Disruptive Aesthetics?

Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 2, 2004, 153–167

Disruptive Aesthetics? Revisiting the Burden of Representation in the Art of Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare Divya Tolia-Kelly and Andy Morris

1. Kobena Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, Third Text, no 10, Spring 1990, pp 61–78. 2. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, Routledge, London, 1994. 3. Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, op cit, p 63.

The publication of Kobena Mercer’s article ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’ in 1990 stands as a significant and, to some extent, characteristic articulation of debates surrounding art, race, and representation in Britain at the end of the 1980s.1 The central argument of the article was that ‘black art’ faced a crisis of being perceived as needing to ‘speak for’ the totality of ‘its culture’.2 Mercer foregrounds this concern by asserting that this predicament was arrived at through a misconceptualisation of culture ‘as a fixed and final property of different racial groups’.3 Our aim in this article is to reflect on how the dynamics between representation and the politics of cultural identity have shifted over the decade or so since Mercer’s essay. More specifically, we want to consider how the art of ‘the other’ has, in some cases, come to be situated within or in closer proximity to dominant institutional notions of art and Britishness. In analysing this integration of ‘the other’ in the dominant institution we also want to consider how this relates to possible changes in the race politics of black artists’ works. In this sense, we want to draw attention to the constraining effect of a perceived relationship between black artists and the aesthetics of the works they produce. Whether this constraint has been partially or completely removed and whether institutional dominance remains ‘unscathed’ will also be integral to our account. This will be carried out through an engagement with the work of two contemporary British artists: Yinka Shonibare and Chris Ofili. The reasons for using the examples of these two artists, and seeing this as a timely insertion into the debates alluded to above, are interrelated. Both of these artists have risen to prominence within the more recent artistic climate of yBaism. Works by both of these artists, and indeed they were the only works by black artists (black women artists being largely occluded), featured in the genre-defining exhibition ‘Sensation’ (1997). Ofili also went on to be the first black artist of Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrella http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0952882032000199678

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African origin to claim the Turner Prize in 1998. Since the initial period of exposure through Charles Saatchi’s endorsement of their work, both artists have seen a growing penetration of their work into dominant art institutions. Significantly for our reflection on issues raised over a decade ago, both artists’ works have been integrated within ‘the story’ of British art that is Tate Britain. To this end, what we want to engage with is both the issue of how Shonibare and Ofili have confronted the cultural politics of being black British artists and how this politics has come to be represented in a contemporary institutional sense. A central issue of the apparent shift in the way black British art is gaining exposure in dominant British art institutions, such as the Tate, relates to a shift within the dynamics of representation; more specifically this is an issue of ‘visibility’. Where ‘The Other Story’ exhibition and the polemics surrounding it concerned themselves to a great extent with the assertion of the place of black artists within the stories of British art, this has since given way to a culture of what Mercer has described as ‘hyper-visibility’.4 For Mercer the political implications of this are significant: The pendulum swung to the opposite extreme, such that difference was unmentionable. What arose was a trade-off whereby the ‘excess visibility’ associated with both multicultural exhibitionism, and its sublation into corporate internationalism, was offset by a mute or evasive positioning on the part of the younger artists who no longer felt ‘responsible’ for a blackness which was itself increasingly hyper-visible in the global market of multicultural commodity fetishism.5

Our interest here is in considering the claim of this ‘trade-off’ and assessing the position of both Shonibare’s and Ofili’s work within the stories of British art as they are told in the gallery spaces of the present. What both of these artists challenge through their work is, as Mercer claims, the need for a sense of responsibility or ‘right to speak for’ a particular cultural identity. Their questioning of and, in true postmodern style, ‘play with’ the politics of cultural identities brings to the fore work that still remains politically engaged, but through a politics which seeks to rearticulate questions of ethnicity, identity, and both their relationship to senses of place and notions of authenticity and origins.

QUESTIONS OF ORIGIN

4. Kobena Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diasporabased Blackness’, Third Text, no 49, Winter 1999, p 56. 5. Ibid, p 57.

For Shonibare, a significant aspect of his work is an attempt to question ideas of essentialised ethnic origins and disrupt the notion of authenticity in this context. This can be identified in his work through two particular and enduring traits. First, there is his continual placing of apparently incongruous elements together within his work, creating a sense of things being in spaces they are not ‘supposed’ to be in. Second, there is his recurrent use of batik fabric, often tailored into formal Victorian dress designs. To begin to illustrate these two interrelated aspects of Shonibare’s work we shall consider a recent and particularly significant example that conveys both of these elements: Yinka Shonibare Dresses Britannia (2001).

