Stateside Perspectives on Black British Artists

Stateside Perspectives on Black British Artists

[…] The two books under review, by scholars based in the United States, exemplify the kind of disinterested scholarship on Black British artists that is still largely absent from British academia. Monique Kerman’s book is an engaging study primarily focused on four women artists, Magdalene Odundo, Veronica Ryan, Mary Evans and Maria Amidu who, despite having long-established careers, remain underexplored in art history. Meanwhile, W. Ian Bourland offers the most detailed critical appreciation to date of the mainly black-and-white photographic work of the late Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a Nigerian-born British photographer. Bourland’s book is also the first in a new series by Duke University Press titled The Visual Arts of Africa and its Diasporas, co-edited by Steven Nelson and Kellie Jones. Although the two studies are radically different, they both offer assessments of Black artists’ histories in postwar Britain. Where Kerman considers the impact of migration and the uneasy emergence of multicultural Britain from the 1970s to the present, Bourland homes in on Fani-Kayode’s contribution to an ‘emerging conception of ethnicity and black radicalism in London’ during the early to late 1980s. Whilst both volumes coincide with an upturn in the profile of Black artists in Britain, they are products of sustained critical inquiry. Kerman’s originates from doctoral studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in the early 2000s; Bourland’s Bloodflowers represents ‘some ten years of work’.

In Contemporary British Artists of African Descent and the Unburdening of a Generation, four of the six chapters comprise individual case studies chosen to reflect differing cultural and artistic experiences and influences. Odundo and Evans were born in colonial Kenya and postcolonial Nigeria respectively, Ryan was brought up on the Caribbean Island of Monserrat and Amidu was born in Britain to Nigerian parents. By linking Britain, East and West Africa and the Caribbean, Kerman simultaneously underlines the scale of Britain’s imperial past and the heterogeneous nature of Black diasporic identity. She draws on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and W. E. B. Du Bois’ antecedent theory of ‘double consciousness’ to ask: ‘Is there a double consciousness operating in the professional and personal lives of contemporary British artists of African descent that defines their relationship to modernity and postmodernity?’. Her case studies are testaments to artists who have, over several decades, not only sustained productive artistic careers in Britain and beyond but presently continue to make important contributions in their respective fields.

Studiously researched, Kerman’s narrative template comprises detailed descriptive accounts which segue effortlessly from childhood upbringing to art education to artistic careers. The case studies also draw extensively from artist interviews mainly conducted during the course of the 2000s. In the main, these are candid accounts. Often unvarnished in their reflections and recollections, Kerman’s case studies bring different and overlapping perspectives on various aspects of the art world, from the 1970s to the present […]

 […]The formative role of art education in Britain figures prominently in each case study. At West Surrey Institute of Art & Design in Farnham, Odundo developed ‘an affinity for ceramics’ and a renewed interest in African art. This was within an environment where tutors such as Henry Hammond and Paul Barron, trained in ‘traditions of East Asian aesthetics’, enabled students to interact with a wide range of practitioners from Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach in Britain to Ladi Kwali and Asibi Aidoo in Nigeria. By contrast, Ryan’s studies in sculpture at Bath Academy of Art between 1975 and 1978 prioritized ‘certain kinds of sculptural conventions derived from Rodin, Brancusi David Smith and William Tucker’. The prevailing ‘masculinist emphasis’ and ‘Eurocentric creative tradition’ was not conducive to Ryan’s interests in ‘African and African-American art’ and in artists such as Eva Hesse and Barbara Hepworth. Ryan recalls how taking her Master of Art at the Slade School of Art was ‘so freeing for me to just make what I wanted to make and not feel inhibited’ . Although Amidu followed an almost identical educational path to Odundo a decade later, her experience is strikingly dissimilar. In Farnham, the ‘narrow-minded tendency of tutors’ was characterized by a department focused on Eurocentric teaching. At the Royal College of Art (RCA), Amidu’s ‘burgeoning artistic identity’ coincided with a growing desire to explore her Nigerian heritage, but according to Kerman, Amidu would ‘face issues of racial difference more directly’. As one of London’s pre-eminent postgraduate art schools, the RCA could already boast Odundo, Denzil Forrester and Keith Piper among its distinguished Black alumni, yet Amidu characterizes the institution as having a ‘mono-cultural attitude’.

 […]Bloodflowers comprises six chapters, ‘exposures’ as he aptly refers to them, which can be divided into two main parts. The first three exposures are ‘orientated spatially’ in terms of the cultural, sexual and political spaces within which Fani-Kayode operated. This includes Brixton in south London where the photographer produced his ‘mature work’, the avant-garde music scene, a proximity to ‘queer politics of the 1980s’, and other spaces which ‘gave rise to emerging forms of identity and their attendant aesthetics and politics’.

‘Exposure 1: Brixton’ offers an original perspective on the eponymous London district. The strife, struggle and acts of resistance in the early 1980s characterized a new phase in Black British identity. Whilst Fani- Kayode would make Brixton, specifically Railton Road (aka the ‘frontline’), his home after the uprisings in 1981 Bourland considers the significance of the artist’s production emerging from a space which simultaneously spoke to and challenged the British political establishment. Bourland notes: ‘Fani-Kayode drew considerable influence and energy from the varied communities that surrounded him there, with whom he worked in dialectical relation’. But equally, ‘theatrical, autobiographical, and homoerotic aspects of his pictures put him at odds with the explicitly politicized and generally heteronormative emphasis of earlier black nationalisms’. Whilst living in New York during the early 1980s, Fani-Kayode was influenced by Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography but Fani-Kayode’s imagery would also deploy African spiritual and cultural signifiers from his Yoruban heritage. Bourland identifies the various ways in which these influences dramatically challenged an array of representational conventions around the Black body, the white gaze and the negation of gay African identity.

[…]‘Exposure 3: Magnolia Air’ grapples with the multiple levels on which Fani-Kayode’s work operated. The interplay between appropriation and subversion, ‘humor, homage and appropriation’ were deployed to challenge ‘heteronormative master codes’ and ‘more racially determined conventions associated with gay subcultural formations’. Ebo Òrisà (1987) portrays the bare upper torso of a muscular black man with his head bowed and face hidden from view, cradling a gelede mask whose bulging eyes stare out to meet the viewer’s gaze. Such compositions exemplify Fani-Kayode’s ability to speak back to history with humour and visual acuity. From Christian iconography and African artefacts to homoerotic imagery and pop music, Bourland supplies multiple cultural prisms through which to read the art of Fani-Kayode. For example, Tom of Finland’s sexually charged Untitled from the 1970s, the illustration of which alludes to any number of oral/anal sexual predilections, is ‘subjected’ to what Bourland describes as ‘a series of knowing substitutions and inversions’ in Fani-Kayode’s Bronze Head of 1987. Where the former work portrays a mustachioed face partly obscured but staring out from between a pair of naked buttocks and thighs suggesting ‘phallic domination’, the latter depicts black buttocks enveloping the head of a bronze head that ‘is as much scatological as the Tom of Finland is fellatial’.

In the second half of Bloodflowers Bourland ‘undertakes sustained semiotic readings’ and, in doing so, continues to mobilize an impressive array of theoretical, art-historical and musical references to decode Fani-Kayode’s ‘technique of ecstasy’, an inimitable visual blend of mysticism and spiritualism, desire and pleasure, anxiety and rumination. Central to Bourland’s immersive readings is the role of Romanticism In The Queen Is Dead, Bourland examines how Romanticism, ‘everywhere’ in Fani-Kayode’s imagery, challenged aspects of representational politics during the 1980s. […]

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