Review of a show at the Royal College of Art, written for the New Statesman's Cultural Capital blog last year. (Image above is Paul Jones' Brixton Hill SW2 7SC.)
RCA
Black, Royal College of Art
Henry Moore Gallery, 31 Aug-6 Sept 2011
The
clue’s in the title. Unlike Tate Liverpool’s Afro
Modern exhibition last year,
this group exhibition at the Royal College of Art doesn’t make any
conceptual claims about their constellation of artists. They had to
be students or graduates of the RCA, and be of African or
Afro-Caribbean descent; simple. Given that, as co-curator Ekua
McMorris told the Guardian, “There have only been 85 black students
at the RCA in the last five years. That's out of a body of over 800
per year”, that already narrows down the field substantially. The
chronological range of the exhibition goes back to Althea McNish,
designer for Liberty among others, who graduated in July 1957, up to
current student Kevin Bickham (whose readymade of a bicycle frame was
a nicely deadpan, if not especially impressive, gesture). Given the
simplicity of the curatorial concept, a show like this stands or
falls on the quality of the work and the arrangement in the gallery.
On
those criteria, the results are somewhat mixed. The variety of
periods, styles and media make it difficult to form a coherent
picture of the exhibition. When I went, ahead of the press viewing, a
few things were missing – in particular, there was nothing from
Chris Ofili, one of the College’s more famous graduates of the last
few decades, and one of McMorris’ two photos in the show was off
somewhere (a particular disappointment, as McMorris’ work is one of
the highlights in the show’s photography). The remaining photo from
McMorris was brilliantly odd and resonant: Mother
and Child depicts
a black woman (presumably McMorris herself) in the bath, facing away
from the camera, a viscous flow of black ooze tumbling from a jar in
her hand into her mouth, although it looks equally as if it were
being extruded from her body. The image has the slight ghoulishness
of Matthew Barney's olfactorily seeping creatures in the Cremaster
Cycle,
but it's deepened when you catch the caption that mentions that the
substance is molasses. Seemingly the least pleasant by-product of the
processing of sugar cane, it lacks the sparkle of, say, golden syrup;
it seems to carry the process of pulverisation and boiling, the
history of violence required to extract it – and hence invades the
picture with the memory of generations of slave labour that filled
cane plantations in the West Indies.
These
little techniques of displacement, of re-framing, of producing puncta
that call up whole histories, characterise the best work in the show.
Paul Jones' charcoal drawings of storms are based on camcorder stills
taken by American stormchasers; the titles give locations near where
Jones lives in Brixton. The images themselves are fantastic swirls
and billows of wind that resemble mushroom clouds or particularly
distorted cumulonimbi – in that sense, they aren't implausible as
views over London, especially if taken from a hill; they participate,
obliquely, in the great tradition of clouds in landscape painting –
Constable's sensitively rendered expanses of chiarscuro, but also
John Martin's glowering, fire-and-brimstone thunderstorms and the
roiling black roof of Turner's Hannibal
Crossing the Alps. But to
take them as London scenes requires some odd imaginative shifts. The
drawings are done on tracing paper, which amplifies the grainy, hazey
quality of images, turning them into documentary fictions. Darren
Norman's deceptively simple How
To Draw A Palm Tree –
a demonstration, printed on vinyl, of the eponymous tree reduced to a
succession of simple additions of shape and colour –
is
remarkably smart and funny; it reminds one of nothing so much as the
stylised signifiers of exoticism on cigarette cards and food packets
(I think, particularly, of Um Bongo, with its approving catchphrase
of “They drink it in the Congo!”) Norman has, in a sense, to
learn how to represent his own heritage – exactly the kind of thing
an Afro-Caribbean artist is supposed to know how to draw – through
the mediation of the 'exotic', and in doing so problematises ideas of
'authenticity', of art as a testament to one's roots. These sorts of
strategies are, perhaps, testament to another history of
displacement, of scrambled memory; in what Paul Gilroy called the
“inverted continent” of the black Atlantic a disconnection from
origins that persist as troubling images is the norm.
Alongside
the missing Ofili works among the exhibition's celebrity turns was a
small cluster of works by Frank Bowling RA (born in Guyana, he moved
to London at the age of 16 in 1950, and graduated from the RCA in
1962). They were, unfortunately, from his early period: decentred,
impressively visceral interior scenes in the post-Francis Bacon,
post-Graham Sutherland fashion, they now appear rather gauche in
comparison to the brilliant, easily referential abstraction of his
later work; in spite of all their virtuosic distortion of figure –
the great swirls of red and flame on the woman’s dress in The
Abortion – once the eye
adjusts and sees what’s what, they have some of the flatness of
Victorian narrative paintings. The body-horror flashes of Two
Figures on a Bed, with its
conventional furniture disrupted by the two reclining nudes, both of
whom seem have misplaced their arms, its centre occupied by a black
mass (with its white edges, it may be an oddly distorted piece of
clothing), are coherent but puzzling; the expressiveness of the
brushwork suggests a turbulent affect for which there seems no ready
origin. Altogether it seems a missed opportunity. Likewise, a
photograph from fashionable graduate Harold Offeh, who makes much
play with wigs, lippy and bared teeth, seems flimsy and
one-dimensional in its gestures. By contrast, the presence of several
suits by Charlie Allen – now designer for the England strip – was
surprisingly impressive, whilst not especially provoking (I have to
admit to not really caring for craft articles at art exhibitions).
There
were two sets of photographs which did, however, impress the elements
of quality to the show. Dribbled down the central division of the
gallery were several works from the Nation
series
of Eileen Perrier, taken on the Paris Metro. People – a dark-haired
white woman carrying shopping bags, black handbag slung across her
knee; a black housewife in purple coat – sit back on the garish red
seats, and carry the wary expression we all do on public transport,
caught in a space that, even if familiar from daily commutes, isn't
domestic. The 'nation' consists of people who are all, no doubt like
their ancestors, on their way to somewhere else. Faisal Abdu'allah's
photogravure portraits from the Goldfinger
series hang on the back wall of the gallery, the faces huge, seeming
to press out of the images at the viewer. The caption doesn't mention
that the faces are all those of prominent British gangsters (although
I do wonder whether I'm in the minority in not recognising them):
there's no violence to them, no sense of intimidation, just a
neutral, battered quality as if they were features of the landscape;
the massive, blocky Anglo-Saxon lineaments are re-coloured by the
copper they're printed on, estranged, deracinated. It's a fine
example of the cunning and strangeness that fills the scattered
highlights of this show.
