CHAPTER THREE

The Significance of the 1970s

The 1970s was, in so many ways, a critical bridge, or decade of transition. Black-British artists ended the decade occupying a decidedly different sort of space to the one they had occupied at its beginning. Perhaps because of the recent occurrence of immigration to Britain from the countries of the British Commonwealth, foreign-born artists still tended to cluster around enforced, assumed and designated labels of national background, vis-à-vis their identity. To this end, the 1970s saw a marked use of terms such as ‘Afro-Caribbean’, ‘West Indian’, ‘African’, ‘Asian’ and so on, to describe, label or identify exhibiting artists. And within artists signified as ‘Africa’ or ‘Asian’, there were often more specific labels of nationality, such as ‘Nigerian’, ‘Ghanaian’, ‘Ceylonese’, ‘Indian’, and so on. With increasingly rare exceptions, the mixed exhibitions that characterised the profile of artists such as Bowling, Chandra and Williams were already becoming a matter of history and for history. Over time, Black artists found the particularities of their ethnic and racial identities counting for more and more, in an art world seemingly increasingly reluctant to accord them full respect as unique and individual practitioners. By the time the 1970s came to a close, only a very small number of Black artists were exhibiting, on occasion, outside of racially or ethnically specific exhibition contexts.

The reasons for this were several-fold. Firstly, these artists pretty much had nowhere else to go, and no other umbrellas under which to exhibit. Secondly, the societal status quo that had emerged in Britain by the mid 1970s was one in which Black people were, at best, assigned the status of societal problem. With the wider society apparently reluctant to accept Black people as equals, it was perhaps not surprising that the art world was to follow suit in such emphatic fashion. Other reasons were perhaps tied to those already mentioned. Foreign-born artists were increasingly drawn to the strategy of coming together as self-identifying groups, demarcated by ethnicity, cultural heritage, or nationality. They tended to do so, not for reasons of ethnic chauvinism but for reasons of mutual support and with the idea of perhaps more effectively contributing to the society of which they were now a part.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, in the late 1970s a group of Indian-born painters came together to form IAUK, which cited ‘its members’ efforts during their individual struggle for recognition’¹ as one of the principal reasons for its establishment. In supporting IAUK, the Commission for Racial Equality stressed that:

they formed themselves into a group more for reasons of mutual support than because they constitute an identifiable ‘school’ of painting. They believe that if they approach the issues concerning them collectively they stand a better chance of making a positive contribution to the arts and culture of the country they have made their home.²

But there were also external, or decidedly international factors that contributed to the extent to which Black artists in Britain were, by the 1970s, starting to cluster around designations of ethnicity as a means of advancing their own practice. In 1977, Nigeria, the West African giant, mounted an ambitious festival of arts, music, dance, literature and culture, called Festac ’77. This was the second Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, an extravaganza that brought together artists, writers, performers and others from the Black and African world, in an African-centred programme of events, performances, activities and exhibitions, for the most part taking place in the then Nigerian capital of Lagos.

An exhibition purportedly representing ‘The work of the artists from the United Kingdom and Ireland’ was sent to Festac’77. In reality, all of the artists were London-based, and the list now provides us with a fascinating snapshot of the Black artists and photographers, drawn from different parts of the world, who had, by the mid 1970s, made London their temporary or permanent home. These artists were Winston Branch, Mercian Carrena, Uzo Egonu, Armet Francis, Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede, Neil Kenlock, Donald Locke, Cyprian Mandala, Ronald Moody, Ossie Murray, Sue Smock, Lance Watson and Aubrey Williams.

7. Vanley Burke, Africa Liberation Day photograph (1977).

The artists each represented different types of art practice, from the demonstrations of abstraction that lay at the heart of the paintings of Branch and Williams, through the pronounced manifestations of African cultural identity in the work of Nigerian artists Egonu and Jegede, to the ecological and environmental concerns frequently manifest in the work of Ronald Moody. The group of artists, with a comprehensive range of formal concerns, came together as practitioners of the Black, African and Pan-African worlds. In the catalogue produced to accompany the exhibition, Yinka Odunlami, Exhibition Officer of UKAFT (UK African Festival Trust), London, sought to locate the group within the aspirations of what he called ‘a common humanity’.

