and its funding streams: one for drama, one for music, one for dance, and so on. The structure did not fit the product, in other words. And those operating it came from di≈erent worlds; they were white, middle class, and unversed in the histories of the arts groups trying—largely in vain—to get through the needle-eye doors. Nowadays, we are starting to acknowledge

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that institutions are imbued with their own histories, constituencies, values. It is part of the common phenomenon of “institutional racism.” Distressed by its own failure to live up to its liberal aspirations, the Arts Council tried a series of di≈erent devices. The most striking and the most controversial was the “4 percent rule” in the 1980s; it established the principle that all arts organizations (including the Arts Council) should allocate at least 4 percent of their budgets to ethnic or black arts. The figure represented the percentage of ethnic minorities in the country at that time. Around the same time, the new Labour administration of the elected Greater London Council (glc) espoused positive action on race and set out an ambitious and well-funded program to empower black artists. The emphasis both worked and did not work at the same time. It resulted in a flow of new money to black artists. The glc’s support brought into being new black video and filmmaking cooperatives and placed an emphasis on black visual art that reinforced the major showing at the Hayward Gallery of The Other Story (1989; plate 28). On the other side of the fence, the 4 percent rule raised issues that are still prevalent today concerning the nature of identity and the role of policy. Let us tackle the history of the 4 percent rule. It brought with it three undesirable factors. First, it encouraged tokenism. Theaters, galleries, and arts centers were tempted to find a handy element on which to spend 4 percent and then forget about the spirit of the edict. Second, there was no strategic base to the edict. There was no expectation that theaters and so on would create a long-term strategy with which to move themselves to a more inclusive and representative state. Third, the ruling elicited hostility. Some black artists disliked being categorized in terms of ethnicity and felt it was unconnected with their primary purpose as creators. Others disliked the sense of being given a handicap, as if they were not able to compete on grounds of quality alone; the ruling carried messages of intrinsic disadvantage. And some white practitioners and managers, often sympathizers with the spirit of the change, reacted against what they saw as policymakers dictating art. It is hard to quantify otherwise the e≈ect of the change because there was an inadequate monitoring system and no debates on follow-through. However, looking back at the 1980s, particularly through the perspective of this conference and with the installation created by Sonia Boyce and David A. Bailey (plate 29) in mind, it is hard not to escape a sense of warning.1 The 1980s held a head of steam, a

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critical cultural mass and a sympathetic environment. And yet, twenty years on, the legacy of all that energy is so very slight. Looking for the artists, the galleries, the companies, one must admit the field is poor. And it is hard not to reach the conclusion that policy in the 1980s failed black British arts and artists. Although there was goodwill, there was not the depth of analysis that would identify the key factors that would guarantee sustainability. The artists made the running, but did the policymakers come halfway to meet them? The lack of facilities and resources today would seem to say no. It is not just a question of history, of apportioning praise and blame or defining causes. The questions are as sharp today, if not sharper. For yet again we have a head of steam; the ring-fencing of £20 million for black, Asian, and Chinese arts in the latest Lottery allocations (and the final sum being even larger, at £29 million) promises capital investment for the first time. The trigger of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and new legislation around racial equality have shifted the onus of good practice on to public bodies.2 Issues that have been debated in circles such as these for a long time—the nature of national culture and the relationship between identity and ethnicity—have surfaced in mainstream thinking. Conferences such as the Arts Council’s “Whose Heritage?” in 1999 challenged museum curators and the definers of history. The Arts Council’s focus from the autumn of 2002 on a large-scale promotional diversity project will shift attitudes. The auguries are promising. But so are the pitfalls, with the major one concerning ethnicity. This conference has argued eloquently that basing artistic judgments on ethnic di≈erence is destructive, an argument with which I have a great deal of sympathy. We live in a radically di≈erent world from 1976 and The Arts Britain Ignores. The inadequacy of ethnic categorization has grown, marked by the increase of mixed marriages and the o≈spring of those marriages. Like you, I long for the freedom from systems that take as their starting and end point the race of the person involved. The freedom from definitions empowers everyone, not artists alone. Having said that, I am still a supporter of a cultural diversity policy at the Arts Council, even though it can ghettoize, even though it can stereotype, even though it can categorize people in ways they reject. The overwhelming argument in favor of a policy comes from evidence on the street. Playing fields are not level. Goal posts are not consistent. Opportunities are not equal. If we look at a number of fundamental areas in the arts—business sponsorship, funding, jobs, spaces, status, and opportunities—the

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barriers can be demonstrated. Black groups and artists are proven to have less chance of attracting business sponsorship. The percentage of black artists in receipt of arts revenue funding is lower. (In the first round of Lottery funding for capital projects, figures showed that only 0.2 percent of black-led projects had benefited from the millions that had gone out. Because the fund naturally responds to urban need—and in cities such as Leicester, ethnic minorities can be nearly 50 percent of the population—the figure is even more unacceptable.) Top jobs in the arts, whether it is running a major cultural center, an orchestra, or an arts funding body, are thin on the ground. In a straw poll of seventeen arts venues in 1999, it was discovered that out of 2,900 employees in state-funded arts venues, 177 were of diverse ethnic origin. This could seem, on the face of it, no great departure from the overall national figure of 6 percent. Dig a bit further, however, and it transpires that 100 of those worked in catering. Only one person was in upper management. There are hardly any black-run arts spaces. Those that have existed have had to struggle against huge odds, often because they had been sited—for reasons of funding—in disadvantaged areas where they have had to deal with the problems of poverty as well as of establishing a new cultural resource. Programming can be equally di÷cult. Anecdotes are exchanged about venues in white areas that cannot see the relevance of black or Asian dance, music, or theater. Other stories told on the circuits describe venues that say brightly, “Oh, we’ve done our black play,” when approached by promoters. In an ideal world, we would all engage simply in quality and the nature of our message. In a less ideal world, I believe policymakers need to intervene. They need to do so even though it might represent something of a contradiction for their own organizations. The Arts Council is as much conditioned by the past as other public bodies, and it should not overestimate the di÷culty of changing its structures, criteria, systems, and schemes, for they are frequently based on instinct and habit rather than deliberate thought. The example of a new ace fund called New Audiences, funded directly by government, is a case in point. It has a number of strands or gateways, of which the first (with a fund of well over £1 million) concentrates on funding practical links between mainstream arts venues and community-based bodies with an arts function. This scheme taps into the myriad cultural associations based around the million-strong people originally from the

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Indian subcontinent whose social and cultural lives are often lived separately from the mainstream. The lessons being learned are new. The scheme has needed an understanding of di≈erent time scales, because community organizations operate around talk and need longer to come to the table. It has meant accessing di≈erent modes of communication, via temples, mosques, travel agents, and so on. It has thrown up questions of criteria and quality and demanded that middle-class, largely white administrators set aside their usual assumptions. Most crucial, it has addressed the question of power and asked for a shift in the old relationships. I realize that it is galling for artists at this conference to feel boxed in or to operate in a setting where they feel that expectations of their work are institutionally stereotyped. However, I do remain convinced that this is one area in which policymakers have an urgent and legitimate role to play. We should be leaning on the organizations we fund to show evidence that they are addressing imbalance, creating schemes that will fast-track black and Asian administrators, ring-fencing funding where there is unfair competition, subsidizing the development of an infrastructure that will in turn develop more artists, audiences, and administrators. I support the new actions being taken by ace and believe—if (and only if ) they are followed up by consistent support over time—they will lead to a healthier, more competitive and open environment for artists, and for everyone who lives in a society where di≈erence should be a source of strength rather than a disadvantage, embarrassment, and barrier. Finally, it is possible to demonstrate that leveling the playing field leaves artists free to choose their own identity, whether as black artists or otherwise. The key is equality, and for that you need intervention—subtle but determined, flexible but consistent. Without it, influence, might, old-boy networks, and all the panoply and weight of old and settled history cannot but prevail.

Notes 1. Objects in Time, John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, 19 April–19 May 2001, opened at the time of the conference. 2. A public inquiry into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager from South London, resulted in the publication of the MacPherson Report in 1999. The report accused the Metropolitan Police of “institutional racism” in their handling of the investigation.

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Gilane Tawadros A Case of Mistaken Identity

In the autumn of 1984 I was sitting in a small lecture theater at the University of the Sorbonne in Paris, attending a seminar on film. The film under scrutiny was Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and it was being subjected to a full semiotic dissection, in French. I did not glean much from my seminar, but, piecing together the signs and symbols written on the blackboard, I got the general gist of the narrative of the film. It revolves around the central character, George Kaplan, for whom Cary Grant’s character is mistaken, and, as a consequence, the latter enters a sinister and secretive world of espionage and murder. What emerges by the end of the film is that the main protagonist, George Kaplan, does not and never did actually exist. The film, among other things, is about identity and mistaken identity. I want to argue that curatorial practice in the later part of the 1980s and through the 1990s was, like Hitchcock’s classic film, a case of mistaken identity: many major art institutions, curators, and critics were looking in the wrong places for the wrong people. In 1988, Damien Hirst curated his infamous Freeze exhibition in London’s Docklands. In 1989, Rasheed Araeen curated his equally infamous group show The Other Story at

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the Hayward Gallery. The story (real or imagined) of the Freeze exhibition and what happened next has been told and retold countless times elsewhere, following the seemingly irresistible rise of the young British artists (ybas) who have dominated the British and international art world. But while most, if not all, of the participants in Hirst’s Freeze show went on to win international acclaim and amass considerable amounts of money, what has happened to the artists that were shown in The Other Story? Were their careers launched into the stratosphere? Have they achieved international acclaim and considerable wealth? The answer, of course, is no. When the Hayward Gallery hosted The Other Story after ten years of negotiations by Araeen, this survey exhibition of Afro-Caribbean, Asian, and African artists was, we were told, to be a prologue to a more detailed examination by our art institutions of the careers of a number of important postwar British artists who had been inexplicably neglected. It seemed for a brief and tantalizing moment that British cultural institutions were at last beginning to reflect the reconfiguration of contemporary British society in all its complexity, but, as it turned out, The Other Story was to prove to be an epilogue to what Ten-8 magazine called the “critical decade.” Perversely, the only artist whose career appears to have benefited from The Other Story is Anish Kapoor, and he refused to take part, arguing that his participation would deny him any serious attention as an individual artist. Kapoor’s reluctance to participate in the exhibition commanded much media attention, as several quality newspapers reported with relish Kapoor’s quoted or misquoted profession to want to be seen as “an artist first and Asian second.” Assisted by the presence of Kapoor’s one-person show at the Lisson Gallery, critics gleefully contrasted the two projects. To take one example, Marina Vaizey, at that time art critic of The Sunday Times, dismissed The Other Story as “artists . . . chosen for their biographies rather than for the quality of their art . . . an exercise in positive discrimination that has positively backfired.”1 At the same time, she delighted in Kapoor’s solo exhibition, concluding that “he has made his Indian experience intelligible and moving.” So, while being in Freeze was practically (although not universally) a guarantee of future success in the rough and tumble of a competitive art market, participation in The Other Story seems—with one notable exception: Mona Hatoum—to have guaranteed the opposite. My point here, however, is that identity is something that could be mobilized by art

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critics and institutions at one and the same time as a marker of both authenticity and inauthenticity. Kapoor was more genuinely both Indian and an artist because, according to the critics, he had made his cultural identity “a servant” to his artistic identity. On the other hand, the artists who agreed to take part in The Other Story were clearly inauthentic, inauthentically Other as well as inauthentically artists. As Brian Sewell from the Evening Standard put it, “Having either no traditions of their own, or traditions so exhausted that no nourishment is to be drawn from them, these artists parrot Western visual idioms that they do not understand. . . . Their third-rate imitations of the white man’s cliché must seem outrageous to all who care to judge by quality.”2 While black British artists were clearly not going to be repackaged for internal or external consumption as the future of British culture, the ybas were quickly embraced by a new administration that was committed (they said) to modernizing Britain and embracing the contemporary world. “Newness” and “coolness” were quickly to become the buzzwords of Blair’s Britain—a place where culture and media were seen to play a pivotal role in public perceptions and international relations. Britain might not rule the world any longer politically or economically, but it would now be seen at home and abroad as “Cool Britannia.” A political understanding of the interface between home and abroad, local and global, past and present is absolutely critical to an understanding of how identity is played out in the cultural realm and how racial politics has operated and continues to operate in the sphere of contemporary art in the United Kingdom (and elsewhere). Those who believe that questions of black British identity and the cultural production of black British artists can be addressed as self-contained questions, removed from the question of Britishness and the history of British art and ideas, have failed to take on board the implications of the particular social, political, and cultural conjuncture through which we have been passing during the past decade. This is why a number of iniva’s (Institute of International Visual Arts) projects over that period are primarily concerned with an interrogation not of blackness, black Britishness, or cultural diversity in the United Kingdom, but of what Britishness is and how it has evolved. “The Essential Guide to British Painting” (1995–97) was a series of talks, which explored the history of British painting and looked at figures like Hogarth, Turner, Wyndham Lewis, and Burne-Jones. “Vindaloo and Chips” (1998) was an evening event where we

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brought together some young British artists to mull over the question of what precisely it means to be an artist, young, and British. “Performing Nations” (1998) was a day-long seminar that looked at the di≈erent ways ethnic performance continues to feature in popular entertainment worldwide, from Disney World to the Millennium Dome. In Sonia Boyce’s peep (1995), an intervention in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery’s collection of non-Western art and ethnography, Boyce wrapped the display cases, creating peep holes through which visitors could gaze at objects donated by various colonial administrators and employees. Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) is a series of photographic tableaux that revisit late-nineteenth-century Britain to observe the frivolous pursuits of a fictitious black dandy at the height of the British Empire, reflecting on the possibility of being black, British, and Victorian. Sensation (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1997) drew together works from the private collection of Charles Saatchi to celebrate the decade of the young British artists. Chris Ofili was in that show, and, together with Steve McQueen and Anish Kapoor, he has become part of the black triumvirate that has won the Turner Prize, disproving once and for all any accusation that the British art world is exclusionary or (heaven forbid) racist. Some commentators have implied that Kapoor, Ofili, and McQueen’s success is predicated on the fact that they have gone beyond identity. We are, some insist, living in a postpolitical, postfeminist, and postidentity world. However, news of the death of identity politics may be somewhat premature. The reality is that the question of identity has never gone away; it is the ways in which the question is posed that have simply become inflected in a number of new and di≈erent ways. A whole generation of artists have grown up in a Britain very di≈erent from that of their parents and are raising the question of identity in a very di≈erent way. I am not just thinking of artists like Ofili and McQueen, but equally of artists like Mark Wallinger and Gillian Wearing, who have long been engaged in an exploration of identity in their work, inflected by the issue of class in British society. The devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland has reinforced, if not triggered, a crisis around Englishness and English identity. And last but not least, the way a globalized culture now frames and intersects with diversity as it is experienced at home is reshaping the relationship between the local and the global, the national and the international. Of course, it was not just Britishness that was being packaged curatorially in the early

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1990s. The art of di≈erent nations came wrapped in national colors: Art from Argentina: 1920–1924 (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1994) and New Art from Cuba (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995), to take just two examples from the early 1990s. These national curatorial projects—significantly, rarely curated by curators from those countries or reflecting the critical voices of their critics—seemed to reach a feverish crescendo with the ambitious Africa 95. It was a multisite project that encompassed most of the major art institutions in the United Kingdom, who took up the challenge of exploring Africa from a million years b.c. to the present day. Easily packaged to capture the attention of audiences and neatly categorized to exploit private and commercial sponsorship opportunities (not to mention Foreign O÷ce priorities), these projects appear now as the last cultural gasps of imperial and nationalist tendencies facing the inevitable surge of the forces of modern globalization. In retrospect, iniva exhibitions dealing with race and nation, in ways that reflected artistic practice and lived experience but often collided head on with bureaucratic structures that still understood the world as it was and not as how it had become, were ahead of their time. Parisien(ne)s (Camden Arts Centre, London, 1997) brought together nine artists living and working in Paris but who had been born elsewhere: Absalon, Chen Zhen, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Thomas Hirschhorn, Huang Yong Ping, Tiina Ketara, Sarkis, Shen Yuan (plate 30), and Tsuneko Taniuchi. Paris has always been the home of itinerant artists from elsewhere—Picasso, Mondrian, Brancusi, to name only three—and these stalwarts of European modernism have come to be seen as quintessentially Parisian and integrated into, indeed constitutive of, French culture and Frenchness. And yet, the artists in Parisien(ne)s are marked by their di≈erence from a designation of pure, unvariegated Frenchness. In July 1998, when France won the World Cup with a team of players that contested the notion of French nationhood as an undi≈erentiated, monocultural entity, France’s image of itself was questioned in the most public of domains. We repeatedly failed to secure private or public funding for Parisien(ne)s, and that failure was, to a great extent, a consequence of the project’s contestation of accepted definitions of Frenchness. The work of the artists in the exhibition did not address the question of their individual identity, nor indeed of the impact on that identity of living in Paris. Rather, the works reflected in more ambivalent ways on the question of place and displacement as an increasingly dominant theme in our lives that, like the displaced

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object of Archimedes’ principle, has an equal impact on the environment surrounding it. Just as the French Academy cannot defend the French language from the daily incursions of English and other cultural invasions, French society cannot defend French citizenship from the inflections and transformations brought about by successive generations of immigrants who are remolding the idea of Frenchness for the twenty-first century. Curated by David A. Bailey, Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Di≈erence and Desire (ica, London, 1995) centered on an exhibition of the work of nine international artists: Sonia Boyce (plate 31), Black Audio Film Collective (Edward George and Trevor Mathison), Renée Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Isaac Julien, Marc Latamie, Glenn Ligon, and Steve McQueen. They took as their starting point one of the key texts of the Martiniquan psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (first published in 1952), which analyzes the psychological e≈ects of postcolonial oppression and racism on the black populations of the African diaspora. Fanon describes an encounter in Paris when a young boy points him out on a train and shouts “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Fanon writes: I could no longer laugh, because I already knew there were legends, stories, history and above all historicity. . . . Then, assailed at various points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train, I was given not one but two, three places. . . . I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. . . . I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness.3 Mirage addressed the lived experience of postcolonialism in the metropolis, the daily psychological violence of the racialized encounter which is articulated primarily and expressly through the visual—through the gaze—and only secondarily through the linguistic or theoretical explications of race and postcolonialism. What was new and distinctive about Mirage was this intimate intersection of questions of race and visuality and the implication of whiteness in discussions of race. Over the past decade or so, we have witnessed the internationalization of the art world, moving beyond the parameters of Europe and North America. The trend has been

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consolidated by international exhibitions that have arisen during this period, challenging the hegemony of the Venice Biennale as the major international event of the art world calendar. Located at the crossroads of East and West, the Istanbul Biennale quickly established itself in 1987 as an important biennial exhibition, although it was by no means the first to be held outside the traditional European centers of art. It followed in the footsteps of the Havana Biennale (established in 1984), whose international profile has grown rapidly in recent years, and the Cairo Biennale (established in the same year). Both of these international exhibitions have brought contemporary artists from Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East to the attention of European and North American institutions. In recent years, biennials and triennials have sprung up in new locations across the globe, including Johannesburg, South Africa; Kwangju, Korea; Queensland, Australia; and Shanghai, China. Significantly, these newly inaugurated events have rejected the national, competitive model established by the Venice Biennale, with its national pavilions and prizes, in favor of cross-national thematic exhibitions which bring together artists of di≈erent national and ethnic identities under the same roof. The internationalization of the biennial has found parallels in the growing internationalization of contemporary art institutions and the increasing influence of the art world’s independent curators from outside Europe and North America, such as Gerardo Mosquera, Hou Hanru, and Okwui Enwezor. Most recently, Nigerian-born Okwui’s appointment as the artistic director of the Documenta xi is a significant indication of where the organizing committee of Documenta feel the future of contemporary art lies. At the same time, the increasing prominence of culturally diverse artists in national institutions seems to indicate that the art world is finally beginning to reflect some of the important cultural transformations that have taken place in British and European society in the second half of the twentieth century. But the very public success of artists like Ofili and McQueen masks the reality of the deep-seated racism of the British art establishment. (There is a disturbing and disproportionate instance of suicide among black art students at one leading art school in Britain.) There is also a lack of investment in culturally diverse artists from all parts of the world by major institutions, which is reflected starkly in their exhibition programs, their sta÷ng, and their permanent collections. All too often we see a brand of cultural tourism that imports international art according to the current trend: one year it is Japanese art; the following year Cuban art; the year

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after Brazilian or perhaps Chinese art. Long-term collaborations cannot be sustained in such an unsympathetic environment, and international extravaganzas that present the work of hundreds of artists in one exhibition provide little opportunity to engage seriously with individual artists in their own right. The interest inspired by exotic artists from abroad—usually represented by commercial galleries in New York—is rarely matched by a similar interest in local artists who are equally diverse in their cultural backgrounds and equally interesting as artists. So what of recent projects like the Tate Modern’s first major exhibition Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (2001) that set out to explore “the relationship between vanguard culture and the urban . . . [focusing] on nine cities which have, at specific historical moments, acted as crucibles for cultural innovation.”4 Let’s start by stating the obvious but nonetheless significant fact that cities have replaced nations in curatorial discourse. It is not the messy, violent city of lived experience or the subversive city where the local/global dichotomy is problematized, but a clean, elegant, streamlined city, as imagined and restaged by the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and the Tate Modern, London. It is the city as “collective symbolic capital,” as David Harvey defined it,5 that trades in authenticity and uniqueness to generate tradable values and cultural currency. Metropolitanism has displaced nationhood, and we can now, it seems, put aside those troubling questions of race and nation. Second, behind a façade of equality, the exhibition reasserts a hierarchy of cultures, or rather of city-states with cultural centers and cultural satellites. With Paris in the first decade and London in the final decade acting as bookmarks, this new cultural order reintroduces the issue of authenticity with a new global twist. Bombay, Lagos, and Rio are rearticulated as the authentic markers of cultural di≈erence, relegating the cultural articulations of diaspora in the metropolis as secondary, inauthentic expressions of di≈erence. Thus, the re-presentation of the city eclipses the thorny questions of race and nation and a new global order is reasserted, with an authentic, exterior Other deployed to delegitimize the diasporan experience. And what of George Kaplan? Well, we were always asking the wrong question. Instead of asking Who is the real George Kaplan? we should have been asking Why is George Kaplan necessary to the plot?

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Notes 1. Marina Vaizey, “Why Partiality Does Not Tell the Whole Story,” The Sunday Times (London), 10 December 1989. 2. Brian Sewell, “Black Pride and Prejudice,” Evening Standard, 4 January 1990. 3. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 112. 4. Iwona Blazwick, “Century City,” in Blazwick, ed., Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis (London: Tate Gallery, 2001), 8. 5. Speaking at the “Global and Local: The Condition of Art Practice Now” conference, held at the Tate Modern, London, 2–3 February 2001, at the time of the Century City exhibition.

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plate s

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Plate 1. Aubrey Williams, The Keeper of the Temple, 1984. Oil on canvas. 47 x 70 in. Photograph by Edward Woodman. Courtesy of Eve Williams.

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Plate 2. (this page) Keith Piper, Another Nigger Died Today, 1982. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas. 6 x 4 ft.

Plate 3. (opposite) Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Sonponnoi, 1987. Gelatine silver black and white with hand tinting. 16 x 12 in. Courtesy of Autograph: Association of Black Photographers, London.

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Plate 4. Lubaina Himid, The Carrot Piece, 1985. Acrylic on wood. 96 x 132 in.

Plate 5. Sutapa Biswas, Housewives with Steak-Knives, 1985. Oil, acrylic, and pastel on paper, mounted on canvas. 96 x 108 in. Collection of Bradford Museums and Galleries.

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Plates 6–9. Eddie Chambers, Destruction of the National Front, 1980. Collage, four panels, each 14 x 12 in.

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Plate 10. Keith Piper, Black Assassin Saints, 1982. Acrylic on stitched, unstretched canvas. 6 x 12 ft.

Plate 11. Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father, 1997. Photograph on aluminium. 48 x 60 in. Photograph by Andra Nelkie. Courtesy of the Estate of Donald Rodney.

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Plate 12. Lesley Sanderson, He Took Fabulous Trips, 1990. Pencil and acrylic on paper. 98 x 78 in. Photograph by Neil Conroy.

Plate 13. Lesley Sanderson, He Took Fabulous Trips (detail), 1990. Pencil and acrylic on paper. 98 x 78 in. Photograph by Neil Conroy.

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Plate 14. Lesley Sanderson and Neil Conroy, Fabrication and Reality, 1998. Pencil on paper, drawing on carbon copy paper, light, viewing device, mdf. 61 x 59 x 16 in. Photograph by Neil Conroy.

Plate 15. Lesley Sanderson and Neil Conroy, Fabrication and Reality (detail), 1998. Pencil on paper, drawing on carbon copy paper, light, viewing device, mdf. 61 x 59 x 16 in. Photograph by Neil Conroy.

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Plate 16. Zineb Sedira, Mother, Father and I, 2001. Video projections.

Plate 17. Zineb Sedira, Self Portraits or The Virgin Mary, 2000. Color photograph. 72 x 40 in.

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Plate 18. Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza, Nexus, 1992. Variable media (C-print, black and white print, digital print), dimensions variable. Photograph by Allan deSouza.

Plate 19. Yong Soon Min and Allan deSouza, Tress/Pass, 1999. C-print, dimensions variable.

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Plate 20. (opposite) Diane Tani, Duel, 1989. Gelatin silver print. 20 x 16 in.

Plate 21. (this page) Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain, 1966–1996, cover of exhibition catalogue, 1997. Courtesy of the Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center, New York.

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Plate 22. Dawoud Bey, Mnemone, 1998. Polacolor er prints, 3-panel horizontal. 30 x 60 in.

Plate 23. Dawoud Bey, Thanh I, 1998. Polacolor er prints, 2-panel horizontal. 30 x 44 in.

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Plate 24. Dawoud Bey, Hasan, 1999. Polacolor er prints, 2-panel horizontal. 29 x 44 in.

Plate 25. Dawoud Bey, Monique, 1999. Polacolor er prints, 3-panel horizontal. 29 x 66 in.

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Plate 26. (this page) Hung Liu, Resident Alien, 1988. Oil on canvas. 60 x 90 in. Courtesy of Steinbaum Krauss Gallery, New York.

Plate 27. (opposite) Xu Bing, A Book from the Sky, 1994. Wood-block printed books and hanging scrolls. Elvehjem Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin.

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Plate 28. Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Upper Level I, 1984–85. Slate and wax. 28 x 15 x 18 in. Photograph by J. Hardman Jones.

Plate 29. Sonia Boyce and David A. Bailey, Objects in Time, 2001. Mixed-media installation. John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

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Plate 30. Shen Yuan, In Threes and Fours or In Knots, 1997. Flax. 39 x 20 x 15 ft. Camden Arts Centre, London. Photograph by Edward Woodman.

Plate 31. Sonia Boyce, Untitled, 1995. Linotronic print.

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Conference Papers and Speakers 19 april 2001 “After the Deluge” Keynote Address: Stuart Hall

21 april 2001 “The Importance of Collaboration in the Development of Practice” Papers: Lubaina Himid, Dawoud Bey

20 april 2001 “Curatorial Debates since the 1980s” Papers: Richard Powell, Sandy Nairne,

Panel: Allan deSouza, Yong Soon Min Chair: Sonia Boyce Session Reporter: Yeu Lai Mo

susan pui san lok Panel: Deborah Willis, Shaheen Merali

“Historical Perspectives on International

Chair: David A. Bailey

Curatorial Debates of the 1980s and 1990s”

Session Reporter: Rohini Malik

Papers: Gilane Tawadros, Stanley Abe Panel: Barbara Hunt, Mark Sealy

“The Thematics and Aesthetic Shifts in Practice since the 1980s”

Chair: Andrea Barnwell Session Reporter: Carol Tulloch

Papers: Rasheed Araeen, Zineb Sedira, Isaac Julien, Keith Piper Panel: Sutapa Biswas, Ingrid Pollard

22 april 2001 “The Role Policy Has Played in the

Chair: Jane Gaines

Development of Cultural Practice”

Session Reporter: Michael Cadette

Papers: Naseem Khan, Lola Young Panel: Rasheed Araeen, John L. Moore III

“Approaches to Diasporic Aesthetics and the Role of Criticism”

Chair: E’vonne Coleman Session Reporter: Paul Dash

Papers: Judith Wilson, Kobena Mercer Panel: Diana Yeh, Niru Ratnam, Janice

Summation

Cheddie, Leon Wainwright

Panel: Stuart Hall, Richard Powell,

Chair: Ian Baucom

Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce

Session Reporters: Pauline de Souza,

Chair: Lawrence Grossberg

Kelvin Black

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Jean Fisher Dialogues

Introduction What constitutes a dialogue, or, to be more precise, what constitutes a productive dialogue? One might suppose that it entails each party’s willingness to accept that, within the given field of discussion, there are diverse positions and interpretations that may or may not coincide with its own, but that, in a spirit of mutual respect, deserve to be heard and assessed. And yet it is not so simple. The philosopher Michel Serres points out that such a dialogue cannot come into e≈ect without background “noise” or “interference”: he calls it, among other things, the “third man.”1 The new constituency of actors with “attitude” that arrived on the artistic stage as Britain entered the decade of the 1980s took by surprise an art world that had never contemplated such a possibility and certainly did not have a place for it. This generation of young black and Asian artists came from diverse cultural and historical backgrounds that, on the face of it, had little in common. So what enabled a diverse body of practitioners to set aside di≈erences and, at least momentarily, to make common cause? Serres’s “third man” here is an e≈ect of what Stuart Hall and others defined as the shared experience of colonial history and its continuing repercussions in a prevailing

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Jean Fisher Dialogues

Introduction What constitutes a dialogue, or, to be more precise, what constitutes a productive dialogue? One might suppose that it entails each party’s willingness to accept that, within the given field of discussion, there are diverse positions and interpretations that may or may not coincide with its own, but that, in a spirit of mutual respect, deserve to be heard and assessed. And yet it is not so simple. The philosopher Michel Serres points out that such a dialogue cannot come into e≈ect without background “noise” or “interference”: he calls it, among other things, the “third man.”1 The new constituency of actors with “attitude” that arrived on the artistic stage as Britain entered the decade of the 1980s took by surprise an art world that had never contemplated such a possibility and certainly did not have a place for it. This generation of young black and Asian artists came from diverse cultural and historical backgrounds that, on the face of it, had little in common. So what enabled a diverse body of practitioners to set aside di≈erences and, at least momentarily, to make common cause? Serres’s “third man” here is an e≈ect of what Stuart Hall and others defined as the shared experience of colonial history and its continuing repercussions in a prevailing

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institutionalized racism blind and/or resistant to the changing face and demands of a heterogeneous national identity. This is emblematized in Eddie Chambers’s fragmentation of the Union Jack (Destruction of the National Front, 1980), symbol of British imperial power lingering on in a nostalgic right-wing politic and in the colonial endgame still being played out in Northern Ireland. Moreover, the continuous sit-ins against apartheid outside the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square were a constant reminder of an imperial past and its unresolved inequities; and, as Shaheen Merali noted, the series of prints A South African Colouring Book (1976) by Gavin Jantjes, the first black South African artist to gain a public profile in the United Kingdom, circulated widely within the popular antiapartheid sentiment at the end of the decade. “Black” in the United Kingdom thereby became the sign of political a÷liation, not of racialized typology. Reflecting on the transatlantic nature of the diasporic debates, Judith Wilson paid tribute to the political radicalism of this concept: “The triangle, for me as an Afro-U.S. person, has always been the most striking feature of black British identity. It embodies its fundamental and revelatory di≈erence from blackness organized around a simple black/white racial binary, as we habitually conceive it in the United States. Instead, the prevailing concept of blackness in the British context involves a minimum of three ethnocultural spheres: African, Asian, and British, with the latter, of course, seen metonymically as Europeans.” That “black” did not, however, survive the 1980s is perhaps because too much “noise” was generated from both within and without. As the decade progressed, multiple configurations and alliances, with often conflicting aesthetic positions and aspirations, emerged that, as it was unanimously agreed, could not be contained under the rubric of any single or coherent movement. By the end of the decade the political and artistic landscape had shifted in ways that exposed the fragility of the ideological ground gained by black artists. The dialogue reopened by “Shades of Black” was an invitation to revisit the period with hindsight, a retrospection that necessarily risked aggravating old frustrations and memories of hopes unrealized, of highlighting di≈erences as much as accords, of contending perceptions of the past, but one that sought to map and understand what the 1980s produced, how the period might be narrativized, and how its lessons might forge a more productive space for future practice. These “Dialogues” attempt to give a provisional shape to the complexity of perspectives voiced by participants to the

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conference in response to the papers and the artists’ presentations, with an editorial gloss on some of the issues discussed.

Historiography and the Living Archive History is always a “living archive” insofar as our understanding of the present is inflected through experiences of the past.2 And yet there has been a tragic aporia between History understood as a selective and national discourse of power orchestrated by a hegemonic elite and the histories of communities and individuals subjected to its e≈ects, between History as a linear written text and history as the polyvocal, multivalenced oral and local transmission of lived and shared experience. It was Walter Benjamin who first voiced the anxiety that the latter, as transmissible experience, was being lost under the increasingly mediating role of information culture. We are not what we remember but what we are told to remember, as Michel Foucault subsequently said—and this is something we may need to keep in focus. In the discussion following his keynote speech, Stuart Hall emphasized that, against certain postmodernist positions that proclaimed the “end of history,” postcolonial debates have been concerned with interrogating the inheritance of the Enlightenment and the nature of modernity. To be sure, this has challenged the Western master narrative in its claim as an interpreter of historical truth, and in this sense its history has, if not ended, at least been put into crisis. Historical process is, however, not at an end; or, to be more precise, the right to be considered as a historical subject is yet to be realized universally. Historical process and the living archive were of profound significance to the generation of British black and Asian artists that emerged in the early 1980s, and yet, as the conference unfolded, it became clear that this has been largely grasped in retrospect. At the level of artistic practice, to take issue with dominant readings of the past by excavating alternative narratives was one means of claiming a sense of agency and of interrogating the imaging and positioning of the black subject in a society still unable to come to terms with a cultural heterogeneity that challenged those assumptions of “Britishness” formulated during the height of Britain’s imperialist history and therefore in and against Empire’s construction of the colonial “other.” However, at the level of art

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history, the conference made very clear the extraordinary inconsistencies in the relationship among black artists, the historiography of modernism, and ongoing critical practice, and much of the debate concerned how this relationship might be conceptualized. art history “under erasure.” Writing the history of the decade proves to be a daunting task. For Stuart Hall the 1980s remained an “enigma, a puzzle,” a “contested space” invested with di≈ering aspirations and perceptions, “an accumulation of contradictory tendencies and forces which, for a time, acquired a definite shape.” Speaking more specifically of the context of art, Kobena Mercer proposed that it was too early to try to define the 1980s as a “closed or finished period,” especially as the broader fifty-year history of Afro-Asian artists in postwar Britain had “still not been written up in any definitive sense. . . . To be clear, in saying that it is too early to define the 1980s as an art historical period, I am not suggesting that we should give up altogether, but that we need to clarify and even discipline our expectations as to what we want such stories or narratives to deliver.” Mercer also pointed to the failure of art history to relate black British or African American formations to the wider history of twentieth-century modernism, citing a conceptual chaos “as to what the primary object of attention actually is: background information about the artist’s cultural identity or foreground matter of the aesthetic work performed by the object?” In e≈ect, among the first problems was to establish appropriate aesthetic and conceptual tools by which to approach art historiography. Mercer’s perspective was endorsed by both Leon Wainwright and Niru Ratnam, two art historians too young to have participated in the debates at that time, but who are now grappling retrospectively with the complexity and contradictions of the decade. Ratnam found it “impossible to compose a narrative” of the 1980s, identifying the disciplinary conventions of art history themselves as inadequate—and reluctant even now—to address or incorporate the issues raised by black artists and postcoloniality. However, rather than abandon art history, thereby letting it o≈ the hook, as it were, Ratnam tries to practice it “under erasure.” And yet, what are the problems of conventional art historical procedures in relation to the Black Arts Movement? Ratnam identified several areas of critical concern: at the outset, black women artists’ critique of the masculinist framework of the Black Arts Movement worked against a sense of any unified position; collaborative projects conflicted with the art historical

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canonization of the solitary genius; and the sheer diversity of practices presupposed a complexity of expanded contexts, cultural experiences, and hybrid aesthetic strategies that Western academic art history and criticism were ill-equipped to identify or synthesize. Although, as one conference participant pointed out, art history is now changing, during the 1980s it was the discipline slowest to take on board intertextuality and what Mercer called the “changing relationship between art, politics, and culture.” Wainwright asked if one could speak of a “diasporic aesthetic” and how one might characterize it. But, as Hall asked: Is the art black because the artist is black, because the experience is black, or because the aesthetic is black? Hall maintained, however, that there is no singular black experience that could be represented by a black aesthetic. There was endorsement from the floor of both Ratnam’s and Janice Cheddie’s position that to make sense of the 1980s the boundaries of art history had to be extended to include a more interdisciplinary framework of visual cultural theory and practice, one, as Keith Piper added, that should include the influence of the music scene. In fact, a conceptual shift had already begun, especially in art education, away from the genealogical narrative to mapping artistic practices within a more pluralized cultural field. Rasheed Araeen disputed the value of cultural theory, consistently arguing that it undermined the development of art history and new aesthetic theories. Mercer believed nonetheless that such changes are happening, citing Rick Powell’s The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism exhibition (1989) as indicative of a major breakthrough in art historiography in that its “comprehensive chronology . . . o≈ers a sense of global shape of the story of how African American artists have participated in each of the key modernist paradigms following the Cubist revolution,” and that the trajectory of black British art is part of this “broader revision of modernism.” However, as Sonia Boyce pointed out, it was central to the spirit of the conference that although there could not be any simple and definitive version of the period, it was not too early to begin an assessment. This seems particularly urgent because, aside from the sad loss of key witnesses like Donald Rodney, Samena Rana, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode, along with considerable documentation, the majority of participants are still alive and the opportunity to assemble extant material and build into the archive those counternarratives to dominant discourse “of displacement, desire, memory,” as Wainwright posed it, should not be missed.

