“The Burial and Unburial of Women”: Thin Black Line(s) and Tracing “Moments and Connections” in Black British Women’s Art Histories

Author(s):  
Celeste-Marie Bernier

As an artist who refuses categorically to shy away from both the “history of slavery” and the “contemporary grievances” arising from a white-dominated British art world, Lubaina Himid created a curatorial tour de force with her Thin Black Line(s) exhibition, on display at Tate Britain in 2011–2012. She adopted an array of signifying practices designed to riff off, reclaim, and revise the ideological biases and racialized blind spots of the Tate as a national institution. Himid’s long history of exhibiting Black British women’s work reflects her determination to fight against their “collective invisibility in the art world” as they “engaged with the social, cultural, political and aesthetic issues of the time” by undertaking a “conceptual reframing of the image of black and Asian women themselves.” Working with the spatial constraints of just one room in which to exhibit a decades-long history of Black British women artists and art making, Himid also had to rely upon numerous strategies to confront the obstacles presented by the Tate’s decision to mount Thin Black Line(s) not as a full-scale exhibition but as an “in-focus display.” This meant that it was not given as extensive a budget or as large an exhibition space as the Tate exhibitions appearing as part of their regular programming, and also not accorded the same levels of marketing, advertising, and scholarly attention. Himid set about solving these problems by engaging in diverse extra-curatorial practices and also by contesting and critiquing these limitations within the space itself. Himid’s self-reflexive strategies became a form of “guerrilla curating” as she engaged in a multitude of methods designed to critique, interrogate, and displace—if not outright reject—the challenges presented by the ideologically confining and tokenizing framing of the Tate as an exhibition space.

Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.


2019 ◽  
pp. 110-137
Author(s):  
Christophe Leclercq ◽  
Paul Girard ◽  
Daniele Guido

Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) is an organization co-founded in 1966 by artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, and engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, in order to support collaboration between artists and engineers. The E.A.T. datascape is a digital instrument for analyzing the digitized traces left by its members via many available resources. Its aim is to study as closely as possible the complexity of collaborative interdisciplinary works. The E.A.T. datascape methodology makes it possible, by means of an anthropological action-centred approach, to go beyond the distinction between art history and art sociology and to renew the social history of art by challenging the notion of authorship and by describing the work as constituted by the intersection between heterogeneous trajectories, rather than an object within a context that would influence it, or constitute its environment. In other words, it allows us to reflect on what digital design does, in turn, to the social history of art, and to put forward hypotheses about what a digital social history of art might be or could offer to the study of complex, interdisciplinary projects that are multiplying in the contemporary art world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-380
Author(s):  
Kathryn Milligan

Abstract ABSTRACT The Dublin Art(s) Club, which operated in the Irish capital from 1886 to 1898, offers an intriguing case study for modes of artistic networks and cultural exchange between Ireland and Britain in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Despite this, the history of the Club has been little explored in historiography to date, often confused with other ventures by artists in the city. Examining the rise and fall of the Dublin Art(s) Club, along with its members and activities, this article retrieves its history and posits that it offers an example of an aspect of art in Ireland which was conspicuous for its cosmopolitan outlook and active engagement with the wider British art world, which then spanned across both islands. The history of the Dublin Art(s) Club poses a challenge to the extant scholarship of this period in Irish art history, which to date has been largely understood to be focused on themes of national identity, the cultural revival, and artists who left Ireland to train in Belgium and France. This article posits that by re-engaging with the activities of art clubs and societies, a more complex reading of artistic life in Victorian Dublin can emerge.


