Chris, Steve, and Yinka: We Run Tings 3
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1 Chris, Steve, and Yinka: We Run Tings 3 Until the 90s, there were hardly any black students at British art colleges. Ofili’s success showed that, if you have the intelligence, savvy and ambition, being an artist is a career option. Someone has to pave the way. And it was clear from the first not just how ambitious Ofili was, but how individual his take on painting was – once he’d ditched his student style of narrative figura- tion (funny how things make their return, and are never entirely lost). Rather than living up to his reputation, he is now more concerned to push his art forward. One of Ofili’s earlier solo shows was called Freedom One Day: let’s see where freedom leads him.2 N ONE OF R ASHEED ARAEEN’S ESSAYS FOR THE OTHER STORY cata- logue,3 one passage stands out as being particularly pithy. It was a com- I ment on the British art scene, which stood accused, by Frank Bowling, of flagrant disregard for his accomplishments, when as a young painter he was overlooked for an important exhibition, The New Generation, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964.4 The exhibition, wrote Araeen, “featured all 1 “We Run Tings” was a popular late-1990s reggae record, by an artist known as Red Dragon, which featured in the 1999 Jamaican film Third World Cop. Assuming the voice of a no-nonsense, street-tough police officer, the song expressed the senti- ment that certain persons (“We”) were in control, in charge, rulers of their own destiny and masters, rather than victims, of circumstance – a blessed state owing much to de- termination, self-confidence, and fortitude. “We run tings, tings nuh run we.” 2 Adrian Searle, “Chris Ofili heads into the shadows: Hip, cool and wildly inventive, Chris Ofili burst onto the scene in the early 90s. Now he’s ditching the dung and the glitter, and going some place darker,” The Guardian (26 January 2010), G2: 21. 3 Rasheed Araeen, “In the Citadel of Modernism,” in The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (exh. cat.; London: Hayward Gallery & South Bank Cen- tre, 1989): 16–49. 4 The New Generation: 1964, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, March–May 1964. The exhibition, from which Frank Bowling considered himself to have been excluded, 98 THINGS DONE CHANGE of [Bowling’s] friends who were later to become famous.”5 His exclusion apparently “confused”6 Bowling: he had received critical acclaim from almost every art critic of note and there was tremendous enthusiasm for his work. When he tried to find out why he was turned down, he was apparently told, “England is not yet ready for a gifted artist of colour.”7 Several decades later, England declared itself ready for not just one, but three particular gifted artists of colour. Their names were Steve McQueen, Chris Ofili, and Yinka Shonibare. The scale of their successes, the nature of their successes, and the extent to which these successes were celebrated – these things were quite unparalleled in the history of Black artists in Britain. The achievements of other Black artists, before these three took centre stage, were decidedly modest by comparison. The triumphs of McQueen, Ofili, and Sho- nibare were, by any standard, substantial, enduring, and ultimately epoch- making. I’m minded, or tempted, to refer to the artists by their first names of Steve, Chris, and Yinka, simply because they represent an art-world equiva- lent of the dominant culture’s familiar references to celebrity TV chefs such as Delia, Gordon, Jamie, and Nigella. Very simply, given the virtual omni- presence of these three artists, constantly feted as celebrities, there are ways in which first names would suffice. There was, in actuality, a precedent for ad- dressing high-profile artists of the yBa generation by their first names alone. The cover of Art Monthly for September 1998 trailed one of its pieces with “No Damien No Gary No Tracey,” in which Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, and featured work by Derek Boshier, Patrick Caulfield, Anthony Donaldson, David Hock- ney, John Hoyland, Paul Huxley, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Patrick Procktor, Bridget Riley, Michael Vaughan, and Brett Whiteley. Bowling had shown at Grabowski Gal- lery in London less than two years earlier, with Derek Boshier. Frank Bowling and Derek Boshier, Image in Revolt, 5 October–3 November 1962. In his introduction to the catalogue, David Thompson wrote: “They [the artists in the exhibition] are starting their careers in a boom period for modern art. British art in particular has suddenly woken up out of a long provincial doze, is seriously entering the international lists and winning prestige for itself.” 5 Rasheed Araeen, “In the Citadel of Modernism,” 40. 6 Araeen, “In the Citadel of Modernism,” 40. 7 “In the Citadel of Modernism,” 40. .