World is Africa

Writings on Diaspora Art

Eddie Chambers

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350140349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Afrikanische Kunst

World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.

Chapter 1

Section One Introduction

Before entering the academic world (for me, a twice-renewed visiting professor position at Emory University, Atlanta, beginning in 2003) much of my writing took the form of art criticism, reviews, catalogue introductions, and so on. My first conscious foray into art criticism had come in 1989, when my text, ‘Makonde African sculpture’, a review of what I regarded as a troubling and hugely problematic exhibition at Oxford Museum of Modern Art, appeared in Art Monthly, London, Number 129, September 1989. The text afforded me an opportunity to reflect on what I regarded as exclusionary practices of supposedly leading gallery spaces, such apparent ignoring of Black British artists made all the more vexatious by a simultaneous, self-regarding, though piecemeal embrace of African art, bringing with it no end of problematic framings. My association with Art Monthly has continued for over three decades, and has afforded me the opportunity to publish a significant number of texts, including a critique of the then upcoming ‘Africa 05’ festival, following on the heels of africa 95 (sic), and ‘Dead Artists’ Society’, a critique of posthumous exhibitions of Black artists’ work, typified, it seemed to me, by the Whitechapel’s 1998 belated showing of Aubrey Williams’ work, years after the artist’s death and years after he had had (despite some successes) art world doors slammed in his face. It seems to me that as much as art historians have the right to undertake whatever research they are inclined to, or the right to avail themselves of whatever catalogue essay opportunities might come their way, there is also a pressing need to critically consider the antics of an art world frequently disinclined to substantially recognize certain artists until they are dead. In various ways, art history, institutions, and academia are all, or certainly should be, in the dock.

Chapter 2

The Harmful Consequences of Postblack

Time flies. It has now been well over a decade since the Studio Museum opened its Freestyle exhibition in 2001, ushering in the term postblack. The term encompasses art that seeks to undermine the role of race within black artists’ practices and yet also explore the black experience – an idea as intriguing as it is confusing.

In some respects, it feels like postblack has been around for a lot longer. It’s now pretty much the only game in town for a new generation of black artists in the United States who wish to achieve any sort of visibility within a gallery system still not particularly minded to treat black artists as individual practitioners – each distinct in his or her own right. There is now a postblack authoritarianism that dictates what sort of black artists, and which practitioners in particular, get exposure. If an artist’s work can be deemed postblack, this affords them greater chances of passage into the firmament of an art establishment torn between gestures of liberalism and pathologies of prejudice (not that those two patterns of behavior are mutually exclusive of course).

It might well be easier to dismiss – or indeed, embrace – postblack were it not for its fiendish entanglement with postrace (the theory that the United States has transcended racial inequity). Postblack might ultimately mean a thousand different things to a thousand different artists, curators, gallerists, and critics; postrace might similarly mean a thousand different things to people in different strands of public life. But these enigmatic terms, notwithstanding their structural manifestations, now dominate in ways that speak loudly about this country’s continued discomfort around matters of race.

There are a large number of white people in the art world who view certain types of black artists as being too strident, too accusatory, too finger-pointing. Postblack art is considered more playful, less hung up about race, and viewed as a blessed relief by some gallerists. Time and again, we have seen the ways in which certain black artists win approval ‘for not making an issue out of race’ or the ‘lightness of touch’ they apply to the perceived racial dimensions of their practice. Such sentiments are coded references to good black artists and serve as lessons, or warnings, for those not yet regarded as good black artists, or, even worse, those regarded as bad black artists.

It was perhaps fitting that postblack should emerge out of a Studio Museum exhibition. The gallery is self-defined as a ‘black space.’ As the Studio Museum has demonstrated from its earliest exhibitions, this ‘black space’ dynamic has given it distinct latitude in its approach to exhibition curating. From its championing of the work of non-figurative painters and sculptors, to its appraisals of art coming out of the era of the black arts movement, to its posing of the postblack proposition, the museum has done singular work in its mission of showcasing the work of African American (and to a lesser extent) African Diaspora artists.

Problems tend to arise when other galleries start bandying around their own versions of postblack without treating the wider body of black artists with respect. It is in this context that postblack assumes decidedly problematic and sorrowful consequences.

In this respect, an exhibition such as the Studio Museum’s recent Fore, which examines art’s relationship to US and global communities, is appropriately located. Fore is the latest of the museum’s series of F word shows, following Freestyle, 2001; Frequency, 2005–2006; and Flow, 2008. The museum has developed the critically-necessary curatorial mindset and operational framework that is able to put all manner of black artists’ work into wider artistic contexts.

