The city as a whole has recently undertaken a sustained initiative to engage with its complex past. This creates the means to forge meaningful dialogue with its diverse community, for whom a street such as Penny Lane – immortalised by the Beatles yet haunted by a bleaker reality of the commemoration of a now notorious slave trader – emerges as just one of many sites of contested memory and identity. The Tate Liverpool is itself implicated in the city's history; the family's fortune built on sugar (Sir Henry Tate, who owned a sugar refinery, patented the sugar cube).
'Afro Modern' thus embarks on these 'Journeys through the Black Atlantic' with an overdetermined amount of baggage. As a result, the nuanced and multiple layers of several individual art works are essentially reduced to illustrating a curatorial concept to which they certainly respond and, for the most part, also exceed. Nevertheless, the exhibition is an ambitious mapping of the fluid terrain and productive, if painful, liminality born of the black Atlantic over the past century.
The first few rooms of the exhibition chart a course through largely familiar territory, with some unexpected stopovers. The first and largest room, for example, covers the appropriation of forms of African art by the European avant-garde (hardly a revelatory tack), from the early twentieth century engagements of Dada, Fauvism, Cubism and Expressionism, to inter-war interest in black culture and ethnography, vis-à-vis Surrealism.
What is refreshing about this introductory space (and is something that Picasso and Africa in 2006 ultimately failed in communicating), however, is that it is traversed by a palimpsest of black Atlantic avant-gardes; not only the familiar narrative of European movements but also the simultaneous counter-appropriations of modernism expressed through the Harlem Renaissance (in the work of Aaron Douglas, for example) or in the 'primitivism' of the Brazilian Anthropofagia movement (which aimed to 'devour' and transform that which was useful in European culture). Criss-crossing the room, as well as the Atlantic, these articulations of the avant-garde are explored not only through art works, but also literature, music and dance.
Unfortunately, this level of engagement with a larger cultural history is not carried through into the rest of the exhibition. For example, the inclusion of some examples of Aimé Césaire's poetry – which draws on surrealist structures and metaphors and was illustrated by Picasso in the anthology Lost Body – would have been illuminating. The following room, 'Black Orpheus', traces challenges to canonical versions of modernism, most notably in the form of Aimé Césaire's Négritude. Négritude, which reclaimed the pejorative notion of the 'négre' and infused it with Afro-Caribbean references and reverence, was variously expressed in ideological and formal terms in the Caribbean, Brazil, Senegal and Nigeria, and the exhibition goes some way towards picking up on these differing inflections (though this occurs more fully in the catalogue).
The transatlantic intellectual and aesthetic crossings of the first rooms change tack to focus on the specific and localised socio-political legacies of slavery, particularly segregation and oppression in the United States and Brazil. Here, marginality and resistance meet to produce radical activism, often taking the form of street-based performances, interventions and improvisations. David Hammon's The Door (Admissions Office), 1969 – an imprint of the artist's body pressed up against a pane of glass – is installed in the viewer's direct eyeline upon entering. A formal obstacle which must be negotiated within the exhibition space, the piece resonates beyond its context of creation (the civil rights movement in the U.S.) and implies the continued 'double consciousness' (to use Gilroy's term) of African American experience; living both within and without dominant discourses and consequently finding that society's doors can both admit and exclude.
Jean Michel Basquiat's highly charged paintings, and his own movement from social margins to commercial mainstream through the workings of the American art scene, provides an evocative counterpoint to much of the overtly, if necessarily rhetorical, documentary photography and activist aesthetic in the rest of the room. In the epigraph to his Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari, 1982, Basquiat elucidates the penchant of the art establishment to assimilate cultural opposition.
The curatorial centre of the show lies in the room 'Reconstructing the Middle Passage: Diaspora and Memory'. The notion of the 'middle passage' also lies at the heart of Gilroy's text. The cipher of the ship in constant motion – as a carrier of people, ideas, activism and cultural artefacts – is paramount. Through it, as curator Tanya Barson points out, the slave journeys across the Atlantic can be read not only in terms of victimhood and exclusion as 'the origin of racial terror and dislocation shared by black communities throughout the Atlantic, but... also [as] the root of a productive syncretism'. In this room, artists explore both historical slave journeys and post-war migration and human trafficking, overlaying these sojourns as a means to interrogate contemporary experiences of transnational dislocation and global inequity.
