 Hello everyone, my name is Mark Hallett and I'm Director of the Director of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. I'd like to offer you the warmest of welcomes to this Autumn's public lecture course, or the beginning of this Autumn's public lecture course which is devoted to the subject of black British artists and political activism, and which has been convened by tonight's speaker Dr Lizzie Robles from the University of Bristol. Before we get properly started, we thought it'd be helpful to provide you with some basic information about the event, some housekeeping information. Here we are and I'll just read through this. So Lizzie's lecture will be followed by an opportunity to ask questions. I think Lizzie will be speaking for about 15 minutes or so. So there'll be plenty of time to ask questions after that, and I'll be fielding questions from you to Lizzie. Audience members can type your questions using the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen so please use that to do so and you don't need to wait until the end of Lizzie's lecture to do so. Please feel free or encouraged to start putting questions as soon as an idea comes into your head or a question comes to your mind that you'd like to pose to Lizzie later in response to her talk. So this session will be recorded and made available to the public at a later date, and should you need it or wash it, closed captioning is available, just click the CC button on your screen to enable captions. And for those of you who might not know us that well, I just wanted to say that the Paul Mellon Centre is a research institute and educational charity that exists to support the most original and rigorous and stimulating scholarly research on British art and architecture of all periods. We endeavor to make this research as accessible as possible. I'd urge all of you to sample and enjoy the packed array of open access online events we've put together for this autumn and winter, which the series of lectures is just one part. Our public lecture courses more specifically are intended to explore and address some of the most important and engaging topics in history of British art, and to bring these topics alive for a wide audience. This autumn series which features a remarkable array of speakers, including artists, critics, art historians and curators is no exception, and promises to be both timely and enlightening. For this I'm hugely grateful to Lizzie, who as I say and in collaboration with my colleague, Nerman Abdullah has put together a wonderful program for this autumn. Lizzie worked with Nerman and I on our last public lecture course which was devoted to the artist, William Hogarth, and for which she produced two gripping films on the ways in which the artists, the Bane Hymid and Yinka Shonabari responded to Hogarth's example. So it's a pleasure to welcome you back Lizzie. Lizzie lectures on contemporary art and history of art department at the University of Bristol, where she's currently a British Academy post doctoral fellow working on a project entitled making waves black artists and black art in Britain. From 1962 to 1982. Most recently she co-edited the pioneering exhibition publication, The Places Here, the Work of Black Artists in 1980s Britain, which is a really brilliant publication at which she co-edited alongside curator Nick Aitkins. And she also co-leads the British Art Network's Black Art British Artist Research Group. So I'd like now to turn over to Lizzie, who will introduce the themes of this series, and they are the rationale and scope what I know will be an exciting and ambitious program of talks and conversations. So thank you Lizzie and over to you. Thank you so much Mark for that warm welcome. I'm very kind and generous introduction, amazing team at the Paul Mellon Center for organizing things so brilliantly for today, and for inviting me to convene this series. Before I crack on, I just want to share my screen with you. So that should know. There we go. That should be working. Somebody pop it in the chat box if it isn't. And thank you of course to everybody at home, who's as you join us as we embark on Black British artists and political activism. A public lecture course that as Mark has said, comprises six sessions, which would be convenient weekly in which artists, art historians and curators have been invited into conversation around the complex and varied relationships between art and political activism. And this our introductory session. Excuse me I've got the reading week cold. So I'm afraid you have to bear with me in this our introductory session. I would like to begin by mapping out some of the parameters of this series. Some of the who's what's wise and when's before moving on to think through some of the issues that arise in the relationship between art and political activism. In a case studies of a pair of works by the artist Rashid are in. In foremost, though I'd like to acknowledge the limitations of a series that does not because it cannot claim or engage or claim or aim rather to engage comprehensively with the entirety of the long and complex history of the relationship between black and brown British artists and political activism. This series represents one set of dialogues and publications that will in the weeks to come, open up and work through a selection of episodes across the last century from the diverse and varied positionalities of our contributors. The series of flash points that this will anchor ourselves in each week will move semi projectly week by week, beginning