JUST IMAGINE BEING A PRIMITIVE, A PROPER PRIMITIVE THAT IS. A PRIMITIVE THAT IS BEYOND CIVILIZATION, A PRIMITIVE IN A STATE OF PERPETUAL INDULGENCE, A PRIMITIVE OF EXCESS. I THINK I WOULD REALLY ENJOY THAT. HERE TOO I CAN BE A KIND OF URBAN PRIMITIVE; A KIND OF BACK TO NATURE CLICHÉ WITH A TWIST. OH HOW I LONG TO BE ETHNIC, NOT JUST ETHNIC. BUT AUTHENTIC ETHNIC. I LOVE PAINT. IT'S REALLY SUMPTUOUS, YUM. WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE SKIRT? WHAT DID LYCRA REPRESENT? WHAT LANGUAGE DOES DOCTOR MARTIN SPEAK? WHO NEEDS PINSTRIPE? LET'S HAVE A GOATEE INSTEAD; PERHAPS NOT-PASS? DOUBLE DUTCH.
YINKA SHONIBARE
Against a lurid pink wall hangs some fifty small canvases coated with dollops of impasto in variegated patterns that play off African fabric designs. At first glance, the exuberant clash of its gaudy patterning and colour- barely offset by the panels’ minimalist arrangement- signals a mimicry of the ‘ethnic’ fabrics one might see donned by black Britons in a show of their solidarity with African culture. But just how authentically ‘ethnic’ are these exoticised emblems of the Other? This is the work of British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, titled Double Dutch (1994)- and it is a closer examination beyond the essentializing seduction of its patterns that unveils the complex interculturation written into them. Shrouded by the visual density of its ‘African’ textiles is the equally dense semiotics of the connotations woven into it; popular in West Africa since the 1960s, the iconographic sources of Double Dutch are in fact batik textiles, originating in Indonesia. Batik techniques were industrialized by Dutch colonizers and later replicated by the British, specifically Mancunian Asians, who produced goods for export to West Africa, which were then re-exported back to Britain to be retailed as traditional ‘African’ crafts (Guha, 1994, p. 88). In a disarmingly simple move, Shonibare deconstructs the ostensibly unambiguous signifier of African national identity, speaking to the larger condition of black cultural production and criticism not only in the British context, but necessarily in a wider discursive terrain that maps the cultural sprawl of “race” globally.
Relegating black cultural production to neither an inviolable aesthetic space of “art for art’s sake”, nor a purely political endeavor subject to authoritarian moral policing, this essay mobilises a hybridized theoretical framework which contends that the structural rigidity of binarisms circumscribes both black cultural production and the critical dialogue surrounding it by misconceiving culture “as a fixed and final property of different racial groups.” Beyond the seeming deadlock of the essentialist vs anti-essentialist dialectic, this essay draws on Kobena Mercer’s 1990 article, Black Art and the Burden of Representation to examine the shift in the relationship between representation and the politics of cultural identity after the second generation of black British artists, characterised by their highly vocal dissidence toward the lack of visibility within the art world, such that they were burdened with the task of speaking for the ‘totality’ of their cultures. As a point of departure, I follow on from Stuart Hall’s explication that, during the 1980s, the foregrounding of “race” as the determining category- relocating the stereotyped black body in the field of vision- engendered not an inherent ‘truth’ about blackness but rather a burgeoning proliferation of meanings surrounding blackness, marking instead “the end of the essential black subject” (2006, p. 20). My focus here is the liminal stage between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, wherein “the pendulum swung to the opposite extreme” (Mercer, 2016, p. 195) as black British art shifted from the cultural margins to a state of hypervisibility by virtue of its sublation into dominant institutions and multicultural exhibitionism. For Mercer, this integration of the Other was offset by the “mute or evasive positioning” of young black artists who no longer felt responsible for a blackness that was becoming increasingly hypervisible in a climate of multicultural normalisation. Exemplified by the work of Yinka Shonibare, I aim to underscore the possibilities of a counter-normalising artistic practice grounded in a politics which resists the institutional reification of the ‘Other’ by “working within the complexities and ambivalences of representation itself, and tries to contest it from within” (Hall, 1997, p. 274). To this end, the deconstructive strategies of Shonibare, who rose to prominence during the more recent culture of Young British Artists, will be situated within the broader predicament of black cultural production: whether black art may ever be described as just ‘art’.
