Sarat Maharaj, 'Introduction'
In: Annotations 5: Run through the Jungle: Selected Writings by Eddie Chambers. Edited by Gilane Tawadros and Victoria Clarke. London: Institute of international Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 4-8
Black Art's Autrebiography: That 'Black Art an' done' stuff, isn't it over and done with?
Eddie Chambers looks on Black Art as ceaseless volcanic activity that smoulders away beyond the explosion of its birth. Beyond its emergence around 1980 - through the fire-storm years of protest marches, petitions, smash-ups, burn outs and sit downs as Black and Asian areas of the English cities cried out against unacceptable conditions, racist violence and policing - Black Art lives on at 2000, not least as a probe for scanning and sounding the art and culture industry, its systemic exclusions and blindspots, its multicultural managerialism.
The scorched years mark the passion behind his thinking which he expresses in forthright, broad-striding phrases, a plain-speaking tone. His voice is a world away from later standstiff commentaries by academic art historians whose professional job on the subject is both indispensable and a death kiss. He speaks from within the smoky murk and flux when elements of Black life, art and politics were unfolding rapidly and coming into shape. The sometimes prickly, often taut, telegraphic tone rings true - shot through with a quite unexpected cool, English understatement and black wit.
He stops short of portraying Black Art simply as artworks and objects with some absolute 'Black' causal trigger. We are encouraged to tussle with 'Black Art activity' - an overspill of sources and origins, a network of neural nodes and criss-crossing pathways. It's a volatile performative process, a spasmic mesh of self-building, self-demolishing connections. At one end, it looks like a fixed programme: by 1981, Eddie, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney amongst others, furiously knocked together a manifesto taking to task the conditions that had 'invisibilized', stereotyped and boxed them in. They sought to wire up to the outside, 'extra-aesthetic' space of ideologies and attitudes, to arguments over racism and ethnicity, to the contemporary everyday of Black lingo and chat, immigrant sights, smells and tastes - a jolt to the art school's autistic abstractionism.
Another node, another line up: Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, Nina Edge, Ingrid Pollard, Jennifer Comrie, Mowbray Odonkor, Veronica Ryan, Maud Sulter, Chila Kumari Burman. Black Art is as much about particular artists and artworks as about efforts like Lubaina Himid's to hold onto the hard-won but ever-diminishing space allotted for the exhibition The Thin Black Line (1985), squeezed into the ICA corridor. Eddie's concern with organising and curating shows, stretching back to a spate of The Pan-Afrikan Connection events, is about winning over space and spacing.
How to deterritorialize 'quarantined' spaces and make room for interaction with Black artists? How to tackle no-go areas with critical attention to race and cultural difference - to re-stack segments and blocks of space, to slice across it transversally, perhaps even to dissolve it into the everyday? His desire to show is not motored by display-cabinet mentality or spectacle craze. He seeks to tease out awareness through a public thrashing out of issues between curator, artist, viewer and space. It is a matter of test driving, of trial and error: with The Black Bastard as a Cultural Icon (1985), fuming, wrong-headed reactions and 'mis-readings' of the show served as feedback and data for the on-going debate on ad-media representations of Black people.
His drift is that Black Art might be a heavy-duty, Formica-top concept - a slightly daunting ideal that artists and participants can only fall short of. Could they ever possibly take its measure? He backs this with Marcus Garvey's stark reminder that the marginalised are at times their own stumbling block to progress. The call is to stage themselves afresh through insight gained from taking stock of their obscure origins, subordinated histories and damaged lives. His references to Marcus Garvey and Walter Rodney are almost in passing. He rarely cites the Black theoreticians' galaxy though we can just about guess who he might have found inspiring. This lends his writing an uncluttered air, a straight-forward, quite anglo pragmatic focus.
He can speak of Black Art and Black community as if they were ready-made, off-the-peg entities. But he also treats them as unfinished projects without finale. Alert to the trap of labels, he coaxes us to look at individual pieces rather than reduce Tom Joseph or Keith Piper to schematic examples of Black Art. He douses such subsuming, abstract categories with a nominalist acid. What if Black Art is 'just a name tag'?
It might frame actual pieces by Joseph, Piper or Boyce but could it ever entirely contain them? This is a low key echo of the century's bigger search from Henri Bergson through Adorno and Deleuze for the art event that wriggles out of the received category of art - an impossible quest summed up in Duchamp's celebrated 'vitriol of nominalism' provocation: 'Can one make a work of art that is not a work of art?' Black Art that is not Black Art?