with next week's investigation of the work and networks of the sculptor, Ronald Moody, who moved to London from Jamaica in the early 1920s. And we'll conclude the series with a discussion of the artist Marlene Smith seminar work, Good Housekeeping one. And displayed in 1985 in response to the police shooting of Deborah that are known as chair gross in the same year. As such the chronological focus of the lecture course is rooted firmly in the 20th century. And we will in many ways spend the coming weeks together looking back to the anti colonial activity activities of Moody's networks. The anti apartheid activism embedded within Gavin yet she's early works, the politics of black nationalism central to Keith Piper's early practice and participation in the black art group. The history of police brutality that Smith responded to in her work. And the activism against the passage of section 28 and other discriminatory laws. In 1988 that doc that were documented by the photographer in good pollard. What does it mean though to look back when there's so much to confront in our present as artists today was to engage with and make sense of the radical activities and debates of our present moment. In the ongoing fallout of the Windrush scandal, Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic to the acceleration of activism's under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement for LGBTQI plus rights and in response to government fueled culture wars and the global climate crisis. This is a question that backs me is embarked on organizing the series. While mulling this over. I was struck by something that the art historian coven a Mercer wrote in a recent essay published in the journal art history. And this is the cover of the special issue that the essay was published and it was called rethinking British art black order black artists and modernism, and it was published only this summer. I'm going to flag it to you now because it's currently free and accessible to all. If you just head over to the Wiley online library. And I really again I really recommend it it's a really fabulous collection of scholarship and I should say that I didn't contribute to it so I really am just a massive fan. In his essay titled the longest journey black diaspora artists in Britain, Mercer addresses a tendency towards what he refers to as present ism in art histories of black British artists. He highlights his present ism in art historical narratives that position now as a redemptive moment for black artists who've achieved levels of visibility and access far beyond what was possible just decades ago. What he calls the battle days back then, though his critique is aimed squarely it seems that a historiography of black artists that produces sort of an easy an easy linearity this easy story that runs from late modern monoculture and towards a post colonial multi culture. It also seemed to offer a constructive way of approaching the ways in which we position our past and presence for our futures to borrow from that text, rather than regard our present as a finalizing act of narrative closure, which sits apart somehow from the series of social and artistic episodes that we'll encounter in this lecture course. We might set out instead to ask how today's difficulties and dissatisfactions are, as he says, descended from yesterday's predicaments remaining unresolved in the present, but which, precisely because they aren't finalized have a bearing on a future which is always up for grabs. We are also reminded that as noted by David a Bailey and Stuart Hall in a text they wrote in 1992. That retelling involves reconstruction. History can only ever be re articulated from within the terms and assumptions of our own time. In this way while the shape of this course is necessarily episodic and moves across time from the interwar period to the final decades of the 20th century. We are invited to bear in mind the longer continuities to map the links between different dimensions of struggles. How might we understand, for example, Ingrid Pollard's participation in and documentation of LGBTQI plus and black woman active activisms in the late 1980s. And how are these understandings re negotiated in her recent work no cover up at the Glasgow women's library in which she gave voice to lesbian archive by interviewing women collected in the past by interviewing them in the present. What might Smith's good housekeeping look like now after Stephen Lawrence and George Floyd, Mark Duggan and Breonna Taylor, Nicole Smallman, Biba Henry, and on and on and on. How might we read from our present position, Piper's looks to the black nationalisms of figures such as Ron Karenca as a part of a longer and still very much ongoing trajectory of black radical thought. And how might we frame the entry shifts from political figuration of the 70s and 80s to the abstraction that we find in his more recent work. To this sentence with great pleasure that I note that where possible this course centers the voices of living and practicing artists, reflecting on their own processes and experiences of thinking and making at the intersections of and political activism at different moments in careers which are crucially ongoing and still in process. The artworks and art worlds that will come into focus in the coming weeks will necessarily be framed within a wider context of not just a series of social socio political flash points, but also against the backdrops of diverse singular and living creative practices. By bringing together a polyphony of voices, the series