The works of artists from the United Kingdom and Ireland Zone who are represented in this exhibition as a substantial contribution to the 2nd World Black & African Festival of Arts and Culture are not just a collection of nostalgic frolic. They are an appreciation of artists originally from widely varying backgrounds; their present human, cultural and environmental conditions focus on the direction of their future development. The concept of Black Art in this exhibition, whilst insisting on the unique contribution of traditional African Art to the general scene, is also committed to the projection of a new image based on the understanding of a common humanity, hope and struggle of people everywhere. It would therefore be wrong to brand this theme racial.³

By the mid 1970s, there was only one dominant context in which the work of Black-British artists was being located, and that was ‘ethnic arts’.

The establishment of the term and the construct of ‘ethnic arts’ could be traced back to a report titled The Arts Britain Ignores written by Naseem Khan in 1976.⁴ ‘Ethnic Arts’ tended to define and regard the arts and cultural expressions of Black (or, more specifically, non-white) people in somewhat fixed terms. ‘Culture’ was regarded as something of a fixed self-referencing entity that the darker peoples of the world carried with them for all time, as part of a historic continuum. One of the biggest problems with this pathology is that it was unable to establish any sort of rapport or interaction between Black people and the main currents of modern and contemporary art. Instead, ‘ethnic arts’ tended to conjure up associations of ancient cultures embedded in the souls of Black people, whilst white artists were never regarded as embodying such historical continuums, thereby rendering them more suited to modern and contemporary art practices. As far as ethnic arts critics such as Rasheed Araeen were concerned, the dislocation between ethnic arts and the main currents of contemporary art was a ‘fact’. Furthermore, ‘our cultural traditions are now being seen and are being offered to us as the limits of our artistic or creative potential.’⁵

By the mid to late 1970s, the political and cultural manifestations of the Black presence in Britain was beginning to undergo seismic and traumatic shifts, reflecting the somewhat pained transition from ‘West Indian’, to ‘Afro Caribbean’ to ‘Black British’. At this time, immigrants from the Caribbean self-identified (and were given the label of) West Indian, reflective of their somewhat tenuous hold on British citizenship. The label and self-identification of Caribbean immigrants as ‘West Indian’ was arguably not as problematic as the telling assigning by British society of the same term to the British-born and British-raised children of these immigrants. The use of the term ‘West Indian’ to describe Black British youngsters continued well into the 1980s, further emphasising a considerable fissure between Blackness and Britishness. Black Britons bridled against the constraining and alienating designation of themselves as West Indian and it was in this context that the term Afro-Caribbean gained both currency and favour as the 1970s progressed.

Notwithstanding the increasing traction of ethnic arts, (and its attendant description of Black Britons as an ethnic minority), the 1970s gave rise to a pronounced and new tendency on the part of Black Britons to embrace the designation of ‘Afro-Caribbean’. And this was reflected, not only in much Black artists’ practice and exhibitions of the period, but in wider cultural manifestations as well. No single image of the 1970s summed up the cultural spaces to which young Black Britain was gravitating more than Vanley Burke’s majestic, panoramic photograph, taken in Handsworth Park, Birmingham, at an Africa Liberation Day rally in the late 1970s. Perhaps counter-intuitively, Burke made the focus of the photograph not the people addressing the multitude, but the multitude itself. In this sense, though the focus of the gathered throng’s attention is located somewhere beyond, or outside of, the right side of the image, Burke chose to make the attentive crowd the subject of his picture. To successfully photograph large numbers of people gathered together in one place is one of the most difficult tasks for a photographer. And yet, within this image, Burke produced a compelling and remarkably cogent document of a particularly culturally and politically charged moment in the history of Black Britain.

Nearly all – to a man, to a woman – of the large number of people in the magnificent, commanding photograph betrayed about them or their person some evidence of the influence of Rastafarianism, the hugely empowering and counter-cultural movement that had emerged amongst Black people in Jamaica earlier on in the twentieth century. In Burke’s photograph, dreadlocks abound, as do tams, wraps and numerous other signs of Rasta. As with all great photographs of crowd scenes, we see not so much a crowd, or a multitude, but a group of individuals. And in beholding or appraising individual people en masse, Burke in effect created a singular study of such things as the facial expressions, body language, and clothing that make each of the photographed people distinctive, particular, and in one or two instances, idiosyncratic or eccentric.