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6. Tate Gallery, Yinka Shonibare Dresses Britannia, press release, 29 October 2001. 7. Yinka Shonibare, ‘Poetic Licence’, in Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue?, ed D Burrows, Article Press, Birmingham, 1998, p 73. 8. Paul Gilroy, ‘The Art of Darkness: Black Art and the Problems of Belonging to England’, Third Text, no 10, Spring, 1990, p 52. 9. H Brocklington, ‘Displaced Difference: Yinka Shonibare at Brent Sikkena’, http:/ /nyartsmagazine.com/ 32/19.html, 1999. 10. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Columbia University Press, New York, 1996, p 26.

The statue of Britannia featured in this work is positioned on top of the portico at the front of Tate Britain, an integral part of the original building’s façade when the Tate was first opened in 1897. The significance of the Britannia figure for the Tate can be linked not only to Victorian notions of nationhood and empire but, more specifically, to the creation of Henry Tate’s wealth through the sugar trade. Shonibare was invited to create this work to mark the opening of the gallery’s extension in October 2001 and the batik clothing stayed in place for a week. In the gallery’s press release to accompany the work it stated that ‘the complex negotiation of cultural contexts is central to Shonibare’s practice, and his work with Britannia illustrates his desire playfully to dismantle fixed notions of nationhood’.6 Whilst the analysis of the work is minimal in the context of the press release, what is significant about this work for the gallery is the way that it opens up a critique, not just of the histories and origins of nationhood but of the gallery itself. The gesture of Britannia’s clothing draws attention to the history of the Tate as an institution, not just in terms of the well-documented wealth generation of its sugartrading founder Henry Tate but also in terms of its role as a gallery that has historically defined itself through fixed and stable notions of nationhood. This work, though significantly unique in its direct interaction with the gallery space, remains consistent with the artist’s ongoing thematic interests. The incongruity within the work is obvious: Britannia, the symbol of the coloniser, is re-contextualised through the embodiment of ‘the colonised’. This directly reflects the artist’s assertion that ‘the fusing of disparate elements on my work remains critical of the relations of power through parody, excess and complicity’.7 The issue of complicity is particularly interesting here. Whilst the aspects of parody and play that Shonibare identifies can be allied with much of the work associated with contemporary British ‘neo-conceptualism’, as it can be loosely defined, the notion of complicity evokes Shonibare’s more specific articulations. In one sense this notion of complicity is a reworking of a familiar theme in postcolonial critiques; namely, that of re-emphasising the complexity and extent of colonial exploitation beyond socioeconomic displacement and the well-documented inhumanity of the slave trade. This is taken up by Shonibare in his engagement with the continuing project of exploring the position of the cultural ‘other’ within Britishness. By drawing the apparently incongruous elements together, whether they are Britannia and batik or Shonibare playing the Victorian dandy amongst his white, nineteenthcentury entourage in Diary of a Victorian Dandy (21:00 hours), 1998, there is a re-invocation of Paul Gilroy’s assertion that ‘we may discover that our story is not the other story after all but the story of England in the modern world’.8 It is this aesthetic intervention that draws Shonibare’s work into a disruption of the essentialised ethnic positioning of black and white. It concerns itself more with their intersection and the processes. In this way we can see ‘that Shonibare’s work announces itself in the political and cultural gaps of identity’9 through the evocation of what Joseph Roach has described as ‘counter-memories, or the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and meaning as it is publicly enacted by the bodies that bear its consequences’.10

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This disruption is particularly effective in Shonibare’s use of batik, as in the case of Britannia, for the element of incongruity it employs in questioning essentialism and authenticity in relation to both Britishness and Africanness. What the use of batik also evokes, however, is a more specific questioning of the geographies of authenticity. The fabric’s use as a signifier of normalised African authenticity is disrupted by the complex story of its ‘origins’: Designed by Mancunian Asians for export to Africa (where they are worn by urban Africans as a celebration of technological advancement and as a declaration of independence from European dress conventions). The fabrics are then re-exported back to Britain where they retail as traditional ‘African’ crafts. Moreover, the Dutch wax technique used in the production of these batik textiles is not African at all but originates from Indonesia, from whence it travelled to Holland then on to Manchester and only then finally reached Africa.11

Through this elaborate story of the fabric’s spatial circulations, Shonibare challenges the idea of its ‘origins’ and, therefore, its African ‘authenticity’. As Okwui Enwezor has noted: ‘the textile is neither Dutch nor African, therefore the itinerary of ideas it circulates are never quite stable in their authority or meaning’.12 In this sense then, the critical significance of combining the fabric with the statue becomes clear: the emphasis is shifted towards questioning the stability of Britannia’s – and more subtly, the Tate’s – authority and meaning. But, the question remains, to what extent are we actually witnessing a disruption of a dominant, white British art history and an alleviation of ‘black art’s’ burden of representation?

