CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Triumphant Triumvirate:
Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili, and
Steve McQueen.

Towards the end of the millennium, a new younger generation of ambitious and media-savvy Black artists, typified by the likes of Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare and Steve McQueen¹ began to take centre stage, arguably reflecting multiple shifts in race and representation and (cultural) politics, relating as much to wider communities of Black people in Britain as to Black artists themselves. The media profile and career success of these artists was simply unparalleled in the history of Black artists in Britain. This chapter examines the trajectories of these artists’ successes. Arguably, their successes lay in their abilities to create work that was perceived to be somewhat comfortably in step with what might be called a post-yBa² moment.

Yinka Shonibare was born in London in the early 1960s, but grew up in Nigeria. Returning to London to continue his art school education, he completed an undergraduate degree before going on to Goldsmiths College for postgraduate study.³ It was at this time – the late 1980s and early 1990s – that he was making some of his most interesting and successful work. His paintings at the time were acrylic canvasses that brought together studies of African art pieces – often depicted were wooden caryatid figures –juxtaposed with all manner of consumer items, readily available on high streets and other retail outlets. What may at first have seemed like incongruous pairings or groupings were in reality bold declarations that challenged often unthinking assumptions about the nature of African cultures and the suppositions that an untroubled African way of life somehow existed separate from the late twentieth century world of technological development and consumerism. With titles such as Caryatid Figures Rafia Colour Motif with Viscount [telephone] from British Telecom (c.1989), Shonibare’s paintings were remarkable affairs. Several years after their making, Elsbeth Court described them as follows: ‘In 1989 he divided the plane of a single canvas into three sections, each containing figurative imagery of an ‘icon’ such as a Lega stool or global designer telephone.’⁴ Elsewhere, Shonibare’s paintings from this period were described as

the diametric opposite of cultural taxidermy. Juxtaposing images of African carved figurines, advertising logos, entomological illustrations, small electrical appliances, and Chinese calligraphic characters, Shonibare disregards any hierarchical arrangements other than those dictated by his compositional choices. The canvasses of the artist often suggest an almost haphazard collage of museological specimen charts and modern advertising billboards.⁵

Steering clear of the occasional didacticism that had not been uncommon amongst certain Black British artists’ practice, Shonibare attempted to fashion new languages, new dialogues, and new terms of reference to describe the peculiarities of his life and his identity in late 1980s London. The decade had given rise to several Black artists who, like Shonibare, were also seeking to utilise painting as more than introspective formalism, and more than the merely illustrative. Instead, they approached painting for its potential to communicate and embody new ideas and new ways of framing elements of the world around them. Particularly noteworthy in this regard were Denzil Forrester, Eugene Palmer and Tam Joseph, discussed earlier in chapters of this book.⁶ Whilst a number of other artists had long since moved away from painting and other practice-based media, Shonibare kept faith with the act of painting, even as he critiqued its history and its legacies. In so doing, he was to go on to make an extraordinary, penetrating work. Following two years of postgraduate study at Goldsmiths College, Shonibare was included in the prestigious Barclays Young Artist Award, 1992, held at the Serpentine Gallery in London.⁷ Elsbeth Court, in her review of his work in the exhibition, claimed that Shonibare was, ‘the first non-European selected to be a finalist.’⁸ There was great significance in Shonibare’s inclusion in the exhibition. More than a decade and a half after the Barclays Young Artist Award, 1992, Shonibare was asked to describe what his big breakthrough was. He replied: ‘Winning a Barclays Young Artist award in 1992. It got me noticed.’⁹

Within his practice, Shonibare was at pains to stress that his work was a critique of, and challenge to, seemingly indelible or fixed notions of Africa and African art. Furthermore, though he was not minded to exhibit in Nigeria, the country he grew up in, Shonibare was nevertheless a clear beneficiary of a new art-world status quo, in which precious few biennales and other international mega-exhibitions were considered complete without the presence of one or more practitioners deemed in some way or another to represent or reference ‘Africa’. Steve McQueen was another beneficiary of the ways in which Black artists, including those from Britain, were increasingly embraced by the biennale circuit during the course of the 1990s.¹⁰

