Third Text – Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture

BEYOND CULTURAL DIVERSITY: THE CASE FOR CREATIVITY

A Third Text Report Compiled and Edited by Richard Appignanesi  

Report offers a new vision of Cultural Diversity in Britain

Britain’s state-sponsored policy of ‘cultural diversity’ has failed.  So where do we go from here?

Beyond Cultural Diversity, a special report commissioned by Arts Council England, offers a timely and uncompromising investigation of what has gone wrong, and why, with cultural diversity policy.  The Report argues that state funding of cultural diversity has resulted in cultural apartheid.

The Report goes beyond criticism to offer a new concept of creative diversity to promote a culturally integrated British society. It proposes a radical shift of historical perspective in a 10-point programme of institutional, educational and policy reforms to develop a culturally whole Britain.

The Report bases its case on a model of creativity and diversity already seen in British art after World War II. African, African Caribbean and Asian artists contributed decisively to the modernist canon of British art between the 1950s to the 1970s. This model of so-called ‘ethnically diverse’ artists working interactively within the British mainstream has been woefully ignored. The Report restores it to the centre stage of Britain’s cultural heritage.

Beyond Cultural Diversity marks a first significant advance since Naseem Khan’s 1976 report The Arts Britain Ignores.  Thirty years on and the question is even more urgent.  What is the rightfully creative place of our ethnic communities in Britain’s contemporary culture?

Beyond Cultural Diversity is a platform of independent views expressed by cultural practitioners from institutions such as art colleges, Tate Britain and the Arts Council, to explore the future of creative diversity. Their proposals for a simultaneously diverse and integral public culture deserve our serious consideration.

‘This ground-breaking report is an antidote to the Coalition government’s unprecedented assault on public culture’, says Professor Ziauddin Sardar, Chair of the Third Text Trustees.

Munira Mirza, Mayoral Advisor on Arts and Culture, Greater London Authority, says: ‘This is a collection of eloquent and intelligent essays which tackle the important issue of diversity in the arts.  I agree with the authors that black artists are often hemmed in by (well-intentioned) policies, and we need to focus more on creativity and artistic freedom.  I hope the Arts Council and others heed their advice and re-think their approach.’

ISBN: 978-0-947753-11-5 £12.95. 230 x 165mm, 152 pages, Illustrations: 15 colour, 6 b/w

ART BEYOND ART

Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century

Rasheed Araeen

The crisis of art today is that of its reduction to picture or object-making for the global spectacle of fetishism. Art is now going round in circles – like a dog chasing its own tail – generating tremendous energy but only to maintain the dynamics of the art market which deals in precious commodities while the world is facing environmental catastrophe. In this pioneering work Rasheed Araeen suggests a uniquely radical way of dealing with this crisis: he offers a body of concepts whose dynamics and vision will not only steer art back on its historical course but also intervene in the world at large to resolve the problems of climate change.

About the Author
Rasheed Araeen is an artist, writer and founding editor of Third Text. As an artist, he began his journey in 1953, while also studying civil engineering. After doing some important work in Karachi, seminal to his later pursuits, in 1964 he left for Europe and has since lived in London. In the late 1960s and 1970s he became active in various groups supporting liberation struggles, democracy and human rights, which led him to write ‘A Black Manifesto’; and then to the publications Black Phoenix (1978), Third Text (1987) and Third Text Asia (2008). He is now directing a project that will produce a revised and inclusive history of art in postwar Britain.

The Essential BLACK ART

Rasheed Araeen

One of the important aspects of 1970s in Britain was the emergence of black consciousness, particularly among some artists who began to deal in their work with the issues of racism and imperialism. In the early 1980, they became the ‘Black Art Movement’, pioneered by Eddie Chambers and Keith Piper, among others. The Essential Black Art is the catalogue of the exhibition curated by Rasheed Araeen held in 1988 at the Chisenhale Gallery, London.

48 pp with 25 b&w illus
ISBN 0 947753 02 8 Paperback £6.95

A CERTAIN LACK OF COHERENCE

Writings on Art and Cultural Politics

Jimmie Durham

This anthology of writings by one of the most controversial figures in contemporary culture, ranges from his appeal to the American Indian nations for strength and unity of purpose in combating the corrosive effects of colonialism, to his acerbic critiques of Western culture and its redemptive myths of the ‘Other’. For Durham, Art and its institutions are not separable from political realities; the West’s representations of ethnic and cultural authenticity, its constructions of primitivism and aesthetic value are intimately bound to the discourse of colonialism and racism. The author’s keen understanding of historical process and witty subversions of Western thought challenge any complacent attitudes we may harbour on ‘multiculturalism’ and offer a model on how we might think and act differently about the world.