Around the time Burke’s Africa Liberation Day photograph was taken, an important exhibition of Afro-Caribbean Art took place at a gallery in London. This was the open submission exhibition referenced in the Introduction, held between April and May 1978 at the Artists Market. Artists represented in the exhibition included Mohammed Ahmed Abdalla, Frank Bowling, Reynold Duncan, Merdelle Irving, Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede, Donald Locke, Cyprian Mandala, Siddig El N’Goumi, Adesose Wallace, and Lance Watson. The exhibition was important for several reasons. Firstly, the staging of the exhibition reflected the sorts of cultural strategies to which a number of Black-British artists were gravitating by the late 1970s. The exhibition was organised by Drum Arts Centre, very much an arts centre in the making, rather than one already fully formed. Secondly, the exhibition effectively reflected a number of the strands of artistic practice then being pursued by Black artists within the capital. And thirdly, the critique of the exhibition by Rasheed Araeen offered what he considered to be substantial pointers to the limitations of cross-art form exhibitions that had as the criterion for their existence the supposed racial or ethnic commonality of the exhibitors. Cross-art form group exhibitions of work by Black artists represented a knotty contradiction. On the one hand, these exhibitions represented an apparent marginalising, or separating, of these artists from the mainstream. Simultaneously, however, the bringing together, within one exhibition of all manner of art works emphasised the degree to which the exhibitors perhaps had little in common beyond shared ethnicity or related ethnic identities.

8. Caboo, Race Today magazine cover (1975).

Like the artists assembled for the Festac ’77 exhibition that took place a year earlier, the coming together of the artists in Afro-Caribbean Art enacted a strategy of cultural empowerment, in the face of British societal hostility and entrenched art world indifference. (Indeed, several artists were represented in both exhibitions). The artists themselves (involved in these particular types of exhibitions) were untroubled by their somewhat eclectic content. Painting was exhibited alongside sculpture, printmaking alongside ceramics, and drawings alongside mixed-media works. Whilst mainstream exhibitions had long since gravitated towards displays characterised by a similarity of media, grassroots initiatives, in which Black artists themselves were often closely involved in the organising, were, by way of marked contrast, displays that often showcased a variety of mediums. Indeed, artists drew strength from their coming together as practitioners across the divides of art practice, and in some instances, nationality. It was for others (notably Araeen) to predict or identify the fissures that would, in years to come, bedevil certain exhibitions of Black artists’ work.

The only substantial references to this exhibition are a review by Rasheed Araeen, contained in a 1978 issue of his Black Phoenix magazine⁶, and a review by Emmanuel Cooper, contained in Art & Artists, July 1978⁷.

Araeen began his review with a disinterested summary of the exhibition, followed by a quote from an introduction to the exhibition. Having dispensed with the formalities, he then laid into the exhibition and what he perceived to be its contradictions and weaknesses. He wasted little time in getting to the nub of his argument:

But what is Afro-Caribbean Art? is the question one cannot help asking after seeing the exhibition. And in fact one wonders if there really is such a thing as Afro-Caribbean Art. The question can be answered in two different ways, affirmatively as well as negatively, depending on how one would like to look at such things. Whether one is just happy to see some black artists exhibiting together under some title, or one is seriously concerned about the nature and content of the work beyond liberal sympathy and sentimentality.

The reality which qualifies an art as ‘Afro-Caribbean Art’ has to be there. Just because an art is produced by somebody who is of Afro-Caribbean origin, or for that matter from Africa or the Caribbean, does not itself lend to that art an Afro-Caribbean particularity unless that particularity is expressed in the work itself, unless the work reflects upon or deals with a reality which in turn necessitates the work to be called ‘Afro-Caribbean Art’.⁸