aims to disrupt the construction of a monophonic and monovalent master narrative. A neat linear story of art that packs it away into neat boxes figuration here and aesthetics there abstraction here and politics over there. The second issue that I was forced to confront early on in the series is the choice to construct a public lecture course focused on black diaspora artists in Britain through the lens of political activism. But simply, there is a long and troubling history of the work of black and brown artists bearing what Mercer is called the burden of representation. That is the burden of representing the entirety of the communities from once they come. The work approach to with a particular set of expectations around what it should look like, who it might speak to about four. These narratives of art history have tended to deploy complex art practices to it best examine or worse explain the social and political implications of race in contemporary Britain and call upon artworks to reform a multitude of stories. The theories and politics of race, nation, multiculturalism, post colonialism and deconestation as ambulance that's emblems even of tolerance and inclusion and so on. Here the critic Jean Fisher's words seem particularly pertinent. And she says art does not transmit information. And art histories which seek to make visible the works of black diaspora artists according to narrow prescriptions under the banners of inclusivity diversity, multiculturalism and more recently to decolonization construct a problematic half story. Because of course though a rich field of activity and research teaching curating and writing about art that challenges these narratives and seeks to attend to the work by bringing it to bear on the massiness of constituting an art history. And I'm not going to go on too much about this, because I would like to sort of move into actually, you know, sort of attending to the work. But if this question of historiography is something that you're interested in. I would point you a couple of places. So again this during this issue of art history, which addresses this issue really head on in a really interesting and important way. And then also to the online pages of the air to AHRC funded black artists and modernisms research project. So they're trying to log on there this morning and they seem to be down. But hopefully they'll be back up and running soon because there's a really rich set of resources arising from this research project that was headed by the artists and researchers on your voice at University Arts London, and whose mantra was a time to work. The field is led in no small way by artists artists who research, curate, write, teach and make is something I find deeply interesting, but perhaps is something we can sort of dive into elsewhere. This is of course not a new quandary and Stuart Hall noted in his now off sighted rough semi Memorial lecture, the difficulty of trying to make connections between the world of art and wider social histories without collapsing the former or displacing the ladder. Despite the sophistication of our scholarly and critical apparatus he asserted. We are still not very far advanced, especially when the language concerned is the visual and finding ways of thinking about the relationship between the work and the world. We make the connection to brutal and abrupt destroying that necessary displacement in which the work of making art takes place. In my own research, and especially my current British Academy funded project. The development of notions of black art and Britain across the 20th century. The question that I have and continue to spend most of my time grappling with that is how do we meaningfully and thoughtfully make the connections of work and world that hall outlines and houses complicated with a boundary between them world and work art and politics, where thin and works are explicitly though of course not exclusively political. The method that I find useful as an object based approach that is beginning by reckoning with a work of art and aesthetic object in its own right to open up some of the nuances in particularities that emerge across these frontiers. And so now briefly I'd like to illustrate a bit of a case story that was just that. The first place in which the supposed frontier between art and politics whereas particularly thin is in modes of address rooted in collecting and collage. This is particularly the case in the practice and reception of artists practicing and what's come to be known as the British black arts movement of 1980s. You can see an example that even here on this cover in a work by the artist more soldier. As one reviewer is just one example of many as one review in the Guardian noted, speaking to black art and done the 1981 exhibition organized by a coalition of emerging black British artists would soon call themselves a black art group. I mean, Smith and Keith Piper who will hear from later on in this course, participate in the black art group and Piper both organized and contributed to the show, the show. So this. As we see here the critic, Irene McManus wrote, you know, their art is really just a collection of political posters. And notably to the racial tensions that shook British political and social life in the late 70s and 80s. The meaning and value of the strategies of collage and montage, I've been largely over determined confined to the description of political intervention. And notably for mercy, a shift towards a cut and mix aesthetic was his, that's his terminology that he observes