Circulated under the ideologically-loaded identifier of “Black British”, the late 1970s and 1980s saw an enormous proliferation and consolidation of black expressive cultures that spanned creative writing, visual and performing arts. Within the postwar genealogy of black British art, this era is identified by Hall as representing the second generation, demarcated distinctively from the first by its separatist, Pan-African diasporic imaginary, whereby “identity” acquired a political dimension and political struggle acquired a cultural dimension (Hall, 2006, p.19).The first generation consisted of visual artists who, born in the 1920s and 1930s, had arrived in Britain as the last ‘colonials’, whereas the second- including Eddie Chambers, Sonia Boyce and Keith Piper- represented the first black generation to be born in the diaspora. The demarcation lies in their attitudes towards Modernism; broadly speaking, the first ‘wave’, propelled by the promise of decolonization, defied their “Otherness” by participating in the modern world as equals, sowing seeds in a universalist terrain to which they felt they already belonged. While deeply critical of the colonial imposition of Western models, this generation deemed the projects of decolonization- which was considered as intrinsic to the modern consciousness- and the ostensibly international creed of “modern art” to be fully consistent with one another. To the contemporary critic, the conundrum is all too apparent: as Richard Iton argues, if modernity, as a reiteration of the Enlightenment, necessitates an alterity- an antonymic “Other”- can those ‘others’ constituted and marginalized through this ideological matrix effectively contest their conditions without deconstructing the language and logic of this exclusion? (2010, p. 13) Such a contradiction raises doubts about the feasibility of a reconciliation of the modern and the black subject; as Hall notes, the Afro-modernist relationship is a “difficult ‘horizon of the future’ for younger contemporaries to imagine or inhabit (2006, p.6).
The disintegration of this conjuncture in black British art was over-determined from multiple directions: its exclusion from dominant institutions and the cannon; a growing disillusionment towards Modernism’s re-exotifying celebration of ‘Primitivism’ and its universalistic promises derived from the Enlightenment conception of ‘Man’; and perhaps most significantly, the dramatic shift in the “whole fulcrum of the political world” (Hall, 2006, p. 16). These transformative conjunctures in Britain- whereby ‘race’ came to be foregrounded as the determining category in place of anti-colonialism- must necessarily be read within the larger context of racial politics worldwide. Taking into account Paul Gilroy’s rotating three-point indicator of the Black Atlantic, the materialisation of a new black British consciousness must be framed critically at the intersection of British and African-American cultural studies and the latter-day Pan-Africanism which charts the “the landscape of ‘race’ in its cultural sprawl, not in its essentialist homelands” (Chude-Sokei, 1996, p. 740). It was at the convergence of the ideological underpinnings of the post-Civil Rights climate, the formation of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), the separatist notions of Black Power, the imposition of the discriminatory 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Act and other global struggles that the shared discursive conjecture of the second ‘wave’ of black British art was forged, testifying visually to the dramatic watershed in racial politics. Perhaps most notably, its renewed focus on race “as a positive but exclusive identity category” marked conspicuously the departure from the assimilationist “black-and-white-unite-and-fight” desegregation struggles of the Civil Rights era (Hall, 2006, p. 17).
Corresponding with the formation of the Black Arts Movement on the other side of the Atlantic, the visual imaginary of the second ‘wave’ was charged with a polemical anti-racist politics, often manifested through the immediacy of highly graphic, iconographic art of which “the black body- stretched, threatened, distorted, degraded, imprisoned, beaten, and resisting” served as a recurring motif (Hall, 2006, p. 17). For Hall, the political identifier of “black”, encompassing all minority migrant communities, was conceived as a plural signifier of difference- a transracial difference which points emphatically to the impossibility of a singular, unified movement anchored in a homogeneous “Black” diasporic experience from the Middle Passage to the present. Rather, it is a condensation of deep fissures, from which contradictory forces and diverging trajectories unfold, that the creative practices of these artists are unified in a shared discursive conjecture. Larry Neal, a notable proponent of the essentialist vein, famously described the Black Arts Movement as “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept”, bound to a Black nationalist struggle founded on the separatist notion of a true nature common to all black people. As such, the interpellative powers of essentializing Afro-centric or Pan-African artworks lie in their projection of an imaginary coherence on the experiences of fragmentation and dispersal endemic to all enforced diasporas. For David Lionel Smith, however, it is precisely this quest for a singular “true” Black Aesthetic that stands as the fundamental theoretical failure of the movement (1991, p. 96); that is, the reading of “black” as a fixed imprint re-entrenches the very logic of race that legitimizes coloniality and continued subjugation by its erasure of difference within the ‘in-group’ of blackness itself, failing to attest to the subtle realities of a hybridized experience, of double consciousness, of a persistent internal tension between two disparate ideals characteristic of diasporic peoples. In terms of cultural production, a “Black Aesthetic” delimits the creative licence of black art in its imposition of an artificial uniformity through a black ‘truth’ disclosed by the work’s biographical associations, a predicament Yinka Shonibare puts succinctly: “What I’ve found, making work in Britain, is that when you make work about your origins, all it can be about is your origins. But if you don’t make work about your origins, people will say you’re an African artist who doesn’t make work about African subjects, so your identity becomes suspect” (Shonibare in Mercer, 2016, p. 148).
