Review of Monochrome: Painting in Black and White: National Gallery, London, October 30, 2017–February 18, 2018 (original) (raw)
The predicament of dress: polyvalency and the ironies of cultural identity
American Ethnologist, 1999
Briar College Tswana with whom I spoke in Botswana often "exposed" the sweeping and cumbrous Herero long dresses as a fraud. These dresses are of Western origin, they would tell me; they were copied from the white missionaries. Like anthropologists, these interpreters of cultural practice also tried to pinpoint a "true meaning" for the dress. In doing so, they effectively strip Herero women of colorful but superficial investitures to disclose the real people-universal humanity-underneath. In Botswana, only Herero women routinely wear "traditional ethnic" clothing. Divesting them of any implied ethnic purity, these Tswana comments assimilated Herero into the broader population of citizens of Botswana, who wear more contemporary Western-style dress. When I asked government officials about the ethnic composition of the broader population, they would always answer, "We are all Batswana here." By this, they meant that ethnic identity does not differentiate citizenship, that they are all citizens of the Botswana state. But they used the Tswana language term Batswana (Tswana people) instead of the more neutral batho ba Botswana (people of Botswana). Herero, too, recognized Tswana hegemony over the terms of everyday life and citizenship in their own term for unmarked, Western-style dress (ozombanda otjitjawana, Tswana-style clothing). 1 Following the lead of my Tswana interlocutors, in this article I, too, look critically at the Herero dress-not to uncover the universal and naked humanity underneath, but to examine the multiple layers of underskirts that support the outfit. Instead of reducing its meaning, I hope to retain the color of the dress, the sense of wearing it, the uncertainty and the ironic sensibility it provoked in Herero women in Mahalapye, Botswana, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period of my fieldwork. Herero often use the dress as an unambiguous, straightforward icon of Herero identity-for example, a woman in the dress figured centrally in all logos debated over the years for the Herero Youth Association (see Durham 1995a). Similarly, the ethnic label "Herero" was rarely, if ever, questioned for its validity. But the full meaning of both the dress and the label was much less assured. The very women who proposed the logo-women who wore the dress frequently to public and ceremonial events (although not in their daily lives)-tittered and murmured cynically, and the Association men exchanged glances, when a To appreciate better the uncertain and unstable way that Herero women of Botswana understand their distinctive dress, I extend Bakhtin's notion of "sparkle" to include the disparate modalities through which meaning is constituted. An embodied subjectivity, or experiential sensibility, intrudes upon structured contrasts that also give the dress meaning in such registers as gender, ethnic relations, and the political economy of the liberal democratic state. I use Herero women's sense of the dress to question recent approaches to "culture" among scholars who look only at its differentiating function, since Herero women also see the dress as a means of building mutuality. Idress, identity, embodiment, agency, gender, southern Africa, culture]
The Emergence of Black Art in Britain
2017
This paper will map the emergence of black art in Britain through two exhibitions curated by Pakistan-born artist/writer/curator and activist Rasheed Araeen: Creation for Liberation (1984), a small open show at the Brixton Art Gallery, London; and The Other Story (1989), a groundbreaking exhibition of black British art at the Hayward Gallery. While the Brixton exhibition was part of the minority push to highlight local and community perspectives, the purpose of the latter exhibition was to install black British art, hitherto neglected by the ethnocentric art establishment, as a part of the story of British modernism. Thus the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London sought to address the lack of ―visibility‖ concerning black art.<br>
Alien nation: contemporary art and black Britain
2011
About the book: This fascinating text introduces readers to postcolonial theory using the context of British media culture in ethnic minority communities to explain key ideas and debates. Each chapter considers a specific media output and uses a wealth of examples to offer an absorbing insight into postcolonial media for all students of cultural and media studies.
