Shades
of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s
Britain
by David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom & Sonia
Boyce, Eds.
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2005
368 pp., illus. 85 b/w, 31 col. Trade,
$99.95; paper, $29.95
ISBN: 0-8223-3409-7; ISBN: 0-8223-3420-8.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
This book collects papers delivered at
the "Shades of Black" conference at Duke
University in 2001, and the reader needs
to remember this fact when "the Conference"
is alluded to later on in the volume.
The anthology was produced by Duke with
the Institute of International Visual
Arts (iniVA) and the African and Asian
Visual Artist's Archive (Aavaa).
The Black Arts Movement of the 1980s in
the UK echoes similar-but-different impulses
in African American artists' work in their
own Black Arts Movement in the United
States during the previous two decades.
Similarities include establishment of
the proper dialogue between the family
or neighborhood and the gallery, problems
of art institutions that ghettoize nonwhite
artists' art, questions about where identity
politics end and the higher (or highfalutin')
aesthetics of world-class international
artworks begin, and what to do about those
few artists hegemonically granted stature
as tokens. Public funds for urban art
centers diminished under the government
of Margaret Thatcher, as they were similar
defunded in the United States during the
presidency of her friend, Ronald Reagan.
One of the most curious and interesting
elements to an American Midwesterner,
used to the unbending Black/White cultural
and political divisions and negotiations
in cities like Saginaw, Detroit, and Chicago,
is the fact that south Asians and even
east Asians are identified in Britain
as "blacks". Among the 13 essays from
the conference, Stuart Hall contextualizes
black art amidst all the histories and
problematics above. Hall praises Aubrey
Williams' Guyanese- and Mayan-inspired
artworks, and laments the career difficulties
encountered by artists Ahmed Pavez, Anwar
Shmza and Rasheed Areen.
The book gives us the artists' own words.
Rasheed Araeen examines "The Success and
the Failure of the Black Arts Movement"
and Keith Piper asks "Wait, Did I Miss
Something?" in his personal musings on
the 1980s and beyond. Lubaina Himid asks
"Why did we invisibilize each other",
blaming artistsincluding women
like herselffor having created
something important, "named it, and then
allowed it to be un-named and thus defunded".
She ends with a lists of Statements and
Responses that express her frustration
at the clubby limitations and underreporting
of the artists of her time. susan pui
san lok feels she has become a ciphered
"Y(B)B(AA)C(YRWBW/M)A", pigeonholed as
a typical and overdetermined "Young (Black)
British (Anglo-Asian) Chinese (Yellow
Red White and Blue Wo/Man) Artist".
Kobena Mercer notes the multiple diasporas
that came together in the Black Arts movement,
and Judith Wilson names its transatlantic
cultural commerce a "Triangular Trades".
Dawoud Bey advocates more collaboration
among artists, and fruitful essay collaborators
here include Zineb Sedira and Jawad Al-Nawab,
who examine their Algerian identities
within Black Britain, and Yong Soon Min
and Allan deSouza, who note the Korean,
Kenyan and Californian currents in their
lives, thought and art projects.
Plates of imagery, artworks by artists
discussed in the essays, follow, including
Rotimi Fani-Kayode rich photography with
hand tinting, and Donald Rodney's photo
of a hand cradling a tiny fragile house.
Dawoud Beynow teaching in
Chicago, USAcreated portrait
Polaroids in series. Two frames are shown
from Zineb Sedira's video projections
"Mother, Father and I". Keith Piper's
passionate mixed media painting employ
graffiti-like texts. Hung Liu gives us
the Resident Alien card of an Asian named
Fortune Cookie. This reviewer privileges
drawing skills, and enjoys Lesley Sanderson's
drawings "He Took Fabulous Trips" but
misses finding draughtsmen of the caliber
of Americans Charles White, John Biggers
and Jon Onye Lockard among the British
artists shown. Perhaps those earlier African
Americans felt that a muscular precision
was necessary to say "I'm Black and I'm
Proud".
The book's third section "Timeline" was
originally an installation filling a gallery
at the "Objects in Time" exhibition. The
timeline is a chronology of artistic and
cultural events of the past fifty years
that had impact on a multiracial Great
Britain. This includes exhibitions of
black British art, like "Black Art An'
Done" at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in
1981, the "Living Archive" conference
put on by the African and Asian Visual
Artist's Archive (Aavaa) of London at
the Tate Gallery in 1997, and the "Race
Today" seminar that year. A show curated
by English exile Rupert Jenkins at San
Francisco's SF Camerawork brought some
black British art to attention overseas.
It's a bit strange that the roster 'Conference
Papers and Speakers" is given its own
section heading, following the essays,
for it might have served better as the
first item in the book following the introduction.
We're not even reminded that this roster
of speakers was at which conference, when
and where. Yet this is a minor confusion
in a book that brings much clarity to
an area of contemporary art that remains
unknown to far too many North Americans.
This reviewer gained much from it, and
only wishes that a companion volume reversing
the ratio of plates to text would now
be published. The oversize format even
suggests a picture book, and we need to
see more black art from Britain.