These patterns reveal the urgency in developing critical frames that resist the entrenched dualisms between the West and the ‘rest’, for, a mere reversal of the terms of systems of representation that stereotype the black body- whereby in a singular inversion “black” became “beautiful”- proves inadequate in dismantling such frameworks (Hall, 2006, p. 20). Hall contends that, instead of subverting this system of representation, inversion leaves it intact; as such, it calls for a deconstruction from within, a destabilization of the ostensibly rational logics that uphold such stereotypes. As per Mercer, it is the persistent dualisms integral to such logics that circumscribe the criticality of black cultural production; at the outer boundaries of the antagonistic ideologies of anti-racism and racism is the common denominator of an ‘ethnic absolutism’ which misconceives culture as a “fixed and final property of different ‘racial’ groups” (1990, p. 63). Such an essentialist conception of culture, in conjunction with the institutional exclusion of black British artists during the 1980s, brought into effect the broader problematic- what Mercer termed “the burden of representation” within which the second ‘wave’ of artists had to work. This moral problematic is construed as a function of the hierarchy of access, such that the ostensibly representative practice of largely invisibilized black British artists obliged them to speak on behalf of their heterogeneous communities through a homogeneous lens. Consequently, black British artists of this generation continually found the value of their work gauged exclusively against extra-aesthetic concerns- namely their capacity to encapsulate a broader black “reality”- within a cultural system that revered the creative act on the basis of its individuality. As per Mercer, the agenda of the second ‘wave’- that is, heightening visibility against the exclusionary boundaries that regulated black British artists’ access to dominant institutions- roused an institutional response that has come to characterise the wider multicultural paradigm of the art world as it stands.
The third ‘wave’ of black British artists, coming to the fore in the 1990s, found themselves facing a drastically different cultural agenda- one of hyper-visible cultural normalisation in the inauguration of the blockbuster model, its key threat being the neutralisation of the political dimension of black cultural production. As such, it created the scenario in which artists of this generation sought distance from the hyper-politicization of a difference which had now, by way of its ‘excess visibility’, become sublated into global multicultural exhibitionism (Mercer, 2016). As the work of black artists came to constitute “the multi in multicultural” and “the cool in Cool Britannia” (Hall, 1999, p. 13), this sublation was met with the emergence of a counternormalisation within the politics of representation. For Hall, an effective counterstrategy necessitates working “within the complexities and ambivalences of representation itself” (1997, p. 274), challenging dominant frameworks through their very own language and logics; this bears an immediate resonance with Yinka Shonibare’s work. Refusing the heavy-handed approach to ethnic authenticity, Shonibare lays bare the psychic and social ambiguities at play in racial representation through techniques of defamiliarization, whereby viewers’ assumptions can be “played with, seduced, and abandoned” (Mercer, 2016, p. 147). In his interview with Mercer, Shonibare asks: “Because I was brought up in Lagos and London- and kept going back and forth- it is extremely difficult for me to have one view of culture....How do I position myself in relation to that multifaceted experience of culture?” This question is answered deftly by his use of batik textiles in Double Dutch, an ostensibly clear-cut signifier of “authentic” African otherness. With some fifty panels of these “African” textiles, arranged precisely in five rows, Double Dutch synthesizes minimalist abstraction with the intercultural complexities of batik textiles in a re-appropriation of modernist primitivism’s appropriations. Unravelling the batik’s spatial circulations- appropriated by the Dutch, then mass-produced in Britain for export to West Africa, and ultimately re-routed back to Britain as a “traditional” African craft- Shonibare betrays the reductive means by which multicultural norms operate in achieving an artificial essential “meaning”, and instead obliges a critical enquiry that understands meaning itself to be unfixed. In each location, the fabric serves to ignite desire- in Africa, it has the allure of imported goods, in Europe, it elicits exotica (Mercer, 2016, p. 150); but what serves as the critical fulcrum in Shonibare’s work is the fabric’s appropriation by black diasporic people as an emblem of cultural nationalism- that is, when ‘ethnics’ appropriate others’ appropriations of ‘ethnicity’. “To show an affinity with Africa, young black British use these fabrics for head wraps, robes, and shirts,” Shonibare notes. “But the essentialism they associate with the fabrics is actually a myth because their origins are already questioned. At the shop in Brixton Market, they are never quite sure of the origins” (Shonibare in Mercer, 2016, p. 150).
