Shades of Black

Recalling the 80s is not an act for the fainthearted. It is, after all, in many ways difficult to remember any aspect of the decade with any fondness or even nostalgia. The 80s are remembered for unpleasant things such as Thatcherism, the housing boom and the housing bust, the unpredicted storm, the miners’ strike, and cuts, cuts, cuts. The decade is also remembered for an astonishing number of tragedies: the Kings Cross fire, the Bradford fire, Hungerford, Lockerbie, Hillsborough, Heisel Stadium, Zeebrugge and the Herald of Free Enterprise, the Marchioness and the Bow Belle, the list goes on and on. For Black Britain specifically, the decade brought little cheer. The ‘riots’ of 1980 and 1981 seemed to confirm and solidify a marginal status for black British youth, whilst the injury of Cherry Groce and the death of Cynthia Jarrett likewise seemed to confirm an apparent cheapness of black life. All in all, it’s easy for us as a nation to imagine that the fractiousness and dissatisfaction of contemporary Britain has its roots in the things that happened to us in the 80s. We can’t quite put our finger on what’s wrong with 2005, but we have a sense that the 80s may well have something to do with it…

... For the moment, this publication is set to be the key text of recent times that attempts to explore and present something of the work of black British artists in the late 20th Century, but herein lies its biggest difficulty. With much of its tone being so cantankerous, readers of the present and readers of the future may well struggle to create from this book a dispassionate, balanced and accurate account of artistic practice in the decade. The book is long on grievances but, correspondingly, has nothing to say about major painters of the decade, such as Tam Joseph, Denzil Forrester and Eugene Palmer, and it tells us little or nothing about many other artists. Shades of Black has much in the way of intemperate hectoring masquerading as dispassionate fact and misinformation masquerading as art history. Lubaina Himid boldly states ‘I must mention here that Claudette Johnson was in the BLK Art Group, so that when this paper is published, that fact will be in the public domain.’ The only difficulty with this statement is that Claudette Johnson never was ‘in the BLK Art group’. The Blk Art Group consisted of four artists: myself, Keith Piper, Donald Rodney and Marlene Smith. So much for fact...

The above extracts are from a book review by Eddie Chambers of Shades of Black, Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, eds David A Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce, Duke University Press/inIVA/ Aavaa, London, 2005. The review appeared in  Art Monthly, London, Number 288, July/August 2005: 46-47