Black Markets 

So what does all this say about images of black people in advertising? Having answered that question, the next question is, what does ‘Black Markets’ add? The answer, unfortunately, is very little.

I suppose the biggest fault of the exhibition is the lack of radical editing of the material, so the viewer stumbles from exhibit to exhibit, wondering if that magazine cover really is racist, or if it would be fairer and more perceptive to simply attribute it to the in-house style and readership of the magazine in question, or wondering if a particular TV advert really is worth moaning about…

…It gets worse. Being wholly devoid of humour and wit, ‘Black Markets’ abysmally fails to pick up on the cynicism for which the advertising industry is renowned. This cynicism, in my view, should have been employed here as a critical consideration, especially when one considers the global politics of commodities, advertising and capitalism…

…As if to prove this point, ‘Black Markets’, features a photograph of a group of Africans gathered around a WWII recruitment poster. The poster features a racially disparate group of military men from different parts of the British Empire. All of them, including the African, march proudly. Within its highly problematic confines, the poster works well. It has power and articulacy, yet these points fail to clearly emerge from Ramamurthy’s text… 

…But the area of ‘Black Markets’ that far and away causes the most grief is the commissioned work. In many ways, the less said about this the better.  One wonders why the curator needed to go through a cumbersome and expensive process of receiving open submission proposals merely to arrive at a clutch of names which the art world has already proved it knows and loves… 

… On the subject of black images, Alice Walker has said, ‘I see our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, captured and forced into images they did not devise, doing hard time for all of us. We can liberate them by understanding this. And free ourselves.’ If only Ramamurthy had employed such clarity of thought.

The above extracts are from an exhibition review by Eddie Chambers, "Black Markets”, Art Monthly, London, Number 148, July/August 1991: 31-33 [RTTJ]