The Wednesday Lecture, Documentary
Wednesday 28th October 2020, Willow Fisher
“Whoever heard of a Black Artist? Britain’s hidden Art History.”
I found this Wednesday documentary to be really informing and in terms emotive as it introduced artists and matters to be that have been absent in my art education and knowledge. I found the video that we watched to be truly significant in introducing art students to art history that has been excluded from conventional learning and practice. I was shocked to discover the movements and groups formed that actually re-established ideologies and artwork within British art history had been left out of art studies. I was even more disheartened to find that I was unaware of so many of the artists present in this monumental history. I would describe this documentary as not only being incredibly informative, but also mature in the approach it has taken to this absurdity in art history, and to be largely emotive in the nature of what was being documented and artists own experiences. Whether the experiences were from the artist themselves in interviews, or archived knowledge from an artist almost completely forgotten after death. I definitely think that it is crucial to introduce to art students and many others of this highly important historical aspect of British Art, even more so of the traditional teaching we receive of artists everyone knows and has seen. We are living in a time where it is more important than ever to broaden our artistic perspectives with artists equally important to the artists and movements we are forced to learn about and endure, we need to acknowledge the diversity that has been neglected for so long within art history. That is why I found it so bothersome and troubling to discover artists I should have learnt about but have not.
This documentary ranged from discussing forgotten artists like Anwarjalal Shemza and Li Yuan Chia, artist Rasheed Araeen and his Black Manifesto, The Black Art Group, and Black Feminist Art. I am grateful to have learnt from this video the power and courage to challenge the unreceptive art world of that era with new and exciting ideas and artwork. I learnt that the main factor that was leeched off during this dangerous decade was slavery, specifically within the art world and art that was produced in that time. The aim of the journey within the video is to rediscover Black Artists, and to change what is being reflected on gallery walls. Introduced to the viewers would be influential absent artists and the Black Art movement of the 1980’s. Artist Sonia Boyce is working with the Manchester Art Gallery to produce an exhibition reintroducing all of the artists and artworks ignored in the past decade, re presenting various works that have been hidden away in museum archives. This definitely portrays an active state of systematic discrimination and racism within the art world causing for a biased reception of work and response which I and many believe to be unacceptable.
Within Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Gallery, Sonia and her team found that the place was a prominent face of British Art and form structure for the upcoming exhibition in Manchester showcasing work of Black and Asian artists. The gallery is found to own works by many British Asian artists, including South Asian modernists and a group of painters including FN Souza. An artist discussed specifically relating to South Asian Modernism is Avinash Chandra. He arrived in Britain in the 1950’s and managed to capture within his paintings a real and honest sense of Indian culture bursting within his creations. Rather than simply imitating the art he pushed himself to instead absorb modern western art, completely devoting himself and his creations to it, paying homage to the art style. In embracing the western art it enabled Chandra to really be himself and create work true to his identity and culture as well as heritage. Another artist producing modern western art was Anwar Jalal Shemza. He produced a painting in 1962 called “One to Seven and One is to Nine'' that is going to be presented in the upcoming Manchester exhibition, reinforced within this painting is a prominent source of repetition and the appearance of calligraphy with the mark making and texture present in Shemza’s painting. He is most knowledgeable for being one of the first artists to mix Islamic calligraphy with abstract painting. However despite his homage to his culture in his vibrant and repetitive artwork his paintings were not understood and were dissociated in the story of British Art. Anwar Jalal Shemza worked as an A level art teacher reducing himself to painting in his spare time, and when he passed away he was simply forgotten. Despite being established in Britain he is still recognised as a South Asian Modernist, Shemza is one of the many artists collected by the Cartwright Hall. During their time there Sonia and her team discovered that the gallery owns over one hundred works by artists of African and Asian descent, more than the Tate’s national collection of British Art. Learning this and the awful realities that Asian and African artists were faced with for just trying to work creatively really presents a strong juxtaposition within the art world, and it has made me notice that the ideologies of the art establishment of that decade has changed dramatically due to the demand of artists of colour and movements, I find it really alarming, especially that something as vast and damning as this is absent from our learning and understanding of British Art. During the 1950’s Bradford’s Asian community became more dense but this large presence wasnt reflected onto gallery walls. Someone that knew this had to change and acted on her instinct to create an environment more diverse and welcoming in its artwork was Nima Poovaya who arrived at the Cartwright Hall as a young curator. She was the first person to start to collect British Asian artwork from artists. From her experience of the unbalanced collection and preservation of art and history it is clear that there is an enormous situation of history that to this day is still trying to be rectified.