Shonibare’s headway was aided by another particularly fortuitous sequence of events – the meteoric coming into view of the so-called yBa generation who have in many ways dominated all curatorial narratives governing British art practice from the mid 1990s onwards. Such was the new hegemony that the yBa grouping represented that by the mid 1990s they were in the words of Michael Bracewell, ‘well on their way to becoming the new establishment of British art.’¹¹

Having studied at Goldsmiths College, the undisputed home of the yBa generation, and graduating from there in the early 1990s, Shonibare was well placed to be identified with these artists and to be noticed, in time, by both influential and impressionable curators, gallery directors, critics, and collectors from far and wide. Ofili (though not a Goldsmiths graduate) and McQueen (another Goldsmiths graduate) were likewise beneficiaries of the unprecedented levels of curatorial and other types of attention paid to the yBa generation that included the likes of Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood and Tracey Emin.

The work that Shonibare exhibited in the Barclays Young Artist Award was groundbreaking. Elsbeth Court, whose review appeared in African Arts, provided the most substantial appraisal of Shonibare’s work in the Serpentine exhibition, which was titled Installation: ‘On adjacent walls Shonibare composed an asymmetrical array of four-sided color field objects prepared from textiles stretched over a frame, like the traditional canvas, and painted. Stunning in appearance and significance, Installation is a watershed for contemporary African art.’¹²

Following on from Installation, one of Shonibare’s next works was Double Dutch,¹³ which consisted of several rows of small rectangular paintings. The paintings were executed on the fronts or the sides of the canvasses, though the canvasses were, in turn, stretched pieces of faux African fabric. The fabric acted as a leitmotif of Shonibare’s own existence and identity. This was irreverent, brassy work. Referencing the modernist grid, the work existed as a critique of Modernism and wider art histories, even as it simultaneously acted as a mechanism through which Shonibare could find a way into these same narratives, and, in effect, create a space for himself within art history. The canvasses were mounted on a wall that was a shocking shade of bright pink in colour, thereby driving a coach and horses through the sacrosanctity of the white cube gallery aesthetic. The work was also an exuberant investigation into the process of painting, in which the paint on the fronts or the sides of the canvasses was applied in luscious, generous quantities, to create shapes, patterns, symbols that were evocative of such things as cultural identity, the occasional eccentricity of fabric design, and investigations into the ways in which paint can be applied to fabric.

Concurrent to Shonibare’s stock rising, an intriguing young artist – not yet into his thirties – crowned off a successful year with a coveted Turner Prize nomination. Chris Ofili was the first British-born Black artist to be nominated. Indeed, Ofili went to on win the Turner Prize, thereby signalling the triumphant arrival of a bold, new, media-savvy talent whose work was characterised in large part by (and indeed, arguably primarily noticed for) its distinctive and liberal use of balls of elephant dung. As Julian Stallabrass observed, ‘He achieved prominence at a genuinely young age, only six years out of art school when, in 1998, he won the Turner Prize and in the same year had a solo show at one of London’s foremost venues, the Serpentine Gallery.’¹⁴ Stallabrass proceeded to make mention of other Ofili successes, before noting that ‘his work arrived swiftly at the official centre of the British art world, and may indeed be seen as a manifestation of the [then] British state’s new self-image.’¹⁵ As mentioned earlier, Ofili, together with Shonibare and McQueen were to an extent fortuitous beneficiaries of the unprecedented levels of curatorial and other types of attention paid to the yBa generation. But other factors were at play in Ofili’s success. Stallabrass opined, ‘The prodigious success of Ofili is however a sign of shifts in the art-world view of black art, one connected with a change in government […] and with larger and deeper changes in the global art world as a whole.’¹⁶ There could be no question that the late 1990s was Ofili’s time. Rachel Newsome, in a feature on Ofili published in November 1998, on the eve of his Turner Prize triumph, summed up the artist’s relevance and timely emergence in a handful of words: ‘it’s a late ‘90s thing.’¹⁷

In his perceptive review of Ofili’s 1998 touring exhibition, Richard Dyer briskly reminded, or made the reader aware of, the artist’s rapid rise to success and good fortune:

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1993 with an MA in painting, Ofili has been courted by the upper echelons of the art establishment – Victoria Miro, Charles Saatchi, the Serpentine Gallery – and starting even while still at college he was a prize winner in the Whitworth Young Contemporaries, an exhibitor in the BP Portrait award and later in the prestigious John Moores Liverpool Exhibition.¹⁸

Ofili’s rise to fame and success owed much to his timely and emotive painting of a woman taken to approximate Mrs Doreen Lawrence, No Woman No Cry (1998), which was purchased by the Tate in 1999.