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re/living the archive. If appropriate conceptual and aesthetic tools are one requirement in the production of art history, or some version of it, one also needs access to resources: archives of documentation and the funding to do what Lola Young called the work of “excavation.” This has always been the argument of Araeen, who, as part of an older generation from the 1950s, was in a position to see a longer view. If the former is now on the agenda of a new generation of art theorists, the latter still remains problematic. Cheddie raised the issue of the serious lack of documentation of the period, particularly acute where artists had since changed practice and media, or where practices were of an ephemeral nature, like performance; and, crucially, that any archive concerned “articulations and discourses of power and privilege, and how we position ourselves in relation to them.” This was the crux of the matter for black artists at the outset of the 1980s, who emerged into something of an art historical vacuum. Piper admitted that, along with other young artists at that time, he had had little sense of the histories and perspectives of black artists in postwar Britain and therefore of the territory they had already traversed. What presence they had had in previous decades was poorly documented and more or less absent from the public domain, a situation that was not to be rectified until The Other Story as late as 1989.3 As a consequence, the new generation of black British artists looked to the United States for both political support—the mobilization of political consciousness stemming from the civil rights and Black Power movements—and artistic role models, beginning a transatlantic dialogue that remained central to sustaining discourses on cultural theory and enabling a sense of artistic value not always forthcoming in Britain. From the other side, Rick Powell described how the first African American encounters with black British arts were through the Caribbean, in terms of both music and the visual arts. Powell recognized the transatlantic links on seeing the catalogue to The Other Story, leading eventually to the collaborative exhibition Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997–98) at the Hayward Gallery, London, which drew critical analogies between this earlier moment of black creative vitality and the British situation. Cheddie questioned Mercer about his emphasis on African American models, suggesting that for third-generation artists it was also important how they were positioned in relation to Europe and the very di≈erent way it conceptualized ethnicity from the Anglo-

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American experience. Mercer admitted that there were still many areas that he had not been able to consider, but that for him the African American model had to be seen as a starting point for thinking about a “system of flows” that could eventually be extended to include other relationships. It remains true that for a number of reasons, not least of which are their Anglophonic emphasis and longevity, black Atlantic debates have been slow to incorporate aesthetic discourses deriving from, especially, Francophonic, Hispanic, and Dutch postcolonial sources. At the same time, diasporic discourses in the European mainland have themselves only relatively recently begun to seek a÷liations with the Anglo-American. Zineb Sedira gave some account of her experience as an artist of Arab origin living and working under the rather di≈erent postcolonial attitudes of France and Britain. Clearly there are important dialogues yet to be developed between British and European diasporic positions and archival resources. To elaborate on Cheddie’s formulation, the task had been conceptualizing how one was positioned by existing sociohistorical processes, and then what critical tools could be developed to reposition oneself in relation to them. Early perceptions that institutional support for the particular cultural perspectives of black artists would not be forthcoming prompted the necessity of becoming their own curators, writers, and archivists, and yet attention to documentation had not been consistent. Lubaina Himid, who, along with Claudette Johnson, was instrumental in creating a public platform for black women artists, was most critical of the naïveté of artists during the 1980s and the opportunities lost. “Our theorists never bothered to look at the work or talk to the practitioners. We allowed the Arts Council to un-name us. . . . We set up archives and then did not record vital and important shows. . . . There was no strategy, just a maelstrom of naïve ideas about fame, political intervention, and the integrity of curators, funders, and publishers.” Himid remained skeptical about the present: “We cannot wait for someone else to document what we do. Whatever the cost, we have to do it ourselves.” Nonetheless, aside from the existence of those personal archives that Himid assumed most artists like herself had assembled, several archival projects set up in the 1980s survived and are now lodged in institutions, most notably Aavaa (African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive), launched in 1988 by Eddie Chambers, at the Art Council’s invitation, as a slide archive of contemporary work by black artists; and Panchayat Art Education and Resource Unit, cofounded by Shaheen Merali and Allan deSouza, also in

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1988, initially to document and curate the work of South Asian artists from Britain and the Indian subcontinent. And yet the original briefs of both organizations were quickly expanded to incorporate constituencies lacking the critical mass to produce their own resources. Instituted under the directorship of Gilane Tawadros in 1994, iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) began the enormous task of collating the past and nurturing the work of the present, but for Tawadros, one of the factors that had to be taken into account was the collusion between documenting and archiving, public institutions and private dealers. In e≈ect, without this support system, as in the case of Li Yuanchia, the archivist had to start from scratch—a slow and labor-intensive process. Lola Young, speaking as a black activist on the policy board of English Heritage, outlined the di÷culties in exerting pressure on institutions to fund the work of preservation, archiving, restoration, and cataloguing. Sutapa Biswas also pointed to what amounted to a lack of will to continue on the part of artists without support and acknowledgment, which clearly contributed to the loss of historical material. In her presentation Cheddie identified from her own experience the frustration of a poverty of documentation and the need to develop a critical practice “which attempts in some ways to deconstruct itself, or work with an idea of a kind of polyvocal, imaginative way of thinking about the work, and I think that leap of the imagination and imaginative frame has to be there, because the work, or the documentation of the work, is actually not there.” However, despite the lack of documentation in some areas, Sonia Boyce pointed out that a glance at the Objects in Time exhibition (2001), showing at Duke University at the time of the conference, indicated that, in fact, there was already so much information it was di÷cult to know how to process it. Mark Sealy reignited Cheddie’s observation that the archive is always inscribed with relations of power by insisting that it was not su÷cient to privilege fine art or a few key figures, or what Allan deSouza named that “mythical moment” articulated around a few select names, thereby obscuring issues of gender and sexuality. And where would one place those black artists who did not align themselves with the Black Arts Movement? Historicizing and archiving processes should not only be about exposing “gaps” in the visual arts narrative: whose work was or was not included. They should also be about expanding the field of assemblage to include multiple narratives that would clarify how visual art as such articulated with other practices and other practitioners not

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directly concerned with the “fine art” debate, or whose practices fell outside the sphere of funding policies. In this respect, Sealy added, it was important to take account of the aspirations of individual practitioners and how they wanted to align themselves, especially those who contested the conventional gallery system. The plurality of positions and aspirations of black artists demands a more complex approach to narrativization and contextualization, and yet there was no consensus about what the priorities should be. On the one hand, it was clear that art historical conventions needed to expand their boundaries to include a broader visual culture perspective; on the other, Araeen contended that what was needed was a “new aesthetic theory, not more cultural theory,” although he did not o≈er any clear insights as to what this might be. While Mercer proposed a kind of neo-Panofsky reassessment of iconography and iconology, Wainwright, as already noted, asked how one might go about characterizing a “diasporic aesthetic.”

Artistic Practice and the Critical Landscape If the 1980s failed to produce a “new aesthetic theory” commensurate with what Araeen felt to be the radical “vision” of the Black Arts Movement, what were the prevailing critical dynamics? What was the relationship between art and critical practice? What was the status of the art object and its spectatorial relations? What system of relations was used to frame or contextualize art? critical practice. In the first instance, there was a justifiable complaint from black artists that artwork itself was and still is rarely addressed directly, a criticism that at times the conference itself drew. As Mercer put it, the focus of writing on artists’ biographical identity and questions of institutional exclusion had overshadowed the “relative aesthetic autonomy of the art object itself.” Speaking from the perspective of long involvement in institutional policies, Naseem Khan acknowledged that the practice of “basing artistic judgments on ethnic di≈erence had been destructive.” In a truly perverse way, the “author,” whom postmodernism famously declared in the 1980s to be dead, returned in the shape of the ethnicized subject. Biswas insisted that the lack of attention to the aesthetic dimension and experience

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of the work was especially tedious considering that, for artists like herself who had emerged from British educational institutions, European and North American art history and criticism had informed their practice. Likewise, for Yong Soon Min all art came with “inheritance,” and hence existed in a system of relations that was both historical and contemporary. Making reference to art historical works has been a practice available equally to black and white artists, although not without controversy even from within the black sector. Boyce recalled how Claudette Johnson’s early interrogation of Picasso’s depictions of women and race and the avant-garde use of African masks had attracted criticism at the First National Black Art Convention in 1982; the argument that references to Western canons in black artists’ work were in some way “counterrevolutionary” prompted the women to adjourn to another room to discuss their own practice separately. Subsequently, this form of quotation became common practice as postmodern irony, and yet even so, as Boyce emphasized, critics persistently failed to apply the same criteria of assessment to black artistic production as they did to the mainstream. While most participants agreed with the lack of an aesthetic discourse, others added that it was di÷cult to isolate the work from its sociohistorical context and still “fully dimensionalize it,” posing the problem of the dynamics of critical context in relation to the “relative aesthetic autonomy” of the object. One can cite some obvious reasons why the mainstream art world avoided critical and art historical language to assess the aesthetic value of the work of educated black artists: institutional privileging of cultural “purity” over mobile or hybridized transcultural practices; assumptions of Western ownership of modernist aesthetics together with an ignorance of the development of modernism outside the West; or even the malingering influence in British art schools of subjective expressionism, which presupposed that the only authentic experience of the black student was in ethnic “roots.” Yet the story clearly demands more complex analysis. To even begin to unpack this problematic, we need to step outside a moment and see the wider context of art criticism during the period: Simply, what were mainstream criticism’s points of reference? For this we need to refer to a degree back to the U.S. situation. While art criticism had accepted intertextuality as a strategy with respect to discourses deriving from feminist and psychoanalytic theory together with French

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poststructuralism, postcolonial critique of the premises of modernity did not begin to enter critical practice until 1984. At this point, the debates surrounding New York moma’s ill-conceived exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: A÷nity of the Tribal and the Modern remobilized the political voice of African American artists, reinforcing the British debates on institutional exclusion and diasporic politics. But the debates did not really gain momentum until Magiciens de la terre (Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1989), which, among other things, gave credibility to the myth of cultural authenticity while engendering the curatorial tourism of “multiculturalism.” Sandy Nairne’s State of the Art exhibition (ica, London, 1987) gave a major institutional profile to issues of “identity, culture, and power,” but drew criticism from Boyce that these issues had been ghettoized into one section only of the exhibition while the nature of the artists’ work suited other categories just as well—a curatorial pattern of including black artists’ work only under themes of identity politics that, alas, was to be repeated for the next decade on both sides of the Atlantic. Given the backlash against theory, which produced a crisis in critical practice in the art world as a whole by the turn of the 1990s, artwork became vulnerable to the most limited vocabulary and simplistic readings of cultural politics. This is well illustrated by Wilson’s analysis of the critical reception of exhibitions of or including British black artists in the United States, drawing attention to not only the lack of critical coverage but also the misleading statements from curators and critics alike. The overwhelmingly negative response to the 1993 Whitney Biennial marked the beginning of the end of at least the U.S. art world’s flirtation with diasporic and identity politics. This was coincidental, as Nairne pointed out, with the rise in power of the curator over the critic as the primary consecrating agent in art’s “restricted cultural field” (to borrow Pierre Bourdieu’s terminology) and with the growing collusion between institutional curators, dealers, and collectors. To this we need to add that, in the history of art, each generation of artists usually has its peer group of critical advocates, but this was missing during the 1980s; while black artists were emerging from the British education system, a support system of black—or other—art theorists, sympathetic to their aesthetic positions, did not begin to emerge until more than a decade later.

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artistic practice and political radicalism. For Araeen, “What di≈erentiated these artists from the mainstream was not the invocation or enunciation of their race or ethnicity—nor a desire to go back to African or Asian roots or cultures and reconstruct them in the light of what some black academics call diasporic experiences—but their uncompromising modernity; a modernity that was given a new role as the avant-garde.” But an opportunity was lost to develop a new aesthetic theory around the early years of the Black Arts Movement because “instead of art historians and theorists who would develop a discourse in support of black art as a new avant-garde, we had sociologists whose cultural theories of ethnicity removed black art from its historical context.” Although one might sympathize with Araeen’s attempt to identify a “rupture” in aesthetic practice, his argument was unfortunately fraught with contradictions. Hall had already outlined how poststructuralist and postcolonial theory had sought to dismantle modernity’s legacy of the Enlightenment; if, in Araeen’s own account, the Black Arts Movement was part of this wider decolonizing project, then aligning it with modernity is highly problematic. The legacy of twentieth-century modernism still rested in Enlightenment individualism, with its valorization of the authorial subject and the autonomy of art understood progressively as a stripping away of all content to achieve pure Form. This perspective did not substantially change until Pop art’s radical shift in referentiality from nature to mediated “culture”; by 1972 Leo Steinberg had characterized these “operational processes with no prior optical event” as “postmodern.”4 Given that the Black Arts Movement itself had an intermedia dynamic that drew equally from high art and black vernacular expression, if one were to situate it in the context of mainstream conceptual practice, then Steinberg’s reading of the postmodern might be a more appropriate place to start. Cheddie hinted at this in her proposal that the way forward demands a “more inclusive definition of how we begin to talk about notions of art and politics, notions of the erasure of boundaries between the popular and high art.” Moreover, at least one artist, Merali, has quite explicitly referred to his work as “black Pop art.” More contentious, however, was Araeen’s claim that the Black Arts Movement had failed to sustain its militancy against the “system” and “forces of oppression.” He initially seemed to be locating this antiestablishment militancy in the work’s critique of sociopolitical conditions of the “victimized subject,” but subsequently tried to separate “radicality” from “politics” by relocating the former in artistic “vision.” If by his argument

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Araeen meant that the early work more directly addressed questions of the prevailing relations of power, then it has some validity insofar as this was a powerful factor in unifying diverse constituencies under the “black” signifier. One also needs to ask how far the later emphasis on “ethnicities” was a disempowering and disuniting distraction. Araeen’s example of artistic vision was Chambers’s Destruction of the National Front (1980) and its relation to Jasper Johns’s Flag paintings; as Boyce explained, if Johns was playing a late modernist game of ambivalent form and content, Chambers’s work certainly reclaimed the flag to British political iconology. Radical as this may be, one still needs to ask the extent to which Chambers’s strategy relates to a post-Johns and particularly British 1970s postconceptual interrogation, informed by feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, of the politics of the image as it circulated around photography, film, and advertising. It begged the question once again of how black artistic productions came to be excluded from critical dialogues with mainstream debates. In clarifying some of the intentions that had informed the interventions of the early years, Piper provided us with the tools for thinking about how the work both connected with and extended 1970s practices and theoretical debates. He cites gender politics, the construction of a nationalistic countertext, and funding and public accountability; but he also spoke of thinking about how work could both describe a particular political and historical situation and prescribe a range of political solutions around a pan-Africanist socialism. That it had in fact “worked” in this sense was confirmed by Wainwright; although he had begun by saying that art should not be “didactic,” he went on to propose that while this work was not propagandist, for him it had an important didactic function. Perhaps what needs to be teased out further is the relationship between didacticism and visual, or aesthetic, pleasure; although these are not mutually exclusive terms, critical practice may indeed have focused on the former rather than the latter. In any case, for Piper, subsequent realization of a greater political complexity also meant a shift in perception and the development of di≈erent tools. If Araeen’s position is to be taken seriously, however, much of his terminology would have to be critically unpacked. Tawadros questioned the appropriateness of the term “avant-garde” for its links with the military and colonizing project and its assumption of an “absolute rupture with the past.” Citing Piper’s interest in science fiction as a way of “imagining the future in terms of the past” and the references to historical models

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in the work of both Himid and Boyce, she suggested that any rupture was in some way contingent on the past. One has perhaps to make a distinction here between two notions of avant-gardism: the historical avant-garde, to which Tawadros was referring, as an attitude within modernism that sought to challenge bourgeois values and preferences (coming, of course, from the bourgeois intelligentsia itself!), and a general impulse in creative processes to extend the borders or limits of existing forms of representation in response to changing life conditions. It is in this latter sense that Merali understands the avant-garde as a construction of new models by which to “test existing and nonexisting codes, conventions, positions and forms of communication.” The question is whether “avant-garde” is so overdetermined by the former meaning that it now has limited value for describing the latter. At the same time, as Tawadros pointed out, the artists’ presentations themselves did not support Araeen’s claim that there had been a failure in militancy and that their work continued to express political radicality, albeit articulated in ways other than those to which Araeen was referring. In any case, as both Barbara Hunt and Tawadros agreed, there was a tendency to look back with nostalgia and loss at the past, perhaps even to overvalorize certain of its aspects in hindsight. There may also be a case for arguing that a di≈erent but equally valid political position was sustained by those artists working in community arts and local residencies. Hall conceded that black artists might well have been thrown o≈ course in the mid1980s, but that it was also a time of profound changes politically. Given this, what were the available strategies? One either tried to regain that momentum or to continue the struggle in the light of new conditions, which meant, as Piper himself had said, reconceptualizing one’s practice. If the sociopolitical climate is constantly shifting and therefore is itself a subject of analysis, as Pauline de Souza pointed out, then resistances expressed through aesthetic process and language must also be in a critical, tactical, and transformative dialogue with it. Battles need to be reconfigured in di≈erent ways, sometimes with di≈erent tools, sometimes from di≈erent systemic angles: a constant “war of position,” as Antonio Gramsci said. Moreover, di≈erent constituencies of artists had variable temporal relations with the institution of art. Diana Yeh, speaking from the perspective of British Chinese artists who had arrived late on the scene, argued that with the advent of globalization and the

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celebratory rhetoric of multiculturalism and cultural diversity, the overtly political work of the 1980s was not only avoided by Chinese artists as ground already covered, but was often seen as outmoded by critics. Moreover, other factors came into play in their situation: “Despite developments in black arts criticism and a recent surge of interest in contemporary Chinese art on an international level, the so-called British Chinese artist still remains relatively invisible today, and that is partly due to the long-established scholarship in the West of classical Chinese art, which still seems very resistant to the very idea of contemporary Chinese art. . . . [It] is in part also due to the fact that the development of British Chinese art only really gathers momentum during the 1990s . . . in stark comparison to the Chinese experience in the U.S.” Therefore, for British Chinese artists, it was necessary to develop di≈erent strategies, shifting away from referencing specifically Chinese contexts to “exploring, for example, intercultural processes and issues of authenticity.” susan pui san lok eloquently outlined the di÷culty that Chinese artists had in being ascribed to any of the given and often hierarchical curatorial ethnic categories and the necessity of actively identifying disparities and contingencies across those ethnically segregated histories and practices in order to break them down. Stan Abe narrated a similar story for Asian Americans in the United States, “resident but always alien,” and the complexities of identification as a new wave of artists from mainland China and Hong Kong arrived in North America with very di≈erent agendas. The high profile of these artists had in e≈ect thrown into invisibility the concerns of Asian American artists like Diane Tani a decade earlier. Abe attributes these changes to complicity between curatorial practice and economic interests: “The emergence of Asian contemporary art—from Asia to Australia, to Venice, Berlin, Paris, London, and the United States—is less a result of the struggle against exclusionary and Eurocentric art policies than a necessary institutional response to shifts in the demography of money. This, it seems to me, is the foundation of multiculturalism, the doctrine of inclusiveness in the age of global capital.” artistic practice and cultural studies. Within the impoverished art critical landscape of the time, postcolonial and cultural studies, generated primarily from sociology and literary theory, provided the most dynamic space of critical analysis. And yet, against Hall’s position that cultural production cannot be understood outside its sociopolitical

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context, Araeen maintained that their influence had redirected art historical studies proper into “cultural theories of ethnicity,” revealing a tension in the relative merits of di≈ering strategies of contextualization. (In fact, this is part of a wider shift in British fine art education from art history to visual culture.) One might concede that the knowledge derived from more academic disciplines, or from certain tools of analysis to which the reproductive media more easily lend themselves, is not fully adequate to the peculiar conditions of visual art experience and meaning. This is possibly the source of Himid’s complaint against theorists: “Being slipshod in your research—by describing artworks as if you had seen them when you have seen only a slide—drives artists crazy, especially when they see the mis-description repeated and repeated in publication after publication, year after year.” Assessment on the basis of reproductive images encourages a reading that is semiotically “readable,” or “communicable,” but whatever it might say on the surface, art is not actually about verbalizable communication. As Mercer said, “Art’s condition of objecthood, as it were, is also as a permanent opening on to those aspects of thought or perception or feeling that remain ‘other,’ that are part of the constitutive outside and that can never be fully grasped by reason or consciousness or by the intellect alone.” If, then, we are to speak of the “relative autonomy of the art object,” as Mercer described it, we cannot locate it either in autonomy from sociopolitical context or in modernism’s self-reflexive formalism; in which case, we need to look again at the question of experience and the psychosocial dynamic between work and the viewer, which brings us back to the role of visual or aesthetic pleasure. There is, however, a deeper problem here. Wainwright alluded to it when he asked, “Isn’t it more crucial to think of visual work informing critical work rather than vice versa?” Gilles Deleuze noted the tendency in criticism to treat the artist as a “patient,” whereas, in fact, the artist was a “clinician” of society, and his or her work an assemblage of e≈ects constituting a “symptomology” of certain tendencies in society of which it was as yet unaware.5 It is in this sense that the artist is a “visionary.” And if the early Black Arts Movement may be said to be visionary, perhaps it is in the way it articulated the desires of an already culturally diverse and reconfigured British society, whose hegemonic element, in its slumbering nostalgia for times past, had not quite woken up to—and no one likes to be rudely awakened from an exquisite fantasy! But

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the point here is that art is ill served when used as a symptom or e≈ect of a process that it itself had already configured. And what now can be said of the aesthetic and visionary dimension of work that no longer exists, except, as Cheddie says, to engage in an imaginative leap of reconstruction? Nevertheless, the discussion suggested that the dominance of cultural studies and identity politics was perhaps part of a more complex interface of pedagogical, critical, economic, and curatorial forces on both sides of the Atlantic. Although diasporic discourses around identity might be seen as a contingent vehicle through which artists were able to articulate their demands for self-representation and cultural participation, especially in North America, an immigrant society tout court, there were limitations. In her presentation, Cheddie spoke of how the repetitious cycle of identity discourses articulated around cultural trauma, memory, and the body had been very restrictive to the development of critical practice. At the same time, there are certain traumatic narratives that have yet to be worked through, especially, as Sedira poignantly described, the personal consequences of the West’s unresolved relationship with Islam and the Arab world. Identities, as Hall elaborated in discussion, “cannot be defined only in terms of their interior, but have to be seen in terms of a constitutive outside, which makes it possible for an inside to declare its own self-presence.” Given, then, that there can be no identity without di≈erence, the “multicultural view of cultural identity”—that everyone has a “full cultural identity” embodied in their culture and carried in its traditions—may have been important as a “tactic for reworking past inadequacies, but is not available as a long-term strategy.” For Hall, as against universalism or cultural relativism, what emerged more positively as a response to the 1980s was a “vernacular cosmopolitanism” that was “located” in culture and traditions but not bound by them. In Britain, as funding for black arts organizations dried up, so the mainstream institutions, as in the United States, opened their doors, as Araeen rightly said, to “cultural diversity.” But if artists were “happy to enter the system on the basis of ethnic and cultural di≈erences,” it was perhaps because there were practically few other available options. As both lok and Sedira pointed out, these kinds of curatorial classifications were meaningless for practitioners with multiple cultural a÷liations and experiences. One member of the audience asked how one challenged classification and provided an “authentic voice,” a question that left begging what at this juncture “authenticity”

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might mean; if it has any meaning at all, where was it to be located: in the subject, the work, its context, or a combination of e≈ects? That the diasporic consciousness was cosmopolitan and international, contrary to the essentialist view, was a more relevant observation made in Isaac Julien’s presentation. Moreover, institutional cultural diversity did not have a wholly negative outcome; it had perhaps partially “resolved” the dilemma that Sedira experienced as an Arab artist “fitting” neither the polarized black/white British race distinctions nor the criteria of the early Black Arts Movement; and as Yeh admitted, the “multicultural” situation enabled British Chinese artists to gain exhibition access. thinking about artistic strategies. Clearly, “cultural diversity” is itself a catchall sociological term that glosses over artistic practices and a more subtle and diverse politics, which the artists’ presentations highlighted and which related to Hall’s initial description of postcoloniality’s deconstruction of Enlightenment premises and the shift toward a “vernacular cosmopolitanism.” The nature of artistic research has often articulated around the problematics of history and anthropology, disciplines sedimented in academia in the wake of the Enlightenment and Empire. Most of the artists represented in the conference had at some time either drawn source material from the collections of anthropological or ethnographic museums or installed work in these spaces, in addition to referencing historical artwork in the national collections. As mentioned earlier, to recycle, reconnect, and put back into public circulation those local narratives and experiences to be found in family traditions, or in hidden and forgotten archives suppressed by the text of history, is a strategy of self-empowerment. For Allan deSouza and Yong Soon Min, however, it was important that the anthropological reference concerned history, not memory, as a means of avoiding any temptation the viewer might have to impose a subjective reading. In this respect some of their work articulated around an ironic play on the anthropological “native informant,” a role, one suspects, multiculturalism expected the ethnicized artist to perform. It is noteworthy that these imaginative uses of archival material and manipulations of disciplinary procedures provide an alternative way of visualizing events and of producing meanings to the conventions of the historian. But more significant, these strategies have also produced what Deleuze and Guattari called the relative “deterritorialization” or “minoritization” of a dominant language—a throwing into discord and reassemblage of its terms.6 According to the authors, deter-

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ritorialization is what a minority does with a major language; it is characterized by a connection of the individual to political immediacy and the formation of new collective assemblages where expression or enunciation takes precedence over prior meaning: the language of a community-yet-to-come. Clear expressions of this are provided by black street vernacular and music culture whose influence on British cultural life as a whole has irrevocably altered and revivified it and whose incorporation into black visual arts demands further theoretical evaluation, as was repeatedly stated in the conference. A classic visual art example of deterritorialization might be Ingrid Pollard’s photography: from the early “tourist postcard” series, which present black figures (associated in the public mind with urban life) in the pastoral landscape and at the seaside, two sacrosanct spatial metaphors of Englishness; to the Billboard Project, which she describes as an “almost anthropological look at white people” and the “constructedness” of the English landscape. Although not, properly speaking, a matter of aesthetics, issues of spatiality, nonfixity, and the journey have been recurrent motifs in the work of diasporic artists. Hall spoke of the physical journeys made by African and Asian populations since the seventeenth century, a historical trajectory that brought deSouza and Min together, and which, in terms of the black Atlantic, Piper attempted to portray in his The Seven Ages of Man (1984). The work concludes, as he wryly noted, with the success of pan-African socialism; youthful utopianism maybe, but expressing a futuristic impulse characteristic of his work, as Tawadros pointed out, and “visionary” in Deleuze’s sense. Piper also spoke of Adventures Close to Home (1987), a tape-slide-sound piece looped in such a way as to produce ever-changing juxtapositions, which he described as “the chance meeting of elements in space.” In retrospect, this work has structural a÷nities with the multiple pathways and visions that were to characterize his subsequent work with the computer interface and interactive cd-roms. In response to Hall, Biswas added that for artists, the “process of making work always marks a journey, an encounter with the world outside and around them as well as within.” For her, echoing Piper, being allowed to dream was a means of allowing spaces to be challenged and changed. Two metaphors have been important in her work to date: the synapse, as a means of conceptualizing the space between work and viewer; and the horizon line, “which in visual terms marks the most extreme point of our experience, and maybe in anthropological terms one could say

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that it marks the edge of the earth, the point against which we all measure ourselves.” Refusing to be “pinned down” by a fixed horizon was a way for Biswas to “disrupt the anthropological tradition.” The dialogical play of multiple spatiotemporalities and identifications that destabilize fixed subjective categories has been inherent in Isaac Julien’s work from the early films through to the more recent multiple film and video installations. Julien was a founding member of Sankofa, which, along with Black Audio Film Collective and Cheddo, were the three black British film collectives operative in the 1980s.7 His work has not only incorporated the practices of film, music, and fine art, but has also addressed the controversial economy of desire in black and white homosexual relationships. Thus, Julien has consistently worked against orthodoxies, his early film work transgressing the stereotypes of black masculinity through a transgression of the logic of genres to combine intertextual articulations of documentary and the archive, fiction, quotation, and the “photographic” tableau vivant. “I see my filmmaking practice as emblematic of the dissolution of traditional boundaries between theory and practice, art and cinema, which I think is an issue in this conference so far.” Julien quotes Robert Stam’s reading of his film work as dialogical and multivoiced rather than authorial: “Identification operates, but not through protocols. The identification is not with positive images, with heroes or heroines, but rather with conflictual communities, aspirations, a community that shares issues and questions, rather than fixed, definitive answers.” In his presentation Julien spoke of a new multimedia work that would draw on the model of the trickster as a “creolized subject, a messenger and traveler of the diasporic world investigating the racism of Europe’s past and present.” Julien’s trickster embodies both Michel Serres’s messenger-angel and Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, bearing witness, as the artist says, to Europe’s “failed hopes and dreams.” Above all, Julien’s work is a provocative invitation to address the dialogue between didacticism and visual pleasure, a debate that preoccupied film theory toward the end of the 1970s, and one that has some resonance in the way we might address the Black Arts Movement. Rejecting the somewhat puritanical ideology of earlier structuralist and political film, and in contradistinction to Araeen’s position, Julien reconfigures the political through a poetics of excess in which the pleasure of music and the fetishized image, of repetition and recognition are set in counterpoint to what Stam called “incor-

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rect images,” which unravel, or “deterritorialize,” the viewer’s assumptions of subjective coherence. Julien’s proposition is that the trickster is significant in diasporic aesthetics because it figures the deterritorialization of language with the intention of e≈ecting a transformation of thought.

The Institution and Support Structures institution and funding. Abe’s economic analysis was a reminder of the extent to which the support of black arts in 1980s Britain was dependent on public funding policies and initiatives in art venues, which, although previously relatively autonomous, were now also becoming contaminated by the influence of powerful dealers and collectors, a particularly damaging turn for young artists. There is also to consider the indi≈erence of the private sector. As black arts organizations folded and the public galleries opened their doors to cultural diversity, how far was the lack of sustainability of black-led activities due to their own naïveté, or to bad faith on the part of policymakers, or to the kind of institutional containment that Sarat Maharaj calls “multicultural managerialism”? Serious questions needed to be asked concerning the conflicting aims and perceptions of policymakers and creators, and how far institutional, economic, and ideological requirements conditioned the direction of artistic and curatorial practices. Naseem Khan’s analysis of the trajectory of funding concluded that the poor legacy of the energy generated in the 1980s had to be attributed to the failure of institutional policy to guarantee sustainability. And yet, despite problems of categorization and “basing artistic judgments on ethnic di≈erence,” Khan believed that a cultural diversity policy is still valid because the playing field remains as uneven as ever; but, following the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and new legislation around racial equality, the “onus of good practice has shifted onto public bodies.” Lola Young, also speaking from her experience on various policy boards, including English Heritage, was rather less sanguine about what could be achieved through them: “The idea that postcolonial critique may be of interest to bodies in positions of power such as the Arts Council is sheer fantasy.” She emphasized the limited influence that black activists could exert on these boards, implying a tokenist inclusion, and her frustration in trying to communicate the need for support for black arts’ heritage. Black

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arts producers needed to be clearer about what policy requirements they had, and also to be aware that institutional policies concealed agendas and therefore needed careful analysis and deconstruction. On a practical level, policy review boards had timetables set by government, creating unrealistic pressures in areas where more time was needed to develop, among other things, alternative ways of representing an issue and the important work of historical excavation. During the 1980s, British institutional funding in the shape of Ethnic Minority Arts had, for some, been too weighted toward community projects, which, though they may have provided the community with a momentary sense of creative possibility, did little to enhance the individual artistic profile of the artists with a mainstream art audience. Nonetheless, for many black artists—Zarina Bhimji, Chila Kumari Burman, Shaheen Merali, and Yinka Shonibare, among others—work in community projects, local authority art centers, and residencies was for a time their main source of income, and perhaps also a space that kept open a certain political vision of art in a wider sociocultural field. The danger was in institutional identification of specific artists with communities with which they may have had little in common. Barbara Hunt, one of the few supportive institution-based curators, describes how she began as a community arts worker. “We were pushed o≈ into community arts and given funds for residencies and workshops to work within ‘our’ communities—that idea of native informant, that we somehow owned these communities, even though we’d never grown up with them, we didn’t speak the same language, but we might look a little the same.” She spoke directly of the frustrations in working with enforced notions of community, the extent to which programs had to be approved by leisure service committees of local authorities, and having to reconstitute grassroots organizations in order to qualify for ever inadequate funding. Above all, that black artists were not o≈ered the same career opportunities in terms of solo shows and catalogues, and there was always the continuing limitation of identitybased projects. Although, as Tawadros pointed out, there were many exhibitions, the “curatorial groupings that put artists together in these di≈erent categories, all these di≈erent black art shows, maybe created a kind of closure when what these artists wanted was to begin a conversation.” Perhaps one of the crudest examples of the tendency to consider black artists only for shows involved with identity and cultural di≈erence was the much vaunted Decade Show (1990), designed to showcase the new “multicultural”

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art world at, among other sites, New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art; it was followed in the museum by other “thematic” shows that included no black artists. Merali, an artist instrumental in opening a conversation between British black artists and the Havana Biennale (the only international event to which they had access in the early 1990s) and active in the spheres of local community and curating, introduced a further facet of the economic relation of art and capital by drawing attention to the role of locally inflected “transitional” exhibition spaces. Merali o≈ered the perception that freelance curating around local discourses, cultural conditions, and di≈erence at one time provided an e≈ective tool against the “universalizing” drive of established curatorial practice and the private sector. Nonetheless, as the use of transitional spaces and a localist ethic became fashionable, so this “village model” became hijacked by government and corporate regeneration policies, which have since obliterated both the work of the artist and the local community. collaboration and curatorial practice. Merali is an artist who has fought hard to be able to move with relative ease across di≈erent cultural spaces and in diverse collaborative projects. But questions of community and collaboration can be deeply problematic for visual artists in ways that do not necessarily a≈ect performance or certain media-based practices, which by their very nature engage several kinds of expertise. In the first instance, the making of visual art, as Himid suggested, is a process that derives from the deep psychic structures of individual experience, which initially is not shareable outside of exceptional circumstances, the relationship between deSouza and Min being a rare example. For a visual artist to move outside the studio into a community situation is to disengage from his or her own practice and to subsume it under the more pedagogical role of enabling others to realize their creative potential. According to deSouza, “Collaboration is really a political decision, and is also to some extent utopian. To function collectively, you have to reassess questions of authenticity and origin(ality). . . . this too has its own problems, namely of individual invisibility, which was contrary to the Black Arts Movement’s underlying demand for visibility.” Collaborative e≈ort was initially a powerful sustaining force for artists in the early years, not only in terms of shared ideological aims, but also in their development as animateurs in the creation of support structures and open discussions. For deSouza, “The

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(f )act of collaboration . . . is a practice of negotiation, sometimes of compromise, but mainly of a joint exploration that can lead us in many di≈erent directions that we, working individually, would not otherwise have taken.” Himid clearly took on organizational roles to open the work of black women’s art and concerns to wider public debate, but she dismissed as unproductive those “collaborative” tendencies that sought to impose agendas on the artist. Likewise, deSouza’s perception was that finally the Black Arts Movement had not fully addressed the nature of alliance and was unable to address the inevitable antagonisms that arose. Collaboration has therefore to be conceptualized and assessed at multiple levels of artistic and curatorial procedure. There seems to be no doubt that, with the 1990s, the aims and conceptual approaches of black curators on both sides of the Atlantic di≈ered widely from those generated by mainstream institutions, and in more imaginative ways, which is perhaps something else that demands more attentive research. Most curators came from art practice,8 which undoubtedly conditioned the ways they approached curatorial practice, and were aware of a necessary pedagogical-historical dimension that again underscored the importance of archival research, as well as the necessity of reconfiguring prevailing notions of modernism. Rick Powell was of the opinion that curatorial projects could be laboratories in which to reconceptualize activities in other fields like teaching and writing, but felt that one was always caught between the demands of the educator and the desire to create surprises. Mercer had already drawn attention to the importance of Powell’s curatorial work and the seminal exhibition Blues Aesthetic, in which, as Powell explained, he had felt the need to create a di≈erent “picture world” from the one presented in the Museum of Modern Art, one that included a broad range of black cultural practices and references, a strategy whose importance Mark Sealy similarly emphasized. In an e≈ort to “rethink race and modernity,” Powell also included work he called “black” by nonblack practitioners, a move that was not understood or appreciated by critics. Both strategies were carried over into Rhapsodies in Black, cocurated with David A. Bailey, who had also instigated the Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Di≈erence and Desire exhibition (ica, London, 1995), based on the imaginative premise of looking at the intellectual legacy of Frantz Fanon through the work of contemporary artists from the black Atlantic. Dawoud Bey, an artist also working in the curatorial field, was one of the few speakers who directly addressed the point of reception of artwork, emphasizing attentiveness

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to the position of the audience and how one might encourage a greater involvement in the work. Alert to the manipulative power, misleading transparency, and intimidating aura of museums for young people, Bey explored creative ways to construct collaborations between the institutions of art and this young community. “In addition, an ongoing critical dialogue is begun in which these students begin to ask questions about curatorial decisions and practices. . . . Along with aiming to open up the institutional space, I have also attempted to shift the nature of the museum from a site where art is displayed to a place where art can be made. . . . In this way, when visitors attend the exhibition, it is the students who are the subjects of the exhibition—and who appear in the photographs—who are the very ones articulating the experience of the work and providing a critical context for the viewers.” In the end, however, he was skeptical about the extent to which his strategies were sustained by the museum after he left.