DISRUPTING DOMINANT DISCOURSE? In 1990, a significant issue for Mercer was the impact multiculturalism was having on the way the work of black artists and the politics of their representation were being articulated. For him, the key threat of multiculturalism was the way it: 11. Tania Guha, ‘Double Dutch’, Third Text, no 27, Summer, 1994, p 88. 12. Okwui Enwezor, ‘Tricking the Mind: The Work of Yinka Shonibare’, in Yinka Shonibare: Dressing Down (exhibition catalogue), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1998, p 10. 13. Mercer, ‘Black Art and The Burden of Representation’, op cit, p 77. 14. Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and the Diaspora-based Blackness’, op cit, p 55.

. . . appropriated and neutralised the political dimension of black culture as a ‘culture’ of resistance. . . our enemies have been able to take the words out of our mouths and appropriate them to their semantic ends and expressive intentions as much as we have appropriated theirs.13

More recently, Mercer has spoken of this unfolding tension in the context of multicultural normalisation: The nineties generation of black artists were neither invisible nor excluded from the hyper-ironic ‘attitude’ in which the yBa was immersed, but enjoyed access to an art world in which ethnicity was admitted through an unspoken policy of integrated casting.14

According to Mercer, then, Shonibare finds himself in an ‘art world’ where the emphasis, for the black artist, has shifted towards the challenge of subverting the multicultural norms of institutions like the Tate. This reification of the cultural ‘other’ through institutional

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appropriation is also a concern for Stuart Hall, who has asserted that the work of black artists had become ‘the multi in multicultural, the Cool in Cool Britannia’.15 As a consequence, the possibilities of being able to reignite a politics of resistance within such institutional spaces have been seen as merely ‘targeting the camouflage, leaving behind the structures of domination almost totally intact’.16 In the case of Shonibare, however, we may be witnessing the emergence of an effective counter-normalisation and the realisation of what Stuart Hall has identified as a counter-strategy within the politics of representation that works ‘within the complexities and ambivalences of representation itself, and tries to contest it from within’.17 Hall’s explanation of this counter-strategy carries an immediate resonance with the themes in Shonibare’s work: Since black people have so often been fixed, stereotypically, by the racialised gaze, it may have been tempting to refuse the complex emotions associated with ‘looking’. However, this strategy makes elaborate play with ‘looking’, hoping by its very attention, to ‘make it strange’ – that is to de-familiarise it, and so make explicit what is often hidden.18

15. Stuart Hall, ‘Whose Heritage? Un-settling “The Heritage”, Re-Imagining the Post-nation’, Third Text, no 49, Winter 1999, p 13. 16. Rasheed Araeen, ‘A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics’, Third Text, no 50, Spring 2000, p 7. 17. Stuart Hall, ‘The Spectacle of the Other’, in Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, ed Stuart Hall, Sage, London, 1997, p 274. 18. Ibid. 19. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Verso, London, 1993. 20. Ibid, p 19. 21. Angela McRobbie, ‘But is it Art?’, Marxism Today, November/December 1998, p 57.

Through the story of the batik’s spatial circulations, Shonibare not only challenges its ‘origins’ and its ‘authenticity’ but by this he also directly disrupts the meaning of the multicultural norms through working them back against themselves and exposing the reductive ways in which they operate. As Hall argues, this is achieved through the process of looking; the unfamiliarity and incongruity of the image, in the case for example of the Tate’s Britannia, forces a critical enquiry in order to make sense of it. What is perhaps most important in Shonibare’s use of batik in relation to the burden of representation is the way that it shifts the emphasis of the relationship between ethnicity and identity firmly into the realms of historical processes of mutability. To this end, his work stands as a significant moment for the Tate Gallery as it opens itself up to historical introspection, the institutional friendly ‘play and parody’ of the work being followed through with a historical critique of ‘complicity’ that allows the process of looking to work towards a reinvigorated politics of ethnicity and Britishness.

