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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 artists––including women like herself––for 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 Bey––now teaching in Chicago, USA––created 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.

 

 




Updated 1st August 2005


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