No More ‘Black’ Artists?

For Workshop 3 my assigned reading is from bell hooks, a hugely influential writer who addressed issues such as race, feminism and class, and who chose for her pen name to use lowercase so as to focus on her ideas rather than her identity. The text is Talking Art as the Spirit Moves Us, a chapter from her 1995 collection of essays Art on My Mind: Visual Politics.

Before undertaking the reading, I had happened to have listened to an episode of Start the Week (2024), subtitled Arts: changing the world?, which included comments on BAME artists. The first of these comes from journalist and broadcaster Ellen E. Jones, who states that for many black filmmakers to achieve recognition they must deal with ‘serious’ topics, such as slavery or civil rights, and, interacting with fellow guest Noora Niasari (an Iranian-Australian filmmaker) asks “why shouldn’t artists of colour be able to make art about whatever they want, however trivial and … frivolous, just as white filmmakers have done?” (16:35). The presenter, Tom Sutcliffe, responds by quoting the British film director Aleem Khan: “the burden or representation goes with the scarcity of representation; if you’re the only muslim filmmaker who’s going to make a film that year, then you feel a sort of weight of responsibility to do everything” (17:07). I’m assuming that Sutcliffe’s view is that the proliferation of ‘white’ filmmakers means that these have no such ‘responsibility’ and are therefore more free in their themes and content.

In the text, hooks takes the view that the works of African-American artists are either misunderstood or unappreciated, or met with “contempt and suspicion” by both white and black audiences (1995, p. 101), and rebuts the viewpoint of Edward Lucie-Smith that “such art is not relevant”, a “mere imitation” of great art by white men, and “an expression of revolt against contemporary western society”. hooks states that these artists are not centring on revolt, but that ‘white folks’ often only see the “anger and rage” (p. 103) (perhaps due to Jones’ ‘serious topics’?). She goes on to evaluate the 1993 Whitney Biennial Exhibition which showcased works by artists of marginal groups, but again frame them within the context of revolt, and therefore the standpoint remains the dominant (white) culture (p. 104).

Later in the radio programme, Jones (Start the Week, 2024, 37:14) adds this thought: “Speaking as an art critic and an audience member … I think the solution I’ve landed on is not that we stop calling black artists black or Iranian-Australian artists Iranian-Australian, it’s that we start calling white artists white and white filmmakers white, and then [indistinguishable due to laughter] see what it’s like to be racialised.” This post’s title may be click bait, but I have felt for a long time that we shouldn’t have to distinguish anyone for being non-white: whilst I appreciate Jones’ humourous proposal, better we abandon these ethnic tags all together, with my preference being only to mention an artist’s ethnicity if it is relevant to present purposes. Just as hooks wished us to focus on her ideas and not her identity, I would urge us, and our students, to adopt such an approach to the artists whose works we scrutinise.

536 words

References

hooks, b. (1995), Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press.

Start the Week (2024) BBC Radio 4, 19 February, 09:00. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001wj91 (Accessed: 22 February 2024). (Timings given are for the BBC Sounds service.)