ETHNICITY AS PRACTICE The relationship between ethnicity and Britishness proposed in Shonibare’s work can be seen to address Paul Gilroy’s argument made in The Black Atlantic,19 that a productive history must ‘transcend both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’.20 That this is addressed precisely through employing the signifiers of these structures and constraints is also what serves to disrupt the stability of their meanings as such. As with Gilroy’s account, the role of history in the effectiveness of this critique is in its treatment as a process characterised by ongoing intersections and circulations, formations that defy the attempts of institutional closure. So, when Shonibare’s work is described as ‘a return to history’,21 this should perhaps not be taken in the more straightforward understanding of what this phrase might mean. This is not merely a retrospective position, nor is it simply

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a rewriting of black and/or white cultural history; more accurately it addresses that: There can, therefore, be no single ‘return’ or ‘recovery’ of the ancestral past which is not re-experienced through the categories of the present: no base for creative enunciation in a simple reproduction of traditional forms which are not transformed by the technologies and the identities of the present.22

The stories that Shonibare invokes are those which join up past and present, near and far, in the form of a temporal/spatial network. What this also achieves is a notion of histories circulating between these places, leaving traces wherever and whenever they go. This, then, is about ethnicity as practice; a tracing of the endpoints of journeys through the routes that connect them, taking in the ‘gaps’ not only of identity but of place and time also. Shonibare alludes to this through the retracing of his own experiences of the relationship between place and identity: My own practice evolved out of a need to understand my own place in history as an artist who was born in England and who has spent a considerable part of my adult life between England and Nigeria. I had to unravel what might constitute perceived notions of my own bicultural and bilingual identity in a British context. A return to history and the origins of my own dual identity created by a colonial encounter has been one strategy that has emerged in my work.23

If, as Shonibare suggests, tracing these histories is more productively carried out through seeing them as practices and encounters, the issue remains as to how a history that avoids fixed categories and points of closure can be realised within the context of a British art history at, for example, Tate Britain.

THE SHIFTING REPRESENTATION OF ‘THE OTHER’

22. Stuart Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, in ‘Race’, Culture and Difference, eds J Donald and A Rattansi, Sage, London, 1992, p 258. 23. Shonibare, ‘Poetic Licence’, op cit, p 73. Emphasis added. 24. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’ op cit, p 252. 25. Ibid, p 258. 26. McRobbie, ‘But is it Art?’ op cit, p 57.

Both Mercer and Hall identify a tangible shift in the way that ‘black art’ has come to be represented within the stories of British art over the last two decades. The 1980s is characterised as a time when it offered ‘a critique of the way blacks were positioned as the unspoken and invisible “other” of a predominantly white aesthetics and cultural discourses’.24 As a consequence, the shift away from this position to the one of a ‘hyper-visible’ multicultural normalisation has created the need to acknowledge that ‘we all speak from a particular place, out of a particular history, out of a particular experience, a particular culture, without being constrained by the position as “ethnic artists” ’.25 The legacy of the yBa era of British art over the last few years has also seen a theoretical shift in a move away from the embracing of critical theory to what Angela McRobbie has described as a ‘marked anti-intellectualism in their work’.26 Whilst artists such as Shonibare, Chris Ofili, and Steve McQueen have been referred to in terms of their association with this awkward category of artists, they are still facing a very different cultural agenda. Whilst the rejection of an art school education of Marxism and

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poststructuralism by the white yBa is one thing, the subversion of multicultural normalisation within art institutions is, for the ‘black yBa’, quite another. As Angela McRobbie has asked: ‘can the two black artists whose work was shown at ‘Sensation’ afford to do without a sense of history and of politics?’27 The answer, it would seem, is no. Whilst, for Mercer, there is a ‘willingness to play along with the jokey yBa demeanour’,28 for Araeen the dominant structures of British art history are intact and ‘the assumption that this has given us the freedom to express ourselves’ is a false one.29 What Shonibare’s work achieves in light of this predicament is the ability not only to traverse this apparent split but to do it in a way that weaves the two together through continually unfolding stories of the relationship between nation and cultural identity. Both history and identity are the co-creation of past and present and the routes through which they intersect, and Shonibare captures this sense of movement and process in his ‘return to history’. For the Tate’s part in the commissioning of his dressing of Britannia, this may also represent a significant institutional shift. However, it is more likely that this is to overstate the case. Tate Britain and British art history more broadly may be confronting the previous failings of their acknowledgement of the intricate relationships between nation, culture, and identity but this is not to say that multicultural normalisation and the burden of representation are similarly critiqued. The limits of Tate Britain may be precisely in its insistence to approach the stories of art through the framework of national culture. When, in an interview in 2001, Shonibare was asked if he believed in such a thing as national identity, he responded: I think it’s a completely convenient and artificial construction. People use that to suit their own needs, whenever it actually suits them. It’s basically a political tool that necessarily doesn’t serve everybody.30