Double Dutch, 1994
Shonibare, Y. (1994). Double Dutch. [Acrylic paint on wall, emulsion, and acrylic on 50 Dutch wax printed cotton canvases] Available at: https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/shonibare/dutch.html [Accessed 2 Jan. 2021].
Using this pliable medium of the batik, Shonibare microcosmically reflects the polyvocal story of Britain, through the lens of what Gilroy calls “transracial syncretism”, “as already cross-cut by new and old lateral connections and reciprocal global influences” (Stilling, 2013, p. 300). In so doing, Shonibare’s employment of the batik, as it pertains to the burden of representation, shifts the focus of the relationship between ethnicity and identity onto matters of “historical processes of mutability” (Tolia-Kelly and Morris, 2004, p. 156). Within the wider dialectic surrounding black cultural production, Shonibare positions himself ambiguously by overriding the antagonism of thesis and antithesis, precisely because of his intimate experience of the intersection of cultures that has made modern African identities as hybridized as they are today (Mercer, 2016, p. 150). Neither sidestepping politics in favour of art for art’s sake, nor ensconcing himself firmly in ‘Otherness’, his work offers a third way of understanding ‘blackness’ in the terrain of a precarious politics of representation: the mapping of the circulation of histories from the past to the present in a spatial/temporal network as an end in itself. In this sense, Shonibare’s work stands as a promiscuous appropriation of earlier generation’s “vernacular” aesthetics borne from the essentialist vein, in order to speak to the non-essentialism of black diasporic experiences. For this third ‘wave’ of black British yBa artists then, many of whom have risen to international prominence since, the burden they bear no longer operates in the project of representation; rather, it lies precariously in the need for a visual vocabulary that dismantles the impartiality of an essentialised yet subsumed “otherness”- an “otherness” that is at the service of re-invisibilizing the particularities of blackness in the name of multiculturalism.
Instanced by Shonibare, what such counter-strategies offer to the broader predicament of black cultural production is not a clear-cut answer, inevitably so given the ambiguous status of black identity itself- understood in this essay to be shifting, fractured, emergent, and always contingent, such that the very assumption that an objective overarching ‘truth’ may be achieved is irresolvable with the subtle details of blackness. Instead, thinking conjuncturally, Shonibare’s counternormalising practice constitutes a momentary intersection within a larger discursive trajectory, one that engages appositely a current predicament of black diasporic art as it pertains to institutional visibility. Resisting the urge to extrapolate from the contrived continuities presented by linear readings of history, Shonibare situates his work within the gaps of history, those histories untold which serve to ever complicate dogmatic notions of identity. Making manifest the disparities between “history as it is discursively transmitted and meaning as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences” (Roach in Tolia-Kelly and Morris, 2004, p. 155), the critical praxis of the third ‘wave’ infiltrates the story of Britain to illuminate the long erased actors, lateral connections and reciprocal global influences that have made the horizon of black British art as compellingly serpentine as it is today. And as it stands, a horizon of this complexity undoubtedly necessitates a correspondingly dynamic critical framework that transcends the reductive binarisms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, and perhaps, even that of ‘essentialist’ and ‘anti-essentialist’.
Works cited
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