The only thing to look forward to… is the past

Abstract

THE 1980S WERE IN SOME WAYS THE DECADE OF THE BLACK ARTIST. From the exhibitions involving the likes of Claudette Johnson, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Marlene Smith and others that took place between 1981 and 1984, through to the unprecedented crop of survey exhibitions in the middle part of the decade, to Rasheed Araeen's substantial Hayward Gallery curatorial undertaking at the end of the decade, The Other Story; there was perhaps a credible sense that significant new chapters in the history of Black artists in Britain were being written, by galleries, institutions, and curators, and by the artists themselves. From the opening of the Black-Art Gallery in 1983, through to the publication, at the end of the decade, of the only British-produced book dedicated to examining and celebrating the work of Black women artists,1 the amount of activity was epoch-making, and quite out of the ordinary. What happened to all this energy and activity? What became of the many artists whose practice emerged or developed during the course of the decade? What is it that prevented so much of that energy and activity from rolling into the 19905 and on into the new century?There are ways in which the are remembered, or perceived, as being as good as it gets (or as good as it got) for Black-British artists; a sense that the decade represented a sort of high point that somehow could not be sustained or replicated and, regretfully perhaps, could not be returned to. A few years ago, David A. Bailey, Ian Baucom, and Sonia Boyce edited a publication called Shades of Black.2 Part nostalgic reminiscence, part exercise in revisionism, part settling of old scores, the book was a curious mixture, which reflected and grew out of a conference of the same title a few years earlier, held at Duke University, in the USA. There was, within Shades of Black, much in the way of gripes and carping. Furthermore, notwithstanding conference sessions such as Debates since the 19805 and Historical Perspectives on International Curatorial Debates of the and 19905, Shades of Black took no particularly serious interest in what came after the 19805, and its consequences and implications for Britain's Black artists. Inadvertently perhaps, the book offered substantial clues to and possible reasons why the decades following the 19805, despite much curatorial activity, were such a brick wall for so many Black artists. Shades of Black, re-presented many partial, nostalgic, and revisionist readings of the 19805, the sum total of which proved to be more hindrance than help, in constructing a compelling historical narrative of the trajectory of Black artists. Gripes and carping aside, the mind-set that the were the be-all and end-all of Black artists' activity left the way clear for a new generation of younger Black artists who regarded the moment of their emergence as a sort of Year Zero, taking no respectful account of whatever had gone before the mid- to late 19905. In this pathology, critics such as Adrian Searle adopted a similar Year Zero framework to that of artists such as Chris Oflli, who seemed to believe that nothing of any great substance, by way of Black artists' activity, took place before the likes of Oflli emerged onto the scene. Few, if any, of the most successful Black artists of the present moment were minded to place their work in the historical context of the or decades before that. (Quite possibly, this is the task of art historians, rather than the duty of artists themselves. After all, the reacting against, or the ignoring of, what went before is in some ways what most characterizes each new generation of artists.) Regardless, for better or for worse, in multiple ways and for conflicting reasons, the has, for Black-British artists, proven to be an important, but somewhat 'quarantined' decade.Attempts to historicize or meaningfully assess Black-British artists' practice of the have tended to fall flat for a number of reasons, though perhaps one of the most compelling has been a reluctance or inability to locate this practice in the context of what came before it, and what came after. …