Rethinking Black Art as a Category of Experience

Abstract

Black art was a widely used category in the late 1970s and 1980s to describe the artwork of British people of South Asian, African or African-Caribbean descent. There are numerous problems associated with the collective labelling of such a group, not least because of the lack of stability as to what the term refers. This article addresses the inherent problems with this category and proffers alternative ways of thinking about Black art in terms that encompass broader identity issues. The concept of diaspora aesthetics, for instance, is presented as a more satisfactory alternative that resists the claim that culture develops along ‘ethnically absolute lines’, to use a phrase by Paul Gilroy, and instead encompasses the lived realities of identity positions as well as the heterogeneity of cultural experience.

Keywords:

• Black art
• Britishness
• diaspora aesthetics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Eddie Chambers, Things Done Change; Black Artists in British Art; and Cultural Politics in the Making of Black Britain.

2 Many of these artists who were at art schools in the 1980s now hold academic or curatorial posts in universities and art institutions. Sonia Boyce is Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts, London; Lubaina Himid is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire; Keith Piper is Associate Professor in Fine Art at Middlesex University.

3 Eddie Chambers’ 2014 monograph, Black Artists in British Art, is helpful for tracing the early histories of the arrival of visible ethnic minority artists in Britain.

4 As well as being an arts practitioner and curator, he was responsible for key publications about art and politics. He was editor of the magazine Black Phoenix in the mid-1970s, which was relaunched as the journal Third Text. See Eddie Chambers, Black Artists in British Art, 55.

5 Chambers, Black Artists in British Art, 3–4.

6 Rasheed Araeen (ed.), The Other Story, exhibition catalogue (Hayward Gallery/South Bank Centre: London, 1989), 40.

7 Stuart Hall quoted in Alison Donnell (ed.), ‘Introduction’ in Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture, xii.

8 Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, James Donald and Ali Rattansi (ed.), ‘Race’, Culture and Difference, 254.

9 Stuart Hall, ‘Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge – and After’, 12.

10 Interpellation, used here in the Marxist sense, is the process in which people recognize and respond to ideologies, thereby treating themselves as subjects.

11 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 291

12 This shift of thinking from being known by one’s ethnic heritage to being regarded collectively as Black artists was reflected in arts funding. In 1976 Naseem Khan’s report ‘The Art Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain’ talked about ‘ethnic arts’ which was countered by the stronger drive for a concept of ‘black arts’ which was driven by anti-racism (Hylton, 2007, 11).

13 The original name was the Wolverhampton Young Black Art Group, which was changed in 1981 to the Young Black Art Group. They were also known as the Pan-Afrikan Connection.

14 The group organized the first Black art exhibition in Britain that was shown at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 1981, ‘Black Art an’ Done’, which was followed by the First National Black Art Convention, also held in the same city in 1982.

15 Gilane Tawadros ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’, 125.

16 This usage was reflected in the programming of The Black-Art Gallery in North London, where Dedi was curator from about 1983 to the early 1990s, a fact that ironically tended to isolate minority groups further rather than emphasizing the commonalities of their struggle. Eddie Chambers commented on how a new directorship by Marlene Smith radically changed the direction of themes; the latter ‘made it clear that she had little regard for the exclusively African/African-Caribbean remit of her predecessor’, an attitude reflected in her first show Colours of Asia, which featured works by eleven artists of Asian origin (Chambers, Black Artists in British Art, 122)

17 See Rasheed Araeen, ‘The Emergence of Black Consciousness in Contemporary Art in Britain: Seventeen Years of Neglected History’, 5. His curated show, ‘The Other Story’ (1989) at the Hayward Gallery (London) was an overt challenge to mainstream British art and presented the historical legacy of Black artists in Britain – as the title suggests, the ‘other’ story of Black British experience spanning over forty years of post-war artwork.

18 James Procter, Writing Black Britain 1948–1998, 194.

19 Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 235.

20 Paul Gilroy, ‘Nothing But Sweat Inside My Hand’, 44.

21 Richard Hylton, The Nature of the Beast, 13, 23, 69.

22 Two survey shows of 1988 include ‘The Essential Black Art’ (curated by Rasheed Araeen) and ‘Black Art: Plotting the Course’ (curated by Eddie Chambers).

23 Chambers quoted in Hylton, The Nature of the Beast, 53.

24 Michael Anthony Slote, ‘The Theory of Important Criteria’, 211–24.

25 Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers ‘Black Art: A Discussion’, 52.

26 It is interesting to compare the grounds for membership with other groups, such as feminism. To be a feminist artist necessitates a critical awareness of the inequality of women and a commitment to addressing this problem. Although one may assume that there are more female feminists than there are male ones, being male does not preclude being a feminist.

27 Chambers describes Moody’s sculpture ‘particularly his dramatic faces, heads, and figures […] has the appearance not so much of racialised imagery […] instead, it presents itself to us as a compelling amalgamation of the breadth of humanity’ (Chambers, Black Artists in British Art, 11).

28 Fanon discusses how he was made aware of his blackness phenomenologically, as it appeared to him by the ‘othering’ of him under the colonial gaze. ‘“Dirty nigger!” Or simply, “Look, a Negro!” // I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. // Sealed into that crushing objecthood’. Franz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks, 82.

29 Cultural appropriation is the adoption of elements from one culture by members of another. It has come to be identified as a particular type of taking that involves an imbalance of economic/social/historical/political power between one culture and another.

30 Hall, Stuart, ‘New Ethnicities’.

31 Martin Jay, ‘Abjection Overruled’, 236.

32 Julie MacDougall, quoted in Michael McMillan, ‘Texts of Cultural Practice’, 137.

33 Paul Gilroy, Small Acts, 24.

34 Paul Gilroy quoted in Alison Donnell, Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture, 126.

35 Paul Gilroy, Small Acts, passim. Gilroy’s book was the inspiration behind the 2010 exhibition at Tate Liverpool, ‘Afro-Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic’, which conveys the richness of a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic and traces the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism.

36 Edward Said describes the condition of exiles as ‘being aware of at least two [cultures], and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions’ (quoted in Amna Malik, ‘Conceptualising “Black” British Art Through the Lens of Exile’ 167.) I am expanding the sense of the terms here to define the experience of migration more generally.

37 It is interesting to note that a similar drive to move beyond the conceptually limiting potential of black art was seen in the US. In the late 1990s the curator Thelma Golden and the artist Glenn Ligon introduced the notion of post-black art as a category of contemporary African American art. Even though ‘black’ here referred exclusively to people of African or African-Caribbean descent, thereby distinguishing from its use in a British context, the category of post-black is important because it sought to move away from the focus on ethnicity. Whilst acknowledging that ethnicity is an integral part of the existential life experiences of black people, ‘post-black’ accommodates the diversity of artists who encompass a variety of backgrounds. One ground for objection to the use of the term is the implication that racism is no longer a concern. Notwithstanding the problems of the term, its use heralds a need to rethink category terms.

38 Leon Wainwright, Perception and Presence, 9–11.

39 Malik, ‘Conceptualising “Black” British Art Through the Lens of Exile’, 178.

40 Sulter keeps the backdrop and poses in line with the conventions of Victorian portrait photographs but the paraphernalia used are non-European.

41 From Go West Young Man. In 1996 the work was developed into a computer animation to powerful effect.

42 Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, 252.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rina Arya

Dr Rina Arya is a Reader at the University of Wolverhampton who is interested in the visual and material culture of religion. Author of Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World (2012) and Abjection and Representation (2014), she is currently working on a study of cultural appropriation in a Hindu context.