Afro+Modern



**Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic**

Tate Liverpool 29 January – 25 April 2010toc

**About the exhibition**
//Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic// explores the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth-century to today. The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy's influential book //The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness// 1993. It features over 140 works by more than 60 artists.

Gilroy used the term 'The Black Atlantic' to describe the transmission of black cultures around the Atlantic, and the instances of cultural hybridity, that occurred as a result of transatlantic slavery and its legacy. //Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic// reflects Gilroy's idea of the Atlantic Ocean as a 'continent in negative', offering a network connecting Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe. It traces both real and imagined routes taken across the Atlantic, and highlights artistic links and dialogues from the early twentieth-century to today.

The exhibition is divided into seven chronological sections. Charting new forms of art arising from black culture and the work of black artists and intellectuals, it opens up an alternative, transatlantic reading of modernism and contemporary culture.

//Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic// is part of //[|Liverpool and the Black Atlantic]//, a series of exhibitions and events that explores connections between cultures and continents. Partners include the Bluecoat, FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), International Slavery Museum, Kuumba Imani Millenium Centre, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Metal, Tate Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, and the University of Liverpool.

Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari

 * [[image:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2010/1/29/1264780792054/Street-to-Mbari-001.jpg caption="Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari (1964) at Afro Modern, Tate Liverpool. Photograph: National Gallery of Art, Washington"]] ||  ||~ Jacob Lawrence's "Street to Mbari," a picture in pencil, tempera and gouache of a crowded market in Nigeria in 1964, is the kind of work that curators put into a group exhibition at their peril. It is so good, so convincing, that it almost blinds you to the merits of every other artist in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which opens today at Tate Liverpoo . And yet Street to Mbari – a portrait of Africa by a great African American artist – is also an argument in favour of this exhibition, and a way to penetrate its complex ideas.

Johnathan Jones, //The Guardian// Afro Modern at Tate Liverpool: Voyage of rediscovery ||
 * ~ == Isaac Julien, Cast No Shadow ==

||  ||~   ||
 * [[image:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2010/1/29/1264788932981/Isaac-Julien-Cast-No-Shad-001.jpg caption="A detail from Isaac Julien, Cast No Shadow (Western Union Series no. 1), 2007, part of the Afro Modern exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Courtesy: Jochen Zeitz Collection Photograph: Tate"]]

//The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness//
media type="custom" key="5389653" ||  ||~ Paul Gilroy has a lot to answer for. Not since Edward Said's //Orientalism// has a book – Gilroy's //The Black Atlantic// – generated such intellectual curiosity and exerted so wide an influence over cultural studies and the way we look at the modern, post-colonial world. Edward Said exposed the near-east as largely an invention of the west – a representation of people and places that would facilitate exploitation of a vast region and its diverse occupants in the name of a civilising zeal. He quotes from "Lui", a poem by Victor Hugo written for Napoleon:

//By the Nile I find him once again. Egypt shines with the fires of his dawn; His imperial orb rises in the Orient. Victor, enthusiast, bursting with achievements, Prodigious, he stunned the land of prodigies. The old sheikhs venerated the young and prudent emir. The people dreaded his unprecedented arms; Sublime, he appeared to the dazzled tribes Like a Mahomet of the Occident.//

The images of victor and vanquished aren't hard to see, but more subtle and solicitous of our complicity is the grateful reception by the masses of ­Napoleon and his ersatz divinity.

In his groundbreaking book, Gilroy argued for the Atlantic to be reconceived as a "continent in negative", a space in which three land masses with distinct cultural and historical markers – Africa, Europe and the New World – became unified, a new chemistry of humanity. This new, more complex cultural formation was indebted to centuries of brutal slavery, which stitched the three separate histories together.

Gilroy's ideas, which have their roots in the work of CLR James and Stuart Hall, throw up telling symbols – the slave ship (for physical pain), the estranging sea (for psychic severance), the subjugated black body (for death and destruction). But, refreshingly, he is mindful of slavery's obverse, its ­unintended consequences, which are renewal and creativity. Instead of Lear's "nothing will come of nothing", for Gilroy, decimated, enslaved peoples summon much out of abject despair. Maps of desolation are ­reimagined as spaces of possibility, the promise of a new life.

The curators of Tate Liverpool 's big-thinking exhibition //Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic//, Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter, clearly have Gilroy's triangular past in mind. There's enough material in the show to merit repeated visits.

The first of the seven rooms takes on the difficult task of declaring a start date. In this case, it is 1907, the year of Picasso's oil on canvas entitled //Bust of a Woman// – a ­geometry of broken boxes for a head that morphs as you gaze at it into a body made up of an amalgam of spheres. What's African about it? We know that Picasso studied African art, which begins in realistic representations of figures denoting ritual and worship. These figures are then transformed by a stretching of features and body parts in a way that is akin to states of mind brought about by trance or possession by some deity. In other words, we see the beginnings of cubism in this primitivism, secreted in it and extracted from it by Picasso's eye. Widely accepted as the father of modernism, Picasso drew inspiration and content from ­Africa; he used it as a regenerative tool for a moribund western artistic practice.

The exhibition's start date could just as easily have been 1903, the year WEB Du Bois published //The Souls of Black Folk//, in which he declared that the 20th century would be defined by race and not by class. Further – and here Du Bois presaged much artistic practice from the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s and early 30s up to the black arts movement of the mid-60s onwards – he described the double consciousness faced by blacks in white America: they must wear a veil of American-ness acceptable to whites but which hides a blackness not yet approved of by white society. Frantz Fanon took this notion further in his 1952 book //Black Skin, White Masks//. Black artists trained in the west may compromise an African artistic sensibility – a translation is needed into western aesthetic terms before the art can receive any plaudits from western purveyors of taste.

Fred D'Aguiar, //The Guardian//
 * Behind the masks: Afro Modern at Tate Liverpool** ||

download [| Afro Modern Educators' Pack] (PDF Format 159 KB) from the Tate, Liverpool media type="custom" key="5260479"