In April of 1993, 18-year-old student Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in a vicious and unprovoked attack that was widely regarded as a racist murder.¹⁹ In the immediate years following the murder, no convictions were secured for this death and allegations persisted that the London police were ultimately indifferent to racist violence against Black people. Worse, that incompetence, corruption, and racism may have played a part in the lack of convictions.²⁰ The New Labour government of 1997, sensing the palpable mood of outrage and injustice at Lawrence’s death and the attendant failure of the police and judicial system to secure satisfactory prosecutions, commissioned a report by Sir William Macpherson which, when published in February 1999 became known as The Macpherson Report.²¹ With its damning verdict that police forces such as the Metropolitan Police were affected by a culture of ‘institutional racism’, the report was seen as evidence that under New Labour, Black victims of crime, including racial violence, would be taken seriously and that the police would work to eradicate racism from their ranks. Notwithstanding the importance of the report, its findings, and its recommendations, the public mood (articulated within sections of the press and media, and elsewhere) took the form of outrage at the wanton violence perpetrated against someone framed as a decent, upstanding, hardworking young man, and sympathy for the Lawrence family, particularly the teenager’s parents. Doreen and Neville Lawrence were regarded as dignified people who, though burdened with an unimaginable grief, carried themselves in a way that was inspirational. Like their son, they were perceived as decent people, who wanted nothing more and nothing less than justice for their beloved son. Few racist murders had in the past generated this level of sympathy. Indeed, much of the media and the wider society had appeared apparently indifferent to the deaths of no fewer than 13 Black youngsters, in a suspicious house fire, at the beginning of the 1980s.²² But on this occasion at least, things were different and there was a palpable sense of society-wide sympathy for Lawrence’s parents and respect for their dignified manner.

When Chris Ofili was shortlisted for the Turner Prize exhibition of 1998, held at Tate Britain from late October 1998 to early January the following year, he became the first British-born Black artist to be so honoured. The other shortlisted artists – Sam Taylor-Wood, Cathy de Monchaux, and Tacita Dean – were also of the yBa generation who had come, and indeed would continue, to dominate Turner Prize shortlists.²³ The award was, in due course, made to Ofili ‘for the inventiveness, exuberance, humour and technical richness of his painting, with its breadth of cultural reference, as revealed in his solo exhibition at Southampton City Art Gallery and in Sensation at the Royal Academy, London.’²⁴ It is certain that his painting, No Woman No Cry, the star of his display, helped him to achieve this recognition.

Ofili’s No Woman No Cry was a sentimental portrait of a tearful woman, widely taken to be Mrs Lawrence, or a woman the viewer can surmise might be representative of Mrs Lawrence. The theatricality of the elephant dung which had catapulted Ofili to stardom was present within the painting – in the form of a pendant worn by the woman, and as two props on which the painting (and indeed, many of his paintings which use the material) rested. But, sentimentality and predictable or inevitable use of elephant dung aside, the painting was widely recognised and it was no surprise when the Tate purchased it in 1999. As Virginia Button noted in her history of the Turner Prize, No Woman No Cry ‘was widely admired by the press.’²⁵ The woman in Ofili’s portrait appeared behind a decorative, latticework type grid, almost a funeral veil. Not a harsh grid that trapped her, but an ornamental patterning that reflects the figure’s gentle humanity. With her hair plaited, and her eyes gently closed in sorrow, the painting was perhaps a timely embodiment of sympathy felt towards Mrs Lawrence and the high esteem in which she and her husband were held. The woman in Ofili’s painting cried gentle tears and within each droplet, those who cared to look closely enough could see a portrait of the murdered, the martyred, Stephen Lawrence. Reflecting as it did something of the nation’s sympathy, it was difficult to imagine Ofili’s No Woman No Cry, as the centrepiece of his display, not winning 1998’s Turner Prize, once Ofili had been shortlisted.