In the mid century Britain artists from Commonwealth countries were greatly ignored, however from the mid 1960’s international artists brought about with them new and exciting ideas described as avant-garde creations unseen within the conventional art scene across Britain. David Medalla was a Filipino artist most commonly recognised for his unusual foam structures that consisted of various works with the intention to create and destroy itself. I would describe this peculiar structure of work to be the artist personifying his materials to decide their creative state and eventual outcome. Medallas' kinetic structures are what established his exhibitions in London. He stated that there are boundaries between the material and the immaterial which I think is truly valid in the sense of building up this relationship between the artist and their artwork, delving further into its intentions and contextualisation. In his gallery Medalla invited artists from around the world to exhibit their artwork, one of the artists that participated was Li Yuan Chia, who unfortunately has almost been completely neglected by the art world but is one of Sonia Boyce’s heroes. Originally from China Li was established and respected to an extent as an artist in the late 1960’s, through interactive artworks like his magnetic disc sculptures which were in fact early examples of kinetic art. His passion in life was to create a Museum in order to introduce avant-garde art ideas into the community around him. He moved from London to Cumbria to establish his dreams of building a gallery of his own to showcase this unique work, in 1970 he moved to a farmhouse in Cumbria and rebuilt it gradually over time to transform it into his space, which he called the LYC Museum. The gallery presented artwork from international artists like Lydia Clark and Barbara Hepworth. In doing this Li actively engaged himself within the community and even created work that encouraged children to interact with it which was highly unusual at that time. When Sonia and the host of the documentary travelled to the LYC Museum in Cumbria they found it to be much larger than they initially thought, the once lively building now sits desolate and has been sitting empty for decades. Because Li Yuan Chia is so influential to Sonia Boyce and is so disengaged in art history she will be paying tribute to him in the Manchester exhibition she is creating, recreating parts of the Museum into the Manchester show for the spectators to experience, to give him the recognition he so definitely deserved and longed for through his artistic career. What stood out the most to Sonia during her time at the gallery was the sentimental aspects of the creation. Li handbuilt all of it with no help from the district council, they came across a hand painted sign for the location amongst rubble that even drove Sonia to delve into her more emotive side, tearing up at the site of one of the artists literal hand making of the place, truly bringing the place to life. I would say that the dedication and handmade creations of the Museum really humanises it and reinforces the lack of empathy and help from authorities and the art world. It's really barbaric that someone so positive who wants to create and present to the world is left alone and neglected by the art establishment, all he wanted to do was engage with people's minds and encourage creativity, and he was silently punished for it with the lack of reinforcements and acknowledgement as well as praise and actual recognition for his work and effects on the art scene. Li’s death was in 1994 and after this was almost completely forgotten about within the London art world despite all he had done. However his memory lived on through his personal archive, preserved in the stores of Manchester’s John Rylands library. He is still barely known across Britain but recently has been rediscovered in the Asian art market and is often acknowledged as the Father of Chinese Abstraction.