Phantom Colours – Colour, Fashion and Cinema in the 1920s
"This paper will consider the interrelationship of colour, fashion and Technicolor in the 1920s through an examination of the intermedial context of colour standardisation and categorisation. The 1920s was a period in which colour was highly 'in vogue'. In the art, advertising, architecture, design and cinema of the jazz age, cultural fascination with colour was lively. Colour was also a subject of intense international debates concerning its artistic, scientific, philosophical and educational significance. Moreover, with the development of new and more accessible dyes, colour was more freely available to be exploited and experimented with. As in the case of cinema where colour was used in a variety of ways. Stencil, tinting and toning, which had been developed for film colouring in the early 1900s, were still frequently used technologies, as were new systems such as Prizma, Technicolor and others. It was also a decade that saw increased activity around colour standardization and categorisation and moreover efforts to produce a universal colour nomenclature. Colour systems such as the Munsell system were promoted as meanings of measuring and standardising colour. In addition agencies such as America’s National Bureau of Standards were experimenting with the measurement of colour for a range of potential uses (Johnston, 2001). The language used to describe colour was also the focus of research by contemporaries culminating in 1930 in the publication of a Dictionary of Colour. Its purpose was to record all colour names in use up to that time and to provide ‘a record of color words and the particular sensations they identify’ (Maerz and Paul 1930). This desire to control the language of colour provides an interesting antithesis to the main function of colour in fashion. ‘Fashion thrives on novelty and change’ (Arnold, 2009) and colours are one means by which fashion can reinvent itself with each new season. This tension of colour in fashion is present in the world of textile and retail industry. For example, the Textile Color Card Association in America promoted the standardization of colours across the fashion industries as well as predicting and naming colours for the following season for the textile and retail industry (Blaszczyk, 2012). Thus proving there was a desire for both standardisation and variety in the growing consumer culture, resulting in colours becoming commodities. These intermedial conditions provide an important context to the development and use of colour in film during the decade and in particular the close interrelationship between colour, fashion and film. In order to explore these themes we will limit ourselves to two colours that were 'hot' in the spring of 1926 but were also linked to color films: Alice Blue from Irene (Green, 1926) and Phantom Red from Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both functioned within a remarkable intermedial network, not only were they famous for the use of a Technicolor II inserts but also for their connection to glamorous women. These stars functioned as examples for young girls that were searching for their identity in this ‘jazz age’ or 'années folles'. The paper will explore the history of both colours, their origins and changing meanings, through their interaction with the film they were featured in and the wider world of fashion and beyond. In this way, we hope to provide a better understanding of the meaning and function of colour in connection to cinema and fashion and of the friction between the wish to control and the need to vary in capitalistic consumer culture. "
A Toowoomba art exhibition considers Black and White art in Australian art history.
Fashion, Plastic and Myths in Color
Photography and Culture, 2021
This short article examines a photograph in a 1956 catalogue for the French department store Galeries Lafayette in the context of the country’s postwar modernization, Paris renovations and the development of the readymade garment industry. It relates the production of image to the construction and dissemination of fashion and femininity in the print media. In particular, it notes how the use of changing technologies in image production, notably Kodachrome color film, shaped and exposed these constructions. Drawing on the notion of myth, as formulated by Roland Barthes, this article asks how the image spoke to modernity’s inherent contradictions, notably between old and new, in its depiction of bodies, plastic and synthetic fabric. Finally, it shows why this was particularly relevant in the culture of postwar France.
Colouring in the Gaps: Exploring Transnational Aesthetics Through Digital Collections
This paper reflects on an approach to the visual analysis of digital collections for the arts researcher. The subject area is cautious about quantitative analysis, but systematic statistical methods can open up new possibilities for those engaged with visual arts research. We asked whether it is possible to manage the subjectivity of colour reception and analyse colour in artwork through the digital means. The objective of the research was to determine whether it was possible to distinguish palette differences across a range of cultural variables, such as gender, nationality, artist’s age, collecting institution, or donor, or pictorial attributes. A sample of 500 contemporary paintings from museum digital collections was constructed and a measurement derived of each image palette’s dominant colour constituents. The digital dataset is drawn from national collections in the UK, Finland, France, USA and Qatar. The images were selected through a random sampling process. The method incorporates the use of a medical mobile app for identifying colour for the colour blind. The app is evaluated as a technique for assisting in colour identification. We reflect on the potential of such datasets and analytical methods to provide new perspectives on cultural heritage, and scope for application beyond the immediate scholarly field. Previous work using such data has challenged more subjective and inferential perspectives on collection policies or gendered career development. The potential to explore preference or transnational aesthetics in respect to physical object characteristics could be useful at both the meta-level of national collections as well as for individual subjects, notwithstanding the ethical dimensions of both. The opportunity, however, is to use available data to explore patterns hitherto only suggested by informed connoisseurs. We reflect that this enables fresh insights to be drawn on social and economic factors relating to cultural identity and heritage.