Confronted by a black man in Handsworth in the West Midlands, the home secretary is bewildered. Douglas Hurd has come to see the riots and will soon pronounce them entirely criminal in origin. But right now, trailed by camera crews in this dire September of 1985, he is attempting a form of royal empathy, nodding sympathetically with a confused smile on his lips. He seems to have no idea what the man is saying.
Caribbean accents, Pakistani voices, jeering rioters and screeching police brakes, the Six O’Clock News and Margaret Thatcher, Mark Stewart and the Maffia: the soundtrack of Handsworth Songs (1986) by the Black Audio Film Collective is almost as famous as the film itself. Once heard, Stewart’s spectacular dub-refracted version of Blake’s Jerusalem, with steel drums fading in and out, is not forgotten. How could Blake’s Jerusalem ever be built in England, it seems to ask, without the inclusion of black people?
Directed by John Akomfrah, Handsworth Songs is the epitome of black avant garde art in the 1980s. With its subtly swirling collage of newsreel, interviews, archive footage of the Windrush generation arriving in bleak Britain, of intensely close conversations with housewives, shopkeepers and rioters, and broad scenes of police kettling crowds and cornering suspects in a clatter of shields (shot, not incidentally, by black film-makers: the police are said to have asked if their cameras were real), this is a work of many voices, and of many lives. It couldn’t be less like a conventional documentary, even though it was commissioned as such by Channel 4; and it is often credited with ushering in a whole new strain of documentary art film that stretches onwards to Isaac Julien, Tacita Dean and Luke Fowler.
Julien himself is represented alongside BAFC in The Place Is Here, a massive survey of the work of black artists in 1980s Britain. They are very precise about this decade at Nottingham Contemporary. This was when the First National Black Art convention took place to debate what constituted “black art”, or the “black arts movement” – to judge from the show’s pamphlet, the artists involved are still arguing about both – and when some startlingly powerful art was being made.
Not that you will have seen very much of it, then or since. To describe this show as a revelation would be true, but an understatement. Some works have come from public collections, but many still belong to the artists or their friends, and a few have even been discovered under beds. They make an extraordinarily various experience – photographs, paintings, installations, GLC murals, lifesize cutout caricatures – but they are all united by the sheer force of their urgency.
Eddie Chambers makes a swastika out of a union jack and then, in a sequence of bitingly graphic collages, tears it all to pieces until neither the symbol nor the flag are discernible. Destruction of the National Front is his rousingly hopeful title. Claudette Johnson, observing that there is so little painting of black women in the western canon, paints herself – magnificently nude – in suave post-Matisse self-portraits. Donald Rodney makes a shadowy house out of hospital x-rays. Before it sits a spectral figure – nothing much more than clothes, in fact – slumped on a chair. The House That Jack Built tells of Rodney’s home and his own suffering, but also of the ancestral history of “75 million dead black souls”, Caribbean victims of sickle cell anaemia. Rodney too died of this disease, for which there is still no permanent cure, at the age of 36.
This is by no means the only moment where the past touches the quick of the present. For all the works in this show concerned with feminism, identity politics, race, class, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, skinheads, star wars or Section 28 – and any show of political art from the 80s would surely touch on all of them – there are many others that speak of the continuing isolation of black immigrants to Britain.
It is there in the photographs of Ingrid Pollard, in which Africans find themselves stranded in the rolling English countryside “… feeling I don’t belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat by my side…” runs the caption to one. It is there in Martina Attille’s outstandingly elegiac film about a Caribbean woman lost in exile, alone in a British bedsit, her husband departed, her children gone, dreaming of the long-ago home as she gradually leaves this world.
And it is there in a poignantly delicate photographic installation by the Ugandan Asian artist Zarina Bhimji. This centres on a horrendous chapter in relatively recent British immigration history when Asian women in the 1970s were forced to undergo virginity tests to determine whether they could enter this country on grounds of marriage. Large photographic images, tinted pink and sandwiched between suspended plexiglass sheets, include a shattered bird and a pair of latex gloves with a government stamp on the back.
One of the most brilliant works in the show is A South African Colouring Book by Gavin Jantjes. As the mordant title indicates, this is a play on racial groups as identified in South Africa’s Population Registration Act, and the dilemmas involved in classifying people by colour under apartheid. Arabs, for instance, are regarded as Coloured, unless they happen to be Christian, in which case they’re suddenly White. A sunburnt Cypriot, on the other hand, “provoked a crisis in immigration circles before he was finally admitted as White”. Most illogical is the fact that an Indian person born in South Africa is treated as Asian, whereas a Japanese person born in Asia becomes “an honorary white”.
Jantjes’s “book” takes the form of prints that montage Warholesque silk-screen images with the wittiest of philosophical writings. Diagrams appear with instructions for the reader to colour. Jantjes was a founding member of the German anti-apartheid movement, has worked for the UNHCR and went on to become artistic director of a museum in Oslo. His loss to art is their gain.
The work here was often made when the artists were barely out of college. It is an art of protest, declaration, revelation, news; it is art as a form of public speech. But what’s striking, too, is just how often it draws on art history. Jantjes is playing with pop conventions. Sonia Boyce’s shattering four-part painting Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great pits Britain’s colonial past against the fetching patterns of William Morris. Rasheed Araeen’s chillingly stylish grid, combining gleaming green panels with photomontages of Awacs surveillance planes in the first Gulf war, drives minimalism straight into politics.
Nobody seeing this compelling show could fail to wonder what happened next. The movement surged and plummeted fast, according to the curators, with an implosion as early as 1984. Araeen has argued that the subsequent absence of black artists from the British establishment is outright racism. Others have claimed that the 80s couldn’t take such transitional work. It is true that even the better-known names – the painters Lubaina Himid (currently showing at Modern Art Oxford), Keith Piper and Sonia Boyce, whose new, performance-based installation opened at the ICA on 1 February, the photographers Maud Sulter and Vanley Burke – all became curators, scholars or archivists of this art in the absence of institutional support.
But here and now, in this exhibition, the early 80s come right back to life: sus laws, punks and Rastas, boomboxes, dub decks and photocopied tracts, Stuart Hall’s speeches, Stokely Carmichael’s pamphlets, the presiding spirit of CLR James; gospel choirs and torched cars, black history murals and anti-racist marches, the sound of ska, Steel Pulse and Peter Tosh. It is all reflected at Nottingham Contemporary. And if a sense of nostalgia begins to creep in for the sheer energy of this art, and those protests, it is worth remembering how hard were the times. Unemployment among black teenagers was reaching extreme levels, as Douglas Hurd must surely have known. And most of these artists put on their own shows in temporary spaces; it would be another 30 years before they all came together again in this museum.
• The Place Is Here is at Nottingham Contemporary until 30 April
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