Araeen continued his relentless critique in similar vein, oscillating between a spirited fault-finding of the exhibition’s structural weaknesses, as he perceived them, and a critique of the artists’ contributions themselves. At one point he even went as far as referring to some Black artists as having ‘produced compromisingly third to fifth rate works.’ Perhaps the most surprising sentiments in Araeen’s review were to be found amongst his references to Frank Bowling. Ten years after Araeen wrote this commentary on the exhibition Afro-Caribbean Art, he included Bowling in his important Hayward Gallery exhibition, The Other Story. In 1978, however, employing the majestic plural, or the royal ‘we’, Araeen’s comments on Bowling were decidedly uncharitable:

Three works by Frank Bowling, who is supposed to be internationally known, might have impressed us twenty years ago. In fact we would have certainly credited him if he had innovated this method of throwing paint directly on the canvas or contributed further to its development. Now one has to be ignorant, or pretend ignorance to appreciate what is no more than a decorative pastiche of the outmoded styles of post-Abstract Expressionist period in New York. They might look beautiful in somebody‘s house or office but have nothing to say.

For good measure Araeen embellished his criticisms by linking Bowling with artists ‘who are dabblingly pursuing a kind of formalist mannerism merely in the interests of careerism.’

The measure of the extent of the problems that Araeen laid out in his arguments about Afro-Caribbean Art could be seen in his own exhibition programming and several of the group exhibitions in which he was represented during the 1980s. In 1986, Araeen put together an exhibition he titled Third World Within. Held at Brixton Art Gallery,⁹ it was described as an ‘exhibition of the work of AfroAsian Artists in Britain’. Apart from Araeen himself, the exhibition featured Saleem Arif, Avtarjeet Dhanjal, Uzo Egonu, Mona Hatoum, Gavin Jantjes, Keith Piper and Kumiko Shimuzu. Within the exhibition, it was not possible to identify which characteristics, sensibilities or aesthetics reflected Araeen’s designation of the artists as AfroAsian (a term he preferred over, or used instead of, ‘Black’). Two years later, Araeen’s altogether more monumental affair, The Other Story, featured a broad range of artists from different ethnic backgrounds (excluding white) whose practices ranged from the explicitly political though to the esoteric, from the highly figurative to the abstract and formalist. He found room in The Other Story for several artists whose work had been in Afro-Caribbean Art, namely Lubaina Himid, Donald Locke and Frank Bowling, about whom, in his review of Afro-Caribbean Art, Araeen had expressed such withering sentiments. In part, Araeen’s curatorial thesis proposed that the 24 artists in The Other Story had been marginalised from dominant narratives of twentieth century British art history and that he wished to see them more fully integrated into such narratives. In effect, this amounted to a mirroring of Mapondera’s introduction that Araeen had quoted at the beginning of his Afro-Caribbean Art review.

Elsewhere, at other times during the 1980s, Araeen contributed work to exhibitions such as From Two Worlds, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1986.¹⁰ Whilst more than two decades earlier Frank Bowling had aspired to exhibit alongside his white peers (with whom he shared an extensive affinity) in The New Generation exhibition (from which he felt himself to have been excluded), From Two Worlds represented a bringing together of an eclectic, or diverse, range of practitioners sharing precious little more than degrees of non-white pigmentation or ethnicity. It was this that led Keith Piper, one of the artists included in the exhibition, to report, some time after the exhibition had closed, that it represented ‘an insensitive lumping together of a hotch-potch of art objects apparently linked only by the ‘non-Europeanness’ of their makers.’¹¹

More than anything, Araeen’s critique of Afro-Caribbean Art, and the ways in which his own interventions were themselves not free from the same critiques, point to the formidable extent to which dominant art world pathologies were wreaking havoc with the aspirations of Black-British artists. Exhibitions of Black artists’ work often came about as a consequence of, or a reaction to, the exclusion of the artists from both integrated gallery programming, or substantial solo exhibitions. By the mid to late 1970s, the sorts of integrated programming and solo exhibitions that Frank Bowling and Aubrey Williams had enjoyed in the early 1960s were pretty much things of the past. Instead, the only platform intermittently available to Black artists was the Black group exhibition, which was sometimes presented as a plea for greater respect and acknowledgement from the mainstream. Unfortunately, discriminatory pathologies of the art world were ultimately unaffected and untroubled by such exhibitions. A decade after Afro-Caribbean Art, those organising such exhibitions were, on occasion, still reaching for ‘Afro-Caribbean’ as a designation or signification of artists’ work. In one such example, several of the artists were born in the UK, and one, Uzo Egonu, was born in Nigeria. Even so, the ‘Afro-Caribbean’ label was freely applied.¹²