Assessing the Past for the Future In his presentation, Piper referred to the “blank page” of 1989, a year when his work came to a halt, surrendering to the demands of reassessment and reflection. It was an experience shared by many black artists. As Tawadros stated, an initiative had been lost to a changing artistic and political landscape. Suddenly the identity debate was appropriated by young British artists (ybas), who redefined Britishness as white, lower middle class, and “laddish”—and in a way palatable to an art hierarchy more comfortable with titillating sensation than with sober political realities. The publicly funded galleries, which had previously taken chances with emerging artists, lost their autonomy to the influential collectors and an unprecedented stranglehold by the market on assigning value. This does not mean that what all artists produce is now market-driven; it simply means that, like any volatile fashion, certain tendencies are privileged over others, and meanwhile the rest of us have to struggle for a climate more favorably disposed to intellectual work more attuned to the changing global situation. For the moment it is unfortunately the case that few artists are o≈ered high-profile solo shows or inclusion in major international exhibitions and national collections unless they have a gallerist behind them. The constituency that has su≈ered the most in this scenario is black women artists,

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as Deborah Willis, among others, pointed out. Although marginal organizations like the Women’s Slide Library in London continued to include their work, as the 1990s progressed there seemed to be a shrinkage of opportunities for their work to be shown; Mona Hatoum was the sole black woman to make a transition into the high-profile private gallery sector. In the end it is not enough, as Hunt said, to see one work here and there in a group show; the sense of an artist’s work can be grasped only through solo shows with accompanying catalogue documentation, and the lack of these forms of public profile for black women artists demands a more proactive drive to develop a curatorial and critical support system. In an odd repetition of history, 1980s black women artists su≈ered the fate of a certain sector of British women artists in the 1970s, which still lacks adequate documentation. The discussion of the complexity of subject positions, deriving from both black women and gay debates of the 1980s, seems now to have lost its currency and remains relatively underdeveloped in dominant discourses. Were black artists caught in an irresolvable conflict of aims? On the one hand, there was the understandable desire of most visual artists for their work to have a significant profile in the international and national circuits of aesthetics and ideas; this, after all, is why so many artists, black or not, gravitated to the most energetic intellectual and artistic centers during the modernist period. Does this, however, entail a more or less passive acceptance of the existing power relations in the “restricted field of cultural production” and their canonical procedures? Or does the persistence of biased configurations of value and exclusive practices suggest that there is still the demand for an ongoing e≈ort to change the power relations from within? Mutual support structures remain a necessary part of the process. However, the strategies available in the 1980s are not necessarily those of the present. One needs to ask what now constitutes “the system” against which Araeen laments a loss of militant action. Is such a system still locatable? Subsequent antiracist legislation that in principle recognizes the equal rights of all citizens to participate in culture renders “the system” less tangible, the issues less clear-cut, and drives discrimination into ever more subtle levels of expression, which is what Young was alluding to. Commentaries from writers as diverse as Michel de Certeau, who claims that we are all now subject to marginality; Paul Gilroy, who, in outlining the profound internalization of slavery in Western modernist civilization, also reveals the extent to which we are all subject to

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a slave economy; and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of Empire as a new deterritorialized apparatus of rule have to be taken seriously as perceptions of how intimately related historical black experience is to emergent global, political, and economic alignments, which have fatally wounded the social contract and rendered power di≈use and invisible.9 Social repression has in some ways become subtler, more totalized. If it is no longer possible to identify “the enemy,” it is also no longer possible to know how and what to confront. This in itself changes the nature of how one might go about challenging perceived inequities. Clearly, earlier strategies that could target specific national policies and chains of command can no longer pose an e≈ective challenge against more di≈use transnational forces in which the power and ethical responsibility of the nation-state appears subtly marginalized by a privatized economy. This global state of a≈airs has rather sidelined national issues of race, ethnicity, and identity in Britain, although this is not to suggest that inequities have miraculously dissolved away. But one might be forgiven for asking now to what extent antiracist—or any other social—legislation gets on the statute books at the very moment issues of race no longer pose a threat to hegemonic power (insofar as this is no longer wholly in the hands of the nation-state); or indeed, that issues of race and ethnicity were always an alibi for whatever other sociopolitical and economic negotiations were being conducted by it. What we are getting at here is the proposition that black arts debates need not only to realign themselves with changing configurations in the national scenario but also to see how these intersect with wider, more subtle, global forces. If Cheddie’s intervention about the relation between a younger generation of black artists and Europe was significant, it was not because it highlighted a particular geographic realignment to which little attention has been paid, but because it alluded to the necessity of realignment and more complex a÷liation tout court. At the very least, as Boyce insisted, there is a need to professionalize the field of black arts, and on multiple disciplinary fronts. Black practitioners previously exhibited a level of naïveté in relation to the workings of the institution of art, especially with respect to the ever more subtle strategies by which exclusion operates. Hence, the general perception in the conference was that the curatorial acceptance of work on the basis of “cultural di≈erence” was a means of maintaining the separation between work by black artists and the white mainstream, thereby foreclosing on any meaningful dialogue. Moreover,

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the identitarian subject does not in itself possess political status; it is an e≈ect of the sign of di≈erence, but this does not enable access to political thought and action. As Mercer pointed out, survey exhibitions like The Other Story and Transforming the Crown (1997) are crucial in providing historical data. The same might be said for anthologies of black artists’ work. But at the same time, they also reinforce the sense of parallel art fields that have little to do with each other, which, as the artists’ work itself shows, is patently nonsense. More imaginative strategies are required whereby more than a few token black artists are included in white-curated shows on diverse themes, or, as in Powell’s provocative curating, a few more token white artists are included in black-curated shows! Nevertheless, it is di÷cult to see how this divisive pattern can be broken in the existing structure of the art field unless black artists are in a position to gain individual exhibitions with serious publications capable of constructing more broad-based aesthetic and critical discourses. Were this point to be reached it may then be possible to reverse the terms of analysis and explore the extent to which “white” mainstream art has been influenced by not only black vernacular culture but also black visual art practices, and eventually to dispense with racial typologies altogether. This means nurturing a less disabling and more productive vision about the past, such as that advanced by Mercer, and more critical and theoretical writing capable of addressing questions such as those Wainwright posed about the feasibility of thinking what a “diasporic aesthetic” may be and its transformative e≈ect on dominant culture. If we return to Hall’s question—Is the art black because the artist is black, the experience is black, or the aesthetics is black?—we have the beginnings of an inquiry capable of making some distinctions that are likely to reveal just how blurred the boundaries of racial di≈erence have become in the new global context, and how what is needed is a new concept of the political subject. The artists’ work, of course, is fully capable of providing the answers, but it needs the critics to address them. The question of the extent to which conventional art historical practices of historicizing and canonizing artists’ work produced a premature closure was one of the key preoccupations of the conference. There is a tension between the artist’s tendency to think toward the future and the historian’s practice of reconstructing the past. A more imaginative and pluralist approach to writing needs to be developed which takes account of the fact that, as both Hall and Mercer point out, visual forms of expression are

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always in excess of the languages available to describe them. At the same time, to form any resistance to the current biopolitical power structures, which seek to manipulate the economic, the political, and the cultural, all disciplines must operate interdependently. As Hardt and Negri point out, “In the imperial world the economist, for example, needs a basic knowledge of cultural production to understand the economy, and likewise the cultural critic needs a basic knowledge of economic processes to understand culture.”10 In this regard, Hall’s notion of a vernacular cosmopolitanism, located in culture and traditions but not bound by them, provides a fruitful means of exiting from the impasse of cultural diversity and thinking how the critic might rewrite the relationship between the work of black artists in a larger cultural, political, and aesthetic context. In other words, there is a general consensus that although work cannot be understood outside its sociopolitical context, it is not reducible to it, and the same applies with respect to the conventions of art history. These positions have to be constantly renegotiated. The question of education here is vital on a number of levels. Merali’s work with children in local authorities and Bey’s collaborations with teenagers in the museum structure exemplify the importance of outreach to those whose attitudes will shape decisions in the future. New generations of art historians and curators are emerging, some of whom have been taught by black practitioners now working in the academic field, or have otherwise been exposed to some postcolonial debates. To develop their research they too need documentary and archival resources, although the suggestion that universities might pay students to do this groundwork is a little optimistic in the present educational economic climate. In any case, one should be optimistic that a process of integration, albeit slow, of a di≈erent set of values is in motion that may one day redefine prevailing notions of aesthetic quality and the role of art in the larger culture, and shift the criteria of judgment of work by black artists away from their entrapment in discriminatory and nondialogical attitudes toward something like an indi≈erence to di≈erence as the inescapable condition of human existence.

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Notes 1. Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 66–67. 2. The first public conference sponsored by Aavaa was entitled “The Living Archive” and was held at the Tate Gallery, London, March 1997. 3. Rasheed Araeen, curator of The Other Story, had first proposed the exhibition to the Arts Council of Great Britain some ten years previously, but it had been rejected. Its timeliness then would have been in no doubt. By 1989, however, the evolution of new debates from the Black Arts Movement had shifted the parameters such that The Other Story was placed in the invidious and compromised position of having to be both a historical survey and a contemporary account simultaneously. For an analysis of the critical dilemma of The Other Story, see Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” in Welcome to the Jungle (New York: Routledge, 1994), 233–258. 4. See Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–92; Ihab Hassan, quoted in Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 17–21. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), xvii. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16–19, 85. 7. With the poverty of funding for black cinema, Menelik Shabazz of Cheddo, representing an earlier generation of black filmmakers than Sankofa or Black Audio Film Collective, has turned his energies to editing the magazine bfm (about black film and tv). 8. Eddie Chambers, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Shaheen Merali, Sunil Gupta, Rasheed Araeen, David A. Bailey, Rick Powell, Dawoud Bey, Fred Wilson, among others, are artists who have been involved in curating exhibitions and/or conferences. 9. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London: Verso, 1993), 41–71. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii. 10. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xvi.

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Adelaide Bannerman Introduction

Beginning to understand the practice of African and Asian artists in Great Britain in the period from 1960 to 2000 requires a social and political understanding of the relationship between the diasporan artists in question and their exclusion from the dialogue of mainstream Western art. Soon after World War II, Britain was where many artists came together from the newly formed Commonwealth. In the 1960s, two such gatherings saw the formation of the Indian Painters Collective and the Caribbean Artists Movement. At that time, a few individuals—among them, Ronald Moody, F. N. Souza, and Avinash Chandra—were accepted into the mainstream and achieved varying degrees of commercial success. But, despite receiving critical acclaim for their art practices, their inclusion into mainstream discussions of modern art continues to be, in relation to their Western counterparts, exacerbated by their ethnic and cultural di≈erence. Since the 1960s, African and Asian artists have felt the need to develop an aesthetic that takes into consideration diverse cultural influences, while also contributing to the conceptual and stylistic modes of the various art movements since that time. This intro-

Time Lines ■ 199

Ronald Moody, Savacou (maquette), 1963. Plaster coated with copper resin paint. 72 x 62 x 23 cm. Photograph by Eddie Chambers.

200 ■ Time Lines

duction briefly summarizes the visual styles of the art movements during this forty-year period, providing a breakdown of some of the theoretical concerns, material choices, and formal properties. A general explanation of some of the initiatives raised by artists during this period is also considered. 1960s. The 1960s heralded the threshold of new social demands for change with the emergence of the women’s liberation movement, Stonewall and gay liberation, and national and civil liberation movements across the world. The aesthetic spiritualism proposed by American expressionist painting (figuratively and in abstraction) had its European equivalent in tachisme. This expressionist idiom had dominated most of the transatlantic dialogue of the 1940s and 1950s and was becoming increasingly untenable in articulating the sentiments of a younger, postwar generation of artists. A reassessment of the objectives of art practice and of “modernism’s final format”1—the gallery space—had already been underway since the mid-1950s. At a time when the French critic Pierre Restany noted “a new sense of our contemporary industrial, mechanical and urban nature,”2 artists were appropriating imagery and objects from everyday life. They incorporated the vagaries of modern life—detritus, industrial materials, newspapers and magazines, organic and inorganic materials—into their artwork. Performance pieces, or happenings,3 in public spaces invited audience participation. They averted a politicized and critical focus on the “white cube”4—the gallery space as an institutional arena—which, for some, exemplified Western modernism’s imperialist and capitalist impulses. Initiatives led by individual artists or groups, such as David Medalla (founder of Artists for Democracy and the Artists Liberation Front) and the Caribbean Artists Movement, made inroads into establishing visibility and creating forums for African, Asian, and Caribbean artists. While the Caribbean Artists Movement had a particularly literary influence, its writers also encouraged an interdisciplinary discussion with emerging and established painters and sculptors. The artists who grouped around Artists for Democracy and the Artists Liberation Front produced artworks that were often multidisciplinary in approach and responded to interests in kineticism, happenings, the ritualisms of performance, and the formalist concerns of minimalism.

Time Lines ■ 201

1970s. Conceptualism continued the debate of reconsidering the art object, and the gallery, into the 1970s. This time there was an emphasis on a practice that adhered less to a retinal aesthetic appreciation of the art object and more to an experiential analysis. Site-specific artworks expanded the field of audience address, and there were ephemeral land artworks that directly used the environment, with the artwork serving, through photography, to document the event. Film and video, text, photography, and sound were also increasingly used as materials to address the public. Minimalist sculptors utilized organic and man-made materials—such as metal, stone, wood, glass, brick, and plastic—often presenting them with minor manipulation to create austere sculptural pieces that provoked confrontation with the aesthetic sensibilities of art critics and audiences alike. The reductive qualities of the artwork continued to strip away the aesthetic framework of what the art object could be and how it was presented. However, one such artist, Rasheed Araeen, confronted by the glass ceiling of exclusion, radically changed his practice from making minimal sculptures to a practice that exposed the relationship between art and society. As Guy Brett explains: The freedom represented by his earlier abstract work came to seem to him to occupy a mythical space “inversely proportional to the real space at the bottom of the hierarchical pyramid.” Paki Bastard (1977) was Araeen’s unique foray into live performance, a moving experience as much for the artist’s dignified awkwardness before the audience as the social realities he was evoking. Identity as an artist, identity as a black person, identity as exploited worker were the three themes whose interrelationship was continually questioned in the piece. Again, Araeen’s minimalist sixties Structures appear in the scenario, playing a role as part of the critical polemic, but also perhaps contradictory as a talisman of artistic exploration, suggesting that the “identity” forced on him by circumstances only represents a part of his humanity.5 At around the same time Araeen also launched the journal Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, which included the essay “Black Manifesto.” In the midst of growing tensions between the host community and immigrant communities, the 1970s saw the mobilization of the political left as a challenging force against racism, with organizations like the Anti-Nazi League and popular rallies organized by Rock Against Racism. The first major report on black arts, then termed ethnic minority arts, in Britain was written by Naseem Khan; The Arts Britain Ignores was commissioned by the

202 ■ Time Lines

(left) Rasheed Araeen, Paki Bastard, Performance, 1977. (right) Naseem Khan, The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain, 1976. Courtesy of the Commission for Racial Equality.

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(top left) Keith Piper, Go West Young Man series, 1987. Detail. Series of 14 blackand-white photo montage and text panels 55.8 x 35.5 cm each. (top right) Claudette Johnson, Miss Tidea and Mabel, 1984. Watercolor paper, pastels, gouache, and watercolor. 5 x 4 ft. (bottom left) The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, 1989. (bottom right) Black Audio Film Collective, Welcome Under the Dear Old Flag! from Signs of Empire series, 1983–85. Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films.

204 ■ Time Lines

Arts Council of Great Britain in conjunction with the Gulbenkian Foundation. The report had a groundbreaking impact on national funding policies for diverse cultural activities. This decade also saw the proliferation of an influential set of discussions from a new school of practice: the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, based at the University of Birmingham. Directed by Stuart Hall, the school “inaugurates research on cultural forms, practices and institutions, and their relation to society and social change.”6 1980s. A revival for painting, both figurative and abstract, returned most notably in the guise of neoexpressionism, photorealism, and postconceptual painting. However, there was disillusionment with the formalist dominance of art, or what became popularly known as art for art’s sake, in favor of a more narrative, subjective practice, one that adhered to the feminist rallying call “The personal is political” as its guiding principle. Precipitated by feminists’ analysis of the image and artists who blurred the boundaries between “high art” and popular culture, art making became increasingly influenced by theories of semiotics and deconstruction, the scattered and often anti-aesthetic components of installation, the significance of corporeality through identity politics (race, gender, and sexuality), and pluralism in postmodernism. If the 1960s and 1970s was about the politicization of the art object and collective mobilization, the activities of the 1980s intensified with the use of the term “black” by an emerging raised-in-Britain generation. Echoing the multidisciplinary nature of the Caribbean Artists Movement, artists, cultural theorists, critics, filmmakers, and photographers burst onto an unsuspecting art scene under the term the Black Arts Movement. This movement was exemplified by groups such as the blk Art Group, Black Audio Film Collective, and Sankofa Film and Video and the coming together of black women artists. Committed to the negation of racist imagery constructed by the West and present in the public imagination, these artists chose to appropriate and deconstruct those same images to confront audiences, both black and white. In creating centrality for themselves, mainstream visibility was met with a do-it-yourself approach, giving the impression that the narrative theme and mode of address was one of confrontation and opposition to “whiteness” and “white” institutional structures. Various regional and national funding bodies attempted to address black arts practice by subsuming it under essentialist funding programs that attempted to come to terms with “ethnic minorities.”

Time Lines ■ 205

The decade ended with the much-debated survey exhibition curated by Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Postwar Britain, which attempted to historicize the contributions that African and Asian artists have made to the British art scene and modernism. A new, more confident stratum of professionals emerged in the field of curating and arts administration with organizations like Aavaa (the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive), Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers), the Black Arts Alliance, the Chinese Arts Centre, ova (the Organisation for Visual Arts), and Panchayat: SouthEast Asian Arts. 1990s. The 1990s began with the internationally acclaimed sculptor Anish Kapoor representing Britain at the prestigious Venice Biennale and then winning the Turner Prize at the Tate Gallery, London. It is a decade that saw consolidation and strategic interventions around reviewing historical achievements and the creation of new pathways. This was demonstrated by Anne Walmsley’s book The Caribbean Artists’ Movement, a fantastic and timely contribution to a debate that is conscious of the need to record and reflect on historical movements. The last issue of the photography magazine Ten.8, The Critical Decade, examined the 1980s as a critical period in the production of black image making and writing. The exhibition Transforming the Crown continued the curatorial debate that The Other Story started by examining the period between 1966 and the 1990s. And the birth of iniva (the Institute of International Visual Arts) heralded a critical discussion on new internationalism. The rise of the yba (young British artist) focused attention on Britain as an artistic center of international repute. This brought about a belated recognition of the wealth and diversity of cultural life that characterized Britain as a modern postcolonial metropolitan society. This was a decade when lens-based practice, digital media, and the Internet really came into their own, adding to the plurality of media at artists’ disposal. It somehow underscored a general trend that was less medium-bound in favor of a more theorized conceptual framework. A few artists—among them, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili, Vong Phaophanit, and Yinka Shonibare—rose to international acclaim in this period, alongside their white yba counterparts. There was a certain ambivalence about the

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(top right) Autograph: Association of Black Photographers, newsletter, 1992. (top left) Black Arts in London, no. 122, March 1990. Courtesy of Arts Council England, London. (bottom right) Ten.8 2, no. 3, 1992, special issue: The Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 80s. (bottom left) Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996, exhibition catalogue, Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center, New York, 1997. Courtesy of Franklin H. Williams Caribbean Cultural Center.

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(top right) Vong Phaophanit installing Neon Rice Field, Tate Gallery, London, 1993. (top left) Yinka Shonibare, Cha, Cha, Cha, 1995. Private Collection, London. (bottom) Jananne Al-Ani, Untitled I & II, 1996, photographs, 120 x 180 cm each.

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strategic move of these artists and their relationship to identity politics, as evidenced in the 1980s. The 1990s ended in quite dramatic style with two of these artists winning the coveted Turner Prize: Chris Ofili in 1998 and Steve McQueen in 1999. Notes 1. John C. Welchman, Art after Appropriation: Essays on Art in the 1990s (San Diego: G+B Arts International/ University of California, 2001), 215. In this chapter, Welchman appraises the conceptualization of the modern gallery space and how media and new technologies used in art have fractured this prescribed space. 2. Pierre Restany, “Modern Nature,” in John Howell, ed., Breakthroughs: Avant-Garde Artists in Europe and America, 1950–1990 (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 43. 3. Outside the Frame. Performance and the Object: A Survey History of Performance Art in the USA since 1950, exhibition catalogue (Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 1994), 154: “In Kaprow’s formulation of Happenings, he states that ‘The line between art and life should be kept as fluid and perhaps indistinct as possible.’ This tendency to dissolve the boundary between art and life can be regarded as one of the primary characteristics of performance art.” 4. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). O’Doherty looks at the relational shifts in twentieth-century art that are influenced by context as opposed to reification of the object. He appraises the beginnings and development of the modern gallery space. 5. Guy Brett, “Life Strategies: Overview and Selection. Buenos Aires/London/Rio de Janeiro/Santiago de Chile, 1960–1980,” in Paul Schimmel, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979 (New York: moca/Thames and Hudson, 1998), 223. 6. Stuart Hall et al., eds., preface to Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79 (London: Hutchinson University Library in association with Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1980), 7. The time line is a development of a sculptural piece composed of sections of text and images on paper that Sonia Boyce and David A. Bailey created for the Objects in Time exhibition (John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 2001), whose opening coincided with the start of the “Shades of Black” conference. Visitors to the exhibition were then invited to add entries. The work draws on and augments the important chronologies of black British visual art developed by Rasheed Araeen (The Other Story exhibition catalogue), Melanie Keen and Liz Ward (Recordings publication), and Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd (Transforming the Crown exhibition catalogue). Additional material has been drawn from the archives of the Commonwealth Institute and the Tate Gallery archive (both in London). The time line neither aims nor claims to be comprehensive; the editors welcome notification of significant omissions. Additional acknowledgments for the research of the time line: Courtney Baker, Kelvin Black, Erica James, Niru Ratnam, Gowry Selvaratnam, Marlene Smith

Time Lines ■ 209

1960

Exhibitions: Iqbal Geo≈rey has a solo exhibition

at Galerie de Seine, Paris. ■ Ronald Moody has a solo exhibition at the Woodstock Gallery, London. ■ New Vision Gallery converts a coal cellar into London’s first gallery devoted to sculpture. The gallery has a policy of presenting artists in a social and political

Ronald Moody/ sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Woodstock Gallery, London, 1960.

context. ■ Ahmed Parvez has an exhibition at Gallery Orez, The Hague, The Netherlands. ■ Ivan Peries has an exhibition at South London Art Gallery. ■ Anwar J. Shemza has a solo exhibition at Gallery One, London. ■ F. N. Souza has a

solo exhibition at Gallery One, London.

1961

Exhibitions:

Avinash Chandra

exhibits in a group exhibition titled South Asian Arts at the Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford. ■ Avinash Chandra exhibits in a touring exhibition organized by the American Federa-

tion of Arts, United States, and in the Paris Biennale. ■ Gallery One moves to North Audley Street, Mayfair (London), and opens its premises with a show by Rufino Tamayo, an outstanding Mexican painter. ■ Ahmed Parvez has a solo exhibition at the Pakistan Arts Council in Lahore, Pakistan. ■ F. N. Souza exhibits in the São Paulo Biennale, Brazil. ■ F. N. Souza has a F. N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, Stone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1962.

210 ■ Time Lines

solo exhibition at Gallery One, London. ■ Aubrey Williams has a solo exhibition at Gallery Caravan, New York.

1960–1961

1960

Exhibitions: Iqbal Geo≈rey has a solo exhibition

at Galerie de Seine, Paris. ■ Ronald Moody has a solo exhibition at the Woodstock Gallery, London. ■ New Vision Gallery converts a coal cellar into London’s first gallery devoted to sculpture. The gallery has a policy of presenting artists in a social and political

Ronald Moody/ sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Woodstock Gallery, London, 1960.

context. ■ Ahmed Parvez has an exhibition at Gallery Orez, The Hague, The Netherlands. ■ Ivan Peries has an exhibition at South London Art Gallery. ■ Anwar J. Shemza has a solo exhibition at Gallery One, London. ■ F. N. Souza has a

solo exhibition at Gallery One, London.

1961

Exhibitions:

Avinash Chandra

exhibits in a group exhibition titled South Asian Arts at the Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford. ■ Avinash Chandra exhibits in a touring exhibition organized by the American Federa-

tion of Arts, United States, and in the Paris Biennale. ■ Gallery One moves to North Audley Street, Mayfair (London), and opens its premises with a show by Rufino Tamayo, an outstanding Mexican painter. ■ Ahmed Parvez has a solo exhibition at the Pakistan Arts Council in Lahore, Pakistan. ■ F. N. Souza exhibits in the São Paulo Biennale, Brazil. ■ F. N. Souza has a F. N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, Stone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1962.

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solo exhibition at Gallery One, London. ■ Aubrey Williams has a solo exhibition at Gallery Caravan, New York.

1960–1961

1962 Exhibitions: Frank Bowling has a solo exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery, London. ■ Iqbal Geo≈rey has a solo exhibition at the Alfred Brod Galleries, London. ■ Ahmed

Aubrey Williams: Paintings, exhibition catalogue, New Vision Centre, London, 1960.

Parvez exhibits in a group exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, London. ■ Ahmed Parvez exhibits in a group exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London. ■ Ahmed Parvez has a solo exhibition at the Lincoln Gallery, London. ■ Anwar J. Shemza exhibits at the Third International Print Biennale, Tokyo. Sociopolitical: Commonwealth Immigrants Bill becomes law; only those Commonwealth citizens issued employment vouchers are admitted to Britain. ■ The black umbrella organization Co-ordinating Committee Against Racial Discrimination (ccard) is set up in Birmingham, followed by the Conference of Afro-Asian-Caribbean Organizations (caaco) in London.

1963 Exhibitions: Frank

Bowling has a solo exhibition at the Grabowski Gallery, London. ■ Avinash Chandra exhibits in a group exhibition at the Hamilton Galleries, London. ■ Uzo Egonu exhibits in a group exhibition at the fba Galleries, London. ■ First Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art, se-

Two Indian Painters in London: Tyeb Mehta and Paritosh Sen, exhibition invitation, Gallery One, London, 1962.

1962–1963

Time Lines ■ 211

lected by Denis Bowen and Kenneth Coutts-Smith, is held at the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery, London. ■ Iqbal Geo≈rey exhibits at the Seventh São Paulo Biennale, Brazil. ■ Iqbal Geo≈rey exhibits at the Paris Biennale. ■ Iqbal Geo≈rey has a solo exhibition at

Grand Central Moderns, New York. ■ Iqbal Geo≈rey has a solo exhibition at the Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles. ■ Victor Musgrave closes Gallery One. ■ Ahmed Parvez has a solo exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. ■ Ahmed Parvez has a solo exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute, London. ■ Anwar J. Shemza exhibits at the Fourth International Print Biennale, Tokyo. ■ Anwar J. Shemza has a solo exhibition at the Gulbenkian Museum, Durham. Film: Ten Bob in Winter. Director: Lloyd

Lloyd Reckord, Ten Bob in Winter, film still, 1963. Courtesy of British Film Institute.

Reckord. First black British drama.

1964

Exhibitions: Indian High Commission mounts the exhibition Six Indian Painters, which includes Balraj Khanna. ■ David Medalla and Paul Keeler open the Signals Gallery and introduce a number of leading Latin American and European avant-garde artists to the British public. ■ The first of three annual New Generation exhibitions is held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. Sociopolitical: Indian Painters Col-lective is formed in London. ■ The o÷cial Conservative candidate in the Smethwick election stands on an openly anti-immigration ticket and wins. He defeats the sitting Labour mp, a prominent

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1963–1964

member of the front bench. ■ Signals, the news bulletin of the Centre for Advanced Creative Study, starts publication. Edited by David Medalla, the magazine becomes an important forum for the discussion of experimental, specifically kinetic, art.

Films:

Jemima and Johnny. Director: Lionel Ngakane. Winner Best Short Feature Film at Venice Film Festival.

Quotes:

david medalla: I don’t subscribe to any theory. I have no

theories, only a certain way of life. I like these lines by Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.1

1965

Exhibitions: Second (and last) Commonwealth Biennale of Abstract Art is held at the Commonwealth Institute, London. ■ Commonwealth Arts Festival at the Royal Festival Hall (London) is an exhibition of new Rhodesian sculpture by a group of black artists who have emerged from the workshop/school run by Frank McEwen at the National Gallery in Salisbury. ■ Commonwealth Arts Festival gets underway in Britain. The central art exhibition Treasures of the Commonwealth is held at the Royal Academy; modern works are in the minority and the central hall, showing the single most important piece from each Commonwealth country, is dominated by a Henry Moore sculpture. ■ As part of the Commonwealth Arts Festival, Glasgow hosts an exhibition of modern Malaysian art at the Museum and Art Gallery, Kelvingrove, and an exhibition of Commonwealth painters at the University, which includes work by Aubrey Williams. ■ Commonwealth Arts Festival

1964–1965

Time Lines ■ 213

has an exhibition of Australian bark paintings on show at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. ■ The first Notting Hill mas (carnival procession) takes place as part of an International Community Festival.

Sociopolitical:

Commonwealth Arts Festival, origi-

nally conceived in 1956, is launched at a politically unfortunate moment, when India and Pakistan have just gone to war, Rhodesia and Tanzania are threatening to leave the Uzo Egonu, Woman Before a Mirror, 1965. Oil on canvas. 103 x 143 cm.

Commonwealth, and the White Paper on immigration does not improve Britain’s reputation among the Commonwealth nations. ■ British civil rights organization Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (card) is formed at the instigation of Martin Luther King Jr., who had visited London the previous year on his way to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. ■ Malcolm X, leader of the Black Power Movement in the United States, visits London. Following his visit, the militant Racial Action Adjustment Society (raas, a Jamaican profanity) is formed. ■ The Race Relations Act is passed. In its wake, the Race Relations Board and the National Committee for Commonwealth Immigrants (ncci) are formed. Film: The Battle of Algiers.

Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, film still, 1965. Courtesy of Zaphira Yacef.

214 ■ Time Lines

1965–1966

Director: Gillo Pontevorco.

1966

Exhibitions:

Battersea Park Sculpture Exhibition is selected by Alan

Bowness. The work of Malaysian artist Kim Lim is included. ■ Indica Gallery in Mason’s Yard, Duke Street (London), holds a series of avant-garde exhibitions, including conceptual works by Yoko Ono. ■ Soundings Three is one of the last shows at Signals Gallery, organized by David Medalla. ■ The first World Festival of Negro Arts opens in Dakar, Senegal, conceived by President Senghor with the prime purpose of showing the world an inventory of black culture or black identity manifested in art. Frank Bowling and the sculptor Robin Horton are both awarded prizes, and Ronald Moody and Uzo Egonu are both included in the festival exhibition. ■ Upper Grosvenor Gallery (London) holds an exhibition of leading artists from India, including Bhuppen Khakkar.

Sociopolitical:

Caribbean Artists Movement (cam)

is formed by the writers Edward (later Kamau) Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Andrew Salkey. ■ Signals

Signals 1, no. 7, 1966. Designed by David Medalla.

magazine closes after losing its financial backer owing to critical comments made by David Medalla about U.S. policies in Vietnam. Abbas. ■ Naked Evil. Director: Basil Dignam.

Film:

India! My India! Director: Yavar

Quotes:

edward brathwaite: The

more I stay here in England, the more it seems to me that our writers and artists are missing a wonderful opportunity to communicate with themselves and with British and

1966

Time Lines ■ 215

Commonwealth artists around them. What I’d like to start going (and it has no doubt been attempted before) is some sort of wi [West Indian] artists’ and writers’ group concerned with discussing wi art and literature. This would take the form of critical symposia, the discussion of recently published material and readings of work in progress: not only by established artists, but by students and others who feel they have something to say. I would not, however, like to see this confined to West Indians. There should be a link-up with Commonwealth and British writers and and artists: it is time they really got to know what we are doing and what we are worth; and time too that we had a chance of discussing their work with them.2

1967 Exhibitions: Exploding Galaxy

is initiated by David Medalla, a fluctuating collective of people living in a house in Dalston, East London. The underlying concept is that everyone is potentially an artist. For the next two years the collective stages dance-dramas, poetry, visual arts, and other events.

Sociopolitical:

Black organizations, increasingly internationalist in

their political outlook, take part in the largest anti–Vietnam War rally in Britain, in London’s Trafalgar Square. ■ Stokely Carmichael, the leading Black Panther member, visits London to attend the “Dialectics of Liberation” conference, an event (in the words of Kamau Brathwaite) “of central importance to the growth and direction of the West Indian imagination.” ■ Extreme right-wing groups merge to form the National Front. ■

216 ■ Time Lines

1966–1967

cam holds its first public meetings at the West Indian Students’ Centre in Earl’s Court, London, one of the few meeting places available. For the next few years these meetings are

In Memory of Malcolm X, Caribbean Artists Movement meeting, 21 February 1969. Photograph by Syd Burke.

regular monthly events; additional informal meetings include Aubrey Williams talking in his studio and a symposium on West Indian artists attended by Aubrey Williams and Ronald Moody. The first cam conference is held at the University of Kent. With Love. Director: James Clavell.

Quotes:

Film:

To Sir

aubrey williams: I have value for the

painter who has come out of figuration, one who has come out of an investigation of the known world. Because his work must be imbued with the human predicament or else it’s just a piece of decoration. . . . All the time I’m trying for visual strengths, forms that disturb. They intensify your looking, seeing, feeling power.3 ■ frantz fanon: And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my chains. In the white world the man of color encounters di÷culties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. . . . ¶ “Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. ¶ “Look, a

1967

Time Lines ■ 217

Negro!” It was true. It amused me. ¶ “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. ¶ “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. ¶ I could no longer laugh, because I already knew that there were legends, stories, history, and above all historicity . . . the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epidermal schema. In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places. I had already stopped being amused. . . . ¶ I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: “Sho’ good eatin.’” ¶ On that day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far o≈ from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood? But I did not want this revision, this thematization. All I wanted was to be a man among other men. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that

218 ■ Time Lines

1967

was ours and to help to build it together.4

Exhibitions:

1968

Caribbean Artists Movement (cam) art-

ists exhibit at the House of Commons, after much internal controversy.

Sociopolitical: Martin Luther King

Jr. is assassinated. ■ The Race Relations Act (1965)

Contemporary African Art, exhibition poster, Camden Arts Centre, London, 1969.

outlawing “incitement to racial hatred” does not prevent Enoch Powell’s advocating further restrictions on immigration and enforced repatriation to avoid “rivers of blood” flowing through the streets of Britain. Film: Baldwin’s Nigger. Director: Horace Ové.

1969 Exhibitions: Camden Arts Centre organizes the first

show in Britain of contemporary African art. The exhibition includes work by Uzo Egonu and other well-known artists, as well as work by artists who have never exhibited before. ■ Fluorescent Chrysanthemum is the first exhibition in Europe of contemporary Japanese

art, which opens at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The work ranges from sculpture to kites, music, and films. ■ The first Pan-African Festival of Culture takes place in Algiers, sponsored by the Organization of African Unity (oau) and with “The Role of African Culture in the Liberation Struggle” as its theme. The festival is largely set up to counter the theory of “negritude” and promotes the acceptance of wider and more inclusive black cultures. ■ When Attitude Becomes Form opens at the Institute of

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Time Lines ■ 219

Contemporary Arts, London. The press release states: “No overriding theme imposed; artists appear to share dissatisfaction with the status of the art work as a particular object in a finite state, and a rejection of the notion of form as quality imposed upon material. Within these broad limits, many diverse tendencies are represented, including post-minimal, conceptual, earth art, etc.” Film: Death May Be Your Santa Claus. Director: Frankie Dymon Junior. ■ Leo the Last. Director: John Boorman.

1970 Exhibitions:

Arts Council opens the Serpentine Gallery in London as an exhibition venue for young artists. ■ Sigi Krauss begins to use his small frame shop in Neal Street, Covent Garden (London), as a gallery for the international avant-garde. It becomes one of the liveliest meeting places for young artists at the time. Sociopolitical: New Activities Committee of the Arts Council starts investigating arts activities that do not fit into the existing categories of drama, literature, music, or visual art in order to allocate appropriate funds in the future. The issue, vital for the contemporary avant-garde, soon becomes equally crucial for community arts and later for black/ethnic arts and their public funding. Film: Reggae. Director: Horace Ové. Edward (Kamau) Braithwaite, Andrew Salkey, and John La Rose at the launch of Savacou journal, 1970. Photograph by Horace Ové.

220 ■ Time Lines

1969–1971

■ Trouble Out East. Director: Mike Beck-

ham.

1971

Exhibitions:

Carib-

bean Artists in England, an exhibition of the work of Caribbean artists living in London, opens at the Commonwealth Art Gallery, largely instigated by members of cam. ■ Hayward Gallery, London, holds an exhibition on tantric art. ■ The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, holds the first Islamic Festival. Sociopolitical: Artists Liberation Front is formed by David Medalla and John Dugger. ■ In Leeds, two assailants, a policeman and a former policeman, of David Oluwale, a Nigerian vagrant whose battered body was found in a river, are acquitted of manslaughter but imprisoned for assault. A≈ected by the case, Rasheed Araeen produces For Oluwale. Film: Ganga Mayya (Mother Ganges). Director: Yavar Abbas.

1972

Exhibitions:

lyc Gallery is opened in Brampton,

Cumbria, by Li Yuan-chia. ■ Gallery House launches a three-part Survey of the AvantGarde in Britain; Part 1 includes David Medalla’s participation piece A Stitch in Time, and Part 3 is devoted to film and video. ■ The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, stages a participation production, People Weave a House, by David Medalla and John Dugger, who have just formed the Artists Liberation Front. ■ The first Pan-Caribbean Arts Festival opens in Guyana.

Sociopolitical:

Stuart Hall becomes the director of

the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England. ■ Ugandan Asians arrive as refugees in Britain.

Perry Henzel.

1973

Exhibitions:

Film:

The Harder They Come. Director:

Eight Commonwealth Artists at the Laing An-

1971–1973

Time Lines ■ 221

nexe, Newcastle, includes the work of Aubrey Williams. Film: Love Thy Neighbour. Director: Contemporary Art of Africa, the Caribbean and Liverpool, exhibition press release, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, 1973.

John Rorsilis.

1974 Exhibitions: A mini

arts festival is held at the Commonwealth Institute to select participants for the Black Arts Festival planned for Lagos, Nigeria, in 1976. Drama and the visual arts are conspicuously absent from the event. An Arts Council Committee turns down an exhibition by black artists for the Serpentine Gallery; the exhibition was to have been part of the British preview of the Lagos festival. ■ The Birth of the Cleaner: Women and Art History; Sex and the Galleries; Sex Bias and Criticism shows the work of twenty-six conceptual women artists, selected by Lucy Lippard. It gets underway at the Artists Meeting Place, organized as a coop-

Armet Francis, London, 1974.

erative where any artist can add his or her name to a list for an exhibition. The Art Meeting Place (as it is soon called) continues to be the only open gallery in London, run by artists for artists.

Savacou: Writing Away from Home, no. 9/10, 1974. Courtesy of Eve Williams.

222 ■ Time Lines

Sociopolitical:

Artists for Democracy is formed by David Medalla and his colleagues. ■ The Drum Arts Centre is established by

1973–1974

John Mapondera and Cy Grant to encourage and promote the artistic and cultural interests of the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain. Films: Pressure. Director: Horace Ové. First black British feature funded by British Film Institute.

Quotes:

a. sivanandan:

But to revolutionise a culture, one needs first to make a radical assessment of it. That assessment, that revolutionary perspective, by virtue of his historical situation, is provided by the

Horace Ové, Pressure, film still, 1974. Courtesy of British Film Institute.

black man. For it is with the cultural manifestations of racism in his daily life that he must contend. Racial prejudice and discrimination, he recognizes, are not a matter of individual attitudes, but the sickness of a whole society carried in its culture. And his survival as a black man in white society requires that he constantly questions and challenges every aspect of white life even as he meets it. White speech, white schooling, white law, white work, white religion, white love, even white lies—they are all measured on the touchstone of his experience. He discovers, for instance, that white schools make for white superiority, that white law equals one law for the white and another for the black, that white work relegates him to the worst jobs irrespective of skill, that even white Jesus and white Marx who are supposed to save him are really not in the same street, so to speak, as black Gandhi and black Cabral. In his everyday life he fights the

1974

Time Lines ■ 223

Balraj Khanna, Birth of a Nation: Bangladesh, 1971–72. Collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

particulars of white cultural hegemony. In the process he engenders not perhaps a revolutionary culture, but certainly a revolutionary practice within that culture.5

1975

Exhibitions: Artists for Democracy’s first exhibition, Works in Progress, is produced. Film:

Man Friday. Director: Jack Gold. ■ A Private Enterprise. Director: Peter Smith,

cowritten by Dilip Hiro. First British Asian feature funded by British Film Institute. ■ Step Forward Peter Smith, A Private Enterprise, film still, 1975. Courtesy of British Film Institute.

Youth. Director: Menelik Shabazz. Funded by British Film Institute.

1976

Exhibitions:

The Fes-

tival of Islam gets underway in London. Highlights include the Art of Islam exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. ■ Sacred Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art opens at the Hayward Gallery, London.

Sociopolitical:

Commission for Racial

Equality (cre) is formed. ■ The Grunwick Strike, consisting of a largely Gujarati workforce and led by Jayaben Desai, begins and becomes one of the longest and most militant strikes in British history. ■ The Arts Britain Ignores, written by Naseem Khan, is published

224 ■ Time Lines

1975–1976

and Minorities Arts Advisory Service (maas) is set up in London, with regional bodies established around the country over the next three years. ■ David Medalla organizes a response to the exhibition Sacred Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art (Hayward Gallery) as a defiant gesture in memory of the massacre of two hundred Indians in 1890. ■ On the final evening of the Notting Hill Carnival, violence erupts between young blacks and the police.