in art of the 80s breaches or perforates the boundaries of sharply drawn frontiers between the message of an image and artists concerned with form. He looks to works, such as this one pipers the black assassin saints of 1982. We have more poorest divisions ones that confound a binary of art and politics in artworks that speak at once the anti racist and socialist politics of the new left, or returning to expressive modes championed by the otherwise conservative return to painting during that decade. Looking to a slightly earlier moment though, and this is where I like to take us today. We find another seminar work, which minds these poorest boundaries at the interstices of work, work and world. This is Rashid arenas for all the wall a is created between 1971 and three men 1975 and also sort of that will become clear the sort of slightly strange configuration of the date. The work is frequently pinpointed as the decisive shift in arenas over between minimalist and kinetic sculptural works which he developed in Pakistan and time moving to London via Paris in 1964. And the political conceptualism that emerged alongside his other critical and curatorial work. Looking to the processes of collecting and collage at play, we can illuminate some of the ways in which he constructs a history of art embedded with continuities and dimensions of struggle across time and place art and politics. For Oluwale response, death of David Oluwale in Leeds in 1969. As a 19 year old student with aspirations to secure a place studying engineering. Oluwale arrived in hall as a stowaway on the temple star in 1949. Immediately upon disembarking, however, he was handed over to authorities and charged as a stowaway under the merchant shipping act. He spent his first month in the UK and armory jail Leeds, and upon his release was unable to secure place at a technical college. By 1953. He was again imprisoned and over the course of the following 15 years. He spent time incarcerated in psychiatric units and living on the street. Sleeping in shop doorways he became the victim of a sustained campaign of violence for members of the Leeds city police force, who gave him the racist nicknames oggy and the lane darkie. He was beaten mercilessly urinated on abducted and left to fund for himself in villages and hamlets on the far outskirts of the city and arrested on false charges several times. Accounts of the last known moments of his life, given by witnesses at the trial of the officers suspected of killing him. Describe him running from police officers along the bank of the river air. He had been discovered sleeping rough and the officers had begun to beat him. His battered body was pulled from the river two weeks later in early May of 1969. And for a more detailed account of his life and death and the trial that followed in the early 70s. There are a couple of really good resources. Among those are Peter Fryer staying power, the history of black people in Britain, which is always a very good place to start. And an article that's a little bit harder to find unless you have access to the archives by Ron Phillips published in Race Today again in the early 1970s. More recently his story is garnered renewed attention as a subject of Kester Aston's nationality walk with the hounding of David Oluwale, which was subsequently adapted into a stage play. And then again in a separate anthology of texts edited by S. J. Bradley under the title remembering Oluwale. Interestingly, in this, in January of this year, 2021, it was announced that the celebrated artist Yinka Shonibare has been commissioned by Leeds City Council and the Arts Council together with the David Oluwale Memorial Association to create a public sculpture in his memory. It's really interesting, I think, to see what Shonibare does and, you know, and think about the context of this very early memorial to Oluwale. Oluwale's story resurfaced in 1971. So he's killed in 1969. The story resurfaces in 71 with a manslaughter trial of the officers involved with his death. Reading coverage of the trial, Arine was moved to make a work dedicated to him. This coincided with what Arine calls a period of identity crisis, wherein he began to lose interest in what he calls a formal art activity. To find his earlier kinetic sculptural minimalist works in favor of newfound investment in anti-colonial literature and radical black political activities. Well, this turning point is fairly well rehearsed within his existing, within the existing narrative of Arine's practice. It's vital to point out here that his political turn was not solely precipitated by events outside of the art world, the police beatings, racist political campaign, rousing post-colonial literature, happening at a comfortable distance from the Sacrosanct gallery space. Rather, Arine notes that what he calls his politicization really happened after he won the John Morris Prize at the Liverpool Biennale in 1969. He recalls, he recalls even quote, I thought I made it and my friends assumed it would then be easy for me to get gallery representation. In fact, some galleries are interested in my work, but they wouldn't exhibit it. One told me we love your work, but we only show British and American artists. So something was wrong. During this period, alongside friend and sometimes collaborator, David Medalla, Arine began thinking about how he could continue to make works of art at all. Although he began to collect and store the printed material that was formed the basis for Fort Oluwale in 1971, it would remain unused several years before