The exhibition was organised by Drum Arts Centre, a would-be arts centre dedicated to the arts of practitioners and performers of the African Diaspora. The Drum Arts Centre in question is not to be confused with the centre of the same name that opened in Birmingham in 1998, though the ventures could be said to have had similar mission statements. In early 1975, Drum Arts Centre (London) declared itself to be ‘A new arts complex theatre, gallery and audio visual workshop to be created in Central London for the promotion of black actors, artists, dancers, musicians and writers.’¹³ One of the important aspects of the exhibition Afro-Caribbean Art was that it was a visual arts undertaking meant to showcase some of the possibilities of what a Black arts centre for London could offer. What made the exhibition such a singular undertaking was that Black arts centres in the UK have largely privileged performance, theatre, poetry, music, and literature above the visual arts. Indeed, for a variety of reasons, the UK’s Black arts centres have, with rare exceptions, tended to ignore the visual arts or to keep visual artists at arm‘s length from what these centres regard as their core programmes of activities.

The Keskidee Centre in Kings Cross was perhaps an exception to this, as it hosted artists’ residencies and was the venue for talks on artists. An indication of the significance of the Keskidee Centre’s role as a venue committed to nurturing, supporting and celebrating Black visual artists can be elicited from a sentence in the Preface to the Caribbean arts journal, Savacou issue 9/10, written by John La Rose and Andrew Salkey:

At the time of writing, the most recent medium session, held at the Keskidee Centre, on Friday 10th March 1972, was A Tribute to Ronald Moody, a historical exposition, illustrated with slides of the Jamaican sculptor, arranged and presented by Errol Lloyd, the Jamaican painter.¹⁴

The Keskidee Centre also hosted a long-term residency by an intriguing Trinidad-born, London painter going by the name Caboo. The February 1975 issue of Race Today magazine featured a substantial feature on the painter, entitled, ‘Caboo: The Making of a Caribbean Artist.’ Not only did the feature run across some four pages and include two reproductions of Caboo’s work, he also had the cover of the magazine, with his name rendered in bold and large typography, together with an image detail. In the text itself, Caboo stated that

in the last 9 months coming to work here at Keskidee gives me the opportunity to hold a studio, hold some materials and start working seriously. So that what you see at the recent exhibition is the beginning of my painting career as such.

The exhibition took place at the Keskidee Centre which is the black community centre in North London. A lot of young people attended. I paint with them specifically in mind.¹⁵

Within these references to Keskidee Centre, Caboo pointed to the nurturing, facilitating and enabling role of the centre in providing valuable studio space and generating audiences. In that regard, Keskidee was particularly noteworthy, and several years later it was a meeting held at Keskidee that saw the launch of an intriguing new initiative known as the Rainbow Art Group. Briefly, the history of the group was as follows:

In the Spring of 1978 MAAS (Minorities’ Arts Advisory Service) held its second London conference. This conference, which took place on the 14th April 1978, summoned together people from ethnic groups living in London who were involved with the arts of London’s ethnic groups […] The visual artists recognised the main problem that exists in relation to the work and aspirations of all ethnic minorities in the art world, including their own. This is the difficulty that all find in getting their work considered seriously and supported through established channels. They therefore decided, at the Conference, to form an organisation with the aim of promoting their work and, by joint efforts, to make a positive contribution to the cultural life of the country. In this way they hope eventually to create a climate of knowledge and appreciation that will allow the work of the future generation to be admired and sought after on its own merits and not simply because it happens to be the work of an ethnic minority. The first tasks were to find a name, qualify aims and objectives and work out a constitution. At the group’s second meeting, held on the 24th June 1978 at the Keskidee Centre, the members agreed that the group should be named ‘Rainbow Art Group’ thereafter.¹⁶

The group consisted of Indira Ariyanayagam, Uzo Egonu, Lancelot Ribeiro, Taiwo Jegede, Errol Lloyd, Yeshwant Mali, Gordon V. de la Mothe, Durlabh Singh, Suresh Vedak, Ibrahim Wagh, and Mohammad Zakir. Rainbow Art Group undertook several exhibitions during the time of its existence.