Film:

Crown Court (The Ju Ju Landlord).

Director: Stephen Butcher. Quotes: naseem khan: It has been claimed that attempts to foster ethnic minority arts are divisive: that they will lead to the perpetuation of di≈erences that will disappear—given a generation or two—leading to a happy, harmonious and homogeneous society. That belief disregards three factors—firstly the demonstrated needs of new-British. In the oldest immigration looked at—Poles and Ukrainians—it is striking how important their parents’ own original culture still is to young people. It is a point of definition that in no way prevents them from identifying otherwise with society at large. For more recent newcomers, particularly coloured children, it is even more important to learn the positive aspects of what is commonly counted a disadvantage. Similarly this is a healthy lesson for the whole host-community.6

1977

Exhibitions: The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (festac) opens in Lagos, Nigeria. Among the visiting artists representing the United Kingdom are

1976–1977

Time Lines ■ 225

Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Uzo Egonu, and Winston Branch. ■ Frank Bowling’s first retrospective is mounted at the acme Gallery in London. ■ Artists for Democracy stage a week-long participatory

Commonwealth Artists of Fame 1952–1977, exhibition catalogue, Commonwealth Art Gallery, London, 1977.

series of visual and performative events titled Eskimo Carver to explore the problems faced by Eskimos and other minority peoples. ■ Rasheed Araeen stages his performance Paki Bastard. Sociopolitical: Indian Artists UK (iauk) is formed by Ibrahim Wagh, Mali, Lancelot Ribeiro, and Balraj Khanna out of the former Indian Painters Collective. ■ National Front march through London with a counterdemonstration by the Anti-Nazi League and Socialist Workers’ Party staged in Lewisham, South London. Film: Black Future. Director: James O’Brien. ■ Black Joy. Director:

Anthony Simmons, Black Joy, film still, 1977.

Anthony Simmons, cowritten by Jamal Ali. ■ Colour Prejudice. Director: John Devine.

1978

Sociopolitical:

Rasheed Araeen writes

“Preliminary Notes for a black manifesto,” which is published in the first issue of Black Phoenix. ■ Policing the Crisis: “Mugging” the State and Law and Order, edited by Stuart Hall, is published by Macmillan. ■ Rock Against Racism festival in London. ■ “State of British Art” conference at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

226 ■ Time Lines

1977–1978

Films:

Dread,

Beat an’ Blood. Director: Franco Rosso. ■ Rasta in A-Babylon. Director: Howard Johnson. ■ Somebody’s Daughter. Director: Noel Hardy.

Quotes:

rasheed araeen: We must

recognize that as long as we allow the West (and for that matter, anybody else), willingly or unwillingly, to dominate our lives, we will only be exploited. As long as our physical and mental resources are under its direct or indirect control, our development will either be suppressed or used for the benefit of the West alone, its art and culture, and its civilization. In other words, we must free ourselves from foreign domination before we can create our own contemporary art and culture. ¶ But this does not mean that we have no option open to us at present or that we cannot carry on an art activity. Of course, if we continue accepting the general situation today which demands our subservience to the West we are doomed as a people. On the other hand, we can and must stand on our feet and oppose those alien values, as well as our own, which obstruct radical change by preventing the development of internal dynamism of our people; and in the process of confronting these values we can and shall discover new art forms that will authentically reflect our own reality today. However, before we proceed further to look into possible alternatives, we must examine here the various aspects of those forces which are holding

Black Phoenix: Third World Perspective on Contemporary Art and Culture, no. 2, 1978.

1978

Time Lines ■ 227

us back.7 ■ edward said: Altogether an internally structured archive is built up from the literature that belongs to these experiences. Out of this comes a restricted number of typical encapsulations: the journey, the history, the fable, the stereotype, the polemical confrontation. These are the lenses through which the Orient is experienced, and they shape the language, perception, and form of the encounter between East and West. What gives the immense number of encounters some unity, however, is the vacillation. . . . Something patently foreign and distant acquires, for one reason or another, a status more rather than less familiar. One tends to stop judging things either as completely novel or as completely well known; a new median category emerges, a category that allows one to see new things, things seen for the first time, as versions of a previously known thing. In essence such a category is not so much a way of receiving new information as it is a method of controlling what seems to be a threat to some established view of things. . . . The threat is muted, familiar values impose themselves, and in the end the mind reduces the pressure upon it by accommodating things to itself as either “original” or “repetitious.” . . . The Orient at large, therefore, vacillates between the West’s contempt for what is familiar and its shivers of delight in—or fear of—novelty.8

1979

Sociopolitical:

Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain’s first woman prime

minister, and the era known as Thatcherism begins. ■ Organization of Women of Asian

228 ■ Time Lines

1978–1979

and African Descent (owaad) holds its first National Black Women’s conference in Britain.

Films:

Destiny. Director: Mike Newell. ■ Oral History. Director: Greg Dropkin. ■

Steel and Skin. Director: Steve Shaw. ■ Tigers Are Better Looking. Director: Hussein Shari≈e.

Quotes: rasheed araeen and david medalla: Rasheed Araeen: What is then your actual role, as a black artist and a radical from the Third World, in this capitalist metropolis? David Medalla: Well, a subversive role; that’s all. Subversion is di≈erent from revolution. You can’t be revolutionary here because you’re a part of a minority. You can only be subversive. You can be a carrier of new ideas, revolutionary consciousness. You can be a catalyst for all the latent creative forces.9

1980 Exhibitions: Afro-Carib-

Eddie Chambers, Destruction of the National Front, 1980. Collage. Each panel 14 x 12 in.

bean Exhibition, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham.

Films:

Babylon. Director: Franco Rosso. ■ Mirror, Mirror. Director: Menelik Shabazz.

1981

Exhibitions:

Black Art an’ Done, Wolverhampton Art Gallery. With Eddie

Chambers, Dominic Dawes, Andrew Hazel, Ian Palmer, and Keith Piper. Sociopolitical: Brixton Riots. Heavy rioting breaks out in April in the wake of an increase in policing. Almost two hundred people are treated at hospital and rioting spreads throughout Britain. A public inquiry results in the Scarman Report and a call for reforming the rela-

1979–1981

Time Lines ■ 229

tionship between the police and the community. ■ The Scarman Report forces a review of funding and cultural policies toward black arts practitioners in the public sphere. ■ A fire in Deptford, southeast London, causes the death of thirteen Afro-Caribbean youths. The tragedy, referred to as the New Cross Massacre, served as a locus for the political organization of black Britain. Believing that the fire was a racially motivated attack and protesting against the lack of media coverage and police investigation, 1,500 blacks participate in a demonstration, the largest ever in Britain. ■ Black Audio Film Collective is established and begins work on a variety of projects, from industrial videos to feature documentaries. Group members include John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste, Eddie George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, and Trevor Mathison. ■ The Nationality Act is legislated, restricting the right to live in Britain to British citizens and denying the right of citizenship to residents of the greater British Commonwealth. The children of non-British parents born in the United Kingdom are denied British citizenship, e≈ectively becoming stateless. ■ Several cases of a rare and deadly form of “cancer” found to create abnormalities in the immune system of patients are reported in the New York Times. Later, the disease becomes known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (aids). ■ The Workshop Declaration is signed to support grant-aided film and video workshops.

Films:

Burning an Illusion. Director: Menelik Shabazz. ■ Grove Carnival. Director: Harvey Martin.

230 ■ Time Lines

1981

■ No Virginity, No Nationality. Director: Claudine Booth. ■ Riots and Rumours of Riots.

Director: Imruh Caesar. ■ Rough Cut and Ready Dubbed. Directors: Hasan Shah and Don Shaw. ■ Sweet Chariot. Yugesh Walia.

Quotes:

keith piper: To me, the black art

student cannot a≈ord the luxury of complacency as enjoyed by many of his white counterparts. These people, finding little worth responding to in their decadent lives of leisure and pleasure, seek out ever more obscure playthings amongst the self indulgent vogues of “art for art’s sake.” The black art student, by his very blackness, finds himself drawn towards the epicentre of social tension. He is forced to respond to the urgency of the hour. The aspirations of the British Black are ripe, and our time is “NOW.” So let us in our work undersign the logical mechanics of our greater struggle. Let us strive by any means to raise the revolutionary consciousness of each other as to the form and functioning of the social, political and economic barriers which this man has placed all around us, and within our very minds.10

1982

Exhibitions:

Closing the Gap,

University of Aston, Birmingham. ■ Metropolis, Royal Festival Hall, London. ■ The Living Arts, Serpentine Gallery, London. ■ The Pan-Afrikan Connection: An Exhibition of Work by Young Black Artists—Good Ideals, the

The Pan-Afrikan Connection: An Exhibition of Work by Young Black Artists, exhibition poster, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, 1983.

1981–1982

Time Lines ■ 231

35 King Street Gallery, Bristol. With Eddie Chambers, Claudette Johnson, Keith Piper, and Donald Rodney. Sociopolitical: While still students, Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper form an art group called the Pan-Afrikan Connection. ■ “The First National Black Art Convention,” organized by the Pan-Afrikan Connection, takes place at Wolverhampton Polytechnic to discuss the form, functioning, and future of black art in Britain. ■ The Committee of Asian Artists (caa) in the United Kingdom stage a number of alternative events as a protest to many British artists of Indian origin being excluded from the Festival of India in Britain. ■ The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain is published by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, England. ■ The Greater London Council Arts and Recreation Committee enacts a policy to recognize and foster the multiethnic nature of London’s culture, resulting in the allocation of muchneeded funds to black arts organizations. ■ In October, maas publishes its first national register of black artists and art groups. The following month, maas produces Artrage, an intercultural arts magazine. The periodical showcases visual, performing, and media arts and literature from communities of color. ■ Channel 4, a new television station, is launched with a specific multicultural remit for minority audiences. It features weekly programs such as Black on Black, produced by Trevor Phillips. ■ C. L. R. James opens the First International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books. The

232 ■ Time Lines

1982

event, organized by John La Rose, draws over three thousand visitors and provides a forum where linkages are made between publishers, writers, and booksellers and also black cultural production and politics. Films: African Oasis. Director: Yugesh Walia. ■ Blood Ah Go Run. Director: Menelik Shabazz. ■ Music Fusion. Director: Horace Ové.

Quotes: hazel v. carby: The black women’s critique of history has not only involved us in Lubaina Himid, Freedom and Change, 1984. Car paint, wood, acrylic, and paper collage on cloth. 275 x 550 cm.

coming to terms with “absences”; we have also been outraged by the ways in which it has made us visible, when it has chosen to see us. History has constructed our sexuality and our femininity as deviating from those qualities with which white women, as the prize objects of the Western world, have been endowed. We have also been defined in less than human terms. Our continuing struggle with history began with its “discovery” of us. . . . We wish to address questions to the feminist theories which have been developed during the last decade; a decade in which black women have been fighting, in the streets, in the schools, through the courts, inside and outside the wage relation.11

Exhibitions:

1983

Black Woman Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre, London. With Brenda

Agard, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Jean Campbell, Margaret Cooper, Elizabeth Eugene, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Mumtaz Karimjee, Cherry Lawrence, Houria

1982–1983

Time Lines ■ 233

Niati, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Andrea Telman, and Leslee Wills. ■ Creation for Liberation, Open Exhibition of Contemporary Black Art in Britain, St. Matthews Meeting Place, London. With Denzil Forrester, Mueme Jiyane, Tam Joseph, Errol Lloyd, Susan McFarlane, Shaheen Merali, Johnny Ohene, Barry Simpson, and Leslee Wills. ■ Five Black Women, Africa Centre Gallery, London. With Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati, and Veronica Ryan. ■ Heart in Exile: An Exhibition of Drawings, Painting, Sculpture and Photography by British-Based Artists, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Tyrone Bravo, Vanley Burke, Pogus Caesar, Dee Casco, Eddie Chambers, Adrian Compton, Shakka Dedi, Olive Desnoes, Terence Dyer, Carl Gabriel, Funansi Gentiles, Headley Grafton, Anum Iyapo, George Kelly, Cherry Lawrence, Ossie Murray, Pitika Ntuli, Joseph Olubo, Keith Piper, Barry Simpson, Marlene Smith, and Wayne Tenyue. ■ New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. With Sunil Gupta. ■ The Black Triangle: Armet Francis, The Photographers Gallery, London. ■ The Pan-Afrikan Connection, group exhibition at the Midland Group, Nottingham, and Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. Sociopolitical: maas National Conference, “Critical Perspectives for the Development of the Non-Western Arts in Britain,” Commonwealth Institute, London. ■ Black-Art Gallery opens in Finsbury Park (London) and shows only the work of artists with African roots. ■ Falkland Islands (Malvinas Islands) War. Britain flexes its

234 ■ Time Lines

1983

military might in a shadow play of its past glory days of Empire building. ■ Sankofa Films (Martina Attille, Maureen Blackwood, Isaac Julien, and Nadine Marsh-Edwards) is established. Films: A Common History: Struggles for Black Community. Director: Colin Prescod. ■ From You Were Black You Were Out: Struggles for Black Community. Director: Colin Prescod. ■ Just a Walk in the Dark. Director: Udayan Prasad. ■ A Sense of Mission. Director: Yugesh Walia. ■ Talking History: C. L. R. James and E. P. Thompson. Director: H. O. Nazareth. ■ Tiger Bay Is My Home: Struggles for Black Community. Director: Colin Prescod. ■ Who Killed Colin Roach? Directed, produced, and written by Isaac Julien.

Quotes:

homi k. bhabha: An important feature of colonial discourse is its depen-

dence on the concept of “fixity” in the ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as a sign of cultural/historical/racial di≈erence in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype, which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place,” already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated . . . as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual license of the African that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved. It is this process of ambivalence, central to the stereotype, that my essay explores as it constructs

1983

Time Lines ■ 235

a theory of colonial discourse. For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individuation and marginalisation; produces that e≈ect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed. Yet, the function of ambivalence as one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power— whether racist or sexist, peripheral or metropolitan—remains to be charted.12 Breaking That Bondage, Plotting That Course: 2 Exhibitions by Eddie Chambers, exhibition poster, Black-Art Gallery, London, 1984.

1984

Exhibitions:

An

Exhibition of Radical Black Art by the blk Art Group (formerly the Pan-Afrikan Connection), Battersea Arts Centre, London. With Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, and Marlene Smith ■ Celebration of Black Women, Southall, London. With Ingrid Pollard. ■ Chinese Billboard,

soas, London University. With Mumtaz Karimjee. ■ Into the Open: New Painting, Prints and Sculpture by Contemporary Black Artists, Mappin Art Gallery, She÷eld. With Clement Into the Open, exhibition invitation, Mappin Art Gallery, She≈ield, 1984. Courtesy of She≈ield Galleries & Museums Trust.

236 ■ Time Lines

Bedeau, Slybert Bolton, Sonia Boyce, Pogus Caesar, Eddie Chambers, Shakka Dedi, Uzo

1983–1984

Egonu, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Claudette Johnson, Tam Joseph, Juginder Lamba, Bill Ming, Tony Moo-Young, Ossie Murray, Houria Niati, Benjamin Nhlanhla, Pitika Ntuli, Keith Piper, Richie Riley, Veronica Ryan, and Jorge Santos. Film Section with Milton Bryan, Imruh Caesar, Isaac Julien, and

Past Imperfect Future Tense: An Exhibition of Work by Keith Piper, exhibition poster, Black-Art Gallery, London, 1984.

Henry Martin ■ Positive Images, The Peoples Gallery, London. Curated by David A. Bailey. With Anthony Andrews, Similola Coker, and Ingrid Pollard. ■ (Second) Creation for Liberation Open Exhibition, The Brixton Art Gallery, London. ■ The Selectors’ Show, Camerawork, London. With Brenda Agard and Mitra

Aubrey Williams, Quetzalcoatl III, 1984. Oil on canvas. 48 x 78 in.

Tabrizian. Sociopolitical: Sankofa’s Maureen Blackwood and Martina Attille lead Black Women and Representation Group seminars (funded by Greater London Council). ■ The Greater London Council (glc) declares 1984 “Anti-Racist Year” and begins a campaign of billboards and posters devoted to combating racism. ■ Racial attacks target the Asian community. In a single year, over seven thousand incidents are reported, including stabbings, a murder, and fire bombings of homes and businesses. The police demonstrate indi≈erence to the attacks. Films: Afia. Directors: Zadoc Nava and Mike Lithgow. ■ Fords on Water. Director: Barry Bliss. ■

1984

Time Lines ■ 237

Majdhar. Director: Ahmed Alauddin Jamal. First British Asian workshop feature produced by Retake Film and Video Collective. ■ On Duty. Director: Cassie McFarlane. ■ Territories. Director: Isaac Julien, produced by Sankofa Film and Video.

Quotes: c.

l. r. james:

What is important to me is that there are now three million black people or more in Britain today. In ten or fifteen years there will be a whole generation of black people who were born in Britain, who were educated in Britain and who grew up in Britain. They will be intimately related to the British people, but they cannot be fully part of the English environment because they are black. Everyone including their parents is aware that they are di≈erent. ¶ Now that is not a negative statement. . . . Those people who are in western civilisation, who have grown up in it, but yet are not completely a part (made to feel and themselves feeling that they are outside) have a unique insight into their society. That, I think, is important—the black man or woman who is born here and grows up here has something special to contribute to western civilisation. He or she will participate in it, see it from birth, but will never be completely in it. What such persons have to say, therefore, will give a new vision, a deeper and stronger insight into both western civilisation and the black people in it.13

1985

Exhibitions:

Black Skin/Blue Coat, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool. With Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Tam Joseph, and Keith Piper. ■ Black Women’s Creativity Project, touring exhibition.

238 ■ Time Lines

1984–1985

Ingrid Pollard and Maud Sulter. ■ Carnival Through My Eye, The Peoples Gallery, London. With Newton Brown. ■ Combinations: Lubaina Himid and Juginder Lamba, The Cotton Gallery, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham. ■ Creation for Liberation, The Third Open Exhibition: Contemporary Art by Black Artists, glc Brixton Recreation Centre, London. With Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Valley of Lights, 1984–85. Slate and wax, 25 x 32 x 242 cm.

Clement Bedeau, Chila Kumari Burman, Pogus Caesar, Eddie Chambers, Margaret Cooper, Stella Dadzie, Shakka Dedi, Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Horace Opio Donovan, Amarjeet Gujral, Tapfuma Moses Gutsa, Lubaina Himid, Amanda Holiday, Anthony Jadunath, George Kelly, Errol Lloyd, Kenneth McCalla, Pitika Ntuli, Mowbray Odonkor, Eugene Palmer, Maud Sulter, and Aubrey Williams. ■ Eastern Views, Museums and Art Galleries, Leicester. With Said Adrus, Saleem Ayub, Surinder Singh Juttla, Anu Patel, and Gurminder Sikand. ■ From Generation to Generation (The Installation), obaala Arts Cooperative, The Cotton Gallery, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham. With David A. Bailey, Sonia Boyce, Shakka Dedi,

Chila Kumari Burman, Body Print, 1985. Etching, 28 x 32 in.

George Kelly, Kenneth McCalla, and Keith Piper. ■ glc Anti-Racist Mural Project, glc Race Equality Unit, London. With Gavin Jantjes and Tam Joseph (Brixton); Dushka Ahmad

1985

Time Lines ■ 239

and Shanti Panchal (Tower Hamlets); Chila Kumari Burman (Southall); and Simone Alexander and Lubaina Himid (Notting Hill). ■ Hounslow Asian Visual Artists Collective (havac), The Hounslow Civic Centre, Hounslow. With Chila Kumari Burman, Allan deSouza, Ferha Farooqui, Amarjeet Kaur Guraj, Satjit Kaur Heer, Shakila Maan, and Amarjit Phull. ■ Human Interest, Cornerhouse, Manchester. With Vanley Burke. ■ Mirror Reflecting Darkly, Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Brenda Agard, Zarina Bhimji, Chila Kumari Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Novette Cummings, Valentina Emenyeoni, Carole Enahoro, Elisabeth Jackson, Lalitha Jawah Irilal, Rita Keegan, Christine Luboga, Sue Macfarlane, Olusola Oyeleye, Betty Vaughan Richards, Enoyte Wanagho, and Paula Williams. ■ New Horizons: An Exhibition of Arts, glc Royal Festival Hall, South Bank Centre, Lon-

don. With Sokari Douglas Camp, Margaret Cooper, Horace Opio Donovan, Jonathan Fraser, Moses Tapfuma Gutsa, Lubaina Himid, Anthony Jadunath, Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede, George Fowakan Kelly, Tom Lal, Waheed Pall, Vijaya Patel, Louie Ramirez, Derek Washington Rose, Veronica Ryan, and Brian Tai-Shen Wang. ■ No Barriers, Cave Arts Centre, Birmingham. With H. Patten and Julien Smith. ■ No Comment, Brixton Art Gallery, London. Gavin Jantjes: Screenprints 1974–1981, exhibition poster, Black-Art Gallery, London, 1985.

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1985

With Rotimi Fani-Kayode. ■ No More Little White Lies, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardi≈. With Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers,

Tam Joseph, and Keith Piper. ■ Roadworks, Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Rasheed Araeen and Mona Hatoum. ■ The Thin Black Line, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Selected by Lubaina Himid. With Brenda Agard, Sutapa

The Thin Black Line, exhibition catalogue, ica, London, 1985.

Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Marlene Smith, and Maud Sulter. ■ Three Asian Artists, Commonwealth Institute, London. With Said Adrus, Sardul Gill, and Gurminder Kaur Sikand. Sociopolitical: An archive is established for black British artists at the St. Martin’s School of Art library, which later becomes a part of the London Institute and finally settles at the Chelsea School of Art, under the guidance of librarian Liz Ward. ■ “Black Art/White Institutions” conference, Riverside Studios, London. ■ The Commission for Racial Equality, set up after the 1976 Race Relations Act, publishes a report, The Arts of Ethnic Minorities. The report recognizes the value of ethnic arts organizations and calls for the Arts Council’s Community Arts Committee to a÷rm its support of groups such as maas that are overstretched and underfunded. ■ Armed police raid the home of Mrs. Cherry Groce in search of her son, in connection with alleged firearms o≈enses. Mrs. Groce is shot by a policeman and left paralyzed from the waist down. Within hours,

1985

Time Lines ■ 241

youths clash with police in the street. The incident leads to Keith Piper’s work Adventures Close to Home. ■ The glc establishes the Black Visual Artists Forum specifically to address the needs of black artists. ■ The magazine Survival, an educational periodical for young black women, is launched. ■ The short-lived Lesbian and Gay Media Group is formed. ■ Live Aid, a rock concert organized by British musician Bob Geldof, raises £40 million in an attempt to alleviate starvation in East Africa. ■ Handsworth in Birmingham and Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, London, both erupt in riots in September, sparked by the death of Cynthia Jarrett and the shooting of Cherry Groce, both of whom su≈er the results of willful negligence on the part of the police. ■ “Vision and Voice,” a black visual arts conference, is held at The Cave, Birmingham, England. Films: A Corner of a Foreign Field. Director: Udayan Prasad. ■ The Deceivers. Director: Nicholas Meyer. ■ An Environment of Dignity. Director: Mahmood Jamal. ■ Here to Stay. Director: Surinder Puri. ■ Just Like Mohicans. Director: Trix Worrell. ■ A Licence to Kill. Produced by Bandung

Productions. ■ Linton Kwesi Johnson in Concert. Produced by Bandung Productions. ■ Mistaken Identity. Directors: Karen Alexander and Helen Potts. ■ My Beautiful LaunStephen Frears, My Beautiful Launderette, film still, 1985. Courtesy of Channel 4 Television.

242 ■ Time Lines

drette. Director: Stephen Frears, written by Hanif Kureishi. ■ The New Eastenders. Produced by Bandung Productions.

1985

■ Our Colourful Lives. Directors: Laxmi Jamdagni and Amina Patel. ■ Our Story. Director:

Kaliani Lyle. ■ The Painter and the Pest. Produced by Bandung Productions. ■ Sixty-Four Day Hero. Director: Franco Rosso.

Quotes: lubaina

himid: All eleven artists in this

exhibition are concerned with the politics and realities of being Black Women. We will debate upon how and why we di≈er in our creative expression of these realities. Our methods vary individually from satire to storytelling, from timely vengeance to careful analysis, from calls to arms to the smashing of stereotypes. We are claiming what is ours and making ourselves visible. We are eleven of the hundreds of creative Black Women in Britain today. We are here to

The Thin Black Line, installation photograph, ica, London, 1985.

stay.14 ■ martina attille: Coming together as Black women was and is an easy first step, the process that keeps us together and facilitates discussion is far more complex. That is why Black Women and Representation never set out to be a definitive analysis of our experiences, the intention was always to establish an ongoing forum for discussion around the social and political implications of the fragmentation of Black women in film/video/television, as well as a forum to talk about the kinds of images we want to construct ourselves towards contributing a more complete picture of our lives and politics.15

1986

Exhibitions:

1985–1986

Time Lines ■ 243

Aurat Shakti: A Photographic Reflection of Our Lives, Cockpit Gallery, London. With Mumtaz Karimjee, Manjula Mukherjee, Vibha Osbon, and Amina Patel. ■ Black Edge: Afro-CaribThe Atrocity Exhibition and Other Empire Stories: An Exhibition of Work by Donald G. Rodney, exhibition poster, Black-Art Gallery, London, 1986.

bean Photography in Britain, Mappin Art Gallery, She÷eld. With David A. Bailey, Newton Brown, Vanley Burke, Armet Francis, Madahi, and Horace Ové. ■ Black Women in View, Battersea Arts Centre, London. With Lorraine Duke, Carole Enahoro, Rita Keegan, Ogu Nnachi, Susie Nottingham, Louise Owen, Elaine Somerville, and Paula Williams. ■ Brushes With the West, Wapping Sports Centre, London. With Achar Kumar Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Allan deSouza, and Shafique Uddin. ■ Caribbean Expressions in Britain, Leicestershire Museum and Art Galleries, Leicester. Selected by Aubrey Williams, Pogus Caesar, and Bill Ming. With Simone Alexander, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Pogus Caesar, Denzil Forrester, Anthony Jadunath, Errol Lloyd, John Lyons, Bill Ming, Ronald Moody, Colin Nichols, Eugene Palmer, Veronica Ryan, Gregory White, and Aubrey Williams. ■ Conceptual Clothing, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With Rasheed Araeen, Sokari Douglas Camp, and Mona Hatoum. ■ Darshan: An Exhibition by Ten Asian Photographers, Camerawork, London. With Zarina Bhimji, Prodeepta Das, Ashvin Gatha, Sunil Gupta, Sunil Janah, Abida Kahn, Mumtaz Karimjee, Samina Khanour, Sarita Sharma, and Padma Shreshtha. ■ Double Vision: An Exhibition

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1986

of Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Art, Cartwright Hall, Bradford. With Franklyn Beckford, Margaret Cooper, Uzo Egonu, Amanda Hawthorne, Debbie Hursfield, Tam Joseph, Johney Saleem Arif Quadri, Enchantments of Sky, Sea and Earth, 1986. Acrylic and sand on paper and muslin. 275 x 215 cm. Copyright dacs.

Ohene, Keith Piper, Lee Hudson Simba, Madge Spencer, and Gregory White. ■ From Resistance to Rebellion, Cockpit Gallery, London, and Triangle Gallery, Birmingham. ■ From Two Worlds, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. With Rasheed Araeen, Saleem Arif, Franklyn Beckford, Zadok BenDavid, Zarina Bhimji, Black Audio Film Collective, Sonia Boyce, Sokari Douglas Camp, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Tam Joseph, Houria Niati, Keith Piper, Veronica Ryan, and Shafique Ud-

Sokari Douglas Camp, Alai Aru, 1986. Steel and wood with two electric motors, 1.52 x 6 x 1 m.

din. ■ Jagrati, Greenwich Citizens Gallery, London. With Dushka Ahmed, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Nina Edge, Bhajan Hunjan, Naomi Imy, Mumtaz Karimjee, Shamina Khanour, Symrath Patti, Sukhwinder Saund, Ranjan Shadra, and Shanti Thomas. ■ Masquerading: The Art of the Notting Hill Carnival, Graves Art Gallery, She÷eld. ■ Reflections of the Black Experience, glc Racial Equality Unit and the Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Marc Boothe, Vanley

From Two Worlds, exhibition guide, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1986.

1986

Time Lines ■ 245

Burke, Armet Francis, Sunil Gupta, Mumtaz Karimjee, David Lewis, Zak Ové, Ingrid Pollard, Suzanne Roden, and Madahi Sharak. ■ Some of Us Are Brave, Black-Art Gallery. With Some of Us Are Brave, All of Us Are Strong: An Exhibition by and about Black Women, exhibition poster, Black-Art Gallery, London, 1986.

Brenda Agard, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Amanda Holiday, Claudette Johnson, Mowbray Odonkor, Marlene Smith, Maud Sulter, and Audrey West. ■ South of the River, South London Art Gallery, London. With Anthony Andrews, Jeni McKenzie, and Maxine Walker. ■ Starring . . . Mummy and Daddy: Photographs of Our Parents, obaala, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Brenda Agard, Norman Anderson, David A. Bailey, Shakka Dedi, Claudette Holmes, Michael Jess, Barbara Jones, Joy Kahumba, Jeni McKenzie, Shirley Mitchell, Babajide Odusina, Zak Ové, Ingrid Pollard, Fitzroy Sang, Annette Sylvester, Maxine Walker, and Joel Woodley. ■ Tangled Roots, Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Carol Agana, Margaret Agana, Barbara Bennett, Rita Charles, Sehnaz Hanslot, Joy Kahumba, Rita Keegan, Lorna Leslie, Veronica Mackenzie, Valerie Mason-John, Glynis Nelson, Louise Owen, Alka Prabhakar, Folake Shoga, Dorothea Smartt, Elaine Somerville, Jennifer Tyson, Enyote Wanogho, and Paula Williams. ■ Testimony, The Pavilion, Leeds. With Brenda Agard, Ingrid Pollard, and Maud Sulter. ■ The Colours of Black: A Black Arts Showcase, glc Conference Hall, London. With Rasheed Araeen, David A. Bailey, Chila Kumari Burman, Uzo Egonu, Armet

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Francis, Gavin Jantjes, Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede, George Kelly, Shaheen Merali, Fitzroy Sang, and Aubrey Williams. ■ Third World Within: Cross-Section of Work by Afro-Asian Artists in Britain, Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Rasheed Araeen, David A. Bailey, Mona Hatoum, and Houria Niati. ■ Twelve Days at the Roundhouse, The Roundhouse, London. With Chila Kumari Burman, Lubaina Himid, Tam Joseph, and Shanti Panchal. ■ Unrecorded Truths, The Elbow Room, London. With Brenda Agard, Simone Alexander, David A. Bailey, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Allan de-

Donald Rodney, The Lords of Mankind (detail), 1986. Mixed media installation.

Souza, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, and Marlene Smith.

Sociopolitical:

The Arts and Ethnic Minorities: Action Plan, a report by the

Arts Council of Great Britain, is published. ■ Black Visual Artists Forum, coordinated by Rasheed Araeen and funded by the glc, is held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. ■ In February, a Single European Act is signed by Britain and other eec countries tightening cohesion of the European community in social and economic a≈airs. ■ The glc is dissolved in April. The duties of the council are theoretically absorbed by other agencies, but its dissolution significantly a≈ects the funding of black arts organizations.

Films: Big George Is Dead. Director: Henry Martin. ■ Black mps. Produced by Bandung Productions. ■ Dub and Visual Perception. Director: Kelvin Richard. ■ Emergence. Direc-

1986

Time Lines ■ 247

tor: Pratibha Parmar. ■ Handsworth Songs. Director: John Akomfrah, produced by Black Audio Film Collective. ■ An Indian Painter in Paris. Produced by Bandung Productions. ■ A Kind of English. Director: Ruhul Amin. ■ Liverpool Eight: We Call It the Homelands.

Produced by Bandung Productions. ■ Mark of the Hand: Aubrey Williams. Director: Imruh Caesar. ■ Mohammed’s Daughter. Director: Suri Krishnamma. ■ Mona Lisa. Director: Neil Jordan. ■ The Passion of Remembrance. Directors: Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, produced Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, The Passion of Remembrance, film still, 1986. Courtesy of Sankofa Films Educational Trust Ltd. Photograph by David A. Bailey.

by Sankofa Film and Video. ■ The People’s Account. Director: Milton Bryan. ■ Playing Away. Director: Horace Ové. ■ Rocking with a Sikh. Director: Tony Jiti Gill. ■ Skin and Coal. Director: Claudine Boothe.

Quotes:

kobena mercer: It would be best to describe

the conference on Third Cinema at this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival as a surface of emergence. . . . The three days of intense debate, and screenings of new and rarely seen films, provided an international frame of reference for a range of emerging di≈erences in approach to cinema as a site of cultural struggle. ¶ The term “Third Cinema” was first coined by the Argentinian film-makers Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas. . . . [It] di≈erentiated an ideologically combative film practice from both the commodity products of dominant film industries and the cinematic values of “auteur-

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ism.” It has since been theoretically developed, and its reference expanded, by Ethiopian scholar Teshome Gabriel as a more general framework for the study not just of films made in the Third World, but of oppositional film practices that articulate cultural struggles. In this sense the concept of a “Third Cinema” cuts across the boundaries of national cinemas and, as Jim Pines and Paul Willemen emphasised in their opening remarks at the conference, its very flexibility seems appropriate for the designation of a variety of emerging trends in radical film theory and practice. Because it does not function as a rigid classificatory term and seeks to avoid setting up yet another hegemonic norm for “correct” film-making, the idea seems particularly relevant to the emergent black independent film sector in Britain. . . . ¶ Within the terms of this specific conjuncture, Third Cinema continued a conversation on the politics of race, nation and ethnicity in the cultural institution of cinema which began with the Black Film Festival, organised by Jim Pines, at the Commonwealth Institute and the National Film Theatre in 1982. That event enabled a young generation of black film workshops, such as Black Audio Film Collective, Ceddo and Sankofa, to make links with their Afro-American counterparts. Its success also demonstrated an incredible hunger for images among black audiences in Britain. In the wake of the political events of 1981 and the advent of Channel Four, it pinpointed a keen interest for black interventions in film and television, a

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Time Lines ■ 249

new threshold of cultural struggle around the image.16

1987

Exhibitions:

Cre-

ation For Liberation, The Fourth Open Exhibition: Art by Black Artists, Brixton Village, London. With Achar Kumar Burman, Margaret Cooper, Amanda Holiday, Zil Hoque, and Fitzroy Sang. ■ Critical Realism: Britain in 1980s Through the Work of 28 Artists, Nottingham Castle Museum, Nottingham. With Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Tam Joseph, and Shanti Thomas. ■ D-Max: A Photographic Exhibition, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With David A. Bailey, Marc Boothe, Gilbert John, David Lewis, Zak Ové, Ingrid Pollard, and Suzanne Roden. ■ Depicting History for Today, Mappin Art Gallery, She÷eld. With Lubaina Himid, Keith Piper, and Donald Rodney. ■ Dislocations, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Selected by Veronica Ryan. With Simone Alexander, Zarina Bhimji, Mona Hatoum, and Veronica Ryan. ■ Element Within, exhibition of Asian Artists Group 1983–87, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham. With Said Adrus, Sardul Gill, and Gurminder Kaur Sikand. ■ The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art, Cornerhouse, Manchester. Selected by Keith Piper and Marlene Smith. With Simone Alexander, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Eddie Chambers, Jennifer Comrie, Allan deSouza, Amanda Holiday, Claudette Johnson, Tam Joseph, Trevor Mathison/Eddie George, Mowbray Odonkor, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, and Marlene Smith. ■ New Robes for MaShulan, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale. With Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter. ■ obaala’s Marcus

250 ■ Time Lines

1986–1987

Garvey Centenary Show, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Eddie Chambers, Shakka Dedi, Olive Desnoes, Horace Opio Donovan, Fowokan (George Kelly), Linda King, Kenneth McCalla, Steve Monerville, and Keith Piper. ■ Polareyes: Black Women Photographers, Camden Arts Centre, London. With

Polareyes: A Journal by and about Black Women Working in Photography, no. 1, 1987. Photograph by Molly Amoli K. Shinhat.

Brenda Agard, Margaret Andrews, Zarina Bhimji, Similola Coker, Joy Gregory, Rhona Harriette, Joy Kahumba, Mumtaz Karimjee, Linda King, Jeni McKenzie, Tracey Mo≈at, Amina Patel, Ingrid Pollard, Samena Rana, Molly Shinhat, Maxine Walker, Sharron Wallace, GeralSandy Nairne, State of the Art: Ideas and Images in the 1980s, published by Chatto and Windus, 1987. Courtesy of Random House Group Ltd.

dine Walsh, Gloria Walsh, and Halina Zajac. ■ Sight Seers: Visions of Afrika and the Diaspora, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Jheni Arboine, Elizabeth Hughes, Ifeoma Onyefulu, June Reid, and Afia Yekwai. ■ State of the Art: Ideas and Images in the 1980s, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. With Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, and Donald Rodney. ■ Testimony: Three Black Women Photographers, Camerawork, London. With Brenda Agard, Ingrid Pollard, and Maud Sulter. ■ The Devil’s Feast, Chelsea School of Art, London. With Zarina Bhimji, Chila Kumari Burman, Jennifer

Testimony, exhibition invitation, Camerawork, London, 1987. Photograph by Brenda Agard.

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Time Lines ■ 251

Comrie, Allan deSouza, Keith Piper, and Donald Rodney.

Sociopolitical:

Third Text, no. 1 is published. ■ Bazaar:

South Asian Arts Magazine, no. 1 is published. ■ “Black Art/White Institutions,” a two-day conference, is held in

Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, no. 26, spring 1994.

Dursley, Gloucestershire. ■ There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, written by Paul Gilroy, is published by Hutchinson in Britain.

Films:

Caméra Arabe. Director: Férid Boughedir. ■ Castles of

Sand. Director: Wendy Williamson. ■ The Hat Videos. Directed and written by Isaac Julien. ■ Hotel London. Director: Ahmed Allaudin. ■ Media Fictions. Directed and written by Isaac Julien. ■ My Baby Just Cares for Me. DirecBazaar: South Asian Arts Magazine, no. 23, 1992.

tor: Peter Lord. ■ Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Written by Hanif Kureishi. ■ This Is Not an aids Advertisement. Directed and written by Isaac Julien. ■ “Two Kinds of Otherness: Black Film and the Avant-Garde.” Essay by Judith Williamson,

published in Screen 29, vol. 4 (1988). Quotes: stuart hall: Constituting oneself as “black” is another recognition of self through di≈erence: certain clear polarities and extremities against which one tries to define oneself. We constantly underestimate the importance, to certain crucial political things that have happened in the world, of this

252 ■ Time Lines

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ability of people to constitute themselves, psychically, in the black identity. It has long been thought that this is really a simple process: a recognition—a resolution of irresolutions, a coming to rest in some place which was always there waiting for one. The “real me” at last! ¶ The fact is “black” has never been just there either.