preparations for the exhibition, artists from five continents, was staged or began in 1973 at London's Swiss Cottage Library. It was later in the decades, in the decade you went. Derek Boschier and John Stezaker, sorry, excuse me, would go on to produce works which brought into sharp focus the right wing media's complicity and state violence in the aftermath of the Battle of Lewisham, August 1977. Arine drew on the long tradition of small scale independent publishing on the political left source material. For this project he produced a panel of hard board upon which he mounted a display of text organized into three registers. And so I'm just speaking now to the sort of panel that you see on the far left of the screen. So as you can see the top two are made up of photocopies of an article that a hand a small sort of handwritten note in pencil on the work indicates comes from the Guardian While laid out like a conventional news article with a small off center picture of Oluwale. In fact, this is an effectively a small scale collage to produce the squarish form of the tech green cut up and rearrange the image in text of the original article, extracting both the byline and the title, and then produce photocopies of his reworkings on a machine at the library. And the bottom most register of material that you can see there, and obviously doesn't include the photo. It was the same text, but this time hand typed for readability by Arine, who was concerned at the time that the print in the reworked newspaper article was unclear and difficult to read. Now if any of the textual structural structure of newsprint here Oluwale story takes on a personal dimension, and Arine's manual engagement with the printed material is brought to the surface. That panel hung in the library's exhibition space for a week before Arine returned to reassemble the display and add material, shading a collage process that lasted over the four weeks of the exhibition. During the newsprint collage, he introduced pages from the latest edition of freedom news detailing ongoing issues of police brutality. So those you can see now in the second week, the thing titled second week panel, right there along the top. And I think I might have a, you might be I think you probably see a little better there. So a short live publication by the British Black Panthers freedom news arose from a growing post war black press that included major titles like race today, and numerous small pamphlets and newsletters. There's some really interesting scholarship on this actually as well. In 1973 as a member of the British Black Panthers, Arine participated in the production dissemination of freedom news and other publications, allowing him to collect material for use in his art practice. The headlines Blair police right in Brockwell Park police terror must stop above the images of black men and handcuffs or showing injuries sustained at the hands of the British state. Interspersed with printed images of black fists and salute. The conventions of the broadsheets give way to the aesthetics of the small scale print tradition of the radical left calls for action in the present drawn into conversation with a tragic outcome of action not taken years before. To this continuity of struggle. At this time, as the panel change over the following weeks, although all their story was replaced by other found material such as leaflets and photocopy news articles protesting anti colonial and anti racist struggles in the UK and further field. And the third week, and this is a close up of that panel. To address the contemporary visit of Portugal's then Prime Minister Marcelo Caitano to London. culminating in celebrations of the sex tenor a sex centenary of the angle of Portuguese alliance. The visit was marked by both official cultural displays of national friendship and unofficial public protest. And the alliance campaign the leaflets advertising some of these protests that are being collected first display to cry the ongoing wars of liberation in Portugal's then colonial states that did place across the 60s and 70s. Sorry. So the and the alliance was obviously this yellow ones. And it's towards the middle on the sides of the book ends. Like the Guardian article that Ari and preserve for several years before creating for the wall. It's notable that the end, the alliance leaflets here reappear in a slightly later work as well. The 1974 work, no politics, please. The leaflets create a rectangular field on a red painted board, overlaid by poster. Collected in the previous year the poster advertises the British museums, 600 years of Anglo Portuguese alliance, an exhibition, which was exhibited contemporaneously with a Swiss cottage show. Carefully placed elements of four Oluwale, the poster sections torn from it, underscoring the physicality of arenas intervention, and recalling the palimpsest textures of streetscape detritus, summoning leaflets and posters have hazardly layered on top of each other, becoming sun bleached and torn over time. Where arenas layers speak to each other across time and space. Although the title of the exhibition is legible. The only other semi complete section of the poster is an illumination from a late 15th century edition of the end. I'm going to share with you a little bit of the French here of the Ancien in Nouvelle chronique d'Angleterre manuscript depicting the royal marriage cured England's relationship with Portugal at the center of the post and you know so which obviously was exhibited as held by the British Library. At the center of the