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Caribbean migrants responded to the hostility of British society and the treachery of Britain’s political class by setting up their own institutions, from churches to Saturday schools, from cricket and football teams to alternative banking systems, from youth clubs to reggae sound systems. All these things were manifestations of Black people’s need to set up their own alternatives, in response to the neglect, indifference, hostility or outright racism demonstrated to them by British churches, banks, schools, social clubs, etc. It was in this context of British societal hostility and entrenched indifference on the part of London’s institutions of arts and culture that a group of individuals, enacting the strategy of cultural empowerment mentioned earlier, came together with the hopes of establishing a dedicated Black arts centre, which they envisaged should be called the Drum Arts Centre.¹⁷

A feature by Taiwo Ajai on Drum Arts Centre titled Drum Call for Black Britain appeared in Africa magazine in April 1975.¹⁸ The text pointed to a number of the elements that reflected the strategies for enhancing visibility being pursued by some Black artists and their advocates. By now, it was taken as a given, amongst certain people, that separate provision was the only way to go. Wrote Ajai, ‘There is undoubtedly a need for a Black arts centre in London and a serious, well-planned attempt to establish one is long overdue.’ Significantly, Ajai also made mention of the country’s apparently ‘deteriorating racial situation’ and assumed a correlation between that and the funding of Black cultural activity. One of the most unvarnished sentiments expressed in the text was that ‘professional Black artists wishing to ‘integrate’ have been faced by an almost total lack of employment opportunities.’ Over time, Ajai’s dispiriting observation would prove itself to be something of an enduring sentiment.

The ‘deteriorating racial situation’ of which Ajai had made mention took a particularly vehement turn not much more than a year after Drum Call for Black Britain was published, when violent disturbances involving Black youth and the police erupted at the annual Notting Hill carnival. That year, 1976, saw a dramatic escalation in the numbers of police officers assigned to patrol the event. This was significant because thereafter, much of the mainstream media structured its coverage of Notting Hill carnival around the supposed links between carnival, the apparent criminality of racial sections of carnivalgoers, and an apparent need for the said criminal elements to be policed. By this time, Black youth, primarily males, were finding themselves to be the increasing focus of the police’s attention, through the operating of the notorious stop and search (Sus) law. The effective swamping of the Notting Hill carnival by large numbers of police officers, and the attendant feelings of intimidation felt by some carnival-goers was memorably captured in a key work by Dominica-born British artist Tam Joseph within a few years of the cataclysmic events of 1976¹⁹.

In one of her concluding paragraphs in the Africa magazine feature, Ajai posited that:

A hopeful sign is that, in a deteriorating racial situation, the British establishment also sees the justification for funding Black cultural activities if only the organisational failures which have bedevilled them in the past can be overcome. The survey on minority arts at present being carried out by Ms Naseem Khan and funded by the Arts Council, the Community Relations Commission and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is evidence of this.

As mentioned in the introduction to this book, ‘Black artists’, as a self-declared, and self-identified body of practitioners did not emerge in the UK until the early 1980s. As late as the 1970s there was a presupposition that being Black and being British were mutually exclusive states of being, hence the use of terminology such as ‘minority arts’. Before the emergence of the Black-British artist there were, instead, ‘Afro-Caribbean’ artists, ‘West Indian’ artists, ‘African’ artists, ‘Asian’ artists and so on. And within artists signified as ‘African’ or ‘Asian’ there were often more specific labels of nationality, such as ‘Nigerian’, ‘Ghanaian’, ‘Ceylonese’, ‘Indian’, and so on. Without exception, none of these artists referred to themselves, or their practice, as ‘Black’, preferring instead umbrella terms such as ‘Afro-Caribbean’. Interestingly, though the notion of Black arts was gaining some traction, the notion of Black art, as a specific type of art practice had not yet manifested itself. But by the late 1970s, the emergence of Black art, and the Black artist was just around the corner.