OFILI’S BIOAESTHETICS

27. Ibid, p 257. 28. Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diasporabased Blackness’, op cit, p 57. 29. Araeen, op cit, p 7. 30. L Waxman, ‘Interview with Yinka Shonibare’, http://www.attnspan.com/ word/9, 29 April 2001. 31. D Glaister, ‘Turner Prize goes to Ofili’, Guardian, 2 December 1998.

In December 1998, Chris Ofili was the first black artist of African origin to win the Turner Prize. Anish Kapoor (born in India) had received the prize in 1991; however, like Ofili, Kapoor rejected an identification within the Black arts movement. Much has been made of the fact that Ofili was paid £20,000 despite using elephant dung in his paintings, exemplified in the Guardian’s headline: ‘the boy dung good’.31 Despite his high acclaim, limited critical attention has been paid to the artistic value of his paintings. The artist remains the object of our attention. Ofili has successfully won the support of the art establishment, reflected in the fact that his works are in several key collections in Britain (including Saatchi and Tate Britain), across Europe and the US, a positioning that would have seemed unobtainable for black British artists in the 1980s. In the yBa’s world, Ofili stands proud alongside other artists from Goldsmiths College. However, unlike other artists within this yBa community, Ofili’s race, ethnicity, and the origins of his aesthetics are key to the debate about his art. These references, however, are not

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32. Rasheed Araeen, ‘From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts’, Third Text, no 1, Autumn, 1987, pp 6–25; ‘The Other Immigrant: The Experiences and Achievements of AfroAsian Artists in the Metropolis’, Third Text, no 15, Summer 1991, pp 17–28; ‘How I discovered My Oriental Soul in the Wilderness of the West’, Third Text, no 18, Spring 1992, pp 86–102. 33. Amrit Wilson, Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain, Virago, London, 1978. 34. Mercer, ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’, op cit; ‘Welcome to the Jungle: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Politics’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed J Rutherford, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1990b; ‘Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diasporabased Blackness’, op cit. 35. L Corrin, ‘Confounding the Stereotype’, in Chris Ofili (exhibition catalogue), Southampton City Art Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery, 1998, p 15. 36. Stuart Morgan, ‘The Elephant Man’, Frieze, no 15, 1994, p 40.

problematic for Ofili; they are sourced through him and his narrative about his art. Ofili’s biology and cultural alliances are the icons of his branding. For Ofili, his work represents a bioaesthetic that is marketable, palatable, and successful in an art world renowned for using ethnicity as a classification of the work of black artists. Ofili does not defy the dominant discourse of ‘primitivism’; instead he uses its legacy to win the prize. The question at stake here is whether Ofili represents a success for the Black arts movement that had confronted the establishment with its racism or whether Ofili’s success is based on a palatable postcolonial primitivism where the mark of ethnicity is within the art, as an overdefined, sensualised, and benign black roots culture which is saleable, and collectable. This celebratory marking of the text (the blackness of Ofili being within the text) is a practice diametrically opposed to Araeen’s critique of Eurocentric modernism.32 By marking the text with blackness, the artist positions it as an object through which the text could be read and understood. Ofili’s art is conceptually figured through his body, and is read through his ethnicity and cultural capital. The vocabulary of the text is ascribed through Ofili. The question of the origin of the artist, therefore, is alive and well within the Eurocentric frame, and the vocabulary used to describe and frame the text is specifically postmodernist and post the didactism of the 1980s Black arts movement. Ofili’s radicalism is relational, without the driving force of ‘finding a voice’,33 or an audience, or a search for a new black aesthetic.34 In this new era of ‘postcolonial hybridity’35 discourses of origin and ethnicity of the artist figure questions of authenticity within the frame; Ofili plays with the frame, at once being authentically from Africa – although ‘Born in Britain Ofili has always felt African’.36 Ofili invests in aestheticising these racial roots through a British cultural lens. Just like the collage of magazine images of popular black artists, Ofili’s cultural identity is spliced into the body of the canvas. There is an intertextuality that gives meaning to the canvas, and helps understand the roots of the aesthetic. Ofili’s positioning is different from that of black British artists in previous decades, as the visual vocabulary of primitivism allows him to be positioned as an expressive, sensual, and playful black boy. Disrupting the moral, ethical, and political problem of representing blackness, Ofili engages with the stereotype of the other and (re)presents a challenge to a political moralism embedded in the work of some black artists of the previous generation.