It has always been an unstable identity, psychically, culturally and politically. It, too, is a narrative, a

Sunil Gupta, Hans Khas, Lodhi Gardens, India Gate, and Humayan’s Tomb, from Exile series, 1987. Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London (Lodhi Gardens and Humayan’s Tomb).

story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found. . . . So the notion that identity is a simple—if I can use the metaphor—black or white question, has never been the experience of black people, at least in the diaspora. These are “imaginary communities”—and not a bit the less real because they are also symbolic. Where else could the dialogue of identity between subjectivity and culture take place?17 ■ paul gilroy: Long ago, in his “Blueprint” for black artists,

Richard Wright asserted the necessity of collective work in the development of black expression. Wright saw this mode of working as an indispensable strategy in circumstances where the fragmentation of the African diaspora and the systemic turbulence of the modern world—its economic and political

Sonia Boyce, She Ain’t Holding Them Up, She’s Holding On—Some English Rose, 1986. Drawing. 7 x 3 ft.

1987

Time Lines ■ 253

crises, meant that for black artists “tradition is no longer a guide.” ¶ Though it emerges from a di≈erent period and from di≈erent strands of black history, the D-Max exhibition represents the fulfilment of a similar commitment. The six photographers whose work is on display have been meeting together to discuss and develop their art for over two years. Their contrasting styles and approaches have been refined and strengthened in a process of mutual criticism and collective support which has become essential to the realisation of individual concerns. Their collaboration is thus more than a joint assault on the mainstream institutions of the art world which marginalise and trivialise black expression by relegating it to the necessary but insu÷cient role of documentary. ¶ The unity within diversity which is an explicit feature of this exhibition betrays

deeper political concerns. It can be read as a bold and significant intervention in recent debates not simply about black aesthetics but about the meaning and status of blackness itself in contemporary Britain. The choice of “D-Max” as a name for the group alludes not simply to a technical command of their chosen medium of expression, but to the range of blacks a photographic emulsion can o≈er. It is a neat symbol of the photographers’ awareness of the aesthetic and political plurality of blackness—its shades, nuances and uneven contours, its inner contradictions and internal fractures.18 ■ keith piper: Ever since the pioneering attempt by the Mappin Art Gallery, She÷eld in 1984

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to bring the work of Black artists “Into the Open” by commissioning two practising Black artists to select work from their contemporaries, galleries nationwide have recognised the viability of this particular option. In his article, “Mainstream Capers,” Eddie Chambers analyses the scenario thus: “Administrators realise, all too correctly, that it would be unacceptable for they themselves to select Black artists directly. Instead they select the selectors.” In the best cases, this strategy could provide opportunities for practising Black artists to structure exhibitions around themes which they know to be of interest to their contemporaries, whilst letting the institution take the financial and administrative strain. In the worst cases (and more often than not, it is the “worst case” that materialises) such shows quickly reveal themselves to be thinly veiled exercises in “four-percent politics.” Clumsily ghettoised hotch-potches in which galleries attempt to head o≈ accusations of racism by doing a “job-lot” of Black artists on the cheap. Selectors are reduced to underpaid, overworked fall-guys who are expected to counter years of elitist and racist policy making on the part of institutions towards local communities, in a handful of frantic, under resourced weeks.19 ■ marlene smith: Much work still remains to be done in the area of documentation. However some of the major issues at stake have been discussed in print; our relationship with the establishment, the climate that creates and the concepts that inform Black art. These commentaries speak

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Time Lines ■ 255

in general terms about the aims and purposes of the art. There we find speculation as to what it is and arguments for what it should be. The purposes identified range from the confrontational kicking-down-the-doors-of-the-art-establishment, to the reciprocal merging of two worlds. As divergent as I have found these essays there are fundamental similarities; they make little or no attempt to deal with the actual art form and connected to this, is the wholesale failure to make any references to the dynamic of gender. In e≈ect this means that historical writings make little or no reference to the work of Blackwomen. Rather than actively investigate the areas in which Veronica Ryan, Attempts to Fill Empty Spaces, 1986. Bronze, reinforced plaster, and pigment. 35 x 250 x 155 cm.

Blackwomen have been active, it is still only necessary to state that they are now visible. But this new visibility is not guaranteed, Blackwomen often disappear from contemporary writings. I recall reading one particular report of a conference. Despite the fact that one of the most volatile discussions of the entire day had been around the subject of the marginalisation of Blackwomen artists this was not recorded in the report. These incidents are unfortunately not isolated. They run the danger of becoming accepted parts of our practice.20

1988

Exhibitions:

Along the Lines of Resistance, Cooper Gallery, Barnsley.

Selected by Sutapa Biswas, Sarah Edge, and Clare Slattery. With Simone Alexander,

256 ■ Time Lines

1987–1988

Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Nina Edge, Leslie Hakim-Dowek, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid/Maud Sulter, Lesley Sanderson, and Marlene Smith. ■ An Element of Fantasy ( . . . In All the Reality), Black-Art Gallery, London. With Bruce Attah, Diana Low, Debbie Norton, and J. C. Quillin. ■ Black Art: Plotting the Course, Oldham Art Gallery, Oldham. With Said Adrus, Upjohn Aghaji, Georgia Belfont, Donald Brown, Val Brown, Nina Edge, Isaiah Ferguson, Amanda Holiday, Carol Hughes, Wendy Jarrett, Tam Joseph, Godfrey Lee, Errol Lloyd, John Lyons, Julia Millette, Mowbray Odonkor, Paul Ogbonno, Eugene Palmer, Tony Phillips, Ray Povey, Jaswinder Singh Purewal, Alistair Raphael, Lesley Sanderson, Mark Sealy, Gurminder Sikand, Shanti Thomas, and Jan Wandja. ■ Gold Blooded Warrior, Tom Allen Centre, London. With Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter. ■ Contemporary Art by Afro-Caribbean Artists, 198 Gallery, London. With Danielle Akua,

Delroy Bent, Paul Green, Anthony Jadunath, George Kelly, David Matsua, Shaheen Merali, Tony Moo-Young, Derek Washington Rose, Patrick Small, Chris Todd, and Geraldine Walsh. ■ The Essential Black Art, Chisenhale Gallery, London. With Rasheed Araeen, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Allan deSouza, Mona Hatoum, Gavin Jantjes, and Keith Piper. ■ Figuring Out the Eighties, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. With Saleem Arif and

Essential Black Art, exhibition catalogue, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 1988. Courtesy of Mona Hatoum.

1988

Time Lines ■ 257

Denzil Forrester. ■ Graven Images: Art, Religion and Politics, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. With Martina Attille, Dreaming Rivers, film still, 1988. Courtesy of Sankofa Films Educational Trust Ltd. Photograph by Christine Parry.

Rasheed Araeen, Saleem Arif, Sutapa Biswas, Arpana Caur, and Dhruva Mistry. ■ Incantations: Reclaiming Imaginations, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Georgina Grant, Amanda Holiday, and Mowbray Odonkor. ■ Influences, South London Art Gallery, London. With Brenda Agard, Simone Alexan-

Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance, film still, 1988. Courtesy of the artist and Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

der, Sokari Douglas Camp, Lubaina Himid, Joseph Olubo, and Keith Piper. ■ Mysteries, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Roy Blackwood, Horace Opio Donovan, and Alvin Kelly. ■ Numaish Lalit Kala: Indian Arts Festival, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool. With Chila Kumari Burman, Arpana Caur, Jagjit Chuhan, Amal Ghosh, Naiza Malik, Alnoor Mitha, Alistair Raphael, and Shafique Uddin. ■ Once Upon a Time: An Exhibition of Pictures and Words by Black Women Artists, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale. With Suandi, Lin Tang, Aldith Venair, and Fiona Walker. ■ Revelations of Black, Greenwich Citizens Gallery, London. With Kevin Johnson, John

Lyons, Alnoor Mitha, Tara Sabharwal, Suandi, Lin Tang, Aldith Venair, and Kanta Walker. ■ Spectrum Women’s Festival Open Exhibition, South London Art Gallery, London. With

Brenda Agard, Zarina Bhimji, Pratibha Parmar, and Suzanne Roden.

258 ■ Time Lines

1988

Sociopolitical:

Aavaa, the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive, is launched in Bristol by its founder, Eddie Chambers. ■ Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers, is formed, with the photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode as its first chair. ■ Coco Fusco writes Young, Black, and British: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective. ■ “De Margin and De Centre,” an introductory essay to Screen 29, no. 4, is written by Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer. ■ Panchayat Arts Education and Resource Unit is formed by Shaheen Merali and Allan deSouza.

Films: Best Wishes. Director:

Ngozi Onwurah. ■ “Black Film: British Cinema,” symposium at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. ■ Blue for You. Director: Peter Harvey. ■ Circle of Gold. Director: Uday Bhattacharya. ■ Co=ee-Coloured Children. Director: Ngozi Onwurah. ■ Dreaming Rivers. Director: Martina Attille, produced by Sankofa Film and Video. Pratibha Parmar, Sari Red, film still, 1988.

■ For Queen and Country. Director: Martin Stellman.

Written by Trix Worrell. ■ Mapantsula. Director: Oliver Schmitz. ■ Measures of Distance. Director: Mona Hatoum. ■ Omega Rising: Woman of Rastafari. Director: D. Elmina Davis. ■ Perfect Image? Director: Maureen Blackwood. ■ Salaam Bombay! Director: Mira Nair. ■ Sari Red. Director: Pratibha

Pratibha Parmar, Sari Red, film still, 1988.

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Time Lines ■ 259

Parmar. ■ Testament. Director: John Akomfrah, produced by Black Audio Film Collective.

Quotes:

rotimi fani-kayode: On three counts I am an outsider: in matters of sexuality; in terms of geographical

Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose (Bodies of Experience), 1989. Courtesy of Autograph abp, London.

and cultural dislocation; and in the sense of not having become the sort of respectably married professional my parents might have hoped for. ¶ Such a position gives me a feeling of having very little to lose. It produces a sense of

personal freedom from the hegemony of convention. For one who has managed to hang on to his own creativity through the crises of adolescence and in spite of the pressures to conform, it has a liberating e≈ect.21 ■ paul gilroy: Artists who would climb out of the underground spaces that serve as the foundations for the British black arts movement, have developed a special skill. They must learn to address di≈erent constituencies simultaneously. The most politically astute of them anticipate not a single, uniform audience but a plurality of publics. These audiences often co-exist within the same physical environment but they live non-synchronously. Cultural activists encounter them as a hierarchy in which profoundly antagonistic relations may exist between dominant and subordinate groups. Making sense of this configuration of publics and the aura of novelty currently being constructed around black art, requires both artist and critic to

260 ■ Time Lines

1988

consider the di÷culties that surround the heretical suggestion that white audiences may be becoming more significant in the development of British black art than any black ones. We must be prepared to assess the di≈erential impact of white audiences on the mood and style of black cultural activism as well as its forms and its ideological coherence.22 ■ martina attille: One of the crucial things about media education in Britain is that you’re involved in very Eurocentric theories, and if you have any sort of black consciousness you begin to wonder where there might be room for your experience within these theories. In Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, one of the key texts for students of semiology, the only reference to anybody black is to the soldier on the cover of Paris Match. The

Martina Attille, Dreaming Rivers, film still, 1988. Courtesy of Sankofa Films Educational Trust Ltd. Photograph by Christine Parry.

very superficial critique of colonialism found in such texts really isn’t enough. ¶ As we began to think about images and about our politics, we realised that the history of independent film and black images was pretty dry, politically speaking. And political films were also really dry stylistically, most straight documentary. And there is always the problem that there hasn’t been much space for black filmmakers in Britain. In terms of political film, also, there wasn’t much room for pleasure.23 ■ rasheed araeen and eddie chambers: Rasheed Araeen: I will take up later the questions of what you con-

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Time Lines ■ 261

sider to be the influence in Britain of an “American Black Arts Movement.” At the moment I want to stay with the issue of what you now consider to be black art. I’m particularly concerned with some of the works you have included in your exhibition [Black Art: Plotting the Course], such as of Gurminder Sikand, John Lyons, Errol Lloyd, Shanti Thomas . . . , which present a problem for me. How am I to consider them as examples of black art? ¶ I’m not saying that they are not good works of art. It’s not the issue here. These works give no indication of what you yourself would consider to be black art. Eddie Chambers: Firstly, I should make it clear that much of the premise on which Black Art: Plotting the Course exists, centres around the notion that there is a wider constituency of artists whose practice criss-crosses the ideology of Black art. The artists you have mentioned are not necessarily the artists one would associate with [a] Black Art Movement, but there are specific works by them with which I would have no problems in classifying as Black art.24 ■ frank bowling: My art is Formalist and my experience that of a black artist. Beginning in 1968 with the American media exhibition Harlem on My Mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, I became fully aware that there have been many short and long statements and much discussion about the nature of Black Art. As defined during the late ’60s, the declared positions of many black American artists perpetually left with me a certain discouraging confusion. Perhaps this

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was inevitable because of a not realised yet urgent yearning. But is Black Art realisable? Black Art seems to have gained little clarity, although the debate still rages.25 ■ richard dyer: Power in contemporary society habitually passes itself o≈ as embodied in the normal as opposed to the superior. This is common to all forms of power, but it works in a peculiarly seductive way with whiteness, because of the way it seems rooted, in commonsense thought, in things other than ethnic di≈erence. The very terms we use to describe the major ethnic divide presented by Western society, “black” and “white,” are imported from and naturalised by other discourses.26 ■ sutapa biswas and marlene smith: There are only a few galleries that are committed to showing Black art. Mainstream galleries until recently remained closed to work by Black artists. When they do show our work it is often the tokenistic gesture of their equal opportunities policy. Additionally the audiences that these venues court and attract is limited to the white middle class. For those Black artists that seek to intervene in that arena and to challenge the system’s view of “us,” “them” and history, there is a consistent battle against the marginalisation of our ideas as well as our practice. ¶ These are just some of the issues facing us. As Black women and visual artists much of our energies are di≈used because we have to work simultaneously on many di≈erent fronts. We must make our images, organise exhibitions, be art critics, historians, administrators and speakers. We must

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be the watchdogs of art establishment bureaucracies; sitting as individuals on various panels, as a means of ensuring that Black people are not overlooked. The list is endless.27

1989

Exhibitions:

Being Here 1, 2 & 3, The Holden Gallery, Manchester.

■ Black Art: New Directions, Stoke on Trent City Museum and Art Gallery. With Chila

Kumari Burman, Anthony Daley, Amanda Holiday, Sharon Lutchman, Amrit Row, Yinka Shonibare, Dionne Sparks, and Maud Sulter. ■ Fabled Territories: New Asian Photography in Britain, City Art Gallery, Leeds. With Nudrat Afza, Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Mujassam C-Maan, Prodeepta Das, Poulomi Desai, Allan deSouza, Sunil Gupta, Suresh Karadia, Mumtaz Karimjee, Shaheen Merali, Mount Pleasant Photography Workshop, Pratibha Parmar, and Juanito Wadhani. ■ Intimate Distance, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. With Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, Mona Hatoum, Ingrid Pollard, and Maxine Walker. ■ One Spirit: Black Artists Against Racism, 198 Gallery, London. With Gavin Jantjes, Juginder Lamba, Jeni McKenzie, Shaheen Merali, and Symrath Patti. ■ Passion: Blackwomen’s Creativity of the African Diaspora, The Elbow Room, London. With Lubaina Himid, Rita Keegan, Michelle Parkerson, Ingrid Pollard, and Dionne Sparks. ■ The Artist Abroad: An Exhibition of Work Influenced by International Travel, Usher Gallery, Lincoln. With Sutapa Biswas, Tam Joseph, Shaheen Merali, Vong Phaophanit, Ray Povey, and Shanti Thomas. ■ The Cost of the English Landscape, Laing Art

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Gallery, Newcastle. With David A. Bailey and Ingrid Pollard. ■ The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, Hayward Gallery, London. With Rasheed Araeen, Saleem Arif, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Avinash Chandra, Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Uzo Egonu, Iqbal Geo≈rey, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Balraj Khanna, Donald Locke, David Medalla, Ronald Moody, Ahmed Parvez, Ivan Peries, Keith Piper, Anwar J. Shemza, Kumiko Shimizu, F. N. Souza, Aubrey Williams, and Li Yuan-chia. ■ U.S./U.K. Photography Exchange, Jamaica Arts Center, New York, and Camerawork, London. Curated by Kellie Jones. With Dawoud Bey, Charles Biasiny-Rivera, Rotimi FaniKayode, Mikki Ferrill and Ingrid Pollard, and Maxine Walker.

Sociopolitical:

The

British government announces that 225,000 citizens of Hong Kong will be given British citizenship. ■ In China, during the month of June, hundreds of pro-democracy university students are gunned down by soldiers in Tiananmen Square.

Films:

Blue Too.

Director: Peter Harvey. ■ Employing the Image. Director: Amanda Holiday. ■ I’m British But . . . Director: Gurinder Chadha. ■ Looking for Langston. Director: Isaac Julien, produced by Sankofa Film and Video. ■ Memory Pictures. Director: Pratibha Parmar. ■ Tangled Web. Director: Raj Patel. ■ Twilight City. Director: Reece Auguiste, produced by Black Audio Film

Isaac Julien, Looking for Langston, film still, 1989. Photograph by Sunil Gupta/Isaac Julien.

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Collective. Quotes: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: It seems obvious to some of us that the disenfranchised female in decolonized space, being doubly displaced by it, is the proper carrier of a critique of pure class-analysis. Separated from the mainstream of feminism, this figure, the figure of the gendered subaltern is singular and alone. Insofar as such a figure can be represented among us . . . it is, first, as an object of knowledge, further, as a native-informant style subject of oral histories who is patronizingly considered incapable of strategy towards us, and finally, as imagined subject/object, in the real field of literature. There is, however, a rather insidious fourth way. It is to obliterate the di≈erences between this figure and the indigenous elite woman abroad, and claim the subjectship of an as-yet-unreadable alternative history that is only written in the general sense I invoke above. ¶ This fourth person is a “diasporic postcolonial.”—“Who Claims Alterity?”28

1990 Exhibitions: An Economy of Signs, The Photographers’

Gallery, London. ■ Ask Me No Questions—I Will Tell You No Lie, Black-Art Gallery, London. An obaala open exhibition. ■ Autoportraits, Camerawork, London. Curated by Autograph. With Monika Baker, Allan deSouza, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Lyle Ashton Harris, Mumtaz Karimjee, and Roshini Kempadoo. ■ Black Markets: Images of Black People in Advertising and Packaging in Britain (1880–1980), Cornerhouse, Manchester. With David A. Bailey, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Roshini Kempadoo, Keith

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Piper, and Donald Rodney. ■ Carnival in Exile: Black Photography ’90, Black-Art Gallery, London. With Vanley Burke, Kevin Small, and Larrie Paul Tierman. ■ Disputed Identities UK/US, Camerawork, San Francisco. With Lyle Ashton Harris, Martina Attille, David A. Bailey, Sutapa Biswas, Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Roshini Kempadoo, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, Yong Soon Min, Ngozi A. Onwurah, Ingrid Pollard, Vincent Stokes, and Diane Tani. ■ Distinguishing Marks, Bloomsbury Galleries, London University Institute of Education, London. With Sonia Boyce, Allan deSouza, Shaheen Merali, Pitika Ntuli, and Keith Piper. ■ Diverse Cultures, Crafts Council, London. ■ Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the aids Mythology, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With Allan deSouza, Rotimi FaniKayode, Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, and Alex Hirst. ■ Heritage, Image & History, Cornerhouse, Manchester. With Lubaina Himid and Ingrid Pollard. ■ In Focus, Horizon Gallery, London. With Nudrat Afza, Zarina Bhimji, Chila Kumari Burman, Jagjit Chuhan, Prodeepta Das, Amal Ghosh, Shareena Hill, Bhajan Hunjan, Mumtaz Karimjee, Mali, Prafulla Mohanti, Sohail, Shanti Thomas, Shafique Uddin, Suresh Vedak, and Ibrahim Wagh. ■ In Sight in View: Mozaix Black Visual Art Poster Campaign, various sites nationally. With Said Adrus, Claudette Holmes, Alvin Kelly, Roshini Kempadoo, Nigel Madhoo, and Maxine Walker. ■ Journeys Through the Continents, Westbourne Gallery, London. With Osi Audu and Emmanuel Jegede. ■ Anish Kapoor represents Britain at the Venice Biennale.

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■ Let the Canvas Come to Life with Dark Faces, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Cov-

entry. With Said Adrus, Olanike Adu, Osi Audu, Lanek Bauga, Andrew Beeput, Georgia Belfont, Marcia Bennett, Chris Bramble, Donald Brown, Chila Kumari Burman, Renganaden Calinghen, Nilifur Chowdury, Sharon Curtis, Dedar, Geta Mekonnen Deresse, Allan deSouza, Paul Duncan, Uzo Egonu, Shreela Ghosh, Georgina Grant, Medina Hammad, Rhona Harriette, Desmond Haughton, Colin Henry, Carlos Holder, Bhajan Hunjan, Richard Hylton, Anthony Jadunath, Winston James, Permindar Kaur, Rita Keegan, Indra Khanna, Manjeet Lamba, Rowland Lawar, Rikki Lawrence, Godfrey Lee, John Lyons, Walid Mustafa, Colin Nichols, Ingrid Pollard, Ray Povey, Jaswinder Singh Purewal, Sarah Rahim, Sher Rajah, Fitzroy Sang, Folake Shoga, Vincent Stokes, et al. ■ Louder than Words, Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Rita Keegan, Dorrett McKoy, and Paula Williams. ■ New North: New Art from the North of Britain, Tate Gallery, Liverpool. With Jagjit Chuhan, Lesley Sanderson, and Maud Sulter. ■ New Works for Di≈erent Places: tswa Four Cities Project, project organized by tswa (a public arts organization supported by tsw, Television South West) in association with Third Eye Centre, Glasgow; Orchard Gallery, Derry; Projects UK, Newcastle; and Plymouth Arts Centre. With Mona Hatoum, Vong Phaophanit, and Donald Rodney. ■ Post-Morality, Cambridge Darkroom and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. With Sunil Gupta, Alistair Raphael, and Ali Zaidi. ■ Strains of War,

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1990

Greenwich Citizens Gallery, London. With Allan deSouza, Leslie Hakim-Dowek, Walid Mustafa, and Ismail Saray. ■ The British Art Show 1990, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, and Hayward Gallery, London. With Black Audio Film Collective, Sonia Boyce, Mona Hatoum, Kabir Hussain, Vong Phaophanit, Veronica Ryan, Lesley Sanderson, and Shafique Uddin. ■ The Empire’s New Clothes, Camerawork, London. With Val Brown and Vincent Stokes. ■ The Women in My Life, Small Mansion Arts Centre, London. With Zarina Bhimji, Sutapa Biswas, and Ingrid Pollard. ■ Treatise on the Sublime, University Art Gallery, California State University, Stanislaus. With Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter.

Sociopolitical: Thatcher is forced out of power after eleven and a half years in o÷ce. John Major, her chancellor, is named as her successor. ■ In February, Nelson Mandela is released from a South African prison, having been incarcerated since 1963. He returns to his former position as head of the African National Congress and works with F. W. de Klerk’s regime toward ending apartheid.

Films:

A Nice Arrangement. Director: Gur-

inder Chadha. ■ “Black British Cinema: Spectatorship and Identity Formation in Territories.” Written by Manthia Diawara, published in Public Culture 3, no. 1 (1990): 121–150. ■ The Body Beautiful. Director: Ngozi Onwurah.

Quotes:

brian sewell: The Other

Story is the maudlin tale of the frustrated genius of artists working in this country, disdained by collectors and the trade, derided by museum curators and ignored by the

1990

Time Lines ■ 269

education authorities—and all because they are not white. In the visual arts, racial prejudice is unchallenged, and even apartheid would be a welcome improvement on the present invisibility of the black artist in Britain—black is used here as the portmanteau term for yellow and all shades of brown, for India and Pakistan, for China, Japan and the Philippines, and for Lebanon as well as Africa, the Caribbean and the Commonwealth ghettoes of Britain. ¶ Are they disdained, derided and ignored? I was under the impression that Britain is to be represented at the next Venice Biennale by Anish Kapoor, an Indian from Bombay, who was a major contributor to the Arts Council’s British Art Show in 1984, whose work has long been promoted by the British Council and who is supported by one of London’s leading dealers. ¶ I was under the impression that the last time I saw Aubrey Williams from Guyana he was in full-blown white robes as a member of the Arts Council’s Advisory Panel on Art—a position that is omitted from his biography in the exhibition catalogue. ¶ Am I in error in recalling that the work of Kim Lim, from Singapore, was included in the Hayward Annual in 1977, and that Lin Show Yu, from Taiwan, was one of the bright lights of the Marlborough Gallery, with work commissioned for the qe2 and exhibited in Germany and America as representative of British painting? Am I deluded when I recall that paintings by Francis Souza, from Goa, and Avinash Chandra, from Simla, India, once hung on the walls of my own studio until

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their mannered emptiness bored me and I sold them for a fraction of their cost?29 ■ john roberts: [Rasheed] Araeen’s politicisation in the early 1970s then, like so many Afro/Asian artists and intellectuals who moved to the metropolitan centres after the colonial break, was a gradual process of unlearning, or rather relearning. Araeen came to London as an admirer of the “New Generation” sculptors (Caro was at the height of his reputation). However, after a period of work as a minimalist sculptor, he began to realise that the higher echelons of modernist discourse and practice were not so susceptible to entry from a non-Western artist. “I did not know that you have to be eligible for a heroic position to achieve . . . recognition. My eligibility, as I became a black person in white society, posed a basic contradiction in the ideology of modernism.” By the early 1970s Araeen realised that this lack of eligibility had nothing to do with a lack of knowledge or talent, but quite simply with the politics of race. Consequently, to continue to work as a black artist unproblematically within the “genderless” and “raceless” spaces of late modernism was increasingly to act in the interests of such misrepresentation. Yet as a modernist, as an artist who recognised the self-critical achievements and technical successes of modernist culture, Araeen was no friend of the traditionalists. If his politicisation recognised the impossibility of an independent voice for the black artist within modernism, his critique of ethnic cultural categories led him to see how

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the British artistic establishment could contain the demands of black artists within the realm of multiculturalism and therefore projectively outside the dominant and determining circuits of power. As Araeen was quick to point out, it matters considerably at what critical level the artist enters discourse.30 ■ pratibha parmar: Indeed, there is an essentialist slant not only in some of the work produced by black women photographers, but also in the very process of naming the multi-accented matrix of black women’s identities. There is a need to guard against the erroneous notion that there is an innate legitimacy in the simple proclamation of an identity as a black woman photographer.31 ■ lesley sanderson: My paintings and drawings aim to be direct and easily read.

Most of the work uses the self-portrait as a vehicle to confront the stereotype, to voice an opinion on racism, generally, personally and from the viewpoint of a woman. It’s important that I use the self-image but as a social image rather than as an introverted self-portrait. ¶ I consciously work in a very straightforward realistic way so that the image and its content aren’t obscured. I want to challenge traditions of representation and feel this is most e≈ectively done by working in a traditional, academic way. I take gestures, symbols, a look, a stance and use them in an unexpected or ambiguous way, thereby challenging by contradiction and irony. ¶ I am concerned with challenging the idea of the “exotic” and with trying to dispel the notion that the ethnic minorities and

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especially the Chinese in Britain are a “homogeneous exotic category.”32 ■ sunil gupta: Lesbian and gay photographers have been with us since the invention of photography, but it is only with the recent focus on the politics of representation that they have been allowed to participate in the cultural agenda. Black photographers, always on the defensive since they inevitably have to speak for the race and fend o≈ attacks from those Black spokespeople who have a vested interest in preserving the Black family as the site of Black experience, have been loath to “come out” in their work. Here I want to consider the work of four Black photographers [Mumtaz Karimjee, Ingrid Pollard, Juanito Wadhwaney, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode/Alex Hirst], who came to their work through quite di≈erent routes and who illustrate the range of cultural origins within Black photography in Britain today.33

1991 Exhibitions: A Table for Four, Bluecoat Gallery,

Liverpool. With Nina Edge, Bhajan Hunjan, Tehmina Shah, and Veena Stephenson. ■ Blood Ties, 198 Gallery, London. ■ Four x 4: Installations by Sixteen Artists in Four Gallery Spaces, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston; Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton; The City Gallery, Leicester; and Arnolfini, Bristol. Curated by Eddie Chambers. With Osi Audu, Val Brown, Stephen Forde, Medina Ham-

Virginia Nimarkoh, Postcard, 1991.

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Time Lines ■ 273

mad, Richard Hylton, Permindar Kaur, Rita Keegan, Shaheen Merali, Houria Niati, Virginia Nimarkoh, Tony Phillips, Sher Rajah, Alistair Raphael, Lesley Sanderson, Folake Shoga, and Vincent Stokes. ■ History and Identity: Seven Painters, Norwich Gallery, Norfolk Institute of Art and Design, Norwich. With Said Adrus, Medina Hammad, Godfrey Lee, Mowbray Odonkor, Eugene Palmer, Tony Phillips, and Lesley Sanderson. ■ Interrogating Identity, Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, New York. With Rasheed Araeen, Allan deSouza, Mona Hatoum, Roshini Kempadoo, Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard, Donald Rodney, and Yinka Shonibare. ■ Jashan-E-Bahar: A Spring Festival from Pakistan, Greenwich Citizens Gallery, London. With Keith Khan and Ali Zaidi. ■ Anish Kapoor wins the Turner Prize. ■ Mothers, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With Caroline Jariwala and Sher Rajah. ■ Photovideo, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. ■ Powers of Perception, Lewisham Festival of Black Photographers. Curated by Jeni McKenzie. ■ Shocks to the System: Social and Political Issues in Recent British Art from the Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre, London. With Rasheed Araeen, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Sunil Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Gavin Jantjes, Tam Joseph, David Medalla, Vong Phaophanit, Tony Phillips, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Maud Sulter, and Mitra Tabrizian.

Sociopolitical:

Nubian Tales organization is established by Marc Boothe

to promote and distribute black diasporic cinema.

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1991

Films:

London Kills Me. Directed

and written by Hanif Kureishi. ■ Miss Queencake. Director: Amanda Holiday. ■ Mississippi Masala. Director: Mira Nair. ■ Birthrights. Series producer: Chris Lent. ■ A Touch of the Tar Brush. Director: John Akomfrah, produced by Black Audio Film Collective. ■ Who Needs a Heart. Director: John Akomfrah, produced by Black Audio Film Collective. ■ Young Soul Rebels. Directed and cowritten by Isaac Julien, produced by Sankofa Film

and Video. Quotes: sarat maharaj: Arms folded, the image of a woman in the Himid work [We Will Be, 1983] stands as a figure of formidable, adamantine opposition apparently “outside” the o÷cial systems of representation it challenges. But it is pieced together of excerpts, signs, passages derived from it; this triggers open a counter-world of far less settled meanings and allusions touching on sexual identity, its style and styling. In this sense, it is not unlike the way Gavin Jantjes’ First Real American Target (1974) and Chambers’ Destruction of the National Front [1980] launch themselves o≈ from a “pre-text”—Jasper Johns’ target and flag paintings with their ambiguities and hesitations between depicting an object and making the brushmark, facture, the act of painting itself the object of artwork. Both artists work through the field of non-representational art, turning its abstractive purism against itself, turning it inside out into programmatic statement.34 ■ kobena mercer: The innocent notion of Blackness as a unitary and undi≈erentiated identity has been radically questioned in the work of Black women

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and Black gay men. Through a range of artistic strategies, their practices have disrupted the idea that a single artwork could ever be totally “representative” of Black experiences because questions of racial and ethnic identity are critically dialogised by questions of gender and sexuality. Monolithic and monologic versions of Black identity are therefore pluralised and relativised to create a critical dialogue between artists and audiences about the multiple di≈erences we each inhabit in the lived experiences of our specific identities.35 ■ claudette johnson: In the work of women writing in the seventies and early eighties, there seemed to be a stripping away of the stereotypes that had shrouded us and the protective fictions of ourselves that

Chila Kumari Burman, 28 Positions in 34 Years, 1992. Mixed media. 84 x 119 cm.

we had created in response. In “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison recounts a common experience of racism through the eyes of the child involved. She describes the anticipated as well as the actual humiliation Pecola experiences and in doing so, gives space and importance to those feelings. For the first time we were the subjects of our own stories.36

1992 Exhibitions:

bbc Billboard

Project, various sites around the United Kingdom. With Permindar Kaur and Ingrid Pollard. ■ Columbus Drowning, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale. Curated by Maud Sulter. With Lubaina Himid, Magdelene Odundo, and Veronica Ryan. ■ Confrontations, Walsall

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Museum & Art Gallery, Walsall. With Chila Kumari Burman, Roshini Kempadoo, Shaheen Merali, and Lesley Sanderson. ■ Critical Decade, The Cave, Birmingham. ■ Crossing Black Waters, City Gallery, Leicester. With Said Adrus, Allan deSouza, Nina Edge, Bhajan Hunjan, Manjeet Lamba, Shaheen Merali, and Samena Rana. ■ Fine Material for a Dream . . . ? A Reappraisal of Orientalism: 19th and 20th Century Fine Art and Popular Culture: Juxtaposed with Paintings, Video and Photography by Contemporary Artists, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston. With Jananne Al-Ani, Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Nina Edge, Sunil Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Sunil Janah, Mumtaz Karimjee, Hani Muthar, Gurminder Sikand, Elia Suleiman/Joyce Salloum, and Mitra Tabrizian. ■ From Where I Stand, Brixton Art Gallery, London. With Ajamu, Henry Davis, Ian Flanders, Thabo Jaiyesimi, Paul Jones, David Emmanuel Noel, and Anthony Russell. ■ Icarus: A Collaboration Between Juginder Lamba and Tony Phillips, Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Wolverhampton. ■ Keepin’ It Together: An Exhibition by Ten Black Women, The Pavilion, Leeds. ■ New Frontiers, Brixton Art Gallery, London. ■ Taking Flight, City Gallery, Leicester. With Jagjit Chuhan, Permindar Kaur, and Gurminder Sikand. ■ The Circular Dance, Arnolfini, Bristol. With Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Jagjit Chuhan, Nina Edge, Gurminder Sikand, and Shanti Thomas. ■ The Dub Factor, Christchurch Mansions, Ipswich. Curated by Eddie Chambers. With Sylbert Bolton, Anthony Daley, and David Somerville. ■ Trophies of

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Empire: New Art Commissions in Bristol, Hull, and Liverpool, Arnolfini, Bristol; Wilberforce House Museum and Ferens Art Gallery, Hull; Bath Hall, Scunthorpe; and Bluecoat Gallery and Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool. With Nina Edge, Sunil Gupta, Bandele Iyapo, Rita Keegan, Shaheen Merali, In Health and Sickness, 1992.

Juginder Lamba, Shaheen Merali, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, and Veena Stephenson. ■ White Noise: Artists Working with Sound, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With Sonia Boyce, Richard Hylton, Rita Keegan, and Pratibha Parmar. ■ Who Do You Take Me For?, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. With Sutapa Biswas, Joy Gregory, Sunil Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Roshini Kempadoo, and Pratibha Parmar. Socio-

political: “Black Is, Black Ain’t: Notes on De-Essentializing Black Identities” is written by Isaac Julien. ■ The quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the New World is commemorated in many parts of the world. While some celebrate the 500-year anniversary, many organizations and cultural groups reflect critically on Columbus’s conquest of indigenous peoples and the subsequent legacies of subjugation and genocide. ■ Los Angeles Riots in April following the acquittal of four white police o÷cers charged for the 1991 beating of black motorist Rodney King. Fifty-eight people are killed, and property damage is estimated at $1 billion. Films: Algeria: Women at War. Producer: Parminder

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Vir. ■ Black and White in Colour. Directed and cowritten by Isaac Julien. ■ Black Poppies. Directors: Peter Markham and John Burgess. ■ Dread Poets’ Society. Written by Benjamin Zephaniah. ■ Electric Moon. Director: Pradip Krishen. ■ A Family Called Abrew. Director: Maureen Blackwood, produced by Sankofa Film and Video. ■ Hummingbird Tree. Director Noella Smith, produced by Gub Neal. ■ In Between. Director: Robert Crusz, produced by Sankofa Film and Video. ■ Mad Bad Mortal Beings. Director: Ludmilla Andrews. ■ Public Enemy/Private Friends. Director: Danny Thompson. ■ Shakti. Director: Sonali Fernand. ■ Songs and Memories. Series producer: Farrukh Dhondy. ■ The Crying Game. Director: Neil Jordan. ■ The Epic of Pabuji. Director: H. O. Nazareth. ■ We the Ragamu;n. Director: Julian Henriques. ■ Wild West. Director: David Attwood. ■ Exodus. Director: Steve McQueen.

Quotes:

coco fusco: The black British–black American dialogue

has helped to highlight the historical contradictions that forged an oppositional relationship between race and nationality in the Anglophone contexts. It has extended a debate on black hybridity, both racial and cultural, that had already been broadened by the feminisms of such writers as Michele Wallace and Angela Davis. I firmly believe that this debate can be enhanced only if recast as a pan-American dialogue, taking into account

Ingrid Pollard, Ms Pollard’s Party, 1992. Billboard commission.

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the complementary discourses on race and nation in Latin America that began five hundred years ago and have informed revolutionary political movements and cultural syncretism in the region’s multiracial societies.37

1993

Exhibitions:

African

Themes, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. With Faisal Abdu’Allah and Maud Sulter. ■ Beyond Destination: Film and Video Installations by South Asian Artists, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With Sutapa Biswas, Maya Chowdhry, Alnoor Dewshi, Khaled Hakim, Shaheen Merali, Sher Rajah, Alia Syed, and Tanya Syed. ■ Black People and the British Flag, Cornerhouse, Manchester. With Marcia Bennett, Godfrey Brown, Dominic Hazell, Bhajan Hunjan/Said Adrus, Richard Hylton, Tam Joseph, Anita Kaushik, Manjeet Lamba, Mowbray Odonkor, Eugene Palmer, Shilmilan Patel, Sarah Rahim, Sher Rajah, Winsome Rowe, Soulheil Sleiman, Veena Stephenson, Danijah Tafari, and Marcia Thomas. ■ Borderless Print, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale. With Faisal Abdu’Allah, Saleem Arif, Chris Ofili, Donald Rodney, and Maud Sulter. ■ Captives: Keith Khan & Ali Zaidi, Walsall Museum and Art Gallery, Walsall. ■ Commonwealth Young Contemporaries, Rhyl Library Museum & Arts Centre, Clywd. With Caroline Jariwala and Fitzroy Sang. ■ Disrupted Borders, Arnolfini, Bristol. With Monika Baker, Sutapa Biswas, and Samena Rana. ■ Embers, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston. With Zarina Bhimji, Permindar Kaur, and Josephine Thom. ■ Four Rooms, Serpentine Gallery, London. With Mona Hatoum, Vong Phaophanit,

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and Gladstone Thompson. ■ Recent British Sculpture from the Arts Council Collection, City Museum & Art Gallery, Derby. With Shirazeh Houshiary, Dhruva Mistry, and Veronica Ryan. ■ Reclaiming the Madonna: Artists as Mothers, Usher Gallery, Lincoln. With Jagjit Chuhan, Claudette Johnson, and Folake Shoga. ■ The Phone Box: Art in Telephone Boxes, public art project in London and Liverpool. Curated by Virginia Nimarkoh. ■ Transition of Riches, Birmingham City Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham. With Said Adrus, Nilofar Akmut, Chila Kumari Burman, Jagjit Chuhan, Amal Ghosh, Sarbjit Natt, Anuradha Patel, and Symrath Patti.