The 1970s found, or left, Black artists in something of an invidious position. The terms of reference used to discuss or locate the practices of Black artists tended to be somewhat separate from those used in relation to their white counterparts, even though the ‘Britishness’ of both sets of artists was, year on year, becoming ever more factual and apparent. Though certain groups of artists were regarding their separateness, or distinctiveness, through a prism of political or cultural empowerment, there was perhaps no mistaking the extent to which the notions of ‘British’ art that were being promulgated at home and abroad tended to cluster around white artists only. Araeen summed up this situation as follows:

While white painters and sculptors, among them many third-rate mediocres, are sent around the whole world to keep the flag of British art achievements flying, black artists, no matter what they have achieved in their work and how important they are historically, cannot even get into mixed shows here in Britain.²⁰

As noted in this chapter, both the emergence of ‘ethnic arts’ as the dominant framework for understanding the practices of Black artists, and the clustering of artists under umbrella terms such as ‘Afro-Caribbean’ were challenged vociferously by Araeen, who had emerged, during the course of the 1970s, as one of the most important and influential figures in the development of Black visual arts practice in mid-late twentieth century Britain.²¹ He was one of the first significant London-based figures to acknowledge and critically engage with the new generation of Black artists such as Keith Piper. An accomplished and widely exhibited artist and sculptor, Araeen was also well known for his work as a writer, curator and editor. It was in his capacity of editor that he brought into existence the journal, Third Text, which he edited for a considerable number of years. His earlier work as a writer and editor centred on the publication Black Phoenix, three issues of which were published towards the end of the 1970s. These issues were hugely important documents, reflecting pronounced counter-cultural arguments and thinking about art, culture, and politics at this critical period in British and international politics. Within these issues were heard not only Araeen’s voice, but also the voices of a range of people, coming from, as well as addressing, different highly charged international locations. Further, these issues of Black Phoenix gave substantial clues and pointers as to the nature of Black artists’ practice of the time. Particularly important in this regard was Araeen’s review of the 1978 exhibition of Afro-Caribbean Art discussed in this chapter.

But this was more than just an exhibition review. Araeen took to task some of the assertions and assumptions that he felt underpinned the exhibition. In so doing, Araeen was to rehearse (or presciently anticipate) many of the issues that were to dominate discussions of Black-British artists’ practice over the course of the following decade and beyond. Black Phoenix – perhaps aptly, given its name – was resurrected, reborn, and relaunched by Araeen as the predominantly theoretical and reflective art journal Third Text. For significant periods of its history Third Text paid attention to contemporary visual arts practice in the UK by reviewing exhibitions and by publishing other features – interviews, biographical texts, and so on. In this regard, Third Text contributed much to the process of chronicling visual arts activity, not just in the UK, but internationally as well.

Araeen was instrumental in curating an exhibition that sought to clarify and resolve what, in time, could be summarised as the ‘what is Black art?’ argument. This exhibition was The Essential Black Art.²² The exhibition was conscious of problematic aspects of the recent history of Black visual arts practice in Britain and how that practice was perceived and defined by sections of the wider community and the art establishment. As such, The Essential Black Art was consciously positioned as an attempt to negotiate a number of impasses or look again at a debate that had, to an extent, reached what Keith Piper termed ‘a consensus of pluralism’, particularly after South Asian visual arts practice had to some extent managed to incorporate itself into broadly accepted definitions of ‘Black’ visual arts activity by the close of the 1980s.

Araeen’s arguments concerning the definition of ‘Black Art’ were articulated in the introductory notes for The Essential Black Art catalogue. His view was that:

The term ‘black art’ is now being commonly used by the black community as well as by people in Britain in general. But this common usage is often a misuse, as far as the work that might be called ‘black art’ is concerned. It may be a convenient term to refer to the work of black artists, but it also implies that their work is or should necessarily be different from the mainstream of modern culture.

Araeen’s thesis was that ‘“Black Art”, if the term must be used, defined specific historical development within contemporary art practice and had emerged directly from the joint struggle of Asian, African and Caribbean people against racism, and the art work itself explicitly refers to that struggle’²³. In his view, any other definition or understanding of Black art (that merely regarded it as the visual creativity of any and all non-white people) was erroneous and had its basis in ignorance. Such thinking and assertions by Araeen marked him out as being an important critical voice. His views and comments influenced the direction taken by Black art into the 1980s and beyond.