Changing States

There might possibly be some artworld people out there – beyond London in particular – who have not yet grasped what exactly inIVA (the institute of International Visual Arts) is or does. Part publishing house, part exhibition generator, part residency facilitator, part library, the part suffixes are, it seems, endless. And yet, despite, or perhaps because of a decade of multi-levelled activity, inIVA continues to struggle for a certain type of visibility and identity, consistent with the breadth and depth of its activities. This new publication, Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation appears, in part at least, as a plea or pitch for a wider and perhaps more sympathetic consideration. The book’s blurb describes it as follows: ‘Featuring the work of over 100 artists and writers, this unique anthology maps the changing landscape of contemporary art and culture over the past decade in the context of global economics and local politics.’ However, within the book itself, this broad range of activity is ‘seen through the prism of a decade of artistic programming by inIVA’…

…While the book’s final pages consist of a useful glossary of terms, Changing States, curiously, has no index. In navigating the book, the reader can do little more than scan the entirety of the contents page in the hope of finding something in particular. This method is not without difficulty. Nothing appears in any sort of chronological or alphabetical order. The chapter headings and sub-sections appear in an ultimately random (though quite pretty, multi-coloured) formation. The only other option of finding something in particular is to flick rapidly, or patiently, through the book. The absence of an index is perhaps the most frustrating and bizarre aspect of the anthology…

…No fewer than four out of the six black artists to receive recent decibel awards of £30,000 each are represented in Changing States. When artists choosing to take the dubious ‘cultural diversity’ route to further their careers end up within the inIVA stable, it is clear that something isn’t quite right. And when those artists who bend over backwards to disassociate themselves from the wider groupings of Britain’s black artists still somehow end up under the inIVA umbrella, it is clear that inIVA’s reach and embrace is perhaps a little too broad and indiscriminate for comfort.  InIVA was, after all, brought into existence, in part at least, to draw attention to more than a favoured few black artists, and to challenge and contradict the retarded ethnic/multicultural/cultural diversity-arts hegemony that has dominated the ways in which black British artists’ work has been framed from the 70s to the present time…

The above extracts are from a book review by Eddie Chambers of Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation, ed Gilane Tawadros, inIVA, London, 2004. The review appeared in  Art Monthly, London, Number 287, June 2005: 38

The review was republished in Art Monthly, London, Number 385, April 2015, under the From the Back Catalogue section. See http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/article/changing-states-by-eddie-chambers-june-2005