Bluntly put, not every exhibition that the Studio Museum shows is in the vein of its epoch-making Freestyle exhibition. In contrast, there are white-run galleries, beyond number, that have declared themselves wedded to only exhibiting those African American artists that it can regard as postblack. This situation turns the fluidity, the nuance, and the boldness, of the postblack proposition from an intriguing idea emanating from a distinct cultural space, into a nationwide out-and-out tyranny embraced by galleries and museums whose senior staffs are as hung up on race as they have ever been.

A discrete but nevertheless important aspect of Fore and its predecessors is the extent to which it disrupts dominant definitions of the contemporary African American artist. The dominant definition used to be a decidedly insular one. There were African American artists, and there were immigrant artists, and curatorially, never the twain shall meet. The curators of exhibitions such as Fore are now starting to be cognisant of particularly fluid aspects of African diasporic existence within the United States.

Fore reveals the extent to which the very notion of African American art has been disrupted by a new generation of artists for whom old-fashioned borders no longer neatly apply. Of the nearly thirty artists in the exhibition, one was born in Santiago, Dominican Republic, and lives in New York; one was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and lives in New York and Amsterdam; one was born in Ife, Nigeria, and lives in San Francisco, California; and one was born in Kigali, Rwanda, and now lives in New York.

We should perhaps thank the Studio Museum for its nuanced approach to curating African American and African Diaspora artists. But as things currently stand, postblack has created a mandate by an army of curators with neither the wit nor the imagination to treat the full range of black artists with proper respect.

‘The Harmful Consequences of Postblack’ was an Op-Ed piece that first appeared in an issue of International Review of African American Art, titled, Triple Consciousness: Diasporic Art in the American Context, Vol. 24, No 3A, 2013: 6–8.

Chapter 3

Africa 05: Polemic

Museums, galleries, concert halls and cinemas will this year ‘be reverberating with the sights, sounds, colours, stories, art, images, textures, fashion, sculpture, photography, film, debate and discourse that will create one of the most significant events in London and the UK in years.’ ‘Africa 05’ has described itself as ‘a series of major cultural events taking place in London that celebrates contemporary and past cultures from across the continent and the diaspora.’

The last time that London saw anything like this was of course ‘africa 95’, on which this latest initiative appears to have been modelled. ‘Africa 05’ provides a useful barometer of the commitment (or lack thereof) of major London galleries towards the art of Africa. With the dubious exception of exhibitions such as the Serpentine’s showing of South Africa’s William Kentridge, ‘Africa 05’ reminds us that it has been a full decade since many of London’s major galleries exhibited any art from Africa. If London’s biggest galleries are only prepared to take art from Africa seriously once every ten years, and if the ‘africa 95’/‘Africa 05’ model is to be the one with which we are saddled, then there can presumably be little genuine hope of African art gaining lasting acceptance and prominence. Several months of feast followed by a decade of famine doesn’t make no sense. Furthermore, once-a-decade festivals are guaranteed to ensure the continued marginalisation of art from Africa, assuming that we accept as a certainty the debatable premise that contemporary African art has indeed yet to take up a prominent place in the so-called mainstream.

The ‘Africa 05’ programme director makes the claim that this is ‘not just a series of exhibitions and events, it’s a watershed moment in the development and promotion of African arts and culture in the UK. We are confident that the year will challenge many people’s preconceptions about Africa and will place many African artists firmly within the UK and international arts scene.’ However, this approach is a denial of the altogether more serious and credible work that has been done by writers, art historians, curators, artists and others, over the course of the past several decades. The message of Africa’s well established links with modernity might indeed not be getting through to the certain types of people, but quick-fix solutions like ‘Africa 05’ won’t help.

One also has to wonder at the motives of those who continue to suggest that African artists are not yet ‘firmly within the UK and international arts scene’ and that there are caricatures of Africa that perpetually need dispelling. Contemporary African art has had a vigorous if patchy presence within the international art world for decades now. We can go back as far as we’d like to, for evidence of this. For example, when I was still in short trousers, Camden Arts Centre held an important exhibition of Contemporary African Art in the Summer of 1969. More than two decades later, Chéri Samba – regarded at the time as being the most contemporary of Africa’s contemporary artists – had a major exhibition at the ICA in 1991. A decade on from that particular exhibition, in the early 21st Century, and no biennale, no Documenta, no mega-exhibition held anywhere in the world, is now deemed complete without at least a smattering of African artists. Many exhibitions of contemporary or modern Afr...