Sociopolitical:

London’s Electric Cinema (1910)

in Portobello Road becomes the first British cinema to screen exclusively black-oriented films. ■ Stephen Lawrence is murdered by white youths. Four young men are tried and acquitted of his murder.

Films:

Bear. Director: Steve

Gurinder Chadha, Bhaji on the Beach, film still, 1993. Courtesy of Channel 4 Television.

McQueen. ■ Bhaji on the Beach. Director: Gurinder Chadha, written by Meera Syal. First British feature directed by a black woman. ■ Chef. Director: John Birkin, created by Lenny Henry. ■ Death of a Swan. Director: Ngozi Onwurah. ■ Families. Series producer: Farrukh Dhondy. ■ Home Away from Home. Director: Maureen Blackwood, produced by Sankofa Film and Video. ■ Seven Songs for Malcolm X. Director: John Akomfrah, produced by Black Audio Film Collective. ■ The

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Attendant. Directed and written by Isaac Julien. ■ What Ya’ Looking At. Director: Trix Worrell. Isaac Julien, The Attendant, film still, 1993.

Quotes:

ajamu: Through my

photography I perform a kind of visual surgery. With my camera I edit from the black male body stories about sex, race, and gender. Sexual interplay, eroticism, pleasure and desire laced with a touch of humour.38 ■ gavin jantjes: Like most other African artists in a similar position, my emigration

to Europe happened in the period of late modernism. The modernist centres of the art world were attractive, they were visual and intellectual provocations to my generation. Today’s critical readings make clear just how ambivalent modernism was as an art historical movement, particularly in its dealings with otherness and cultural di≈erence. For an African artist to enter this cultural arena without being ambivalent about it, was tantamount to relinquishing his or her identity, and to accepting unquestioningly the evaluations and definitions modernism gave to the culture of Africa. ¶ The scenario in which I would much rather see the contemporary African artist placed is therefore not that of the roller-coaster, but analogous to a more Ajamu, Bodybuilder in Bra, 1990.

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rural setting; where the thrills and the spills do

1993

not come blind, but result from calculated risks, where the millennium signals a station at which African artists get o≈ the roller coaster, and cut their own historical inroads into the jungle of art history.39

1994

Exhibitions:

Elements of Eve, 198 Gallery,

London. With Claudette Dunkley and Sheila Seeparsaud-Jones. ■ From Beyond the Pale, Irish MoMA, Dublin. With Vong Phaophanit and Maud Sulter. ■ Home and Away: Seven Jamaican Artists, October Gallery, London. With Eugene Palmer and Danijah Tafari. ■ Quinta Bienal de la Habana (Fifth Havana Biennale), Cuba. With Rasheed Araeen, Chila Kumari Burman, Sunil Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Lubaina Himid, Gavin Jantjes, Symrath Patti, and Keith Piper. ■ Sculptors’ Drawings Presented by the Weltkunst Foundation, Tate Gallery, London. With Shirazeh Houshiary and Anish Kapoor. ■ Seen/Unseen, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool. With Uzo Egonu, Lubaina Himid, Olu Oguibe, Folake Shoga, and Yinka Shonibare. ■ Stated Values: An Autumn Salon of Fine Paintings, Ceramics and Sculptures, Gallery Forty-Seven, London, a 198 Gallery Presentation. With Hassan Aliyu, Chris Bramble, George Kelly, Eugene Palmer, Anya Patel, Raksha Patel, and Frances Richardson. ■ Time Machine: Ancient Egypt and Contemporary Art, British Museum in association with iniva, London. ■ Us an’ Dem, The Storey Institute, Lancaster. With Faisal Abdu’Allah, Denzil Forrester, and Tam Joseph. ■ Visions of Darkness: A Photographic Representation of Urban Youth Culture, 198 Gallery, London. With Jennie Baptiste

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and Eddie Otchere. ■ Voyager: An Exploration of Asian Legacy and Contemporary Life, Rochdale Art Gallery, Rochdale. ■ Walking on Sunshine, 198 Gallery, London. With Hassan Aliyu, Judith Henry, Meena Jafarey, Michael O’Connor, Eugene Palmer, and Johannes Phokela. ■ With Your Own Face On, City Museum & Art Gallery, Plymouth. With Chila Kumari Burman and Rita Keegan.

Sociopolitical:

iniva, the Institute of Interna-

tional Visual Arts, is launched at the Tate Gallery, Millbank, London, with the conference “A New Internationalism.” ■ Welcome to the Jungle: New Institute of International Visual Arts, agenda, 1999–2000.

Positions in Black Cultural Studies is written by Kobena Mercer and published by Routledge. Films: A Man of No Importance. Director: Suri Krishnamma. ■ B. D. Women. Director: Inge Blackman. ■ Bandit Queen. Director: Shekhar Kapur. ■ Mama Lou. Director: Maybelle Peters. ■ Rhythms. Director: Ruhul Amin. ■ The Darker Side of Black. Directed and written by Isaac Julien. ■ Welcome II the Ter-

rordome. Director: Ngozi Onwurah. Quotes: edward lucie-smith: Before the great tide of Indian immigration had fully begun to flow, the outsider status of the Indian artist could be an advantage rather than a handicap in Britain. During the 1950s, for example, two painters of Indian origin were prominent in London—Francis Newton Souza (born 1924) and the late Avinash Chandra (1931–92). [Rasheed] Araeen [in the

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exhibition The Other Story] seems to attribute their failure to sustain initially brilliant artistic reputations to simple prejudice, but the situation was surely more complicated. Both artists are figurative expressionists; both make use of imagery drawn from traditional Indian sources, ranging from Khaligat bazaar paintings to Tantric diagrams. And both su≈ered from the backlash against overtly emotional, densely textured painting triggered by the rise, first of Pop Art, then of various types of Minimalism. ¶ In addition, both artists abandoned London for New York at a crucial moment in their careers—Chandra in 1965 (he returned in 1971) and Souza in 1967. The break in continuity delivered a fatal blow to what had, until then, been rising reputations. In 1962, for example, Chandra was the subject of a film made for Britain’s then most prestigious arts television programme, Monitor. Souza was British representative in the Guggenheim International Award in 1958, and in 1962 the respected critic Edward Mullins published a monograph about him. After his move to America he never completely vanished from sight. In India he is now one of the best-known modern artists—there were major retrospectives in Delhi and Bombay in 1987.40

1995

Exhibitions:

Boxer, Walsall Museum & Art

Gallery, Walsall. With Keith Piper and Ingrid Pollard. ■ Care and Control, Hackney Hospital, London. With Virginia Nimarkoh and Donald Rodney. ■ Cocido y Crudo, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid. With Mona Hatoum, Vong Phaophanit, and

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Keith Piper. ■ Farewell to Shadowland: A Series of Three Monographic Shows, 198 Gallery, London. With Denzil Forrester, Joy Gregory, and Glasford Hunter. ■ Freedom, Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow. With Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé, Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Mona Hatoum, and Keith Piper. ■ Journeys West: Contemporary Paintings, Sculpture and Installation, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester. With Gang Chen, Ting-Fay Ho, Xiaopeng Huang, Christopher Ku, Kwai Lau, Moses Lee, Kim Lim, Hale Man, Wenbiao Mao, Jian Jun Xi, and Ying Sheng Yang, and Cai Yuan. ■ Mirage: Enigmas of Race and Desire, Institute of Isaac Julien, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, film still, 1996. Photograph by Elspeth Collier.

Contemporary Art, London. With Sonia Boyce, Nina Edge, Ronald Fraser-Munro, Eddie George, Renée Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Isaac Julien, Keith Khan, Susan Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Trevor Mathison, and Steve McQueen. ■ Moti Roti Presents: The Seed, the Root, Brick Lane and Spitalfields, London. With Steve Ouditt and Ali Zaidi. ■ Original, Gasworks, London. Curated by Sonia Boyce. With Marc Kearey, Virginia Nimarkoh, Johannes Phokela, and Yinka Shonibare. ■ Phaophanit and Piper, Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham. With Vong Phaophanit and Keith Piper. ■ Photogenetic: Reviewing the Lens of History, Street Level Gallery, Glasgow. With Sonia Boyce, Chila Kumari Burman, Lubaina Himid, Pratibha Parmar, Ingrid Pollard, and Delta Streete. ■ Portable Fabric Shelters, London

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Printworks Trust, London. ■ Revelations, Bonnington Galleries, Nottingham. With Faisal Abdu’Allah and Clive Allen. ■ Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, Tate Gallery, London. With Hamad Butt and Mona Hatoum. ■ Self-Evident, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. With Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé, Ingrid Pollard, and Maxine Walker. ■ The British Art Show 4, South Bank Centre Touring Exhibition, London. With Permindar Kaur, Steve McQueen, and Chris Ofili. ■ The Caribbean Connection, Islington Arts Factory, London. With Frank Bowling, John Lyons, Bill Ming, Ronald Moody, and Aubrey Williams. ■ The Impossible Science of Being: Dialogues between Anthropology and Photography, The Photographers’ Gallery, London. With Faisal Abdu’Allah, Zarina Bhimji, and Dave Lewis. ■ I Am Not What I Am, six solo exhibitions of the work of British Chinese artists at

various venues across the United Kingdom. Curated by Barbara Hunt. Sociopolitical: Aavaa moves from Bristol to London, reestablishing itself at the University of East London. ■ Black Women Artists study group is formed. Films: Brothers in Trouble. Director: Udayan Prasad. ■ Five Easy Pieces. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Passing. Director: Erika Tan. ■ That Rush! (Williams on Limbaugh). Director: Isaac Julien.

Quotes:

jean

fisher: I was struck in one of my daydreaming digressions that pass for “serious” reading by a thought suggested by Michel de Certeau’s essay, “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals,’” to the e≈ect: Where I am visible, I cannot speak. This seemed to have some rel-

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evance to two problems in considering the di÷cult relations still existing between art from the black or non-European artist and the mainstream art system—its historiography, market, aesthetic and critical values—and so-called multiculturalism: one relating to the curatorial field and the other to art itself. To those of us watching the response of the galleries and museums, it has seemed as if the demand to end cultural marginality could be solved simply by exhibiting more non-European artists although on a selective and representative basis provided that they demonstrated appropriate signs of cultural di≈erence. Globe-trotting has become a popular curatorial pastime: over the past couple of years we have had “New Art from” the Indian sub-continent and China, and this year Cuba and Africa. Geo-ethnic mapping maintains the separation between the art practices of the European and non-European, whilst masking the economic and power relations inherent in such projects. . . . Above all, from my point of view, it evades the complex negotiations which must take place between European aesthetic languages and those of the rest of the world. ¶ For the West to frame and evaluate all cultural productions through its own criteria and stereotypes of otherness is to reduce the work to a spectacle of essentialist racial or ethnic typology and ignore its individual insights and their universal applications—a treatment not meted out to the work of white European artists.41 ■ gilane tawadros: Writers and critics have been searching for an

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appropriate language with which first of all to describe and then to critique the various and varied interventions being made by Black artists in the arena of British visual culture. ¶ Like the process of unravelling the Sphinx’s riddle, the process of deconstruction and

critical analysis pro≈ers a tacit prize, that of resolution, of a single answer which will sweep away the debris of established discourses and hegemonic narratives to reveal an underlying universal truth. The seductive and compelling nature of this prize harbours particular dangers for those of us who have been, and still are, searching for an adequate critical language with which to articulate the ideas contained within the work of contemporary Black artists.42 ■ marina warner: In the large scale work commissioned for Antwerp ’93 [titled 1822–Now], she [Zarina Bhimji] actively engaged with theories of eugenics, which in the nineteenth century included human beings in the scope of its inquiries into breeding and cross-breeding. Zarina asked over two hundred people of mixed race to sit to her camera. Again, she used a scientific method—a kind of taxonomy of faces—to put ideas about history and identity to the question. She took another cue from Julia Margaret Cameron, who wrote that she wanted to catch the souls of her sitters in her portraits. Zarina set her subjects before her 4" x 5" camera for halfan-hour, the kind of long exposure familiar in the Victorian era. But whereas Cameron used clamps to keep her models still, Zarina did not, and furthermore, after talking to

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them for ten minutes, then left them alone in the room for the rest of the time. She hoped in this way that their features would relax and she would capture their most characteristic look, their “soul.” The wall of faces that results reverses many of the norms of portraiture: again, they seem subaqueous, twilit, mysterious, only tentatively visible, suggesting hauntingly the fugitive, the precarious, the provisional character of any statement about a person. They also issue a powerful challenge to all racial stereotyping, in an oblique but intense criticism of commonplace attitudes (which continues work Zarina Bhimji made at the end of the Eighties about representations of black people in packaging and advertisements). As the features dissolve and blur, so they erase any generalised preconceptions about genetic predictability.43 ■ melanie keen: Increasingly, the knowledge that history is a series of fables inspires us to question these fictions. The fact that the same story can be told over and over again, with the emphasis constantly shifting, has made us expect less from historical truth and move from our own stories. These stories are constructed at the point where history and personal history collide, especially since the urge to document our daily lives with the aid of technology is a persistent and recurrent one. Thus, by retrieving the past we can obtain an understanding of the subjective present. Dan Cameron in his catalogue essay History as Fiction states: “Once one’s faith in history is shaken, it is almost impossible to go

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back.” While the journey backwards is indeed a complicated task, it is not only possible but imperative. ¶ [Faisal] Abdu’Allah & [Clive] Allen’s photographic work, The Last Supper, 1995, references a subject that has historically been represented in painting. The quality of labour and dexterity in painting, however, is here upset by utilising photography—thus questioning the idea of the “original” and its authenticity. Photographic representation is no more truthful than other forms of representation, yet on occasion it is crucial to supplant one “truth” with another to disrupt the notion of history as a linear and fixed narrative.44

1996 Exhibitions:

From Negative Stereotype to

Positive Image, Watershed Media Centre, Bristol. With Vanley Burke and Claudette Holmes. ■ Imagined Communities, South Bank Centre Touring Exhibition, London. With Denzil Forrester and Yinka Shonibare. ■ Picturing Blackness in British Art, Tate Gallery, London. With Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Ronald Moody, and F. N. Souza.

Films:

Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask. Director: Isaac Julien. ■ Just Above My Head. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Stage. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue. Director: Steve McQueen. Quotes: lola young: Part of black film-makers’ project has been to refuse the positions of libidinous primitive, colonial sub-

Sutapa Biswas, Untitled (The Trials and Tribulations of Mickey Baker), 1997.

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ject, alien interloper and threat to the nation. I would argue that the look, when it is seized and returned, recasts its parameters and scope of vision: thus the look has the potential to be de-colonized. In Pressure, Black Joy and Burning an Illusion the imperial eye is denied its narcissistic concentration on white subjectivity as the look is not turned on white people but through them. They are not the focal point but a means through which to view both intercultural and intracultural relations.45 ■ rosemary betterton: The use, and implicit critique, of academic life drawing is central to [Lesley] Sanderson’s work and in this context, realism of style becomes ironic. Life drawing, traditionally associated with recording truth to appearance, is undercut by frequent transition between di≈erent orders of representation within a single frame. Part of its sheer pleasure is her drawing skills which make frequent transitions between densely worked areas and delicately deft outlines. The drawing itself also functions semiotically to signify both political and personal meanings. In He Took Fabulous Trips, 1990, patterns of unequal global exchange are woven into the image of her mother and father’s naked and sandalled feet. “Exotic” textiles produced by cheap female labour in countries such as Malaysia and Thailand appear initially as pure decoration. On closer inspection, small squares of brightly painted “fabric” scattered across the drawn surface reveal themselves to be patterned with a repeat motif of an ex-colonial type in a pith helmet and dark

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1996

glasses. Sanderson uses the physical immediacy of such precisely detailed objects, the pattern in a textile, a palm leaf fan, a Chinese bowl, to trace the relations between self and Other, interconnected fragments of western and eastern identity. In this “portrait,” the “Western focus on the face of the sitter is replaced by drawings of her parents’ feet—colonising masculinity and colonised femininity” [Jane Beckett in Lesley Sanderson: These Colours Run (Wrexham: Wrexham Library Art Centre), 1994, 12–14]. But if these feet signal di≈erences in power, they also suggest a certain complementary intimacy. Two distinct drawing styles are used on both figures—one delicate and linear, the other strongly modelled in chiaroscuro—which simultaneously reveal and subvert divisions of gender and culture.46 ■ steve mcqueen: I’m in the position I am because of what other people have done and I’m grateful, for sure. But at the same time, I am black, yes. I’m British as well. But as Miles Davis said, “So What?” I don’t say that flippantly but like

Steve McQueen, Deadpan, film still, 1997.

anyone else I deal with certain things in my work because of who I am. I make work in order to make people think.47 ■ chris darke: [Mona] Hatoum’s videos frequently employ material from her work in other media to strike new, unsettling layers of juxtapositions. Such material may derive from previous performance/installation pieces, as with

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the handheld black and white Super8 documentation footage of the performance piece Under Seige (seven hours naked and enclosed in a mud-filled perspex container at the London Film-makers’ Co-op in 1982). Incorporated in Changing Parts, these images intrude into and overwhelm the atmosphere of formal beauty and nostalgic remembrance of the first part of the tape. Equally, So Much I Want to Say was conceived as a live work made specifically for a Sloscan transmission between Vancouver and Vienna. The piece therefore exists as documentation and single screen text, with both elements contributing to the suggestion that, behind the global, electronic ether, in which talk is cheap, plentiful and deafeningly profuse, is a basic, unbreachable incommunicability. But the hands around Hatoum’s mouth are male; incommunicability is seen to reside as much in processes of coercion and structures of power as it does in the Beckettian injunction to “proceed by aporia” implied by the mantra “So much I want to say.”48 ■ ian iqbal rashid: [Alia] Syed freely borrows strategies from several schools of practice and theory. Fatima’s Letter with its layering of imagery and meanings becomes at times a conceptual project, while the way in which it has been shot and edited to the rhythm of passing trains (evoking film passing through the projector) suggests a structural approach. Swan (1997), a short sensual film using repeated images of a swan preening itself, reveals her abilities as a formalist. The influence of race and feminist politics and

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theory and the issue-based work which those movements generated is apparent in The Watershed (1994).49

1997 Exhibitions: Out of the Blue, Glasgow Museums. With

Faisal Abdu’Allah, Sher Rajah, and Zineb Sedira. ■ Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996, Caribbean Cultural Center, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. ■ The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. With Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, and Keith Piper.

Sociopolitical:

“Re-inventing Britain” conference at Bruni Gallery,

London. ■ Aavaa organizes a symposium on “The Living Archive,” Tate Gallery (London).

Films:

Catch. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Dancehall

Black Film Bulletin (Bumper Windrush Special) 5/6, no. 4/1, 1997–98. Courtesy of Horace Ové.

Queen. Director: Don Letts. ■ Deadpan. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in Secrets and Lies. ■ My Son the Fanatic. Director: Udayan Prasad, written by Hanif Kureishi. Quotes: mona hatoum: At the beginning it was important to think about the black struggle as a total political struggle. There are common political forces and attitudes that discriminate against people. In the same way as feminism started o≈ with this totalizing concept of “sisterhood,” and then we ended up with many feminisms, if you like. The black struggle became more diversified once the basic issues were es-

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tablished. And blackness here is not to do with the colour of your skin but a political stance. In the early 1980s I don’t think I saw my practice as part of the black struggle, I was doing my own thing. I have always worked in an intuitive way and couldn’t see my work as serving any group, political or otherwise. I was basically trying to deal with an environment that I had experienced as hostile and intolerant and eventually those feelings began to pervade the work—and still do.50 ■ david a. bailey: To understand what lies at the heart of [the works of ] Zarina Bhimji, Ingrid Pollard, Keith Piper and Faisal Abdu’ Allah, we need to look at 1980s Britain where a range of artistic practices and strategies were developed in response to a variety of discourses. These artists’ works “fuse” together two important movements in British visual culture: the “pioneering” image text work of Victor Burgin and Alan Sekula alongside what was emerging from the black photography movement as represented by black photographers such as Sunil Gupta, Vincent Stokes, Maxine Walker, David Lewis, Brenda Agard, Mumtaz Karimjee and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. The major element that brought these two movements together was the privileging of non-realist modes of representation over the realist documentary image—the beginnings of what is commonly known today as “issue based work.” ¶ By the mid-eighties, within black cultural politics the campaign to contest negative stereotypes with positive images had moved on to an enquiry into the politics of the image itself.51

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1997–1998

1998 Exhibitions: Chris Ofili wins the Turner Prize. Films: Babymother. Director: Julien Henriques. ■ Barrage. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Drumroll. Director: Steve McQueen. ■ Speak Like a Child. Director: John Akomfrah. ■ White Elephant. Director: Steve McQueen. Quotes: guy brett:

Chris Ofili, No Woman No Cry, 1998. Pencil, acrylic paint, oil paint, polyester resin, paper collage, map pins, and elephant dung on linen with elephant dung supports. Courtesy of the artist.

A consideration of participatory and collection experiments which evolved in Britain . . . shows what they had in common with Argentinian and Brazilian work in bringing art out of institutional confines, but also some piquant di≈erences. ¶ David Medalla saw his participatory works as arising directly from his kinetic experiments of the sixties, for example his Bubble Machines (1964). The artist’s relinquishing of control, the surrender to chance, and the allowance of natural forces to go beyond artistic choices excited him. . . . Although he was already giving performances in the 1960s, Medalla felt the need also for an object or installation, potentially open to the passer-by and chance encounter, which could focus creative energies within contemplative time and space. . . . ¶ In Porcelain Wedding [1974] a couple lay down naked and were encased in clay over their bodies by the other participants. The clay was decorated with linear designs and then cut into small squares to be baked and threaded together to form. . . . As a prelude to the symbolic wedding visitors were invited to make clay sculptures alluding to the

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seven days of creation: a form of “o≈ering.” Porcelain Wedding could also be seen as a fantastic parody of the life drawing class. The relationship between “artist” and “model” was revitalised by the hands-on collective game of molding the art material directly to the body, obliterating the element of cold detachment and surveillance, and at the same time becoming fused with the loving union of the couple in the marriage. . . . In A Stitch in Time [1968], people were invited to sew anything they liked on long sheets of cotton. Installed di≈erently each time, the work filled the room with a nonrigid, hanging, hammock-like structure, incorporating the sheets, the multitude of bobbin of coloured thread, and the needles. It was easy to enter (“people can walk in and out of my situations,” the artist explained), and the invitation to sew took away all preconceptions associated with high art, yet the ambience exerted subtle psychological pressures. . . . In place of an artist’s traditional “achieved work,” here was a growing kinetic model of a creative process in which artist and spectator, individual and collective, fabricator and material, reciprocally produced each other.52 ■ deborah bright: Black British photographer Ajamu photographs a black body-builder with his arms raised, displaying to advantage the beautifully sculpted and modeled surfaces of his upper back and arms. An ordinary white bra, its tired elastic indicating repeated use, strains against its hooks to accommodate the model’s broad torso. The cultural fetishizing of

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the black male body and its “monstrous” phallic presence is utterly decoded and undone by this humble scrap of women’s intimate apparel and the image is stunningly sexy. In his self-portrait of 1993, Ajamu again references mainstream art photography’s established fascination with the black male nude (e.g. Van Vechten, Mapplethorpe), but here the photographer shows us his active intervention as both the erotic object of his own gaze and as self-pleasuring subject.53 ■ yinka shonibare: I want to examine the transgressive qualities of some recent British art, placing particular emphasis on how earlier generations have helped to release the shackles of race and gender for a younger generation of female and black artists who, while very much aware of their identities, have developed a new confidence to be playful and even ironic in the face of great expectations by a now weary Left establishment. This cheeky monkey approach to art can be seen in the work of artists like Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Steve McQueen and, to a point, in my own practice. I too would eventually succumb to cheeky titles and the sigh of relief which goes with the freedom of not always having to be didactic. Mummy and Daddy Conceptualism, “can we go out to play now?”54 ■ nikos papastergiadis and gilane tawadros: Nikos Papaster-

giadis: One of iniva’s central goals is to broaden

Mayling To, A Cute Puncture, 1998. Wood, foam, fabric, polyester, acupuncture needles. 65 x 60 x 97 cm.

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the cultural aesthetic and get beyond the modernist claims of universalism. But the problem with broadening is that it might move away from rigidity into a sort of openended space which is just as destructive, because it moves into flaccidity. Gilane Tawad-

ros: I would question whether broadening necessarily leads to that kind of open-ended, “anything goes” space, or to use Nelly Richard’s phrase to an “economy of sameness,” where things become so equalised that they become undi≈erentiated. I’m more interested in creating a space for the particular and the specific but not so that they are completely self-referential. I’m more interested in how a specific experience and a particular expression can be mediated in such a way that it finds points of reference with other, very di≈erent experiences.55

1999 Exhibitions: Africa by Africa, Barbican Centre, London. ■ Empire and I, Pitshanger Manor Gallery, London. With Colin Darke, Lorrice Douglas, Alana Jelinek, Anthony Key, Niema

Damien O’Donnell, East Is East, film still, 1999. Courtesy of Channel 4 Television.

Khan, Tertia Longmire, Shaheen Merali, Rea, and Erika Tan. ■ Steve McQueen wins the Turner Prize. Films: East Is East. Written by Ayub Khan Din. Grosses over £10 million in United Kingdom ■ Three. Directed and written by Isaac Julien. ■ From China to Chintz. Director: Erika Tan.

2000 Quotes: diana yeh:

In this light, the notion “British-Chinese” can be seen as both a burden and a blessing,

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enabling the artists in the embryonic formation of a “British-Chinese” consciousness to erect a temporary platform within the current climate of cultural diversity, whilst exploring the limits of investigations into cultural identity. This is not to dismiss the very real concerns of their political strategies but to prioritise art over ethnicity, by questioning the schism between subjectivity, the construction of identity and its final representation. The tension between public and private, the gap between past and present, and the constant movement between lived, imaginary and represented identities renders the attempt to confine their works within a single term almost impossible. Whilst we are often provided with representations of fragmented and conflicting identities, this is balanced by a knowingness, a humour and irony, and a final rejection of the significance of cultural identity and ethnicity. Whatever the case, it is clear that neither these artists nor their works can be neatly contained within the signifier “British-Chinese.”56

Notes 1. Signals, no. 1 (August 1964): 1. 2. Letter to Bryan King, 30 November, in Anne Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London: New Beacon Books, 1992), 47. 3. Quoted in ibid. 4. Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 110–113. First published in French, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1952. First translated into English, New York: Grove Press, 1967. 5. “Alien Gods,” in Colour Culture and Consciousness (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974). 6. The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976), 6.

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7. “Preliminary Notes for a black manifesto,” in Making Myself Visible (London: Kala Press, 1984), 76. Originally published in Black Phoenix, no. 1 (January 1978) and in Studio International 988, no. 1 (1978). 8. Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995), 58–59. Original edition: New York: Pantheon, 1978. 9. “Conversation with David Medalla,” in Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, no. 3 (spring 1979): 16. 10. Quoted in Eddie Chambers, “Black Art Now,” in Third Text, no. 15 (summer 1991): 94. 11. Based on excerpts from “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, ed., The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 212. 12. “The Other Question . . . Homi K. Bhabha Reconsiders the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24, no. 6 (November/December 1983): 16. 13. “Africans and Afro Caribbeans: A Personal View,” Ten.8, no. 16 (1984): 55. 14. Catalogue statement in The Thin Black Line, exhibition catalogue (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1985). 15. “Black Women and Representation: An Introduction,” Undercut, special double issue on women’s work, no. 14/15 (summer 1985): 60. 16. “Third Cinema at Edinburgh: Reflections on a Pioneering Event,” Screen 27, no. 6 (November– December 1986): 95–96. 17. “Minimal Selves,” in Identity (London: ica Documents 6, 1987), 45. 18. Introduction to D-Max: A Photographic Exhibition, exhibition catalogue (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1987). 19. Foreword to The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art, exhibition catalogue (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1987). 20. Introduction to The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art, exhibition catalogue (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 1987). 21. “Traces of Ecstasy,” Ten.8, no. 28, special issue: Rage & Desire (1988): 36. 22. “Cruciality and the Frog’s Perspective: An Agenda of Di≈iculties for the Black Arts Movement in Britain,” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988): 35. 23. An interview with Coco Fusco, “A Black Avant-Garde? Notes on Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa,” in Coco Fusco, Young, British, and Black (New York: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 1988). 24. “Black Art: A Discussion,” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988): 55–56. 25. “Formalist Art and the Black Experience,” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988): 78. 26. “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (autumn 1988): 45. 27. “Will the Art Critic Please Step Forward,” Spare Rib: A Women’s Liberation Magazine, no. 188 (March 1988): 10. 28. “Who Claims Alterity?” in Barbara Kruger, ed., Remaking History: Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 4 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 273.

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29. “Black Pride and Prejudice” [review of The Other Story exhibition], Evening Standard (London), 4 January 1990, 25. 30. Postmodernism, Politics and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 187. 31. “Black Feminism and the Politics of Articulation,” in J. Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Di=erence (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 119–120. 32. Artist’s statement in The British Art Show 1990, exhibition catalogue (London: South Bank Centre, 1990), 100. 33. “Photography, Sexuality & Cultural Di≈erence: The Emergence of Black, Lesbian and Gay Identities in the UK,” SF Camerawork Quarterly (autumn 1990): 20. 34. “The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis: Art in Britain of the Immigration,” Third Text, no. 15 (summer 1991): 86. 35. “Dark & Lovely: Notes on Black Gay Image-Making,” Ten.8 2, no. 1, special issue: Bodies of Excess (spring 1991): 79–80. 36. “Issues Surrounding the Representation of the Naked Body of a Woman,” Feminist Art News 3, no. 8 (1991): 12. 37. “Pan-American Postnationalism: Another World Order,” in Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture: Dia Center for the Arts Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 8 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 284. 38. Interview with Susan Banton, Autograph Newsletter (summer 1993). 39. “The Artist as a Cultural Salmon: A View from the Frying Pan,” Third Text, no. 23, special issue: africa (summer 1993): 103–104. 40. Race, Sex and Gender in Contemporary Art (London: Art Books International, 1994), 78–82. 41. “Some Thoughts on ‘Contaminations,’” Third Text, no. 32 (autumn 1995): 4. 42. “The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Black Women Artists in Britain,” in Katy Deepwell, ed., New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 27. 43. “Zarina Bhimji: Secret Ceremonies of Innocence,” in Zarina Bhimji, exhibition catalogue (Cambridge, England: Kettle’s Yard, 1995). 44. “Faisal Abdu’Allah & Clive Allen,” in Make Believe, exhibition catalogue (London: Royal College of Art, 1995), 52. 45. Fear of the Dark: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London: Routledge, 1996), 152. 46. Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996), 169. 47. “Let’s Get Physical,” interview with Patricia Bickers, Art Monthly (December 1996–January 1997): 5. 48. “Mona Hatoum,” in A Directory of British Film and Video Artists (Luton: University of Luton Press and the Arts Council of England, 1996), 76–77. 49. “Alia Syed,” in A Directory of British Film and Video Artists (Luton: University of Luton Press and the Arts Council of England, 1996), 188. 50. “Michael Archer in Conversation with Mona Hatoum,” in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, and Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), 14. 51. “Black Photographic Practices and Europe,” in David A. Bailey et al., On the Bright Side of Life (Berlin: ngbk, 1997), 78.

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52. “Life Strategies: Overview and Selection. Buenos Aires/London/Rio de Janeiro/Santiago de Chile, 1960–1980,” in Paul Schimmel, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979 (New York: moca/Thames and Hudson, 1998), 213–214. 53. The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (London: Routledge, 1998), 145. 54. “Poetic Licence,” in David Burrows, ed., Who’s Afraid of Red White and Blue: Attitudes to Popular and Mass Culture, Celebrity, Alternative and Critical Practice and Identity Politics in Recent British Art (Birmingham, England: Article Press, 1998), 71. 55. “Global Proposals: A Conversation with Gilane Tawadros,” in Nikos Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998), 138. 56. “Ethnicities on the Move: ‘British-Chinese’ Art—Identity, Subjectivity, Politics and Beyond,” Critical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (summer 2000): 65–91.

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Leon Wainwright Introduction

Some brief editorial notes are necessary as a guide and explanation for this bibliographic section. The range of published materials and sources relevant to the interests and concerns voiced in this volume is broad and varied. Some thematizing and structuring of this complex and overlapping literature goes some of the way to making it more accessible. Here we have adopted just four themed areas. By no means bounded categories, many of the titles could easily fit in two or more of the focus areas, and users should be encouraged to maintain and explore points of connection between sections. Material published during the 1980s has been privileged in the selection, but not isolated; certain foothill titles from the late 1970s and a number of texts that emerged in the 1990s serve in crucial ways to frame, reframe, and enhance the so-called critical decade of the 1980s, and so deserve space. Attention has been paid to chronological spread, allowing readers to register continuities in debates and practices and trace temporal paths in and between historical moments as they emerged. The range of visual media has also been considered to capture the extraordinary breadth of the period’s visual technologies and processes. Gendered and sexualized positions, practices, and identi-

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ties have been kept boldly in view, as have the range of ethnicities—the “shades of black”—that produced the period as a multishaped one. In the first section, “Histories and Positions,” predominantly polemical pieces jostle among historical surveys (themselves prone to an interpretive “assembling” and historicizing) and debates around criticism and its importance. A number of influential texts greatly enabled these discourses, such as Fanon’s writings, and adjacent theoretical discussions that bear little or no direct references to visual practices and makers, such as Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture and vanguard pieces in postcolonial theory from those such as Gayatri Spivak. These strands in some measure present a discontinuous ground for discussing problems around subjectivity (in terms of ethnicities, identities, and their politics) and the place of the visual in enabling these practices and their histories. The second theme is “Visual Practices,” listing titles specific to visual media, for example, filmmaking by Sankofa, collaborative producers such as Black Audio Film Collective, and discussions about photography, performance, installation, painting, and so on. Some concerns with visual tropes and technologies, such as Mark Sealy on “hybridity,” also appear, with preference given to texts that closely reference examples of actual visual practice. Critical accounts of or by individual artists have been drawn in, such as Sue Hubbard on Saleem Arif and Frank Bowling on formalism and black experience. Space is also given to artists’ monographs published to stand alone rather than as an accompaniment to a particular exhibition, such as the substantial number from iniva. The third section, “Exhibitions and Display,” includes certain milestone shows, survey exhibitions, and important artists’ monographs produced to accompany public events. Debates around the poetics and politics of display also figure, pointing to the growing interest in curatorial practice as it developed during the decade. Some critical and press responses to significant exhibitions appear too, such as the flurry of reaction to The Other Story. The final theme is “Institutions, Policies, and Reports,” occupied with material produced by or relevant to key public institutions influencing the arts, such as the Arts Council of Great Britain, Greater London Council, and Greater London Arts. There are also responses from artists, curators, and others to funding patterns and other initiatives. Some material on the institutions themselves has also been included, detailing

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debates around the life of iniva and Aavaa and publishing houses such as Kala Press (responsible for the journal Third Text). This section also carries related commentary on issues of public patronage, multiculturalism, and visibility. Histories and Positions Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Araeen, Rasheed. “The Other Immigrant: The Experiences and Achievements of Afro-Asian Artists in the Metropolis.” Third Text, no. 15 (summer 1991): 17–28. —. “Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse.” Third Text, no. 6 (spring 1989): 3–14. —. “‘Paki Bastard’: Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person.” Black Phoenix, no. 2 (summer 1978): 12–17. —. “Preliminary Notes for a black manifesto.” Black Phoenix, no. 1 (January 1978): 3–12. —. “Problems Facing Black Artists.” Art Monthly, no. 26 (1979). Barker, Martin. The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe. London: Junction Books, 1982. Barnett, Pennina. “Artists and Racism.” Artists Newsletter (December 1987). Bhabha, Homi K. ica Documents 6: Identity. London: ica, 1987. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. —. “The Other Question.” In Francis Barker et al., eds., Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976–1984. London: Methuen, 1986. —, ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Biswas, Sutapa. “The Presence of Black Women.” Art Monthly, no. 123 (February 1989): 11. Bourne, Stephen. Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television 1896–1996. London: Cassell and the Arts Council of England, 1998. Burman, Chila Kumari. “There Have Always Been Great Black Women Artists.” In Hilary Robinson, ed., Visibly Female, Feminism and Art: An Anthology. London: Camden Press, 1987. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1982. Chambers, Eddie. “The Black Art Group.” Artrage, no. 14 (autumn 1986): 28–29. —. “The Emergence and Development of Black Visual Arts Activity in England between 1981 and 1986: Press and Public Responses.” PhD diss., Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1998. —. Run Through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers. London: iniva, 1999. Chambers, Eddie, Tam Joseph, and Juginda Lamba, eds. The Artpack: A History of Black Artists in Britain. London: Haringey Arts Council, 1988. Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art. Kingston-uponThames, England: Dangeroo, 1985. Doy, Gen. Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity. London: I.B.Tauris, 2000.

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debates around the life of iniva and Aavaa and publishing houses such as Kala Press (responsible for the journal Third Text). This section also carries related commentary on issues of public patronage, multiculturalism, and visibility. Histories and Positions Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Araeen, Rasheed. “The Other Immigrant: The Experiences and Achievements of Afro-Asian Artists in the Metropolis.” Third Text, no. 15 (summer 1991): 17–28. —. “Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mudhouse.” Third Text, no. 6 (spring 1989): 3–14. —. “‘Paki Bastard’: Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person.” Black Phoenix, no. 2 (summer 1978): 12–17. —. “Preliminary Notes for a black manifesto.” Black Phoenix, no. 1 (January 1978): 3–12. —. “Problems Facing Black Artists.” Art Monthly, no. 26 (1979). Barker, Martin. The New Racism: Conservatives and the Ideology of the Tribe. London: Junction Books, 1982. Barnett, Pennina. “Artists and Racism.” Artists Newsletter (December 1987). Bhabha, Homi K. ica Documents 6: Identity. London: ica, 1987. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. —. “The Other Question.” In Francis Barker et al., eds., Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference, 1976–1984. London: Methuen, 1986. —, ed. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge, 1990. Biswas, Sutapa. “The Presence of Black Women.” Art Monthly, no. 123 (February 1989): 11. Bourne, Stephen. Black in the British Frame: Black People in British Film and Television 1896–1996. London: Cassell and the Arts Council of England, 1998. Burman, Chila Kumari. “There Have Always Been Great Black Women Artists.” In Hilary Robinson, ed., Visibly Female, Feminism and Art: An Anthology. London: Camden Press, 1987. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1982. Chambers, Eddie. “The Black Art Group.” Artrage, no. 14 (autumn 1986): 28–29. —. “The Emergence and Development of Black Visual Arts Activity in England between 1981 and 1986: Press and Public Responses.” PhD diss., Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1998. —. Run Through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers. London: iniva, 1999. Chambers, Eddie, Tam Joseph, and Juginda Lamba, eds. The Artpack: A History of Black Artists in Britain. London: Haringey Arts Council, 1988. Dabydeen, David. Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art. Kingston-uponThames, England: Dangeroo, 1985. Doy, Gen. Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity. London: I.B.Tauris, 2000.