Ellen Gallagher's Bird in Hand, which conjures an alternative cartography based on the underwater mythology of Drexciya (the home of souls thrown overboard during the middle passage of Atlantic slave crossings) is a particularly evocative piece; art retrieving metamorphosed bodies from the ocean bed. Sheets of inked and stained pages stacked, layered and glued on canvas are then cut in coral-like patterns to reveal the colour striation beneath, from which Drexciya's inhabitants emerge as creatures half-human and half-fish; hybrid forms of being, birthed in the amniotic space of the middle passage.
Trinidad-based artist Christopher Cozier's ongoing series of ink and graphite drawings, Tropical Night, spans an entire wall with its quilt-like grid of seemingly stream-of-consciousness figures, maps, birds, benches, seascapes, numbers. Each seven-by-nine-inch drawing reads as a self-contained visual episode in a continuous (and continuously changing) narrative that is difficult to pin down. The frame of a post-colonial Caribbean is only one way of tracing meaning through his elusive personal vocabulary, but it is this mode that is imposed by the exhibition's over-determining black Atlantic metanarrative.
Tracey Rose's Venus Baartman, and works from Candice Breitz' Ghost series of Tipp-ex-ed ethnographic tourist postcards, are included in the penultimate room, 'Exhibiting Bodies'. The art included here explores how (black) bodies have been exhibited, circulated and 'consumed', from the pseudo-scientific discourses underlying nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology and photography, to the perpetuation of selective representations of black identity through the contemporary lens of mass media and popular culture. Breitz' series could have been more productively used to problematise is the way in which the black body has and continues to be mobilised by white artists, and the politics of representation attendant on this issue (which is never explored beyond the first room of the exhibition).
Rose's intervention into tropes of black female subjectivity through the historical lens of spectacle and display unfortunately does not compete with the likes of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena's iconic video performance The Couple in the Cage: A Guantianaui Odyssey, or the complexity of Wangechi Mutu's reappropriation of Surrealist collage (which recall Breitz's 'Rainbow' series). Composite, subversive portraits made up of cuttings from beauty magazines, medical journals, wildlife and pornographic publications, Mutu's labour-intensive and lyrically layered works highlight how such circulated images and ideas mediate articulations of the racial 'other'.
The final room, 'From Postmodern to Post-Black' - the latter term used to described a new generation of (largely US and UK) artists 'adamant about not being labelled as "black" artists, though their work [is] steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness' according to US curator Thelma Golden - surveys recent art working through modes of subversion, irony, negation, intertextuality and 'black' humour. These include the likes of, among others, current Tate-darling Chris Ofili, as well as Glenn Ligon, who transcribes in painted letters the punchlines of Richard Pryor's stand-up comedy.
In many ways, the exhibition comes full circle in Kara Walker's silent film 8 Possible Beginnings or: the Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture. Divided into chapters, the film uses shadow puppets, developing out of her trademark cut-paper silhouettes, which simultaneously evoke the middle-class popularity of minstrel shows, as well as the eighteenth century phenomenon of physiognomy (the pseudo-science which claimed that inner character and intellect could be read from one's profile). From the terror of the middle passage in which slaves are thrown overboard, to the continued ambivalence of identity in contemporary America, Walker weaves a complex and often wryly ironic narrative through the power struggles of history, race, sexuality and self-determination. Literal journeys in 8 Possible Beginnings... are overlaid with conceptual and personal ones, and never reduced to the purely polemical; suggesting the productive potential of Gilroy's 'double consciousness'.
It's a pity the Tate seemed intent on authoritatively mapping the entire Black Atlantic arena of enquiry with such a determinate, and determining vision. If only the exhibition had left out the first few (somewhat belaboured) rooms, and taken a swifter journey from the Middle Passage to today, there may have been the physical and discursive space to give more individual works the scope they deserve, and to see what new and unexpected exchanges occurred among them within the ebb and flow of curatorial and gallery dynamics.
