Black Arts in the Maelstrom

Shades of Black was the title of a conference held in April 2001 at Duke University, North Carolina, which has now been extended and produced as a book.¹ It is an ambitious publication, with essays, commentaries and responses from the conference, illustrations of some key works, and a critical and instructive timeline (originally created as an exhibition by Sonia Boyce and David A. Bailey). The tone displays some of the rough-and-tumble irritation and disagreement of a conference, but the book is nevertheless a welcome addition to the literature of the visual arts.² It is particularly welcome because of its international framework: the conference was held in the United States, and the book contains important contributions from American artists and critics.³ More work is still required to map the post-war development of overlapping generations of artists of Asian and Afro-Caribbean cultural backgrounds, but Shades of Black shows very well the impact these artists have had on the visual arts in Britain.

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1980s Britain was a fraught society. The Thatcherite years saw a series of major confrontations between government and governed, of which the race riots of the early and mid decade and the miners' strike were among the most prominent. Less visible but no less crucial were shifts in the cultural terrain affecting all arts institutions, including those in the visual arts. The Thatcher regime reconfigured the political landscape in ways that were as alienating to most artists as they were to many intellectuals and writers: changes that affected the whole quarter century that followed. Only from the vantage point of the new century is it possible to look back at particular strands of cultural activity, and analyse them in the light of the experience of those who were fighting to create new cultural forms and opportunities.⁴.

The exhibition A New Spirit in Painting⁵ in 1981 is often cited as the most visible demonstration of changes that brought an end to the dominance of abstract painting and sculpture and the reintroduction into art of content, narrative and expression. Many commentators saw these as the last days of the grand modernist project, and compared the 'new' painting and sculpture with the eclectic development of post-modernist architecture and design. But this narrative of a new heroic, expressive – and mostly male – artistic exuberance, while breaking the dominance of the New York School and allowing such European figures as Francesco Clemente, Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer to be recognized, also pointed back to complex artists such as Francis Bacon and even Pablo Picasso, to a more eclectic viewpoint within modernism. What these general accounts failed to do was to take any account of changes in the work and recognition of women artists, the influence of conceptual and performance artists, and the work of black artists who had already broken the mould of formalist styles for more than a decade but who had almost no presence in the commercial art market and little in the larger international biennales.

Stuart Hall – whose essay sets out many of the key questions taken up in the book: how to 'assemble' the 1980s as an object of critical knowledge, how to assess the 'identity question', and how to account for race itself, the 'fact of blackness' – describes the decade as marking the overlap of two profoundly different generations of black artists in Britain. The first, born elsewhere, came to Britain to further avant-garde ambitions, and took part to lesser or greater degrees in the London art world at its more cosmopolitan. The first generation included such figures as Francis Newton Souza, Frank Bowling, Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke, Avanish Chandra, David Medalla, Balraj Khanna, Saleem Arif, Li Yuan-chia, Rasheed Araeen and slightly later Gavin Jantjes. They arrived 'on the crest of the wave of post-war decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s'.⁶ The leading artists of the second wave, who were born and educated in Britain, include Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Lubaina...