poster these torn sections. A black and white photocopy of a found image. While difficult to distinguish immediately, given both a print quality of the reproduction and the areas of green poster that partially and irregularly come surface. It clearly depicts the mutilation of dead black bodies by what are identified by the uniforms as Portuguese soldiers. Victims clergy and aristocracy drift in and out of focus. Histories are entangled is then and now come to bear here and there. With links circuits of colonial and neocolonial power and the industry of culturally bear the futility implied in Irene's title is clear. In the final week of the display so now it's the right most image. The first piece of material was supplemented by further pages of that week's freedom news. So, over and over we see sort of new additions of freedom news being placed and one of the interesting things I've not sort of written into the talk but that I find very interesting is that there were different additions of freedom news for different parts of the country and different sort of local areas of London and so he Irene uses his sort of local north London edition, but again there were there were other ones. So circulating. So again this that was really interesting thing of time, and also the particularities of place. So among the, the stories and that week's freedom news were coverage of resistance to racist immigration policies, which themselves made use of a well known photograph in the marches against the 1962 immigration bill. Another layer of meaning and imagery. Added into the historical continuities map by Irene. We find the artists. We find the artists hand at work with a handwritten text appended to an article which encourages viewers to organize to fight for a decent home. Other material includes photo photo copies of articles from the free free Palestine newspaper, accompanied by a hand type passage calling attention to the flow of arms from the UK to Israel. Again, Irene plays in the instances of time and place and here and there. The institutional spaces and voices of art galleries museums and broadsheet newspapers, and the political material space of activism that is work sought occupy and subsequent exhibitions beginning with works 1965 to 1975, which, surprisingly was stage in 1975. He reactivated the 1973 material by recreating each of the panels, but this time displaying them side by side. The movement through time from week to week. So, you know, again when this is exhibited it was cottage it's a single panel that gets sort of done read on. Certainly, it's displayed in this way, where that movement of time from week to week is translated into movement across space. As Irene's physical intervention the work is memorialized in what is now what now becomes a static object. The political activities and abisms that were once contemporaneous to the works exhibition, documenting the dynamic social and political world happening outside of the library in the summer of 1973 are now fixed as a material history of the recent past and the artist relationship to it. Crucially however for Irene this fixity is disrupted continuously by the implications of time and space within hegemonies of our knowledge. In echoing Bailey and Hall statement that are referred to earlier around the rearticulation of the past and the present. He asserts that ideas as knowledge can always be salvaged from history, given a new context and made to move forward within the dynamic of new time and space. 20 years after Irene began to collect material around the death of Oluwale. He salvaged the events of 1961. I'm sorry 1969 1971 and 1973. This is where for Oluwale to which was created in 1988. And which instantly was also recently exhibited together with the original work at the Tatle in an exhibition there rooted in the memory of Oluwale. In this work. Each of the original four panels have been photographed. And the color and texture of the closures flattened onto into the grayscale of reproduction. The original reconstructions of the Guardian article are rendered even more blurry through being copied and recopied and resized. Details are lost in reconstruction. However, with the addition of two new panels and so these are the two middle panels. Sorry, Irene brings others to the surface. The first new panel is a hand type text by the artist. So this is the one on the left hand side introducing the story of Oluwale and outlining the technical and critical processes by 1973 work. The emphasis on the importance of infiltrating the gallery space as a location for a bourgeois aesthetic assumptions with actual reality, which were clearly articulated in that panel. Comes to life in its neighbor the second new addition so this is the one on the right. So slightly better image. Here we find another in large text. This time an anonymous letter of complaint sent to the visual arts director of the Swiss Cottage Library in response to the 1973 exhibition. The letter Hamstead resident sort of anonymous letter expresses their dismay that the painting intended for exhibition. I've been displaced by quote a copy of a newspaper called the freedom news special. Highlighting the papers connection to the black workers movement, which they know it was formerly the bridge by Panther Party. Hamstead publication is hate propaganda and appeals to the library to remove quote this offensive publication as quickly as possible, especially a might of its proximity to its children section. So you might be able to read a moment. It's, it's really interesting, sort of, I