256 pp with 18 b&w illus
ISBN 0 947753 03 6 Hardback £22
ISBN 0 947753 04 4 Paperback £11.95

GLOBAL VISIONS
Towards a new internationalism in the Visual Arts

Edited by Jean Fisher

This anthology of collected papers, presented at the INIVA symposium in London in April 1994, brings together some of the foremost thinkers and practitioners in the visual arts in a provocative critique of notions of internationalism, the role of curatorial practice, the modern museum and art history, particularly in relation to the debates on cultural identity and difference, and the nature of innovation in visual culture at the end of the millennium.

ISBN 0 947753 05 2
192pp with 12 b&w illus Paperback £11.95

CHILA KUMARI BURMAN
Beyond Two Cultures

Lynda Nead

This monograph brings together Chila Kumari Burman’s work of the last fifteen years with a thought provoking text by Dr Lynda Nead.

Chila Kumari Burman was among a handful of artists whose families had settled in postwar Britain and who emerged from art schools in the early ’80s. Faced with an art establishment unwilling to recognise the individual cultural practices of such artists beyond the stereotypes of ethnicity, Burman became part of a Militant vanguard determined to gain their right to full participation in the nation’s cultural life on their own terms — meaning, amongst other things, self-representation and artistic credibility. Burman has consistently used her own image in an ever-expanding repertoire of provocative and active female identities, complementing her artwork with polemical texts, curating exhibitions and community art projects. Confrontational yet celebratory, Chila Kumari Burman’s work occupies an important position within issues of cultural identity, class and gender.

ISBN 0 947753 07 9
80pp with 25 colour and 34 b&w illus
 Paperback £8.95

EXPLODING GALAXIES
The Art of David Medalla

Guy Brett

This monograph brings together a fascinating and ephemeral body of artistic work which escapes a simple definition. Born in Manila, in the Philippines in 1942, and based since 1960 mainly in London, David Medalla has distinguished himself internationally as a major innovator of the avant-garde. Over the years his work has embraced a multitude of enquiries and enthusiasms, forms and formats, to express a singular yet deeply coherent vision of the world. Proud of his effort to remain independent of the commercial, bureaucratic and chauvinistic pressures of the art market, he has nevertheless been an international creative force; travelling, encouraging artists, creating groups and exhibition spaces, and evolving his own art which strives towards the emergence of a new kind of transnational and polymorphic culture.

“Medalla’s work proposes an endless story, that of a perpetuum mobile, a universe where particles rebound ad vitam aeternam“.

Yve-Alain Bois

ISBN 0 947753 06 0
216 pp with 68 colour and 117 b&w iIIus Paperback: £18.95

UZO EGONU
An African Artist in the West

Olu Oguibe

In this pioneering work Olu Oguibe charts the life and career of Uzo Egonu, from his origins in Africa to his expatriation in Britain.

Egonu, a remarkable, compassionate and very private artist, has been described as “perhaps Africa’s greatest modern painter”, one whose work challenges the impoverished Western myth of the naive African artist. The complexity of Egonu’s work is firmly located within the tradition of modernism. What we see is a judicious synthesis of visual languages developed from his critical encounter with Western art and an informed awareness of his African heritage; a synthesis which reaches beyond mere formalist concerns to involve both the experiences of his life in the West and the painful turmoils of his country of origin, post-colonial Nigeria.

This monograph is a timely intervention in the prevailing debates on the role, position and aesthetic concerns of the African artist in the contemporary world, and offers a unique contribution to the scarce literature on artists of African, Asian or Latin American origin living in the West.

This insightful study is the most sophisticated and intensive full-length analysis of a modern African visual artist.

Simon Ottenberg, Emeritus Professor University of Washington, Seattle, USA

ISBN 0 947753 08 7
176pp with 65 colour and 41 b&w illus Paperback £16.95

SONIA BOYCE
Speaking in Tongues

Gilane Tawadros

The work of Sonia Boyce occupies a special place within the recent history of British art, encouraging and challenging us to ask what it means to be a black woman artist in a hierarchical art world, and to confront the difficult and vexing questions surrounding inter-racial relations in a cosmopolitan society where cultural identities still condense around myths of nationhood.

This monograph traces the artist’s trajectory from early graphic work, which subtly weaves a complex tapestry of the memories, desires and constrains that mark the formative years of a young woman subject to differing cultural values, to the recent mixed-media work which, drawing on familiar elements of British popular culture and cinema, addresses society’s positioning of individuals in terms of race, class and gender.

The sensitive and authoritative essay by Gilane Tawadros is accompanied by a parallel commentary selected from the artist’s diary notes, detailing those moments and encounters which she felt to be most significant in the development of her thought and art practice.

Gilane Tawadros is an art historian and the Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA), London.

ISBN 0 947753 09 5
96pp with 35 colour and 40 b&w illus Paperback £11.95

AII these books (exept The Essential Black Art and Global Visions) are published under The Arts Council of England & INIVA franchise.

KALA PRESS
PO Box 3509, London NW6 3PQ.

ISBN: 978-0-947753-10-8 £12.95, 170 pages, 220 x 165mm,  Illustrations: 37 colour, 15 b/w