Eddie bites the hand that feeds him? His adroit if uneven responses highlight the fraught business of targeting the liberal art and culture industry whose non-racist credentials are otherwise taken for granted. He joins a line of tough questioners from Naseem Khan through Rasheed Araeen and Gavin Jantjes - probing the logic of closure, exclusion and guarded tolerance inscribed in art institutions and the gallery circuit. He is outspoken, a bit bruising. But his views contribute to the payoff: a climate of steady updating, appraisal and revision of liberal approaches to cultural diversity - clarifying needs and improving concrete art, and culture provision and possibilities in an evolving,1990s multiculturalism in Britain.
He discomforts the art world's liberal pretensions just when it settles down into thinking it is 'liberal an' done'. This makes for a tricky, disputatious often exasperating relationship. The pressure Black Art activity puts on liberal views is inseparable from the on-going, post-1960s critique of pure tolerance. In promoting the 'desire for difference' it counters the tacit 'demand for assimilation' that lies behind 'pure tolerance' and the liberal ideal. The latter demand, however, well-intentioned, is not untouched by a kind of 'repressive tolerance' - an implicit expectation that all should conform to its norms, the price 'others' must pay for acceptance.
A hard-nosed self-appraisal leads Eddie to see his brand of Black Art practice as perhaps done for. Is it 'passé and crude' in contrast to newer, less head-on strategies of difference and dissent of the generation of Steve McQueen, Alistair Raphael, Chris Ofili or Permindar Kaur? It seems just possible that the Black Art stance lives on for the reason it had all along been castigated - for its somewhat essentialist view of identity and difference based on a steely black/white binary. This emphasis on adamant difference, however, unpalatable, trips up the drive towards sameness implicit in 'pure tolerance' - the regulation and control with which 'Fortress Europe' handles 'difference' regarding headscarves, ritual slaughter, clitoridectomy, 'African sans papiers', Romany blacks, motorway 'immigrant' sex-workers. The Black Art perspective cuts across the drive to sameness in 'pure tolerance' which can so easily tip over into that demand for sameness at the heart of 1990s xenophobia anti-immigrant fever and 'racisme sans race'.
Apartheid in full spate saw student bodies from the segregated universities and the ethnically separated 'tribal' colleges desperately clutching onto their affiliation with the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) - a beleaguered, white-run, non-racial organization. The dilemma facing NUSAS was that under the race laws, even for the brief spell of a conference, non-whites could not stay at white campuses or socialize together. Could they ever meet as equals to discuss equality? The usual fudge was that some Indian and mixed-race students were packed off to houses in 'racially appropriate' areas outside the city or bundled off with African students who were always expected to kip down for the night in the limboland of some church.
At the fateful 1967 conference at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Steve Biko and mates - Ben Nqubane, Rogers Ragavan, Johnny Masonwane and Shan Maharah amongst others - planned to protest and withdraw if living arrangements were not integrated. They were upstaged by a more radical motion which condemned the NUSAS executive - rather than Apartheid laws - for the deadlock. A dragged-out, agonised debate took place. Liberal whites could not understand why non-whites would not agree to staying at the church 'in the interest of the greater good'. Biko thought this showed that they 'tended to take things for granted and wanted us to accept things that were second class'. Until then he had felt it almost sacrilegious to question the 'dogma of non-racism' as purveyed by the liberals. But it began to dawn on him that 'our understanding of our own situation' did not quite square with theirs.
Non-white students would go on to create a student body of their own which became the springboard for Black Consciousness - a mode of activity centred on thinking through concrete particularities of the situation in which they found themselves under apartheid. It was critique through grounded experience - poles apart from the impressive but abstract opposition to apartheid espoused by the liberal world which tended to cave in whenever put to the test in the detail of everyday situations. This kind of working through dense actualities, argument and action gave that ethical force and temperance that would be the mark of Biko's practical, almost Anglican-minimalist tone - against liberal hot-air.
