57. RCA Black

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.