DISRUPTING DOMINANT AESTHETICS? Ofili’s work not only disrupts the space in which it is exhibited (Tate Britain, 1998), but it also engages the audience with its sensory and visual aesthetics not usually encountered within a space for high art. In the ‘Captain Shit’ series, for example, which include Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars (1997), one encounters not only the jumbo comic strip figures but also a first truly Black superhero. The luminosity and richness of the paint on canvas give depth to the facile

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collage of soap stars and musical performers, pasted as stars that surround the doubled figure of Captain Shit. Elephant dung, originally brought from Africa, exudes odour, and introduces waste into the white cube. The dung is routed in the story about Ofili’s British Council-funded trip to Zimbabwe (but is actually from the London zoo). Its odourauthenticating discourses of Ofili’s African origin, and figuring Ofili as a playful, sensual subject, literally expresses Ofili’s blackness through the craft of his painting. The double helpings of elephant dung, coated in resin, forming the plinth for the canvas, emphasise a sensual connection back to Africaness, twice over. These over-definitions offer an insight into the humour of Ofili’s intervention but the humour becomes unfixed when the figures and the audience become a focus of the mockery. The figuring of black masculinity is counter to the D-MAX projects of the 1980s,37 where the photographic representation of the black figure is loaded with a moral and social responsibility. Ofili’s over-defined stereotypes, using the sensual aesthetics offered by the dung and a vivid palette, mock the reverential politics of representation, and the ‘burden’ of the politically responsible practitioner. Ofili, in some ways, is evidence of progress; he has shed that burden of representation, and worked against a reverential representational politics. The D-MAX years were dominated by debates over the black practitioners’ access to exhibition, as well as the need for the development of a black aesthetic in British photography, as explained by Eddie Chambers: Here . . . the word ‘Black’ does not particularly refer to the content of the photographs. . . . Instead, the word Black refers to the photographers themselves. . . . In Britain at the moment, there is a sizeable number of Black photographers, but nothing exists that can be visibly be identified as being a collectively-created Black aesthetic.38

37. D-MAX was a collective of black photographers formed in 1987; their title alludes to the plural shades of black in the photographic spectrum with the intention of negating essential understandings of race and identity within the context of racial discrimination in society and the arts. 38. Rasheed Araeen and Eddie Chambers, ‘Black Art: A Discussion’, Third Text, no 5, Winter 1988/89, pp 69–70.

It is clear that the collective political project in Chambers’s vision was to create a disruptive aesthetic, organically formed through a collaborative black photographic collective. Here, the biological and cultural roots of the practitioners would build a new aesthetic formed outside the exclusive institutions and art spaces of exhibition. This goal would inscribe an aesthetic that was informed through the black experience, and which was re-presented via a black lens, unmediated by the racism of exclusive art institutions. This was clearly a reaction to marginality and a lack of value given to the work of black practitioners. Although some would argue that Ofili’s aesthetic is a successful ‘black aesthetic’ that has been given legitimacy at the heart of the art establishment, it would seem na¨ıve to believe that this is because issues of exclusion and marginality are no longer live there. On examining Ofili’s ‘black aesthetic’, it is clear that it does not represent black culture, or what a black expressive culture has contributed to modernity; Ofili’s aesthetic is double-faced, neither committed to a critique of the politics of black expressive cultures as represented in popular culture, nor a critique of the art establishments defining a black artist’s work through his blackness. Ofili’s lens is of a corporate formula, it delivers a package of yBa: an accessible, distilled aesthetic, and a consumable product that does not tax the mind or the soul. The philosophy of Ofili’s art is removed from the politics of blackness, and is centred on the cynical need to exploit the British