Rasheed Araeen was one of the founding fathers of British Black Art. At the time of the 1970’s the optimism that had been finding its feet with all of these artists was starting to disperse, with racial tensions rising due to national unrest and anger about Asian migration. Rasheed revealed that he was met with immediate racism, he began contributing to the British Minimalist scene creating geometric lattice works. He openly talked about his experience and stated that he faced constant discrimination within the art world and found it challenging to continue his work as an artist in London. During his struggle he was introduced to the British Black Panthers merging all people of colour from Britain's ex colonies to fight and unite, which restored some of Rasheed’s confidence. Due to this experience he began producing political art, his most controversial was a performance piece inspired by memories of the racist attacks on Brick Lane’s Asian Community, he called the hard hitting performance “Paki Bastard” to reinforce the reality and brutality of the context portrayed by the artist. However creating art about issues he was faced with didnt feel enough for him, so as well he began writing about his experience, documenting all of his anger and despair which became the Black Manifesto, which was the first document to define British Black Art as a new political art form. The 1970’s brought about a lot of anger. Rasheed’s photographic work will be in the Manchester exhibition, his manifesto inspired artists all over Britain, reaching out to the children of the windrush generation, in particular Eddie Chambers, who at 19 years of age made the Artwork Destruction of the National Front in 1979. The artwork responded to the racial tensions in Wolverhampton that many black people were enduring, it was revealed that Eddie along with his classmates were told by tutors that there was no such thing as Black Art, which I find deeply disturbing. So the students chose to introduce Black Art to the ignorant nation. They called themselves the BLK Art group who invested their time and youth to create artwork intended to shock viewers and deal with issues of colonialism and imperialism. What appeals to me the most about the artwork created by the group collectively is the tone, its raw and really captures the brutal nature of the issues maturely portraying them despite the artists young age. I would describe a vast amount of the artwork as being incredibly thought provoking and emotive in its realistic portrayal, however shocking and brutal it is, in the end its true to its nature and reflective of what the young black artists and many other black people have to experience. We may not be personally involved with the issues but this artwork is forcing us to view it and respond to it, placing it directly in front of us so we can pay attention to it and hopefully re evaluate our priorities and privilege in many cases. I'm relieved that the artwork produced shocked the nation because it's necessary for everyone to understand that this is the reality for some, I gather that there is a great sense of togetherness within a lot of the works. Conveyed in the art was political slogans and racist imagery to really open our eyes to the unfortunate world we are living in. The BLK Art group created work from 1979 to 1984, the members were Eddie Chambers, Donald Rodney, Keith Piper, Marlene Smith and Claudette Johnson. Due to the fact that the earlier work of the group was deemed too radical for the art world at the time few pieces were collected. An art piece by Keith Piper in Cartwright Hall will be displayed for the first time in decades at the Manchester exhibition. In the year 2012 Wolverhampton Art Gallery realised the lack of BLK Art group artwork so began collecting pieces of that era to display, however many works have been lost or destroyed.
The work and artists was documented however by a photographer called Pogus Caesar in the 1980’s who coincidentally documented a lot of Black History. Captured in one of many of Caesar’s photographs was a young Sonia Boyce, who saw a poster for the first national Black Art Convention whilst studying at Stourbridge College of Art. The BLK Art group had put a call out to art schools across the UK and received a wide response from students. The convention took place in October 1982 on the 28th at the Wolverhampton Art School in the lecture hall. It was an amazing experience that witnessed a generation of young artists coming together, it has been recognised as a historic day insinuating the beginning of the Black Art Movement. Lubaina Himid who attended the convention was the first black woman to win the Turner Prize in 2017, the upcoming Manchester exhibition will be featuring a series of Himid’s paintings. Lubaina Himid is massively significant in Black Art History because she is responsible for organising exhibitions for Black Womens work; her breakthrough came in 1985 when she secured her first Black Art Exhibition within a mainstream London gallery. It was called “The Thin Black Line” and opened at the ICA displaying art from eleven female artists, for these female artists exploring the personal was political for them. Sonia Boyce produced paintings positioning the domestic life of black women in the focal point. Artists Igrid Pollard, Maud Sulter and Brenda Agard worked with technology to create photographic portraiture documenting black lives. For many young women and aspiring female artists the exhibition was recognised as a empowering introduction to Black Feminist Art.
Overall I think this Wednesday Lecture has been massively influential on the work I want to learn and has most definitely broadened my artistic perspective. I hope to gather inspiration from this video into my own practice and research as I would really like to look at unfamiliar artists and work unconventionally known. This has really been an eyeopener into the art world we are slowly entering through our university experience and I hope that what I can take from this is positive. I definitely feel more appealed to look at feminist art throughout different art movements as I have discovered through my history of art lectures so far that female artists that have contributed to the artistic development and movements have been neglected. I also look forward to my own research into the female artists I have learnt about today and feel eager to experience it myself with any feminist art exhibitions that open up in the future. I already have collected books introducing the Female Pre-Raphaelites and female Expressionists so I will absolutely search for African and Asian female artists to read about. To conclude I felt really entranced by this documentary and motivated to learn more.