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Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. London: Pluto Press, 1986. First published 1967. Fernando, Sonali. “Blackened Images.” Bazaar, no. 12 (1990): 14–16. Fisher, Jean, ed. Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts. London: Kala Press and iniva, 1994. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 1984. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. —. “It Ain’t Where You’re From, It’s Where You’re at . . . The Dialectics of Diaspora Identification.” Third Text, no. 13 (winter 1990): 3–16. —. “Nothing but Sweat Inside My Hand: Diaspora Aesthetics and Black Arts in Britain.” In Kobena Mercer, ed., ica Documents 7: Black Film/British Cinema. London: ica, 1988. —. Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989. —. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987. Gupta, Sunil, ed. Disrupted Borders: An Intervention in Definitions of Boundaries. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1993. Hall, Stuart. “The After-life of Frantz Fanon.” In Alan Read, ed., The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. London: ica and Bay Press, 1996. —. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” In Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies. London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. —. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Jonathan Rutherford, ed., Identity: Community, Culture, Di=erence. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. —. “Minimal Selves.” In Homi K. Bhabha, ed., ica Documents 6: Identity. London: ica, 1987. —. “New Ethnicities.” In Kobena Mercer, ed., ica Documents 7: Black Film/British Cinema. London: ica, 1988. —. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” In Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992. Hall, Stuart, and Tony Je≈erson, eds. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1977. Himid, Lubaina, and Maud Sulter, eds. FAN (Feminist Art News). Special issue on black women’s creativity, 2, no. 8 (1988). James, Winston, and Clive Harris. Inside Babylon. London: Verso, 1993. Jamie, Rasaad. “Black Arts in Britain.” Art Monthly, no. 104 (March 1987): 25. Jantjes, Gavin. “Critical Perspectives: The Role of the Visual Artist.” Artrage, no. 2 (1983): 2–3. —, ed. A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism. London: iniva, 1998. Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. “De Margin and De Centre: The Last ‘Special Issue’ on Race?” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 2–11.

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Kapur, Geeta. “Contemporary Cultural Practice: Some Polemical Categories.” Third Text, no. 11 (summer 1990): 109–18. —. “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh.” Third Text, no. 8/9 (autumn/winter 1989): 25–64. Keen, Melanie, and Elizabeth Ward. Recordings: A Select Bibliography of Contemporary African, AfroCaribbean and Asian British Art. London: iniva and Chelsea College of Art and Design, 1996. Maharaj, Sarat. “The Congo Is Flooding the Acropolis: Art in Britain of the Immigrations.” Third Text, no. 15 (summer 1991): 77–90. Mercer, Kobena. “Engendered Species.” ArtForum (summer 1992): 74–77. —. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1994. Mirza, Heidi Safia, ed. Black British Feminism: A Reader. London: Routledge, 1997. Nairne, Sandy. State of the Art: Ideas and Images in the 1980s. London: ica, 1987. Owusu, Kwesi, ed. Storms of the Heart: An Anthology of Black Arts and Culture. London: Camden Press, 1988. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Disputes at the Boundaries of ‘New Internationalism.’” Third Text, no. 25 (winter 1993–94): 95–101. Parmar, Pratibha. “Perverse Politics.” Feminist Review 34, no. 1 (1991). Patton, Sharon. African-American Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Phillips, Mike, and Trevor Phillips. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain. London: HarperCollins, 1998. Powell, Richard J. Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Roberts, John. “Postmodernism and the Critique of Ethnicity.” In Roberts, Postmodernism, Politics and Art. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1990. Rutherford, Jonathan, ed. Identity: Community, Culture, Di=erence. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Tawadros, Gilane. “Other Britains, Other Britons.” Aperture, no. 113 (1988): 40–46. —. “Who Needs Anti-racist Approaches to Photography: Whose Image?” Ten.8, no. 34 (1989): 48–51. Tharani, Nadir. “Within the Sands: South Asian Arts in Britain.” Artrage, no. 17 (summer 1987): 2–3. Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists’ Movement 1966–1972. London: New Beacon Books, 1992. West, Cornel. “Black Culture and Postmodernism.” In Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, eds., Remaking History: Dia Art Foundation Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 4. Seattle: Bay Press, 1989. Williamson, Judith. “Two Kinds of Otherness: Black Film and the Avant-garde.” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 106–112. Yeh, Diana. “Ethnicities on the Move: ‘British-Chinese’ Art—Identity, Subjectivity, Politics and Beyond.” Critical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (summer 2000): 65–91. Young, Lola. Fear of the Dark: “Race,” Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema. London: Routledge, 1996. Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Visual Practices Alexander, Simone. “The Black Art Group.” Artrage, no. 14 (autumn 1986): 30. Araeen, Rasheed. “Conversation with Avinash Chandra.” Third Text, nos. 3–4 (spring/summer 1988): 69–96. —. Making Myself Visible. London: Kala Press, 1984. Araeen, Rasheed, and Eddie Chambers. “Black Art: A Discussion.” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988): 51–62. Auguiste, Reece. “Handsworth Songs: Some Background Notes.” Framework, no. 35 (1988): 6. Avtarjeet Dhanjal [text by Brian McAvera]. London: iniva, 1997. Bailey, David A. “D-Max.” Ten.8, no. 27 (1988): 36–41. —. “Photographic Animateur: The Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode in Relation to Black Photographic Practices.” Third Text, no. 13 (winter 1990): 57–63. —. “Photography, Black Arts and the Burden of Representation(s).” Autograph Newsletter (August/ September 1991). Bailey, David A., and Stuart Hall, eds. Ten.8 2, no. 3, special issue: Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 1980s (spring 1992). Bowling, Frank. “Formalist Art and the Black Experience.” Third Text, no. 5 (winter 1988): 78–94. —. “Is Black Art about Color?” In Rhoda L. Goldstein, ed., Black Life and Culture in the United States. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1971. Burman, Chila Kumari, and Bhajan Hunjan. 1987. “Mash It Up.” In Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, eds., Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985. London: Pandora, 1987. Chambers, Eddie. “His Catechism: The Art of Donald Rodney.” Third Text, no. 44 (autumn 1988): 43–54. —. “Perspectives and Directions” [review of “Vision and Voice” conference, The Cave, Birmingham, December 1985]. AN-Artists Newsletter (April 1986): 14. Chambers, Eddie, et al. The First National Black Art Convention to Discuss the Form, Functioning and Future of Black Art. Wolverhampton, England: Wolverhampton Polytechnic, 1982. Diawara, Manthia. 1990. “Black British Cinema: Spectatorship and Identity Formation in ‘Territories.’” Public Culture 3, no. 1 (1990): 121–150. Fani-Kayode, Rotimi. Black Male/White Male. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1988. Fusco, Coco. “An Interview with Black Audio Film Collective.” In Kobena Mercer, ed., ica Documents 7: Black Film, British Cinema. London: ica, 1988. 60–62. —. Young, British and Black: A Monograph on the Work of Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective. Bu≈alo, N.Y.: Hallwalls and the Contemporary Art Center, 1988. Gilroy, Paul. “Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problem of Belonging to England.” Third Text, no. 10 (spring 1990): 45–52. Gilroy, Paul, and Jim Pines. “Handsworth Songs: Audiences/Aesthetic/Independence. Interview with Black Audio Film Collective.” Framework, no. 35 (1988): 11.

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Gupta, Sunil. “Fabled Territories: New Asian Photography in Britain.” Bazaar, no. 10 (1989): 12–13. Hamad Butt: Familiars. London: iniva, 1996. Hemphill, Essex. “Brother to Brother: Interview with Isaac Julien.” Black Film Review, no. 5 (summer 1989): 14–17. Himid, Lubaina. “Mapping: A Decade of Black Women Artists 1980–1990.” In Maud Sulter, ed., Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox Press, 1990. Hubbard, Sue. “The Art of Saleem Arif.” Third Text, no. 27 (summer 1994): 37–44. Jantjes, Gavin. “The Artist as a Cultural Salmon: A View from the Frying Pan.” Third Text, no. 23 (summer 1993): 103–106. Johnson, Claudette. “Issues Surrounding the Representation of the Naked Body of a Woman.” fan (Feminist Art News) 3, no. 8 (1991): 12–14. Julien, Isaac, and Kobena Mercer. “True Confessions: A Discourse on Images of Black Male Sexuality.” Ten.8, no. 22 (1986): 4–9. Keen, Melanie. “Out of This World: Digital Technology as a Critical Space for Cultural Politics.” ma thesis, Royal College of Art, London, 1995. Malik, Sarita. “Beyond ‘the Cinema of Duty’? The Pleasures of Hybridity: Black British Film of the 1980s and 1990s.” In Andrew Higson, ed., Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema. London: Cassell, 1996. Mercer, Kobena. “Art That Is Ethnic in Inverted Commas.” Frieze, no. 25 (1995): 38–41. —. “Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination.” In Mbye Cham and Claire Andrade-Watkins, eds., Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema. Cambridge, Mass.: mit Press, 1988). —, ed. ica Documents 7: Black Film/British Cinema. London: ica, 1988. Nead, Lynda. Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures. London: Kala Press, 1995. Pines, Jim. Representation and Race in British Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1991. Pines, Jim, and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1989. Pollard, Ingrid. “Ingrid Pollard: Pastoral Interludes.” Third Text, no. 7 (summer 1989): 41–46. Roberts, John. “Interview with Sonia Boyce.” Third Text, no. 1 (autumn 1987): 55–64. Sealy, Mark. “Talking Hybridity: Interview with Kobena Mercer.” Creative Camera (February–March 1995): 16–19. Sealy, Mark, and Jean Loup Pivin, eds. Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst: Photographs. London: Autograph and Editions Revue Noire, 1996. Shonibare, Yinka. “Fabric, and the Irony of Autheniticity.” In Nikos Papastergiadis, ed., Annotations 1: Mixed Belongings and Unspecified Destinations. London: iniva, 1996. Tawadros, Gilane. “Beyond the Boundary: The Work of Three Black Women Artists in Britain.” In Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds., Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. —. Sonia Boyce: Speaking in Tongues. London: Kala Press, 1997.

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—. “The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Black Women Artists in Britain.” In Katy Deepwell, ed., New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. Ugwu, Catherine, ed. Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. London: ica, 1995.

Exhibitions and Display Anish Kapoor: Drawings. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Jeremy Lewison. London: Tate Gallery, 1990. Archer-Straw, Petrine. “The Other Story.” Art Monthly, no. 133 (February 1990): 14–15. Aubrey Williams [texts by Guy Brett, Andrew Dempsey, Anne Walmsley, and Denis Williams]. Exhibition catalogue. London: iniva, 1988. Avinash Chandra. Exhibition catalogue. London: Horizon Gallery, 1987. Balraj Khanna. Exhibition catalogue. London: Bloomsbury Gallery, 1982. Bhabha, Homi K. “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness.” In Anish Kapoor. Exhibition catalogue. Berkeley: University of California Press and Hayward Gallery, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K., and Sutapa Biswas. “The Wrong Story.” The New Statesman, 15 December 1989, 40–42. [debating The Other Story exhibition] Black Art An’ Done: An Exhibition of Work by Young Black Artists. Exhibition catalogue. Wolverhampton, England: Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 1981. Black Art: New Directions. Exhibition catalogue. Stoke on Trent, England: City Museum and Art Gallery, 1989. Black Art: Plotting the Course. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers, ed. Oldham, England: Oldham Art Gallery, 1988. Black People and the British Flag. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers, ed. Leicester, England: City Gallery, 1993. Brett, Guy. Exploding Galleries: The Art of David Medalla. London: Kala Press, 1995. Chris Ofili. Exhibition catalogue. London: Serpentine Gallery, 1998. The Circular Dance: Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Jagjit Chuhan, Nina Edge, Gurminder Sikand and Shanti Thomas. Exhibition catalogue. Bristol, England: Arnolfini Publications, 1991. Claudette Johnson: Pushing Back the Boundaries. Exhibition catalogue. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox Press, 1990. Columbus Drowning: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Lubaina Himid, Magdalene Odundo, Robyn Kahukiwa, Veronica Ryan. Exhibition catalogue. Rochdale, England: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1992. Creation for Liberation Open Exhibition: Art by Black Artists. Exhibition catalogue. London: Creation for Liberation, 1985. Crossing Black Waters. Exhibition catalogue. Allan deSouza and Shaheen Merali, eds. London: Working Press, 1992. Cross-Sections: Sculptures and Drawings by Dhruva Mistry 1982–1988. Exhibition catalogue. Tessa Jackson, ed. Glasgow: Collins Gallery and University of Strathclyde, 1988.

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—. “The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Black Women Artists in Britain.” In Katy Deepwell, ed., New Feminist Art Criticism: Critical Strategies. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995. Ugwu, Catherine, ed. Let’s Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. London: ica, 1995.

Exhibitions and Display Anish Kapoor: Drawings. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Jeremy Lewison. London: Tate Gallery, 1990. Archer-Straw, Petrine. “The Other Story.” Art Monthly, no. 133 (February 1990): 14–15. Aubrey Williams [texts by Guy Brett, Andrew Dempsey, Anne Walmsley, and Denis Williams]. Exhibition catalogue. London: iniva, 1988. Avinash Chandra. Exhibition catalogue. London: Horizon Gallery, 1987. Balraj Khanna. Exhibition catalogue. London: Bloomsbury Gallery, 1982. Bhabha, Homi K. “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness.” In Anish Kapoor. Exhibition catalogue. Berkeley: University of California Press and Hayward Gallery, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K., and Sutapa Biswas. “The Wrong Story.” The New Statesman, 15 December 1989, 40–42. [debating The Other Story exhibition] Black Art An’ Done: An Exhibition of Work by Young Black Artists. Exhibition catalogue. Wolverhampton, England: Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 1981. Black Art: New Directions. Exhibition catalogue. Stoke on Trent, England: City Museum and Art Gallery, 1989. Black Art: Plotting the Course. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers, ed. Oldham, England: Oldham Art Gallery, 1988. Black People and the British Flag. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers, ed. Leicester, England: City Gallery, 1993. Brett, Guy. Exploding Galleries: The Art of David Medalla. London: Kala Press, 1995. Chris Ofili. Exhibition catalogue. London: Serpentine Gallery, 1998. The Circular Dance: Sutapa Biswas, Chila Kumari Burman, Jagjit Chuhan, Nina Edge, Gurminder Sikand and Shanti Thomas. Exhibition catalogue. Bristol, England: Arnolfini Publications, 1991. Claudette Johnson: Pushing Back the Boundaries. Exhibition catalogue. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox Press, 1990. Columbus Drowning: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Lubaina Himid, Magdalene Odundo, Robyn Kahukiwa, Veronica Ryan. Exhibition catalogue. Rochdale, England: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1992. Creation for Liberation Open Exhibition: Art by Black Artists. Exhibition catalogue. London: Creation for Liberation, 1985. Crossing Black Waters. Exhibition catalogue. Allan deSouza and Shaheen Merali, eds. London: Working Press, 1992. Cross-Sections: Sculptures and Drawings by Dhruva Mistry 1982–1988. Exhibition catalogue. Tessa Jackson, ed. Glasgow: Collins Gallery and University of Strathclyde, 1988.

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Dave Lewis: Monograph. Text by Rohini Malik. London: Autograph, 1998. Deal: Susan Pui San Lok and Mayling To. Exhibition catalogue. London: bcwa, 1999. Denzil Forrester: Dub Transition, a Decade of Paintings, 1980–1990. Exhibition catalogue. Preston, England: Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 1990. Dhruva Mistry: Sculptures and Drawings. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, England: Kettle’s Yard Gallery, 1985. D-Max: A Photographic Exhibition. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Paul Gilroy. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1987. Earthen Shades: Paintings by Shanti Panchal. Exhibition catalogue. Bradford, England: Cartwright Hall, 1988. The Essential Black Art. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Rasheed Araeen. London: Kala Press, 1988. Eugene Palmer. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers and Lynda Morris, eds. Norwich, England: Norwich Gallery, Norfolk Institute of Art and Design, 1993. Fisher, Jean. “Rasheed Araeen.” Artforum (March 1988): 155. [review of exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham] F. N. Souza. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Edwin Mullins. London: Anthony Blond, 1962. From Generation to Generation (the Installation). Exhibition catalogue. London: Black-Art Gallery, 1986. From Modernism to Postmodernism: A Retrospective 1959–1987. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Rasheed Araeen. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1987. From Two Worlds. Exhibition catalogue. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1986. Fuller, Peter. “Black Artists: Don’t Forget Europe.” Sunday Telegraph (London), 10 December 1989, 10. [debating The Other Story exhibition] Haye, Christian. “Motion Pictures: Christian Hayes on Steve McQueen.” Frieze, no. 28 (1998): 39–43. Icarus [Juginder Lamba and Tony Phillips]. Exhibition catalogue. Wolverhampton, England: Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 1992. I Will Always Be Here [Zarina Bhimji]. Exhibition catalogue. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1992. In Focus. Exhibition catalogue. London: Horizon Gallery, 1990. Into the Open: New Painting, Prints and Sculpture by Contemporary Black Artists. Exhibition catalogue. She≈ield, England: Mappin Art Gallery, 1984. Jagrati. Exhibition catalogue. Fay Rodrigues, ed. London: Greenwich Citizens Gallery, 1986. Joy Gregory: Monograph. Text by Sunil Gupta. London: Autograph, 1995. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Levine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Keegan, Rita. “The Story So Far.” Spare Rib (February 1990): 36. [debating The Other Story exhibition] Keith Piper: Relocating the Remains [text by Kobena Mercer]. London: iniva, 1997. Let the Canvas Come to Life with Dark Faces. Exhibition catalogue. Coventry, England: Herbert Art Gallery, 1990. Les Magiciens de la Terre. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989. Mirage: Enigmas of Race and Desire. Exhibition catalogue. London: ica and iniva, 1995.

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New Robes for MaShulan: A Room for MaShulan [Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter]. Exhibition catalogue. Rochdale, England: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1987. Numaish Lalit Kala. Exhibition catalogue. Liverpool: Bluecoat Gallery, 1988. The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain. Exhibition catalogue. London: Hayward Gallery, 1989. Play and Display: Steel Masquerades from Top to Toe: Sculpture by Sokari Douglas Camp. Exhibition catalogue. London: Museum of Mankind, 1995. Roshini Kempadoo. Text by Deborah Willis. London: Autograph, 1997. Seen/Unseen. Exhibition catalogue. Olu Oguibe, ed. Liverpool: Bluecoat Gallery, 1994. Sewell, Brian. “Pride or Prejudice.” Evening Standard (London), 4 January 1990, 25. [response to The Other Story exhibition] A Ship Called Jesus [Keith Piper]. Exhibition catalogue. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1991. Some of Us Are Brave, All of Us Are Strong: An Exhibition by and about Black Women. Exhibition catalogue. London: Black-Art Gallery, 1986. Synapse: Sutapa Biswas. Exhibition catalogue. London: Photographers’ Gallery, 1992. Tam Joseph. Exhibition catalogue. London: Bedford Hill Gallery, 1989. These Colours Run: Lesley Sanderson. Exhibition catalogue. Wrexham, England: Wrexham Library Arts Centre, 1994. The Thin Black Line. Exhibition catalogue. Lubaina Himid, ed. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox Press, 1985. Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Caribbean Cultural Center, 1997. Trophies of Empire. Exhibition catalogue. Bristol, England: Arnolfini, 1994. The Unmapped Body: Three Black British Artists. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Ian Baucom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1998. Us an’ Dem: A Critical Look at Relationships between the Police, the Judiciary and the Black Community. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers, ed. Lancaster, England: Lancashire Probation Service, 1994. Vanley Burke: A Retrospective. Mark Sealy, ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Veronica Ryan. Text by Sarat Maharaj and B. Bettinger. Bristol, England: Arnolfini Gallery, 1988. Walmsley, Anne, ed. Guyana Dreaming: The Art of Aubrey Williams. Coventry, England: Dangeroo Press, 1990. Yinka Shonibare: Dressing Down. Exhibition catalogue. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1999. Young, Lola. “Where Do We Go from Here? Musings on ‘The Other Story.’” Oxford Art Journal, no. 13 (1990): 2.

Institutions, Policies, and Reports Araeen, Rasheed. “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts.” Third Text, no. 1 (autumn 1987): 6–25. —. “History of Black Artists in Britain.” London, glc Race Equality Unit. Unpublished, 1986.

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New Robes for MaShulan: A Room for MaShulan [Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter]. Exhibition catalogue. Rochdale, England: Rochdale Art Gallery, 1987. Numaish Lalit Kala. Exhibition catalogue. Liverpool: Bluecoat Gallery, 1988. The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain. Exhibition catalogue. London: Hayward Gallery, 1989. Play and Display: Steel Masquerades from Top to Toe: Sculpture by Sokari Douglas Camp. Exhibition catalogue. London: Museum of Mankind, 1995. Roshini Kempadoo. Text by Deborah Willis. London: Autograph, 1997. Seen/Unseen. Exhibition catalogue. Olu Oguibe, ed. Liverpool: Bluecoat Gallery, 1994. Sewell, Brian. “Pride or Prejudice.” Evening Standard (London), 4 January 1990, 25. [response to The Other Story exhibition] A Ship Called Jesus [Keith Piper]. Exhibition catalogue. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1991. Some of Us Are Brave, All of Us Are Strong: An Exhibition by and about Black Women. Exhibition catalogue. London: Black-Art Gallery, 1986. Synapse: Sutapa Biswas. Exhibition catalogue. London: Photographers’ Gallery, 1992. Tam Joseph. Exhibition catalogue. London: Bedford Hill Gallery, 1989. These Colours Run: Lesley Sanderson. Exhibition catalogue. Wrexham, England: Wrexham Library Arts Centre, 1994. The Thin Black Line. Exhibition catalogue. Lubaina Himid, ed. Hebden Bridge, England: Urban Fox Press, 1985. Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Caribbean Cultural Center, 1997. Trophies of Empire. Exhibition catalogue. Bristol, England: Arnolfini, 1994. The Unmapped Body: Three Black British Artists. Exhibition catalogue. Text by Ian Baucom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1998. Us an’ Dem: A Critical Look at Relationships between the Police, the Judiciary and the Black Community. Exhibition catalogue. Eddie Chambers, ed. Lancaster, England: Lancashire Probation Service, 1994. Vanley Burke: A Retrospective. Mark Sealy, ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993. Veronica Ryan. Text by Sarat Maharaj and B. Bettinger. Bristol, England: Arnolfini Gallery, 1988. Walmsley, Anne, ed. Guyana Dreaming: The Art of Aubrey Williams. Coventry, England: Dangeroo Press, 1990. Yinka Shonibare: Dressing Down. Exhibition catalogue. Birmingham, England: Ikon Gallery, 1999. Young, Lola. “Where Do We Go from Here? Musings on ‘The Other Story.’” Oxford Art Journal, no. 13 (1990): 2.

Institutions, Policies, and Reports Araeen, Rasheed. “From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts.” Third Text, no. 1 (autumn 1987): 6–25. —. “History of Black Artists in Britain.” London, glc Race Equality Unit. Unpublished, 1986.

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—. “Why ‘Third Text’?” Third Text, no. 1 (autumn 1987): 3–5. Araeen, Rasheed, and David Medalla. Open letter to the British Council. Art Monthly, no. 24 (1979): 25. Art Black Live: Black Art Alliance Report. Manchester, England: Black Arts Alliance, 1999. “Arts Council Boycott!” Black Arts in London, no. 51 (March 1986): 3. Arts Council of England. Digest of Responses to the Cultural Diversity Green Paper, “The Landscape of Fact.” London: Arts Council, 1997. —. The Landscape of Fact: Towards a Policy for Cultural Diversity. London: Arts Council, 1997. Arts Council of Great Britain. The Arts and Cultural Diversity. London: Arts Council, 1989. —. The Arts and Cultural Diversity Symposium Report. London: Arts Council and the Home O÷ce, 1989. —. The Arts and Ethnic Minorities: Action Plan. London: Arts Council, 1986. —. Masquerading: The Art of Notting Hill Carnival. London: Arts Council, 1986. “The Arts Council’s Ethnic Minority Action Plan.” Black Arts in London, no. 49 (February–March 1986): 3–4. “Arts Council Moves: The African and Asian Visual Artists Project.” AN-Artists Newsletter (December 1988): 10. Axarlis, Nick. “Greater London Arts Black Arts Consultancy.” Black Arts in London, no. 73 (April 1986): 16. Blackman, Peter, and David Bryan. Cultural Equity. London: Arts Council, National Arts and Media Strategy Unit, 1991. Commission for Racial Equality. The Arts of Ethnic Minorities: A Reading Guide. London: cre, 1983. —. The Arts of Ethnic Minorities: A Role for the cre. London: cre, 1983. —. Reform of the Race Relations Act 1976. London: cre, 1998. Cork, Richard, Balraj Khanna, and Shirley Read. Art on the South Bank: An Independent Report. London: Greater London Council, 1986. Dedi, Shakka. “Black Art in Britain Today.” Arts Review (November 1984): 556–557. Fisher, Mark. “Black Art: The Labour Party’s Line.” Modern Painters 2, no. 4 (1989): 77–78. Forrester, Andrew, Stewart Lansley, and Robin Pauley. Beyond Our Ken: A Guide to the Battle for London. London: Fourth Estate, 1985. Garrison, L. “The Black Historical Past in British Education.” In P. Stone, ed., The Excluded Past. London: Routledge, 1990. Greater London Authority. Without Prejudice? Exploring Ethnic Di=erences in London. London: gla, 2000. Greater London Council. The Black Experience Arts Programme. London: Greater London Council Race Equality Unit, 1986. —. New Horizons: Exhibition of Arts. London: glc Ethnic Arts Sub-Committee, 1985. Hall, Stuart. “Constituting an Archive.” Third Text, no. 54 (spring 2001): 89–92. Hall, Stuart, et al., eds. Policing the Crisis: “Mugging,” the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. Hiro, Dilip. Black British, White British. London: HarperCollins, 1992.

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Khan, Naseem. The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain. London: Arts Council, 1976. —. “Struggles for Black Arts in Britain.” Artrage, no. 14 (1986): 34–36. Khanna, Balraj. “Obscure but Important.” Art Monthly, no. 36 (October 1980): 25. Lavrijsen, Ria, ed. Cultural Diversity in the Arts: Art, Art Policies and the Facelift of Europe. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1993. Livingstone, Ken. If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It. London: Collins, 1986. Lloyd, Errol. “The Roundhouse.” Artrage, no. 5 (autumn 1993): 30. Luthra, Manmohan. Britain’s Black Population: Social Change, Public Policy and Agenda. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 1997. Owusu, Kwesi. “Black Art in London and the glc: The End of an Era?” Artrage, no. 8 (spring 1985): 2–3. —. The Struggle for Black Arts in Britain: What Can We Consider Better than Freedom? London: Comedia, 1986 Owusu, Kwesi, and Jacob Ross, eds. Behind the Masquerade: The Story of the Notting Hill Carnival. London: Arts Media Group, 1988. “Racial and Ethnic Relations in Britain: Past, Present and Future.” New Community, no. 14 (1987): 1–2. Rewcastle, Martin. “The Place of ‘Ethnic’ in Art.” Art Monthly, no. 37 (1980): 17. Walker, Sam. “Black Cultural Museums in Britain.” In Eilean Hooper Greenhill, ed., Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain. Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1997.

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Contributors

Stanley Abe is Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Duke University. In 2000, he organized the Tobacco Project, a series of site-specific installations on the Duke campus and the Duke Homestead and Tobacco Museum by Xu Bing; in 2001, he was faculty organizer for the Made in Asia? student-curated exhibition at Duke University Museum of Art. His publications include “Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West,” in Curators of the Buddha (edited by Donald Lopez, University of Chicago Press, 1995); “No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky,” boundary 2 25, 3 (fall 1998); and Ordinary Images (University of Chicago Press, 2002). Jawad Al-Nawab was born in London to an English mother and Iraqi father. A degree in human sciences and training in addiction counseling followed many years later, along with an active exploration of Englishness. Al-Nawab’s research on “Dual Heritage: An Arab-English Experience” was published by the Arab Club of Great Britain in the proceedings of the Third Arab Communities Conference (University of Westminster, 1999). His essays on related themes include “Estuary Boy’s Journey Home” (London Diaspora

Contributors ■ 319

Project, 2002), and he has o≈ered workshops and given readings of his writings. He is currently completing an autobiography, Dear Hussam. Rasheed Araeen is an artist, writer, and founding editor of Third Text. After pioneering minimalism in Britain (1965), he moved on to be the first in Britain to raise and deal with the issues of racism and imperialism that inflict mainstream contemporary art practice and its legitimation in his “Preliminary Notes for a black manifesto,” Black Phoenix, no. 1 (1978). Among his many other activities, he curated The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (Hayward Gallery, London, 1989), which pointed out the gaps in the o÷cial histories of British art from which Afro-Asian artists have been excluded. His early writings, along with artworks, were published as Making Myself Visible (Kala Press) in 1984. David A. Bailey is a photographer, writer, curator, and lecturer. In 1992, he coedited, with Stuart Hall, the Ten.8 special issue The Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 1980s. His curatorial projects include Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Di≈erence and Desire (ica, London, 1995) and Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (Hayward Gallery, London, 1997). A founding member of Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers, he was Codirector of Aavaa (African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive) from 1996 to 2002 and is currently Associate Senior Curator at iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and an Editorial Advisor to Third Text. Adelaide Bannerman is a London-based curator working on independent projects. She has worked with the Arts Council of England, The Showroom, iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and Aavaa (African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive). Past curated projects include Discarded Memories of Delhi (198 Gallery, London, 1999), Drapo Visions: Contemporary Haitian Artists (198 Gallery, London, 1999), and Domestic Bliss (South London Gallery, 2000). Ian Baucom is an Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of ldentity (Princeton University

320 ■ Contributors

Press, 1999) and Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Duke University Press, forthcoming). Dawoud Bey is Professor of Photography at Columbia College, Chicago. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University and has exhibited internationally. His critical writings have appeared in Third Text (London); C: International Contemporary Art (Canada); AfterImage (New York); ars 01 (Helsinki); and various other journals and catalogues. He has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others. Bey is represented in the United States by Gorney Bravin + Lee Gallery, New York, and by Rhona Ho≈man Gallery, Chicago. In Europe, he is represented by Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin and Stockholm. Sonia Boyce first achieved critical attention as a figurative artist at the height of the British Black Arts Movement during the mid-1980s. She has since gone on to exhibit widely in the United Kingdom and internationally. Exhibitions include The Other Story (Hayward Gallery, London, 1989), Interzones (Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, 1996), Sonia Boyce: Performance (Cornerhouse, Manchester, England 1988), and Century City (Tate Modern, London, 2001). From 1995 until 1998, Boyce established and coordinated the Black Women Artists’ Study Group, an informal discussion forum, and between 1996 and 2002, she was a Codirector of Aavaa (African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive) at the University of East London. Allan deSouza left Britain in 1992 and is now based in Los Angeles. He has exhibited extensively, including at Talwar Gallery (New York, solo shows in 2001 and 2003); Susanne Vielmetter (Los Angeles, solo show in 2001); Looking Both Ways (Museum for African Art, New York, 2003); and Unfamiliar Territory (San Jose Museum of Art, 2003). His writings have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Third Text (London); Amerasia Journal (Los Angeles), New Observations (New York); Kunst Nach Ground Zero (edited by Heinz Peter Schwerfel, Dumont Press, 2002), and Tracing Culture (Whitney Museum, New York, 1994). He coedited Crossing Black Waters (Working Press, 1992) and

Contributors ■ 321

is currently on the editorial board of X-Tra (Los Angeles). He has most recently taught at the University of California at Irvine and at the California Institute for the Arts. Jean Fisher studied zoology and fine art before becoming a freelance writer on contemporary art. She is the former editor of the international journal Third Text, editor of the writings of Jimmie Durham (A Certain Lack of Coherence, Kala Press, 1993) and Lee Ufan (Selected Writings, The Lisson Gallery, 1996), the anthologies Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts (Kala Press, 1994) and Re-verberations: Tactics of Resistance, Forms of Agency (Jan van Eyck Editions, 2000), and author of Vampire in the Text: Narratives in Contemporary Art (iniva, 2003). She teaches at Middlesex University and the Royal College of Art, London, and is on the editorial board of Afterall (London). She is currently researching a book on tricksterism, the carnivalesque, and contemporary art practices. Stuart Hall is an internationally renowned scholar, writer, and teacher. A founding figure of British cultural studies, he helped establish and then served as Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Among his many publications, he has coauthored or edited Resistance Through Ritual: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (Hutchinson, 1976), Policing the Crisis: “Mugging,” the State, and Law and Order (Macmillan, 1978), The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (Verso, 1988) and, more recently, Questions of Cultural Identity (Sage, 1996), Representation (Sage, 1997), Visual Culture (Sage, 1999), Di=erent: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (Phaidon, 2001), and essays in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1996). He is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University; Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, University of London; and Chairman of the Boards of both iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers). Lubaina Himid was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and is currently Professor in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom. She is a practicing artist and occasional essayist and curator. Exhibitions include Hogarth on Hogarth

322 ■ Contributors

(Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1997), Venetian Maps (Harris Museum, Preston, 1997), Zanzibar (Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales, 1999), Memory Woman (Wellington City Art Gallery, New Zealand, 1998), and Plan B (Tate Gallery, St Ives, 2000). Recent projects include an exhibition, Inside the Invisible (St Jorgens Museum, Bergen, Norway, 2001), exploring leprosy and histories; an exhibition in Bolton, United Kingdom, titled Double Life Exploring Memory, Family, Identity (2001); “Cotton.com” for Fabrications (Cube, Manchester, 2002); and a solo show at Peg Alston Fine Art, New York (2002). She is currently working on two exhibitions for 2004: Naming the Money (Hatton Gallery, Newcastle) and Distance No Object (Bowes Museum, County Durham). During the past twenty years she has curated exhibitions in public and private galleries all over the United Kingdom and shown her own work in many galleries in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Naseem Khan recently returned to freelancing after seven years as Head of Diversity for Arts Council England. She has been active in the struggle to reorient British arts policy for some thirty years, as journalist (New Statesman, The Guardian), researcher (as an Associate with the public sector consultancy Comedia and independently), and administrator. Her report The Arts Britain Ignores (1976) first opened the public debate on the true character of British culture and identity. She is the coeditor, with Ferdinand Dennis, of Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from the Caribbean, Africa and Asia (Serpent’s Tail, 2000). susan pui san lok is an artist and writer based in London. Recent exhibitions include The Translator’s Notes (Café Gallery Projects, London, 2003), New Releases (Gallery 4a and agnsw, Australia, 2001), and Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, London, 1999) and solo shows at East London Gallery, Stu≈ (both London, 2000), and the Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester, 1998). Publications include articles for Third Text and Parallax and essay contributions to exhibition catalogues and books, including Discerning Translation (edited by Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra, forthcoming). She has been Visiting Lecturer at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, Winchester School of Art, and Middlesex and East London Universities.

Contributors ■ 323

Kobena Mercer writes and teaches on the visual arts of the black diaspora. He is editor of Black Film/British Cinema (ica, London, 1988) and author of Welcome to the Jungle (Routledge, 1994) and has contributed exhibition catalogue essays to Black Male (Whitney Museum, New York, 1994), Pictura Britannica (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1997), and Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, 1999). Currently he is based in the Department of Visual Culture, Middlesex University. Yong Soon Min’s multimedia installations, informed by cultural and postcolonial studies and movements for social justice, have been widely exhibited. A current art project explores the relationship between migrant labor and nationalisms. She curated an exhibition and symposium about the Korean diaspora for the Fourth Kwangju Biennale (2002) in South Korea. She is Professor and Department Chair of Studio Art at the University of California at Irvine. Keith Piper was a founding member of the blk Art Group, an association of young black artists that formed in 1979 and exhibited work nationally through the early and mid-1980s. He has subsequently worked across a broad range of venues and media, currently specializing in the use of computer-based digital and interactive technologies in gallery-based, video, cd-rom, and Web-based projects. He currently teaches Media Production at the University of East London. Zineb Sedira, born in 1963 in France, moved to England in 1986. Her work explores the paradoxes and intersections of her identity as a French Algerian and an English resident. She has exhibited extensively internationally and in the United Kingdom. Sedira exhibited at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and has since participated in biennales in Valencia. Her first major touring solo show will be launched in January 2004 (Cornerhouse, Manchester). She has been featured in numerous magazines and books, most recently Blink–100 Photographers, 10 Curators, 10 Writers (Phaidon Press, 2002). Sedira is represented by The Agency Contemporary, London, and Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris. Gilane Tawadros is the Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) in London, an organisation that has been at the forefront of developments in contemporary

324 ■ Contributors

visual art, new technologies, and cultural diversity in both national and international contexts. Responsible for the overall artistic direction of iniva, Tawadros has curated and cocurated a large number of exhibitions and edited several publications on contemporary visual art and theory. Leon Wainwright is a researcher on visual culture and diaspora and Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Sussex. He is currently completing a book provisionally titled Diaspora Presence: Perception and Efficacy in British Art Now, based on six years of research at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and Middlesex University. He has contributed essays to British Arts of the African Diaspora (edited by John Picton and Nancy Hynes, Sa≈ron, 2004); Wadabagei (City University of New York Press, 2001); A Companion to Black British Culture (Routledge, 2002); and a number of exhibition catalogues in India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In 2004, he began work for a book about contemporary art and agency in the Caribbean region, supported by a Research Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust. Judith Wilson has written about art, literature, gender, and race relations for publications ranging from Ms. Magazine, Essence, and the Village Voice to American Art, Third Text, and the International Review of African American Art since the late 1970s. Her most recent publications include essays in the anthologies Art/Women/California 1950–2000 (University of California Press, 2002), Race-ing Art History, and Theorizing Feminism and Visual Culture (both Routledge, 2002). Currently, she is Assistant Professor of AfricanAmerican Studies, Art History, and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Contributors ■ 325

326 ■ Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank: – Janie Conley, Gillian Elinor, Michael O’Pray, Gowry Selvaratnam, Marlene Smith, the Aavaa Board of Trustees, and the University of East London for their enthusiasm and support, particularly at the initial stages of the project. – The John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and the many individuals at Duke, including Courtney Baker, Cathy Davidson, Karla Holloway, Erica James, Molly Renda, Rob Sikorski, and Amy Vickers, who made the “Shades of Black” conference possible. – The contributors to the conference: Stanley Abe, Rasheed Araeen, Andrea Barnwell, Dawoud Bey, Sutapa Biswas, Kelvin Black, Michael Cadette, Janice Cheddie, E’vonne Coleman, Paul Dash, Allan deSouza, Pauline de Souza, Jane Gaines, Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Lubaina Himid, Barbara Hunt, Isaac Julien, Naseem Khan, susan pui san lok, Rohini Malik, Shaheen Merali, Kobena Mercer, Yong Soon Min, Yeu Lai

Acknowledgments ■ 327

Mo, John L. Moore III, Sandy Nairne, Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard, Richard Powell, Niru Ratnam, Mark Sealy, Zineb Sedira, Gilane Tawadros, Carol Tulloch, Leon Wainwright, Deborah Willis, Judith Wilson, Diana Yeh, and Lola Young. – All artists, artists’ estates, galleries, and institutions for their generosity in letting us reproduce images in the publication. – Duke University Press and Ken Wissoker for their sustained support for the book. – iniva for its invaluable sponsorship and assistance and, above all, Sarah Campbell for her indispensable critical insight and untiring energy in bringing this volume to completion.