guess in a scholarly sense, you know, this anonymous person since quite a lot of time talking about when they were child they were taught to trust the police and isn't it wrong that we're showing our children that, you know, the police aren't to be trusted and a lot of there is a lot of symmetries obviously a lot of these histories not over, obviously. Um, what I find really notable and interesting though is that the writer fails to register for Oluwale is not work at all. It describes it rather as a bare display of political text. An example of political activism of black Britons though pointedly that term is not used, boldly quote putting their case in a public library. In this way the 1973 made space for social and political realities within art space, using the language of modernist formalism to address the material realities of colonial and neoclonial subjects. In 1978, Irene would come to reckon with the forces that seek to control the work and the world and the spaces between them. Forces which were brought into sharp focus in the night in his 1978 seminal text, preliminary notes for black manifesto in which he wrote in all capital letters. The door which is shut in our face by a white land lady is also the door with which opens to the art establishment. So I like to draw some start to draw some conclusions, though this is an introduction maybe this isn't the best place for conclusions. So maybe we can call them sort of a direction for travel as we anticipate next week session and all those that follow in weeks I look forward to exploring with you and with our fabulous lineup of contributing speakers, the ways in which this relationship between the work and the world art and political activism, examined with such nuance by Irene might be negotiated renegotiated over time and across different artistic practices and spaces. It is from an inherently polyvalent and poly vocal approach that the series invites us to think through the frontiers of art and political activism in the past, in the present for the future. Next week then will be joined by the scholar archivist and mixed media artist, I go so in ski, who will share with us her research on the works and highly active political networks of the sculpture Ronald moody. And you can book your tickets for that if you haven't already on the PMC's website. In the meantime, though, I welcome any questions that you might have for me. Thank you. Thanks so much Lizzie. That was really a brilliant introduction to the to the series and yeah pleased. Gather your thoughts everyone those of you watching and I'd really appreciate it and I know Lizzie would really appreciate it if you could think of a question or that to respond to either that case study that Lizzie focused on arenas for a lot of work, or a question in relation to the broader themes that Lizzie outlined an issues that she outlined in the first half of her lecture so while we're waiting for some questions to come in. And again I'd really encourage you to ask anything that that struck me about the presentation I'd be I'd love to focus in myself, Lizzie. You've got such a troublesome cough and cold but you don't get to use things. Can you just talk a bit a bit I'm really intrigued by this work, the, the arena work maybe to. I mean in relation to I mean there's two questions one quite specific question, which is very interesting about the ways in which he reconfigures the board week by week, and the models for that kind of practice in artistic practice where do you find where what's he sort of building that idea of kind of real kind of regular reassembly kind of weekly reassembly on is it, is it, is it based on the rhythms of news and of the newspaper or are there some really interesting artistic precedents or models that you can see him operating with there. And I guess that leads to a broader question which is at the heart of the of your of the course in some ways is that relationship between aesthetics and of, and, and, and a form, which you touched on in that work to the, to those are to the to the characters of activism and it'd be really interesting if you could talk about the ways in which one, one might read that object or engage with that object formally and aesthetically, or whether that was, you know, or the issues around that kind of approach to an object like that one. Thank you. Thank you so much yeah I mean that's sort of the thing isn't it that's the thing that I think about most of the time yeah how do we, how do we do that thing where we, we read these really complex works as both political works which are political and which would speak to the world very specifically, but which are also yeah these there's really complex practices which speak to our histories and sort of contemporary practice. And one of the things I find so interesting about Rashid are in is that the way that he conceives things like the grid, for example so you know that's the history of the modernist grid in in of what God practice is being really rich and sort of quite well established. Sorry, give me one second I realize that the baby monitor is on in this room. Excitement some places in the zoom webinar, everyone. But while this is away again we've got already got a really interesting question from Jennifer, Jennifer sorry to be coming in but more would be very welcome. Yeah, sorry, sorry. The joys of children and being at home. Yeah, and so thinking about sort of the grid that that are in place with and that sort of idea of symmetry that we see I'm engaging with both, you know across the sort of