Something of this unrhetorical element has to be kept in mind in grasping the absence of broadbrush theoretical strokes in Eddie's approach - the idea of starting from intellectual systems rather than concrete situations would be back to front for him. Black Art practice might be eclipsed by the 1990s. But does it serve as a rudimentary gauge for the plethora of cultural diversity perspectives - billed as post-colonialism, global tribalism, inter(net)nationalism, as in between-ness, hybridity or cultural translation, as invisible minorities policy, inclusion/exclusion - on-line at 2000? As these blur and coalesce in an all-over, Macdonalizing swirl at the century's end, a jelly-centre, statutory multiculturalism - an almost official, Bennetton ideology of accented diversity - settles in across the art-culture industry. It has its own administrative logic for regulating and managing 'cultural difference' - not least by wittling it down into market digestible notions of ethnic vibrancy and colour. Black Art's clear-cut, liberatory purpose stands as a rod against which the flat-ironing force of this emergent multicultural managerialism might be measured.
'Chip-on-the-shoulder stuff?' The charge of spleen-talk, that he is too mired in things to be objective, misses the point. Eddie is a flesh and blood participant in the plot he scripts. He is not writing at second-hand about something that had already happened before he came on the scene. He is the event and the writer of the event from the thick of the situation he found himself in as a Black person in late 1970s England. He contributes to constructing the stage that would bring contemporary Black creativity into view. He would have to start from scratch in his bed-sit in Bristol, putting together the African and Asian Visual Artists Archive - 'snip-snipping into yards of invisibility. A scissors and paste, handloom job. Scraps of report, slides, dupes, repros. squashed into shoeboxes, chomping away at the big British Art story.' It would not be easy to map art and politics in Britain today without rummaging through his archive.
He has had to construct the field of commentary as he has gone along - there being no ready-made, on-the-shelf object of commentary that he could simply reach out for. It accounts for some of the rapid fire of his thinking. Sartre's remarks in 1957 on Albert Memmi's spleen-talk in The Colonizer and the Colonized - also on that of Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth - throw light on the thorny issue: Memmi expresses his ideas in the sparking order of discovery, according to the pinch of the particular situation he finds himself in: 'starting with human intentions and felt relationships, he guarantees the genuineness of his experience. He suffered first in his relations with others and in relations with himself; he encountered the objective structure in thoroughly studying the contradiction that was rending him, and he delivers structure and contradiction up to us just as they are, raw and still permeated with his subjectivity.'
The contradiction was tearing the Black student apart - but they don't get it, the Bloomsbury professors grilling him about his research. He is stammering out what has yet to be spoken - Blackness vis-à-vis the 'normalcy of whiteness'. On top of 'the fact of his Blackness' is that 'he's albino'. A Black man shouts from across the road, 'Hiya albino, wha'appen?' The Profs bang on. 'Have you looked at the literature on the subject?' The literature they're thinking of is some stolid, corpse-cold account of the image of the Black in Western painting. they have yet to learn to listen. He is grappling with the convoluted wraparounds of blackness-whiteness in the burning present which is killing him.
'Your writing's subjective. No hard facts. Have you any statistical evidence? Isn't what you're saying mere opinion?'
'But isn't opinion a mainstay of academic argument. Look at that old, stuffy convention: 'Aristotle is of the opinion that such and such..... Plato opines such and such.....Heralites holds to the opinion that such and such....'
'Spleen-talk, not proper research. Go and write fiction.'
The Profs still don't get it and it's 1999.
Eddie is the Black young man roaming the bleak, industrial Black country, Wolverhampton and environs, in late 1970s England. Things were less romantic. His Black Bastard and a Cultural Icon show dissecting the golliwog image would ponder how advertising jingles twist into taunts. Whatever the etymology, golliwog chimed in with the common racist tag of the time. In the TV ad, the golliwog on the Robertsons jam-jar label would spring to life, jump off the label, prance and jig across the table laden with tea goodies. To the cry, 'Get back to your jam jar', he would leap back into the label. That cut to the quick in the 'If they're black, send them back' climate demanding repatriation of Blacks and Asians. There was the dreaded daily greeting at the school gates: 'Cadbury's take 'em and they cover them in chocolate' - all to a swaying calypso beat, prelude to violence, sometimes murder.
Against such low-growl micro-tonals of racist scorn, Eddie would cut in with high-fidelity Black sonics: speaking the electric intensities of his own life and art world he would speak that of the Black Art world breaking through closure and confinement - an autrebiography in which both self and other are impossibly voiced separately and together at once.