328 ■ Acknowledgments

Index

Aavaa, xi, 173, 206 Abe, Stan, xiii, xxii, 181, 187 Absalon, 127 ace. See Arts Council Across the Pacific: Korean and Korean American Art, 112 activism, 86 Addison Gallery of American Art, 104 Adventures Close to Home (Piper), 185 Africa Centre, 22, 42 Africa Centre Gallery, xvii, 13 African American art, 54; relationship with black British art, 55; transatlantic dialogue, 172. See also black art; Black Arts Movement African American artists, 91, 171, 177 African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive. See Aavaa African Arts, 96 Africa 95, 127 Afro-Asian British Arts Movement. See Black Arts Movement ahistoricism, 99 Ajai, Taiwo, 117 Ajamu, 18

Akomfrah, John, xiv Al-Ani, Jananne: Untitled I & II, 208 Algerian identity, 67–74 alienation, of Asians in the United States, 112 Al-Nawab, Jawad, xxi, 67, 74 Altars of Commerce (Piper), 96 alter idem/performing personae (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 82 Althusser, Louis, 4 American politics, black presence in, 38 Ang Ien, 62, 64 animateurs, 50, 189 Another Nigger Died Today (Piper), 9, 136 anticolonialism, 3, 5–6 anti-intellectualism, 99 antipluralist backlash, 99 antiracism, 3, 9, 202 antiracist legislation, 192 The Appropriated Frame, xiii Arab identity, 173; “beurette,” 68; female body, 70; French experience, 68–69; invisibility as an artist, 72; Islamic influences, 73; parentage, 67; veil, 70, 73

Index ■ 329

Araeen, Rasheed, xvii, 43, 45, 179; access to resources, 172; “Art and Black Consciousness,” 23; “Black Art: A Discussion,” xvi; The Black Manifesto, 6–7, 10, 202; first-generation U.K. black artists, 5; The Golden Verses, 92; importance of black art history, xi; and institutional indifference, 9; militancy of Black Arts Movement, 25, 178, 180, 192; The Other Story, xxiii, 8, 123, 172; Paki Bastard, 202, 203; participation in Interrogating Identity, 91; roots of jazz, 11; value of cultural theory, 171, 175, 182; and visibility, 37 archival research, 46, 190 archives, 41, 42, 172, 195. See also individual archive names Arif, Saleem, 5 Arles Photography Festival, xii art criticism, xx, 176 art education, 42, 171, 182, 195 art for art’s sake, 205 Artforum, 94 Art from Argentina, 127 art history, xx, 170; documentation of, 44, 172, 173, 174; inclusion of cultural theory and practice, 171; and intertextuality, 171 Art Index, 93 Art in General, New York, 80 artist, as visionary, 182 artistic practice, black: and cultural studies, 18, 181–84; diversity of, 171; and political radicalism, vii, xvii, 178–81; postcolonial, beginnings, 2; and representation, 16 artistic research, 184 artistic vision, 178 Artists for Democracy, 201 Artists Liberation Front, 201 art market: corruption in, 106; globalization of, 32, 111 Art Monthly, 45 art object. See artworks arts administration, 206; black employment in, 121; museums, 107; programming, 121 The Arts Britain Ignores (Khan), xxiii, 117, 118, 120, 202, 203 art schools, 176 Arts Council, xxiii, 30, 41, 173, 187, 205; cultural diversity policy, 115, 120; 4 percent rule, 119; funding by, xviii, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121; New Audiences fund, 121

330 ■ Index

Arts Magazine, 94 artworks, 53, 105; and concept of addresses, 77–78; ephemeral, 202; experiential analysis of, 202; materials and media, 25, 49, 67, 73, 104, 202, 206; nature of their existence, xxii; politicization of, 205; purchase of, 44; reception by audience, 190–91; relationship with the world, 18–19; relative autonomy of, 53, 170, 175, 176, 182; and sociohistorical context, 176 Asian American art, xiii, 109–113; Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art, 112; Disputed Identities: U.K./U.S., 91; and invisibility, 181; Made in Asia?, 112; and racism, 113 Asian Canadians, 111 Asianness, xxii Asian Society Galleries, 112 Association of Black Photographers. See Autograph Attille, Martina, 91 authenticity, 183; and cities, 130; and collaboration, 189; identity as a marker of, 125 Autograph, xii, 206, 207 avant-garde, 27, 178, 179, 180 Baguio Arts Festival, 81 Bailey, David A.: critical decade, xiii; Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, 128; Objects in Time (Bailey and Boyce), 119, 161; organizing black artist exhibitions, 45; participation in Disputed Identities, 91; Rhapsodies in Black, 190; U.S./U.K.: Transatlantic Dialogues, 104 Baker, Houston A., 7 Baraka, Amir, 116 Baucom, Ian, xii Bearden, Romare, 54, 56; Black Manhattan, 56; collage, 56; “The Negro Artist’s Dilemma,” 56; Pittsburgh Memories, 56; Work Train, 57 Beaton, Norman, 117 Beauchamp-Byrd, Mora J., 92 Belmore, Rebecca, 91 Benjamin, Walter, 186 Bey, Dawoud, xxi, xxii, 190–91; collaboration with young people, 195; Hasan, 156; Mnemone, 154; Monique, 157; Thanh I, 155 Bhabha, Homi K., 95 Bhimji, Zarina, 18, 188 Biasiny-Rivera, Charles, 104 biographical identity, 53, 170, 175 Biswas, Sutapa, xii, 18, 174, 175; “Black Aesthetic”

(Williams), xvi, 10; effect of feminism/black politics on, 16; Housewives with Steak-Knives, 139; participation in Disputed Identities, 91; use of metaphors, 185 black aesthetic, definition of, 11 black art: definition of, 11; first-generation U.K. artists, 4–5; funding of, 120; internationalism of, xxiv; professionalization of, 193; response to social and political forces, 21; second-generation U.K. artists, 5, 12; solo exhibitions, 194; status of artists as Others, 32; validity of terminology, 36. See also African American art “Black Art: A Discussion” (Araeen and Chambers), xvi Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, xiii, xx, 54 Black Art An’ Done, 11, 13, 26 Black Art Conference, 43 Black-Art Gallery, London, xviii, 37, 39 Black Arts Alliance, 206 Black Arts in London, 207 Black Arts Movement, xiii, xv, xviii, 36, 56, 70, 89, 205; American, 3; avant-garde attitude of, 27; beginning of, xviii, 70; blackness as a multiracial sign, 90; collaboration, 43, 79, 80, 190; confrontation with political right wing, 22; and cultural and political climate, 39; exhibitions in the United States, 89, 96, 99; failures of, xix, 28–32; and history of modern art, 28; invisibility in, as an Arab artist, 67; masculine framework of, 170; militancy of, 25, 178, 180, 192; success of, 25; transatlantic dialogue, 172; visibility of, 37; as visionary, 182 Black Assassin Saints (Piper), 56, 142 Black Atlantic, 54, 70, 185 Black Audio Film Collective, 49, 128, 186, 205; Welcome Under the Dear Old Flag!, 204 black British art. See black art black British identity: triangular nature of, 89–90, 168 Black Consciousness, 13 Black Male, 98 Blackman, Peter, 11 Black Manhattan (Bearden), 56 The Black Manifesto (Araeen), 6, 10 blackness, 17, 23; as a multiracial sign, 90, 91, 93 Black Phoenix: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 202 Black Power, 13

Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 56, 128 Black Visual Culture (Doy), 52 black women artists, xix, 16, 23, 41–42, 173, 190, 205; solo exhibitions, 191–92 Blazwick, Iwona, 46 blk Art Group, 39, 43, 45, 49, 205 The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (Powell), xx, 54, 171, 190 the body, black, 17; Black Male, 98; female, Arab, 70; male, 96 A Book from the Sky (Xu Bing), 158 Bourdieu, Pierre, 177 Bowling, Frank, 5, 6, 23, 37, 38 Boyce, Sonia, xii, 18, 23, 55, 171, 176; on Destruction of the National Front, 179; effect of feminism/ black politics on, 15; Five Black Women, 13, 42; historical models in the work of, 180; Objects in Time (Boyce and Bailey), 119, 174, 161; paintings, 49; peep, 126; professionalization of black art, 193; second-generation U.K. black artists, 5; Talking Presence, 57; Untitled, 128, 163 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 116 Brett, Guy, 8, 202 The Brewery, Los Angeles, 84 Britain, sense of difference, 69 British art establishment, racism of, 129 British black art. See black art British Chinese artists. See Chinese art, U.K. British Empire, 69, 168 Britishness, xxi, xxiv, 125, 126, 169, 191 Bronx Museum, 92 Brooklyn Museum, New York, 52 Burke, Vanley, 13 Burman, Chila Kumari, 18, 24, 55, 188 Cabral, Amilcar, 12 Cairo Biennale, xxiv, 129 Camden Arts Centre, 127 Camerawork, xxii, 82 Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, 9 Canadian artists, 91 capital, flow of, xxii Caribbean Artists Movement, 92, 199, 201, 205 The Caribbean Artists’ Movement (Walmsley), 206 Caribbean Cultural Center, 89, 92 Carmichael, Stokely, 9 The Carrot Piece (Himid), 138 categorization. See ethnic categorization

Index ■ 331

Celtic Revival, xiv censorship, 73 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 205 Centre Georges Pompidou, 177 Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, xxiv, 130 Certeau, Michel de, 192 Cha Cha Cha (Shonibare), 208 Chadwick, Whitney, 45 Chambers, Eddie, xvi, xvii, 5, 10, 26, 37, 38, 45, 200; Aavaa, launch by, 173; “Black Art: A Discussion,” xvi; blk Art Group, formation by, 49; curating, 29–30, 32; definition of black art, 11; Destruction of the National Front, xvii, 9, 25, 168, 179, 140–41; I Was Taught to Believe, 9; influence of U.S. Black Arts Movement, 3, 13; partnership with Keith Piper, 22 Chan, Nadine, 91 Chandra, Avinash, 5, 199 Chanting Heads, xiii Cheddie, Janice, 172, 173, 174, 178, 183; broadening of art history, 171; young Black artists and Europe, 193 Cheddo, 49, 186 Chen Zhen, 127 Chenzira, Ayoka, 91 Chinese art, U.K., 59–65, 180, 181, 184; artist as black, 60–61; funding, 120. See also Asian American art Chinese artists, U.S. See Asian American art Chinese Arts Centre, 206 Chinese British artists. See Chinese art, U.K. Chineseness, xxii Chong, Albert, 91 cities: and cultural innovation, 130; curatorial approach, xxiv; as markers of cultural difference, 130 Cities on the Move: East Asian Art, Architecture and Film Now, 61 civil rights, 9, 13, 15 class issues, 14, 70, 126 Cobb, Portia, 91 collaboration, xix, xx, 50, 78–87, 103, 170, 189–91. See also engagement collage, xvii, 25, 56 collectives, 49, 79 colonialism, 6, 23, 59, 67, 71, 81, 83 commercial galleries, xix community arts, 188, 189

332 ■ Index

Community CopyArt, 79 computer technology as a medium, 73 conceptualism, 202 conjunctural change, 4, 18 Conroy, Neil: Fabrication and Reality (with Sanderson), 63, 146–47 Cool Britannia, xxiii, 125 corruption in art market, 106 Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic, 22 Creation for Liberation, 39 The Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 1980s, xii, 207 critical practice, 175–77 critical theory, xx cubism, xvii, 25 cultural authenticity, 177 cultural difference, 3, 56 cultural diversity, 51, 181, 183, 184, 187, 195; Arts Council policy, 115, 120; curating, 193 cultural identity, 32, 125 cultural politics, 9, 50, 177; American, 98 cultural studies, 181–84 cultural theory, 16, 171, 172; relationship with global capitalism, 3 cultural tourism, 129 culture, meaning of the word, 97 curating, xxiv, 29–30, 32, 123, 190, 206; selection by cultural difference, 193 Dadaists, 26 Davies, Miles, 7 Dawes, Dominic, 26 deBord, Matthew, 98, 99 The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the Eighties, 78, 188 decolonization, 28, 73 Decter, Joshua, 94 Deleuze, Gilles, 182, 184 Derrida, Jacques, xiv deSouza, Allan, xxi, 174, 184; alter idem/performing personae (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 82; collaboration, 185, 189, 190; FluxUs (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84; Fray Wray (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84; Geography of Desire (Yong Soon Min, deSouza, and Francia), 81; Nexus (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 80, 150; Panchayat, co-founding, 173; participation in Interrogating Identity, 91–92; Tress/Pass (Yong Soon Min and

deSouza), 84, 151; Will **** for Peace (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 86 Destruction of the National Front (Chambers), xvii, 9, 22, 25, 168, 179, 140–41 deterritorialization, of language, 184, 185, 187 devolution, and Englishness, 126 Dhanjal, Avtarjeet: Upper Level I, 160 Dialectics of Liberation, 9 Diary of a Victorian Dandy (Shonibare), 126 diaspora, xx, 118, 128; African, 3; Black Atlantic, 54, 70; Caribbean, 3; Chinese, 61, 181; Korean, 77; North African, 68; subjectivity, 55; and twentiethcentury modernism, 53 diasporic aesthetics, 194; the trickster in, 187 diasporic experience, delegitimization of, 130 diasporic politics, 177 didacticism, 179; dialogue with visual pleasure, 186 Different: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (Hall and Sealy), 1 displacement, 69, 92, 127 Disputed Identities: U.K./U.S., xii, 89–96 diversity. See cultural diversity dmz, 77, 95 Documenta XI, 129 documentation, xi, 172, 173, 174, 195; by artists, 42–43; funding of, 44 The Domino Players (Lloyd), 11 Doy, Gen, 52 Driscoll, David, 54 Drum, 7 Drys, Margaret Van, 58 Duel (Tani), 152 Duke University, xii, xiii, 174 education. See art education Egonu, Uzo, 5, 53 Ellis, Trey, 50 Ellison, Ralph, 55 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 193, 195 engagement; and multiculturalism, 112; museums, 104, 105, 106, 107; with society, 103. See also collaboration English heritage, 174, 187 English identity, 126 Englishness, 185 the Enlightenment, 184 employment of black artists, 44 Enwezor, Okwui, 129

“The Essential Guide to British Painting,” 125 essentialism, 11, 184 ethnic categorization, xxiii, 119, 120, 183, 187, 188 ethnicity, xx, xxii, 92, 120, 179, 193 Ethnic Minority Arts, 188 ethnocentrism, xviii Euro-American foreign policy, 80 Eurocentrism, 8, 99; of British art schools, xvii Evening Standard, 125 exclusion, 2, 16, 39, 202. See also mainstream art exhibitions of black artists: importance of solo exhibitions, 191–92, 194; organizing, 44; reviews, 44, 94–96, 98, 124, 125 Exit Art, 81 expressionist painting, American, 201 Fabrication and Reality (Sanderson and Conroy), 63, 146–47 Fani-Kayode, Rotimi, 13, 18, 49, 57, 104, 171 Fanon, Frantz, 12, 56, 128 feminist perspectives, 15, 16, 23, 176, 205; postfeminism,16 Ferrill, Mikki, 104 Feyzdjou, Chohreh, 127 film, 49, 91, 186 Fisher, Jean, xx, 57 Five Black Women, 13, 42 Flash Art International, 96 FluxUs (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84 formalism, 98 Francia, Luis, 81 Francis, Armet, 13 Fray Wray (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84 Freaky Deaky Meets Cult Nats (Tate), 50 Freedom Hunters (Jantjes), 9 Freeze, xxiii, 123, 124 Frenchness, 127 Freud, Sigmund, 19 Frieze, 45 funding, xviii, xxiii, 120, 127, 174, 179, 183, 187–89, 205; access to resources, 172; by Arts Council, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121; by GLC, 31; grants to artists, 44; intervention to preserve equality, 122; misdirection of, 42; by West Midlands Arts, 37 Fusco, Coco, 99 Gaines, Jane, xiii galleries, 29, 202; “white cube,” 201

Index ■ 333

gender issues, xviii, xix, 15, 70, 73; Gay Liberation, 201; performance, 80, 81; politics, 37, 179; stereotypes, 80 Geoffrey, Iqbal, 5 Geography of Desire (Yong Soon Min, deSouza, and Francia), 81 George, Edward, 128 ghettoization, xxiii, 120 Gilroy, Paul, 192 glc, xviii, 29, 30, 119; lack of knowledge of black art, 31 globalization, 2, 50, 71, 73, 127, 180; of the art market, 32 Globe and Mail, 94 Golden, Thelma, 98 The Golden Verses (Araeen), 92 Gonzalez, Jennifer, 58 Gooding, Mel, 45 Gosani, Bob, 7 Go West Young Man (Piper), 204 Goya, Francisco de, 26 Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 180 Great Indian Dancers, 118 Greater London Council. See glc Green, Renée, 128 Gregory, Joy, 18, 49 Grey Art Gallery, 78, 89, 91, 95 Guattari, Félix, 184 Guggenheim, Bilbao, 130 Gulbenkian Foundation, 205 Gupta, Sunil, 18 Hall, Stuart, xiii, 1, 43, 116, 170, 205; The Arts Britain Ignores (Khan), 117; and the black aesthetic, 171; and cultural production, 181; definition of black art, 11, 194; and documentation of black art, xi; and identities, 183; interpretation of 1980s, xvi; nature of 1980s, 170; and postmodernism, 77, 169; and poststructuralist theory, 178; and vernacular cosmopolitanism, 184, 195 Hanru, Hou, 129 happenings, 201 Hardt, Michael, 193, 195 Harlem Renaissance, xiv, 7 Harris, Lyle Ashton, 91, 128 Harvey, David, 130 Hasan (Dawoud), 156 Hassan, Jamelie, 91; Prove It, 92

334 ■ Index

Hatoum, Mona, xvii, 5, 53, 91, 124, 192, 206; effect of feminism/black politics on, 15; Them and Us . . . and Other Divisions, 24 Havana Biennale, xii, xxiv, 78, 129, 189 Hayward Gallery, xvii, 61, 78, 119, 124, 172 Heartfield, John, 25 Henderson, David, 54 He Took Fabulous Trips (Sanderson), 59, 60, 144–45 High Performance, 94 Himid, Lubaina, xix, xx, 5, 180, 182; and black women artists, 23, 24; and collaboration, 50, 189, 190; The Carrot Piece, 138; effect of feminism/ black politics on, 16; Five Black Women, 14, 42; historical models in her work, 180; paintings, 49; personal archives of, 173; We Will Be, 24 Hines, A. G., 117 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 127 Hirst, Damien, xxi, xxiii, 123 historical practices: effect on artists’ premature closure, 194 historiography, xx, 169. See also art history Holmes, Claudette, 15 home, 117 Housewives with Steak-Knives (Biswas), 139 Howe, Darcus, 116 Huang Yong Ping, 127 Hughes, Robert, 98 Hung Liu, 109; Resident Alien, 158 Hunt, Barbara, 82, 180, 188, 192 The Hustler, 116 ica, London, xvii, 24, 177, 190 iconography, 53, 55, 57, 175 iconology, 53, 55, 175; British political, 179 identity, xvii, 3, 12–13, 52–53, 94–96, 119; African, 99; Asian American, 78, 110, 112; in Britain, 193; and Britishness, 125; Chinese, 59–65; cultural, 71, 92; and death, 57; diasporic notions of, 89; English, 126; and ethnicity, 120; French Algerian, 73; as marker of authenticity, 125; misrepresentation by scant biography, 60; Paki Bastard, 202, 203; performative, 13; politics of, 97, 99, 177; transatlantic terminology differences, 61; understanding through interfaces, 125; yba s’ intervention, 191. See also cultural identity imperialism, cultural, 7 In the House of my Father (Rodney), 57, 143 In Threes and Fours or In Knots (Shen Yuan), 162

inauthenticity: identity as a marker or, 125 Indian art, 122 Indian Painters Collective, 199 iniva, xxiv, 46, 125, 127, 174, 206 installation art, 67, 73, 81–85, 91 Institute of Contemporary Arts, xvii, 24, 177, 190 Institute of International Visual Arts, xxiv, 46, 125, 127, 174, 206 institutions: and Black Arts Movement, 30; exclusion by, 175, 177, 193; funding by, 187–89; indifference of, 9; museums, 104–8; policies, 187–89; racism of, 119 institutionalization, of black art, 71 internationalism, 87, 128; in the arts, xxiv Interrogating Identity, 78, 89–96 intertextuality, 176 invisibility, 41, 61, 67, 70, 72, 79, 181, 189. See also visibility Invisible Man (Ellison), 56 Islamophobia, 72 Istanbul Biennale, xxiv, 129 I Was Taught to Believe (Chambers), 9 Jain, Ravi, 117 Jantjes, Gavin, 5; A South African Colouring Book, 168; Freedom Hunters, 9 Japanese art, 109 Jenkins, Rupert, 91 Johannesburg Biennale, 57 John Hope Franklin Center, xiii Johns, Jasper, 179 Johnson, Chris, 91 Johnson, Claudette, xviii, 5, 23, 26, 37, 173, 176; blk Art Group, 43; Five Black Women, 14, 42; Miss Tidea and Mabel, 204 Jones, Kellie, 91, 104 Journal of Art Historians, 45 Jue, Sharon, 91 Julien, Isaac, 50, 128, 184, 186, 206; participation in Disputed Identities, 91; the trickster, 187 Kapoor, Anish, xix, 124, 125, 126, 206 The Keeper of the Temple (Williams), 135 Kempadoo, Roshini, 18, 91; Presence, 92 Ketara, Tiina, 127 Khan, Naseem, xxiii, 175, 187; The Arts Britain Ignores, 117, 118, 120, 202, 203 Khanna, Balraj, 5

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 9 Korean art, 109, 112, 113. See also Asian American art Kramer, Hilton, 98 Kumalo, Alf, 7 Lamming, George, 5 land art, 202 La Rose, John, 116 Latamie, Marc, 128 Latin American artists, 91 Lebanese artists, 91 Lennon, John, 85, 86 lens-based media, 73 Lewis, Dave, 18, 49 Lewis, Samella, 54 Ligon, Glenn, 91, 128 Lisson Gallery, 124 The Living Archive, xi, xv, 169 Li Yuan-chia, 5, 174 Lloyd, Errol: The Domino Players, 11 location, politics of, 71 Locke, Donald, 5 lok, susan pui san, xxi, 181, 183 London Citizens’ Gallery, 80 Lottery allocations, 120, 121 Lovell, Whitfield, 91, 92 Luna, James, 91 maas, 117 Made in Asia?, xiii, 109, 112, 113 Maestro, Lani, 91 Maghreb, 74 Magiciens de la terre, 177 Magubane, Peter, 7 Maharaj, Sarat, xx, 187 mainstream art, 11, 194; access to venues, xviii; black exclusion from, 3, 39, 193, 199; black inclusion, 40; galleries 71 Malcolm X, 9 Manchester University Press, 46 marginalization, xix, 96 Marley, Bob, 9, 13, 18 Marxism, 14; post-Marxism, 16 materials and media, 25, 49, 67, 73, 104, 202, 206 Mathison, Trevor, 128 McQueen, Steve, xix, 51, 128, 129, 209; Turner Prize, 126, 206

Index ■ 335

Medalla, David, 5, 53, 201 media, British, 72 Meher, Shantu, 117 Merali, Shaheen, 168, 178, 189; on avant-garde, 180; Havana Biennale, curating at, 78; Panchayat, co-founding, 173; work in community projects, 188, 195 Mercer, Kobena; and art historiography, 170; art/ politics/culture relationship, 171; on The Blues Aesthetic (Powell), 190; iconology and iconography reassessment, 175; importance of survey exhibitions, 194; inadequacy of 1980s art criticism, xx; relative autonomy of artworks, 175, 182; use of African American models, 173 metropolitanism, and displacement of nationhood, 130 migration, 87, 128; Asian Canadians, 111; and labour shortages, 72 militancy, 25, 178, 180, 192 Miller, Ron, 56 Min, Yong Soon. See Yong Soon Min Ming, Mur-Ray, 91 Minh-ha, Trinh T. See Trinh T. Minh-ha minimalist sculptors, 202 Minorities Arts Advisory Service, 117 minoritization of language, 184 Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, 128, 190 miscommunication, 92 Miss Tidea and Mabel (Johnson), 204 mixed-media, 91, 92 mixed nationality, 68 Mnemone (Dawoud), 154 modernism, xvii, 5, 7, 51, 53, 54, 94, 99; African American, 56; historical avant-garde in, 180; historiography of, 170; twentieth century, 170 modernist aesthetics, 176 modernity, 51, 99, 177, 178, 190 MoMA, 177 Monique (Dawoud), 157 Moody, Ronald, 199; Savacou, 200 Moret, Alfonso, 91 Mosquera, Gerardo, 129 Mother, Father and I (Sedira), 148 motifs, of diasporic artists, 185 movements, nature of, xiv The Moving Cube, xii Mulero, Lilian, 91

336 ■ Index

multiculturalism, 98, 111, 113, 177, 181, 184; and engagement, 112 Murray, Ossie, 117 Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, 78 Museum of Contemporary Poetry, 104 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 95 Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 127 museums, 104–8; display of black artists’ work, 44; engagement with artists and society, 107; and young people, xxii, 106, 191 mushairas, 118 music culture, 13, 171, 185 Muslims: in the British media, 72; French and Arab, 68–69 Naipaul, V. S., 5 Nairne, Sandy, 177 narrativization, 175 nation, xxii National Black Art Convention, xviii, 37, 176 national culture, 120 nationality, 92 National Portrait Gallery, 104 nationhood, xxiv Native American artists, 91 native informants, 95, 112, 184, 188 Nead, Lynda, 55 Negri, Antonio, 193, 195 The Negro Artist’s Dilemma (Bearden), 56 neoexpressionism, 205 neoformalism, 99 Neon Rice Field (Vong Phaophanit), 208 Nesbitt, Lois E., 94, 96 New Art from Cuba, 127 New Black Aesthetic (Ellis), 50 New Criterion, 98 New Museum of Contemporary Art, 78, 189 Newsweek, 98 New York Times, 96, 98 Nexus (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 80 Niati, Houria, 14, 42 Nka, 98 Notting Hill Carnival, 118 Objects in Time (Boyce and Bailey), xiii, 174, 161 Oboro Gallery, 86 October, 98

Ofili, Chris, xix, 51, 52, 129, 209; Turner Prize, 38, 99, 126, 206 Olmec-Mayan series (Williams), 10 Ono, Yoko, 85, 86 Onwurah, Ngozi A., 91 Organisation for Visual Arts, 206 Orientalism, 8 otherness, 36; philosophy of the Other, 16; status of artists as Others, 32 The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, 16, 204, 160; assessment of 1980s cultural shifts, 78; comparison with Freeze, xxiii, 123; exhibition catalogue chronology, xx; exhibition reviews, 125; first major black art British exhibition, xvii, 55, 194; glc funding, 119; as precursor to Rhapsodies in Black, 172; subsequent invisibility of artists in, 8, 124 ova, 206 Ové, Horace, 13 painting, 49, 91, 92, 98, 205 Paki Bastard (Araeen), 202, 203 Pan-Afrikan Connection, xvii, 3, 23, 26 Panchayat, xii, 78, 79, 173, 206 Panofsky, Erwin, 55 Parachute, 93 Parisien(ne)s, 127 Parker, Charlie, 7 Parvez, Ahmed, 5, 8 Passion: Discourses on Black Women’s Creativity (Sulter), 42 Patton, Sharon: African-American Art, xx, 54 peep (Boyce), 126 performance art, xix, 84, 86, 201 “Performing Nations,” 126 Peries, Ivan, 5 Phaidon Press, 46 Phaophanit, Vong. See Vong Phaophanit photography, xii, xxii, 1, 57, 67, 80, 91, 92, 103; Diary of a Victorian Dandy (Shonibare), 126; documentary realism, 49; as a medium, 73; U.S./U.K.: Transatlantic Dialogues, 105; use with ephemeral art, 202. See also street photography photomontage, 56 photorealism, 205 Piper, Keith, xviii-xix, 5, 12, 43, 179; Adventures Close to Home, 185; Altars of Commerce, 96; and black art history, xii, 172; Black Assassin Saints,

56, 142; Go West Young Man, 204; influence of U.S. Black Arts Movement, 3, 13; and militancy, 25; music scene in the 1980s, 171; 1989 halt in work, 191; paintings, 49; participation in Interrogating Identity, 91; partnership with Eddie Chambers, 22; Reactionary Suicide: Black Boys Keep Singing or Another Nigger Died Today, 9, 136; second-generation U.K. black artists, 5; Seven Ages of Man, 185 Pittsburgh Memories (Bearden), 56 political correctness, 99 political history, British, 14; and cultural production, 18; feminist politics, 15; Thatcherism, xvii, xviii, 22, 38 political radicalism, vii, xvii , 178–81 politics, black, 14, 70, 71 Pollard, Ingrid, 49, 91, 104, 185 Pollock, Griselda, 45 portraiture, 73 postcolonial attitudes, 173 postcolonialism, 16, 71, 128, 170, 184 postcolonial oppression, 128 postconceptual painting, 205 postmodernism, 3, 77, 178 poststructuralism, 16; French, 176; theory of, 178 Powell, Enoch, 9 Powell, Richard (Rick), 172, 190, 194; Black Art and Culture in the Twentieth Century, xiii, xx, 54; The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism, xx, 54, 171, 190; Culture and Modernism, 54, 171 power relations, 96 Presence (Kempadoo), 92 Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, 177 promotion of black artists, 42, 44 Prove It (Hassan), 92 psychoanalytic theory, 176 publishers of black art, 46 Queens Museum of Art, 112 race, xx, xxii, 14, 92, 93; as addressed by Mirage, 128, 190; essentialist definition of, 17; and hegemonic power, 193; and metropolitanism, 130; racial monitoring, 69; racial politics, in contemporary art, 125; racialization, 71; representation, 98 racism, 2, 111, 112, 113; alienation from British society, 12; of British art establishment, 129; Destruc-

Index ■ 337

tion of the National Front, 22; and education, 69; and employment, 69; iconic events related to, 9–10; as legacy of slavery and European colonialism, 23; legislation against, 69; maintenance of British white supremacy, 27; and militancy of young black artists, 25; oppression of black women, 31; racial abuse, 26; racist imagery, 205 race riots, 15; Los Angeles, 82; Notting Hill, 9; Paris, 68 “Race Today,” xvi, 10 radical politics, vii, xvii , 178–81 Ramsay, Ellen L., 94, 95 Rana, Samena, 171 Rastafarianism, 13 Ratnam, Niru, 96, 170, 171 Reactionary Suicide: Black Boys Keep Singing or Another Nigger Died Today (Piper), 9, 136 Read, Herbert, 6 reggae, 13 regionalism, 92 relative autonomy, 53, 170, 175, 176, 182 representation, 2, 16, 17, 45, 73, 96; race, 98; visual, 89 Resident Alien (Hung Liu), 158 Restany, Pierre, 201 Retake, 50 reviews. See exhibition reviews Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, 172, 190 Riggs, Marlon, 91 riots. See race riots Rock against Racism, 202 Rodney, Donald, 5, 49, 91, 171; In the House of my Father (1997), 57, 143 roles of art, 86 The Roti Maker (Thomas), 11 Routledge, 46 Royal Academy of Arts, 126 Royal Festival Hall, 31 Rushdie, Salman, 63 Ryan, Veronica, 14, 42 Saatchi, Charles, 126 Said, Edward, 19 Sanderson, Lesley, 59, 62; Fabrication and Reality (with Conroy), 63, 146–47; He Took Fabulous Trips, 59, 144–45; These Colours Run, 64 Sankofa, 49, 186, 205

338 ■ Index

Sarkis, 127 Savacou (Moody), 200 Scott, David, 4 sculpture, 9, 91, 92 Sealy, Mark, 1, 174, 175, 190 Sedira, Zineb, xxi, 173, 183, 184; Mother, Father and I, 148; Self Portraits or The Virgin Mary, 73, 149 self-censorship, 73 Selvon, Sam, 5 Sensation, London, 126 Sensation, New York, 52 separatism, 11 Serpentine Gallery, 99 Serre, Michel, 186 Seven Ages of Man (Piper), 185 Sewell, Brian, 125 sexuality, 15, 80 SF Camerawork, San Francisco, xii, 89, 91 SF Camerawork Quarterly, 94 Shemza, Anwar, 5, 8 Shen Yuan, 127; In Threes and Fours or In Knots, 162 Shonibare, Yinka, 51, 91, 126, 206; Cha Cha Cha, 208; Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 126; work in community projects, 188 Shu Lea Cheang, 80; Those Fluttering Objects of Desire, 81 Simmons, Gary, 91 Slade School of Art, 24 slavery, 3, 93, 192 slide archives, 173 Smalls, James, 58 Smethwick election (1964), 9 social interaction, 84 Soe, Valerie, 91 Sokolowski, Thomas, 91, 95 solo exhibitions. See exhibitions of black artists Sonponnoi (Fani-Kayode), 136 Sophiatown Generation, xiv source materials for artists, 184 South Asian artists, 79, 168, 174, 206 Souza, Francis Newton, 5, 9, 53, 199 Souza, Pauline de, 180 spaciality motifs, 185 Stam, Robert, 186 State of the Art, 177 Steinberg, Leo, 178 stereotyping, xxiii, 70, 81, 103, 112, 113, 120, 122 Stokes, Vincent, 91

Stonewall, 201 street photography, xxii, 103 street vernacular, 185 Studio Museum of Harlem, 78, 92 subjective expressionism, 176 Sulter, Maud, 5, 42, 43, 45, 50; effect of feminism/ black politics on, 16 The Sunday Times, 124 Tabrizian, Mitra, 18, 53 tachisme, 201 Talking Presence (Boyce), 57 Tani, Diane, 91, 112, 181; Duel, 152 Taniuchi, Tsuneko, 127 Tate, Great, 50 Tate Gallery, 206 Tate Modern, xxiv, 50, 130 Tawadros, Gilane, xxiii-xxiv, 191; as author of iconographic study, 55; curatorial grouping of artists, 188; directorship of iniva, 174; historical avantgarde, 179, 180; organizing black artist exhibitions, 45 Taylor, Robert, 13 Ten.8, xii, xiv, 124; The Critical Decade, 206, 207 terminology; black art, 11, 194; people of color vs. black, 61; validity of, 36 Thames and Hudson, 46 Thanh I (Dawoud), 155 Thatcherism, xvii, xviii, 22, 38 These Colours Run (Sanderson), 64 The Thin Black Line, xvii, 24, 45 Third Text, xvi, xvii, 5, 10, 96 Thomas, Shanti: The Roti Maker, 11 Thompson, Robert Farris, 54 Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (Shu Lea Cheang), 81 Time, 98 Timeline, xiii tokenism, 119, 187, 194 transatlantic dialogue, 172 Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain 1966–1996, xx, 55, 61, 89–96, 194, 206, 207, 153 Transition, 97 transnationalism, xii Tress/Pass (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84, 151 Trinh T. Minh-ha, 60, 64 Tulloch, Courtney, 116

Turner Prize, xix, 29, 38, 44, 99, 126, 206 Union Jack, deconstruction of, 22 University of Birmingham, 205 The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, xii Untitled (Boyce), 163 Untitled I & II (Al-Ani), 208 Upper Level I (Dhanjal), 160 U.S. foreign policy, 86 US/UK Photography Exchange, xii, xxii U.S./U.K.: Transatlantic Dialogues, 104 Vaizey, Marion, 124 Vancouver (journal), 94 Van Drys, Margaret, 58 veil, 70, 73 Venice Biennale, xxiv, 129 vernacular cosmopolitanism, 183, 184 video, 49, 67, 91, 92, 73 Village Voice, 50, 98 Vindaloo and Chips, 125 visibility, 2, 37, 61, 73, 79, 189, 201; of black art in galleries, xviii. See also invisibility visionary, artist as, 182 Vong Phaophanit, 206; Neon Rice Field, 208 Wadsworth Athenium Museum of Art, 104 Wainwright, Leon: art historiography, 170, 175; diasporic aesthetic, 171, 194; didacticism, 179; visual work informing critical, 182 Walker Art Center, 104 Walker, Kara, 52 Walker, Maxine, 104 Wallace, Michele, 54–55, 98 Wallinger, Mark, 126 Walmsley, Anne, 206 Wang, C. C., 112 Wearing, Gillian, 126 Weems, Carrie May, 91 Welcome Under the Dear Old Flag! (Black Audio Film Collective), 204 Western images, 73 West Midland Arts, xviii, 37 We Will Be (Himid), 24 Wexner Center for the Arts, 104 Whitechapel Art Gallery, 46, 61, 127 white cube, 201 whiteness, 205

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Whitney Biennale, 81, 98, 99, 177 “Whose Heritage?,” 120 Will **** for Peace (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 86 Williams, Aubrey, xvi, 5, 8, 9, 53; “A Black Aesthetic,” 10; The Keeper of the Temple, 135; OlmecMayan series, 10 Williams, Malaika, 91 Williams, Raymond, 8 Willis, Deborah, 192 Wilson, Harris, 5 Wilson, Judith, xxi, 168, 177 Windrush, 5 Wolfflin, Heinrich, 55 Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 11, 13, 26 Wolverhampton Polytechnic, xviii, 37 Women’s Liberation Movement, 201 Women’s Slide Library, 192 The Work Between Us (Fisher), 57 works of art. See artworks Work Train (Bearden), 57

Yale University Art Gallery, xii, 104 ybas, xix, xxi, xxiii, 36, 51, 124, 125, 191, 206 Yeh, Diana, 180, 184 Yong Soon Min, xx, 176, 189; alter idem/performing personae (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 82; and anthropological references sources, 184; collaboration, 185, 189; concept of artwork addresses, 77; FluxUs (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84; Fray Wray (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84; Geography of Desire (Yong Soon Min, deSouza, and Francia), 81; Nexus (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 80, 150; participation in Asia/America: Identities . . . , 112; participation in Disputed Identities, 91; Tress/Pass (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 84, 151; Will **** for Peace (Yong Soon Min and deSouza), 86 Young British Artists, xix, xxi, xxiii, 36, 51, 124, 125, 191, 206 Young British Chinese Artists, xxi, 64 Young, British & Black, xii Young, Lola, 172, 174, 187, 192

Xu Bing, 113; A Book from the Sky, 159 000zerozerozero: A Celebration of British Asian Culture, 61

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shades of black : assembling black arts in 1980s Britain / edited by David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce. p. cm. Documentation from a conference and exhibition held at Duke University in 2001. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3409-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 0-8223-3420-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Art, Black—Great Britain—Congresses. 2. Art, British—20th century—Congresses. 3. Multiculturalism in art—Congresses. 4. Postcolonialism and the arts—Congresses. I. Bailey, David A. II. Baucom, Ian. III. Boyce, Sonia. IV. Institute of International Visual Arts. V. African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive. n6768.s47 2005 704.03’96041’09048—dc22 2004022038

340 ■ Index