Alan Read, 'Preface'
In: The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. Edited by Alan Read. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, pp. 8-11.
This book is intended to create a dialogue between Frantz Fanon's ideas on the significance of intellectual work, the politics of location, everyday traumas of social inequality, minorities and their experience of the contemporary metropolis, and artists and thinkers whose work has been concerned with the structures and technologies of representation, race and radicalism.
There are few figures through whom this complex of concerns could be illuminated - Frantz Fanon is one. The name of Fanon, author of seminal works such as Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, is well known, yet the particular geographical and political conjuncture of his work, coupled with a radical commitment to psychiatry, remains an evocative and problematic terrain for contemporary reconsideration.
The legacy of Fanon's work provided the touchstone for Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, an exhibition, film, live art and discussion programme which was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London between May and July 1995. These events were preceded by a conference, 'Working with Fanon: Contemporary Politics and Cultural Reflection'. Artists from the building-wide project joined theorists and cultural practitioners from a diversity of disciplines to take Fanon on, to engage with each other's perspectives on his influence and to seek the resonance between their work and his work. The purpose was not to detect the effect of Fanon, but to work with Fanon in understanding how narrative, the media, image and symbol lie at the very heart of the practice of politics and social knowledge.
The Fact of Blackness is one after-effect of this work. It takes its title from a seminal chapter in Black Skin, White Masks which provided a provocative location for conference debate. In order to maintain the disagreements and discussions that characterised the life of the conference, dialogues have been included throughout the book which develop various aspects of the papers. The dynamic relationship between talking and doing which the Mirage events evoked, where the practice of artists rubbed up against the thoughts of speakers, provides another context. Yet what follows has specific additional aims: to reconsider the critical context of Fanon; to articulate the precise historical and professional milieus of his work; to discuss artists' affiliations with the nexus of race, representation and radicalism which were also Frantz Fanon's concerns; and to reiterate ways in which these concerns are already inscribed within contemporary politics.
The book moves towards looking; towards the distracted glimpse of recognition in the day-to-day encounter and the concentrated gaze of speculation in an artist's work. Looking marks the inextricable link between words, particularly those of Frantz Fanon, and the public world of sights and sounds: the common place of daily acts, which both resists and reinforces the tyrannies of injustice.