1992/3
From cradle to grave the black diaspora artist is haunted by originality informed by an historical memory of the Middle Passage and slavery mostly in the New World. Torn by reminders of the need for revenge and a driven desperate love of the enemy. In hot embrace through which all instincts towards revenge are consumed, some human secreted chemistry turns innocent anger to confusion equally innocent. Only to be replaced by a sometimes difficult and dangerous search for truth; truth to oneself. Picking out the brighter selves from the tangle of mundane everyday, the works made under this pressure often return to a childhood that persists like a memory of the intolerable wise wound from which it sprang. One aspect of this originality is its capacity to assimilate and to challenge the romantic.
Twenty years ago Clement Greenberg said to me that it takes three generations of middle class breeding for a people to produce individuals with the ability to make good art; or words to that effect. In our line of work these things count but they don't always pan out the way the pundits claim, besides which Greenberg is not the only one to hold such opinions. These sentiments are more given to the way English society ineluctably conducts itself. And anyway artists are notorious mould breakers.
It has also been suggested that the language of art, today, appears totally inadequate for conveying the experience of horrors such as the Holocaust and white man's enslavement of black people in the New World. And to which only silence can be a fitting tribute. But herein is a perceived misunderstanding of the traditions of painting and sculpture where the language of these disciplines either lost, disclaimed or simply abandoned to photography and the cinema any claim to convey the utterly base nature of such man made, human engineered and deliberately induced disasters and destruction. Quite simply as painters and sculptors we are into art's power to redeem and transform this burden which is a much more modest task, yet paradoxically is an additional and greater challenge.
Given the current funereal atmosphere in Britain, with the deadly lawlessness in the City of London during recent time: Barlow Clowes, BCCI, Guiness, Lloyds and currently Robert Maxwell, younger black artists and art workers like Eddie Chambers and his friends must, to my mind, be saluted. You can't make art without money and the prevailing odium generated by the deservedly bad publicity attendant on the rotten state of affairs in London, tends to affect adversely the market place machinations of all but a very few artists livelihoods; if you're dead and famous the market for your production is a good deal more secure. Last on the list of purchases for the consumer society are fine art pictures and sculptures, and during difficult times such like "luxury" items are not on the list at all.
Difficulties for me arise when works of art however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsessions of individuals become the products of collective negotiation and exchange. Even before the Hayward Gallery exhibition "The Other Story" had closed here in London over two and a half years ago, one of the organisers was overheard declaring that, after this show, Black Art which the exhibition was partly intending to help establish, was finished. To my ears this was shocking. Although never an advocate, believer or supporter of this loudly proclaimed and aggressively debated new kind of art heard of throughout the Western Hemisphere, the United States, Europe and perhaps even in Africa, the way in which it came across to me sounded as though the intention was to marginalise the efforts of artists who happened to be black. Or to put it another way, works made by African-somethings: African Americans, African Brits [Irish, Scots, Welsh]. Indeed West Indians of African descent. Diaspora blacks. How wrong can one be. My listening must have been informed by the paranoia about which my friends are endlessly tolerant.
It transpires the younger artists themselves were already in possession of the awareness that Black Art as a notion was historically insupportable; or at least that a certain kind of illustrative figuration learned in the illustration and Graphic Design departments of U.K. art schools, featuring fashionable black history and its gallery of heroes and heroines, hardly stood out as arresting images alongside Classical African Art, nineteenth and early twentieth century Oceanic Art, the pictures of Delacroix,Gericault, Goya and even Daumier. That all the black art to be seen consisted of badly drawn black people type faces and slogans derived from unquestioned generalisation given to the world of advertising, commercial promotion and minstrelsy, seemed not to have occurred to their makers. And within a few years of "The Other Story" a change. Yet artists trying to make pictures of a personal and specific nature must always have been there in the existing art circles around the U.K. Image makers in the visual fine arts who hopelessly embraced the rod delivering indiscriminately that deeply emotionally wounding lash that said they were slavishly succumbing to formalist modernism, a white man's notion if there ever was one.
To my certain knowledge Anthony Daley has been trying to create original work, and now, though new to me, Eddie Chambers has introduced me to the things of two painters who also happen to be of African West Indian descent. It is clear that Tony Daley, Sylbert Bolton and David Sommerville [and perhaps many others yet to come forward] are wrestling with the continuingly elusive notion of a specific location between motif, theme and archetype within the activity of painting itself. It is as if, on the wing, the artworks we expect them to produce must be touched by an impulse to serve a new order of cultural coherence. That they fail, in the eyes of the antipathetic undiscerning other, may not be cause for celebration; but is hardly cause for regret. This is a testing time; time when such artists, and the ones to come, must test their efforts alongside the great works in the museums; to self-sustaining and lofty traditions and not be afraid of such like confrontations but respond with critical perception; with the will, the willingness to create as good when not better. And to turn away from fashion and flavour of the month type local success, where claims for universal validity deny to others first order products of the human intellect while failing themselves by the very criteria they invoke. Where, in other words, the yardstick by which achievement is measured is no longer about excellence but whether it's British.
Recently it was put to me much more clearly than my own fumblings in this direction have done, that comparisons between black musicians and painters or sculptors tend to be pernicious. Stanley Whitney the African-American painter and printmaker from Philadelphia, who begins teaching at the American School in Rome this autumn, talks about lifestyle. Mr. Whitney admits parallels in drive, humour, innovation and acute technical grasp of the essential disciplines. But insists that the material and physical apparatus which painting and sculpture traditionally entail, separates us for better or for worse from musicians. Despite the known fact that African-American artists aspire through their exertions to create works of equal power to their brothers and sisters in jazz.