Author(s):  
Shikha Singh ◽  

The paper explores the multiple transgressions and border-crossings elaborated in the visual travelogue The London Jungle Book (2004), by Bhajju Shyam, a Pardhan-Gond artist and produced by Tara Books, an independent artists’ collective specialising in experimental visual literature. The paper discusses the cultural history of “Pardhan-Gond art” and the dislocations and relocations of the art form in the contemporary art world. The paper argues that the personal experience of the artist appears to reflect these shifting categorizations, movements and locations of performance of the art form. The images and metaphors of displacement and transgression have varied connotations in the visual travelogue as they reveal the complex mechanisms of travel and mobility in the contemporary world. The text also articulates the response of the artist to the social, political and economic conditions surrounding the production and circulation of his art, through reimagining his homeland, his cultural ties and his own identity. In a paradoxical sense, the experience of travel and mobility does not symbolise the uprootedness or detachment of the artist, but it brings into effect, with more immediacy, the cultural identity and ties of the artist, as a Pardhan-Gond artist, in the contemporary art world. Furthermore, the materiality of the crossover text challenges the notions of media, genre and readership, associated with the picturebook format, destabilising the categories and assumptions associated with the literary genre.


Experiment ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-309
Author(s):  
Louise Hardiman

Abstract Maria Vasilievna Iakunchikova designed three works of applied art and craft in a Neo-Russian style for the Russian section of the Paris “Exposition Universelle” of 1900—a wooden dresser, a toy village in carved wood, and a large embroidered panel. Yet, so far as the official record is concerned, Iakunchikova’s participation in the exhibition is occluded. Her name does not appear in the catalogue, for it was the producers, rather than the designers, who were credited for her works. Indeed, her presence might have been entirely unknown, were it not for several reports of the Russian display in the periodical press by her friend Netta Peacock, a British writer living in Paris. The invisibility of the designer in this instance was not a matter of gender, but it had consequences for women artists. In general, women were marginalized in the mainstream of the nineteenth-century Russian art world—whether at the Academy of Arts or in prominent groups such as the Peredvizhniki—and, as a result, enjoyed fewer opportunities at the Exposition. But the Neo-national movement, linked closely with the revival of applied art and the promotion of kustar industries, was one in which women’s art had space to flourish. And, in the so-called village russe at the Exposition, which featured a display of kustar art, by far the larger contribution was made by women, both as promoters and as artists. In this article, I examine Iakunchikova’s contribution to the Exposition within a broader context of female artistic activity, and the significance of the Russian kustar pavilion for a gendered history of nineteenth-century art.


1959 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
K. Edwards

During the last twenty or twenty-five years medieval historians have been much interested in the composition of the English episcopate. A number of studies of it have been published on periods ranging from the eleventh to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A further paper might well seem superfluous. My reason for offering one is that most previous writers have concentrated on analysing the professional circles from which the bishops were drawn, and suggesting the influences which their early careers as royal clerks, university masters and students, secular or regular clergy, may have had on their later work as bishops. They have shown comparatively little interest in their social background and provenance, except for those bishops who belonged to magnate families. Some years ago, when working on the political activities of Edward II's bishops, it seemed to me that social origins, family connexions and provenance might in a number of cases have had at least as much influence on a bishop's attitude to politics as his early career. I there fore collected information about the origins and provenance of these bishops. I now think that a rather more careful and complete study of this subject might throw further light not only on the political history of the reign, but on other problems connected with the character and work of the English episcopate. There is a general impression that in England in the later middle ages the bishops' ties with their dioceses were becoming less close, and that they were normally spending less time in diocesan work than their predecessors in the thirteenth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter C. Mundy

Abstract The stereotype of people with autism as unresponsive or uninterested in other people was prominent in the 1980s. However, this view of autism has steadily given way to recognition of important individual differences in the social-emotional development of affected people and a more precise understanding of the possible role social motivation has in their early development.


1997 ◽  
pp. 3-8
Author(s):  
Borys Lobovyk

An important problem of religious studies, the history of religion as a branch of knowledge is the periodization process of the development of religious phenomenon. It is precisely here, as in focus, that the question of the essence and meaning of the religious development of the human being of the world, the origin of beliefs and cult, the reasons for the changes in them, the place and role of religion in the social and spiritual process, etc., are converging.


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