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cultural hybrid of ‘high art lite’, which posits high production values, combined with yBa celebrity personas, as a replacement for high art values. The nihilism of Ofili reflects the embodied nihilism of the culture of hip-hop and gangsta rap.39 Within black political culture, the presence of nihilism is often explained as offering a logical and necessary respite from oppression and sociopolitical subjugation. This nihilism is a celebration of an artist that does not have to pay dues to the union of black practitioners but who can engage with the creation of a bioaesthetics that reflects his postcolonial positioning, which is as a modern, mobile, expressive artist acknowledged through international exhibitions. Ofili, however, does not bear the burden of representative aesthetics, or the burden of authenticity. His tactics are disarming because of his deployment of black cultural icons. These are the key to his successful positioning within the art establishment and credibility authorised by some black audiences. The name-checking of stars, rappers, and athletes through their stick-on faces on canvas immediately inscribes a black audience. The familiar icons position the viewer both as a voyeur of black popular culture and as a member of a community that celebrates and values black expressive culture. The act of recognising the stars makes the viewer an insider. Ofili’s bioaesthetic offers an optical illusion. It presences, represents, and figures a black aesthetic within the mainstream space using an ahistorical visual vocabulary. The discourses of modernism and primitivism are unacknowledged, yet Ofili successfully engages with the resulting race-dynamics of their legacy through his aesthetics. Nonfigurative dotted lines painted, elephant dung, and a ‘cacophony of expression’,40 all referenced as a collage of sensual expression, are all usual on the canvas of the stereotyped black artist.

SAMPLING ETHNICITY IN ARTISTIC PRACTICE

39. Paul Gilroy, ‘After the Love has Gone: Biopolitics and Ethno-politics in the Black Public Sphere’, Third Text, no 28–29, Autumn–Winter 1994, pp 25–47. 40. G Worsdale, ‘The Stereo Type’, in Chris Ofili (exhibition catalogue), Southampton City Art Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery, 1998, p 5. 41. P Miller, ‘Deep Shit: an interview with Chris Ofili’, Parkett, 58, 2000, p 169.

In the analysis above we have been critical of Ofili, precisely because of the relationship between his ethnicity and the body of art that he has produced. The ‘burden of representation’ still haunts artists like Ofili. The questions of his representativeness, ethics, and authenticity continue to be of interest in a society where Ofili’s work has relatively limited exposure within the black British community. In fact, his art remains for a minority audience within which the black presence is limited. The effect of producing art for a minority, usually a white audience, raised anxieties amongst black artists in the 1980s. Issues of relevance, democratic access, and the valorisation of ‘black art’ within a ‘white’ context were signified as problematic. Ofili in 1998 has a different positioning in relation to the questions of selling out to a ‘white’ audience: I think the jazz generation’s very different from the hip-hop generation. Really. I think the jazz generation had this real problem facing the audience, and was afraid of selling out. And I think the hip-hop generation is really not afraid to say all the bad and the good. And to make fun of what is considered sacred.41

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Chris Ofili, Double Captain Shit and the Legend of the All Stars, 1997, oil, acrylic, field-dried elephant dung and various media on canvas, 244 × 183 cm, Tate Gallery collection

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This quote reveals much about Ofili’s relationship with a socially mix audience. As his work communicates in various ways through the collage built of many layers, the idea of a singular message or narrative is made redundant. And as he takes no responsibility of representing to the politically correct audience, Ofili is relieved of the burden of creating a language that communicates a moral or political message. Instead he is free to express without the constraint of a manifesto. The use of a multi-layered medium, with mixed messages within an undefined mixture of elite and vernacular contexts, is characteristic of the yBa schema of presentation. This formula allows Ofili a convenient and liberating exit from an essentialist politics of production that considers the necessity of producing ‘black art’ for a black audience, and which is only comprehended and validated by the black community itself. The question of right aesthetics 42 is overcome by incorporating popular culture: thus we have the familiar faces of Snoop Doggy Dog, Miles Davis, Cassius Clay, Diana Ross, James Brown, which for Ofili represent a black popular aesthetic resistant to a critique of relevance, or ‘selling out’.

A COLOURBLIND ART HISTORY Ofili’s apolitical correctness seems to disengage him from the experiences of marginalisation, exploitation, and oppression faced by black people/ artists. In Britain, the validity of these experiences has now been acknowledged, leading to the development of a public institution (inIVA) that was set up specifically to deal with them. But inIVA seems to have failed through its ‘bureaucratic institutionalisation of cultural theory’.43 Its failing is perceived as being rooted in its practices that define artists through the categories of ethnicity, and curatorial practice that evades the political challenges in relation to race politics and the larger problem of challenging Art History’s history. It is useful here to look at the example of a Kara Walker work of 1998, which intervenes in this issue of marginality and oppression. This is Kara Walker’s self-portrait; it is a life-sized silhouette made of black paper glued to a gallery wall showing a young woman sailing through space with her arms thrown back over her head. If you look at the image, beneath its initial sense of celebratory movement there is evidence of self-mutilation. Her wrists are cut, neatly severed at the joint with a razor she holds in her left hand. The image is a reaction to a photograph of her that appeared in Interview magazine, and is described as Walker’s:

