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The Longest Journey: Black Diaspora Artists in Britain
Author(s) -
Mercer Kobena
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.12576
Subject(s) - modernism (music) , transculturation , hegemony , art , art history , diaspora , foregrounding , minimalism (technical communication) , literature , sociology , gender studies , politics , anthropology , law , political science , statistics , mathematics
This essay offers an account of the ways in which successive generations of Black artists in Britain engaged with modernism during the UK's transformation from a monocultural to a post‐imperial society. Whereas the first wave (including Frank Bowling and Anwar Shemza) sought to reconcile their late colonial backgrounds with the tenets of high modernism – the autonomy of the artwork, the disinterested beholder, and universalist claims of timeless aesthetic value – the second wave (including Rasheed Araeen and Gavin Jantjes) turned to minimalism, performance, and photo‐text to de‐centre modernism's core assumptions that relied on formalist discourse. Collage and montage practices among the UK‐born third wave (including Sonia Boyce, Maud Sulter, and Donald Rodney), which entailed the hyphenation of cross‐cultural elements, thus call for a deeper look at transculturation processes active since modernism's beginning, but which were not previously recognized on account of formalist hegemony.