Despite the pronounced, supposedly playful and somewhat mannered nature of the found imagery and the pick and mix approach to Black popular culture that characterised Ofili’s work, its strongest and most dominant aspect was in many ways not the content itself, but the paintings’ luxurious, indulgent, decorative nature. These were beautiful, crafted, layered affairs in which the somewhat gimmicky elephant dung acted as a foil for what were clearly painstakingly assembled mixed media paintings. Stallabrass described something of Ofili’s technique:

Ofili started making quasi-abstract paintings of a very complex, decorative nature, composed of many layers. Typically his paintings will contain, from bottom layer to top, under-painting in sweet colours, collage material from magazines, glitter, drips and slashes of resin, and finally dot painting and dung.²⁶

In Ofili’s early paintings, technique was everything and content, such as it was, ultimately counted for little or nothing beyond its supposed playfulness. In this respect, No Woman No Cry, notwithstanding its tendency towards mawkishness, was something of an exception, in that it brought together something approaching more substantial content and medium. Only Ofili’s earliest, non-figurative pictures, (which had no references to the sexual organs or other body parts that characterised many of Ofili’s dung paintings) such as Painting With Shit on It, were as successful.²⁷ That particular painting, one of Ofili’s first to make use of elephant dung, established the artist’s trademark. As Stallabrass bluntly put it, ‘Shit was Ofili’s logo, and he did what he could to brand both himself and the product he had created.’²⁸

As was the case for the most successful of the yBa coterie, in what seemed like no time at all Ofili had acquired a tangible celebrity status, the trappings of which included a documentary on him broadcast on television,²⁹ a medium which had previously done little to nothing in the way of providing substantial focus on a Black British artist. Like other artists alongside him, some of Ofili’s press and media coverage presupposed an understanding of, or familiarity with, Ofili’s practice, thereby enabling other aspects of his life to be brought to the public’s attention. The Guardian newspaper was a particular admirer of Ofili, providing consistent coverage on him and his work over an extended period of time. Going beyond his art practice, the Guardian’s Weekend magazine of 25 November 2000 included a lifestyle and interior decoration feature that focussed, in part, on Ofili’s London home.³⁰

Within two years of leaving Goldsmiths College as Steven McQueen,³¹ Steve McQueen was in a group exhibition at the ICA, then one of London’s most prestigious visual arts venues.³² By 1997, McQueen’s career was already being described as ‘formidable’.³³ He had already been included in a number of important exhibitions and had shown work in a number of prestigious galleries, and greater success clearly lay ahead. Remarkably, McQueen’s career was launched on the back of barely half-an hour’s worth of 16mm film and video projects. But such was the special and arresting quality of McQueen’s work that curators, gallery directors and art critics all took notice of it. In a piece written towards the end of 1997 for an American publication, Michael Rush, clearly impressed, wrote that:

Steve McQueen, a twenty-eight-year-old Black British media artist, has already forged a formidable career with less than thirty minutes worth of video and films. This year alone he has had solo exhibitions at documenta X, the Johannesburg Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum, Marian Goodman Gallery, and now at the estimable Projects Room at MoMA.³⁴

Time and time again critics found themselves voicing surprise at the speed with which McQueen established himself. An Artforum review, again of late 1997 began with:

I liked Steve McQueen’s first New York show, and then I found that he has an exhibition history rather fatter than either the thin number of years he has been practising or the slender body of art he has made.³⁵

Glowing reviews and press adulation followed McQueen from his earliest work onwards. Within little more than a decade and a half of graduating from Goldsmiths, Art Review magazine summarised McQueen’s stellar achievements: ‘The only person on the planet to have been awarded both the Turner Prize and the Caméra d’Or (for best first feature at the Cannes film festival) is also representing Britain at the 53rd Venice Biennale.’ The magazine ran a feature on the artist, whose portrait appeared on the cover of one of its issues. Perhaps not surprisingly – and perhaps with good reason – the cover introduced McQueen as ‘The Most Relevant Artist in Britain’.³⁶

Shonibare had his faux African fabric, Ofili had his elephant dung. What got McQueen noticed was his apparent seriousness and the depth of his practice and vision. His film work acted as something of an antidote to the knowing, ironic, supposedly self-deprecating, post-modern frivolity and froth that was, even then, starting to grate and wear a little thin in some of the work of the yBa generation. McQueen’s films, such as his 1995 works, Bear and Five Easy Pieces, and his 1997 work Deadpan, came as a blessed relief to those looking for substance. As Chris Townsend noted in his book, New Art From London:

The best artists of the new generation are distinguished by a seriousness and by a thoughtfulness about their work that has not been a significant feature of British art for many years. (The decision to award the 1999 Turner Prize to Steve McQueen for his self-reflexive videos suggests an early manifestation of this return to art as a serious topic, where concentrated attention is paid to the content and rhetorical forms of the art work, rather than to excess publicity or media interest in the artist.)³⁷

McQueen’s characterisation as a serious artist may have been a device to differentiate him from the other Black Turner Prize winner of the period, Chris Ofili. The body of paintings for which Ofili had secured his nomination included titles such as Popcorn Tits, Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars, and Seven Bitches Tossing Their Pussies Before the Divine Dung. Such titles reflected a contrived and grating hilarity, which contrasted poorly with McQueen’s framing as an assiduous and visionary technician, not given to frivolity and mirth.

It appeared that McQueen had found the holy grail for which many Black artists had searched, seemingly since time immemorial. What large numbers of Black artists had earnestly pursued or sought after was what one might call a largely non-racial reading of the Black image. In a world in which the white image stood for the general and the Black image stood for the racially or ethnically or culturally specific, McQueen’s work seemed to challenge this debilitating and constraining pathology. McQueen seemed able to use, or construct, the Black image in ways that, whilst not exactly transcending race or difference, were able to wrestle it free from the limited range of readings that historically seemed to plague the Black image. To be sure, it was difficult to characterise or caricature McQueen’s work according to explicitly racial narratives, even though the Black image (or perhaps more correctly, images of Black people) was often central to the crafted, filmic narratives and sequences of his earlier work. McQueen may have been Black and a filmmaker, but he most assuredly was not a Black filmmaker. The significance of this cannot be overstated. Others before him may have been Black, and artists, but almost irrespective of their practice or their intentions, they would, whether they liked it or not, invariably find themselves caricatured or categorised as Black artists. McQueen seemed able to break that coupling of the words Black and artist, even though, as mentioned earlier, his camera lens at this time had the Black image as its unswerving focus.

Earlier generations of Black artists who utilised the Black image in a range of social narratives had developed mechanisms for dealing with art world indifference or creating platforms of visibility for their work. These included Black exhibitions and other self-initiated visual arts projects. As time went on, a number of these Black artists found sporadic exposure through actions and approaches that had explicit racial or anti-racist agendas. But other Black artists, whose practice eschewed pronounced or didactic Black symbolism, also fell victim to the art world pathology of perceiving overt racial narratives – in artist or in art – where such narratives did not necessarily exist. Most damning of all, generations of Black painters whose practice was characterised by notably non-figurative elements similarly found themselves kept at arm’s length by an art world largely unconvinced or uninterested in their practice. Much of this changed with the arrival of this new late 1990s grouping of artists, McQueen, Ofili and Shonibare. Of the three, it was perhaps McQueen who has been most feted for the quality of his work, its vision and its depth. Rush was not alone in observing that McQueen was ‘an assured craftsman for whom simple, often straight-on, bold camera shots can enact an entire scenario in less than five minutes.’³⁸ and that, ‘McQueen’s characters to date are powerful, living sculptures, at once enigmatic, erotic, and solitary.’³⁹

It was clear that McQueen was a new type of Black artist, one for whom the substantial exhibitions and other recognition just kept stacking up. Significantly, as mentioned earlier, McQueen became (in 1999) the first Black British artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.⁴⁰ Nearly a decade and a half earlier, Lubaina Himid had occupied the ICA concourse gallery (in effect, corridor walls) and an upper room with her The Thin Black Line exhibition.⁴¹ Discussed in Chapter Nine, this was a critically well-received exhibition that nevertheless took place in something of a marginal and marginalised space, albeit within a prestigious central London venue. A decade on, and David A. Bailey, working with Catherine Ugwu, presented Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference & Desire within the main gallery spaces of the ICA.⁴² This was the first time in the venue’s history that it had given itself over to such an exhibition, featuring as it did Caribbean-born, Black British and African-American practitioners. Within a couple of years of Mirage, McQueen made a triumphant return to the ICA, occupying its gallery spaces with a universally celebrated exhibition. It was this exhibition, and his show of the same year at Kunsthalle, Zurich that gained McQueen his Turner Prize nomination and subsequent win.⁴³