43. Mercer, ‘Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diasporabased Blackness’, op cit, p 60.

. . . attempts to better understand her own role in history by re-creating it in the present. The pain of constantly performing such an artistic identity may be read in the artist’s adaptation of the quartet of unravelling braids found in the photograph. The two tightly bound braids recall not only the braids of stereotypical pickaninnies. . . but in their affinity to the hairstyles found on good little black girls, evoke the middle class assimilationist role the artist herself has rejected.44

44. G Du Bois Shaw, ‘Final Cut’, Parkett, 59, 2000, p 129.

The substance of her body, the blackness, is a vehicle for exposing the mutilation endured through succumbing to a professional success based

42. bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, New Press, New York, 1995.

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Kara Walker, Cut, 1998, cut paper and adhesive on wall, 88 × 54 inches, collection of Donna and Cargill MacMillan

on a racial stereotype. It seems Walker feels that she has ‘prostituted’ herself to the racist gaze, which fixes her physical body in powerful colonial oppression: thus it is commodified, and available for consumption. It is as if her success is based on her image meeting the stereotype of a palatable blackness – sensual, sexualised, and playful.

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Although black artists cannot escape their racialised identities, Walker, however, does not see herself representing a stereotype, nor does she think that her imposed cultural identity should be precursor to the interpretation of her work. Ofili, in contrast, plays along with the skewed occularity within which he is represented; he draws from its rich racial stereotyping. He packages it up and throws it back to the audience with great artistic finesse. This is where dung, Zimbabwe, Hip Hop, and Rap are all part of the optical game that he plays with the audience. He wins by positioning himself as an object of a racialised gaze, successfully utilising its skewed occularity. However, Ofili’s game is successful in the short term because his success can only signify what is acceptable to the present state of the British art establishment. A non-threatening individualism can only forge an aesthetic that is interchangeable with the faces on soap operas, the sound of Motown, and the sight of packaged ethnicity in our supermarkets. The positioning that Ofili takes has been described as being ‘only really black in inverted commas’.45 However, this removal of his ethnicity is not something that merits celebration. Ofili’s ethnicity is willingly parenthesised through the cacophony of aesthetics that he trades in. This is Ofili’s real social positioning; he has the luxury of parenthesis, one that is not afforded to those who face race prejudices in the everyday. Ofili has been able to pitch his art within a receptive context. His bioaesthetic mode is received with humour and irony but underlines the superficial politics of placing his ethnicity within the text. As many black artists continue to have difficulty in exhibiting in key spaces across Britain, and sustaining careers as practitioners, Ofili’s positioning is creating a ‘fiction of difference. . . that was required to grant him allowance within contemporary British art’.46 A colour-blind art history is only achievable if the structures within which we produce, consume, and record visual culture shift in recognition of the colonial legacy. Kara Walker’s anxieties symbolise how little has changed for black artists since Kobena Mercer’s original treatise on ‘Black Art and the Burden of Representation’ a decade ago.

CONCLUSION

45. Niru Ratnam, ‘Chris Ofili and the Limits of Hybridity’, New Left Review, 235, 1999, p 159. 46. Olu Oguibe, ‘ “DoubleDutch” and the Culture Game’, in Be-Muse (exhibition catalogue), Hendrik Christain Anderson, Rome, p 34.

Ofili and Shonibare intervene in the British art space with differing tactical positions, which represent their very different race politics. Both artists successfully demonstrate the potential for artistic practice for black artists despite their shift away from the reducing radical and moral agenda of black artistic practices of the 1980s. These were dominated by claims for exhibition space and the reclamation of a rightful place in the history of art. By proclaiming that the stories of British art have been formed through other practices internationally and are dialectically connected to the project of Imperial economic and cultural regimes of power, Shonibare seems to dismantle the binary of occident and orient by weaving them as singular text, thus exposing their relational and codependent identities. For Ofili, art is not about history, it is about ‘radically’ shifting the institutional space of art. He juxtaposes the desire for ‘authentic’ discourses within the text and solicits the voyeurism of modern society.

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The audience’s gaze is tainted because the project of art is still an exclusive one, which continues to occlude on the basis of gender and race. These exclusions continue to skew the lens away from exploring the intrinsic, aesthetic qualities of artistic production. Those excluded ‘others’ continue to work at the coal face of British art, simultaneously challenging their exclusion from art’s history and bearing the burden of creating a visual vocabulary that operates beyond the project of representation.