layout but then also this symmetry of coming back and that's a ritual. Is he writes really incisively about how he sees symmetry as a sort of political statement, and he finds symmetry in in the sort of ways in which politics orders life. And so in that way, you know this idea of so these formalist techniques arising from, you know, forms of modernism, which are so untouched by the concerns of the world. I mean, his practice he thinks about that really interesting way so actually this idea that, you know, and I can I realize not everybody's necessarily so very well acquainted with his work but he begins by doing these really amazing sculptures and he's inspired by Anthony Coro and I'm really interested in and so minimalism. And again that sort of idea of symmetry. But again sort of and so interesting is the way that those sort of aesthetic devices become political devices for him and so I think in his practice and I think in most practices you can't really to try and divorce the idea of art and politics is a real And yeah, you just telling one half story instead of the other story. I have one more question which follows on from that but then we'll certainly turn to our audience because we're getting some really interesting questions coming in now. I mean it's really interesting you talk I mean this might seem a strange link or an accidental one but it's I think there is force to it I mean it is interesting that you dealt with Hogarth and with responses to Hogarth in your last public lecture presentations for us Lizzie and one of the ways in which collage can be understood as it's being mobilized in 20th century visual culture is is as a kind of form of radical satire that because and satire is a pictorial satire and collage always seem to have this, they have one foot in the field of the fine arts of the art world or visual culture, and then they have satire certainly and collage, in many ways also has a foot in the world of print culture and journalism. And here you get a practice that seems to exactly be pulling those worlds into intercollision and, and it seems to build on a notion of account is you can understood in relation to a lineage of radical satire which is about a critique of an established order from a position of of an outsider or someone with a very, very critical perspective on on that order. So it's interesting that there is a kind of there's a way in which you can relate arenas practice very squarely in relation to even the traditions of collage and satire and, and it's in that, in that way in which he does these weekly in these weekly reassembled is of his critique. I mean, in many ways for me, looking back over the history of satire that satirists would regularly do these kind of installments where they would on a weekly basis attack, using the visual tools at their disposal and, again, the rhetoric of journalism to attack certain politicians or political orders. And I think, yeah, thank you, I think, I think you're absolutely right that there is that, you know, that sort of set of linear is that he's tap into says that sort of more public sort of sphere of satire. And then also, yeah, the sort of the political avant garde, you know, even, you know, thinking about people like Hannah Hawke and the way that collage is used in in in sort of across the 20th century to speak very powerfully to politics and yeah as you say across this line of art and formalism and aesthetics and I think I don't know, as a contemporary specialist. I do often find myself, you know, you might appreciate sort of going back to Hogarth and just thinking there is as you say there's so much here but you know Hogarth is somebody that really understood the power of media and the power of the sort of the satirical image and the ways in which we use reproduction and mechanical reproduction of these things. And yeah, I think Irene is definitely a part of that. Thank you. Let's turn to some questions that we're receiving from our audience and thanks to those who've submitted them. The first is from Jennifer Sarathy and Jennifer asks, I was wondering if you could speak more about Irene's relationship to alternative media like the freedom news. I wonder how the circulation of this media again expands a movement across space that you describe. Thank you, Jennifer. So, so the freedom news as I said was published by the Black Workers movement which had previously been the British Black Panther Party and Irene was, he was a member of the party and involved in the publication of freedom news. So I think he was sort of quite intimately involved with that press and he's sort of again he's a really highly engaged in the sort of radical politics at this moment. And so it's a close relationship, it's I think probably quite a personal relationship. Yeah, and I wonder how the circulation of this media expands the movement across space. This is something to me that I find really interesting because I think, you know, thinking to sort of no politics, please, the thing that immediately springs to mind is I think you probably don't see it very much anymore these days, but if you go to sort of bus stops or train stops and, you know, sort of loads of stickers and posters and things sort of all, you know, the ways in which they all layer up on each other. And that's really, you know, this idea that these elements of activism move across each other and across time and across space and we, you know, are sort of circulated locally, to some extent, because as I said before, like the freedom news had different editions for different sort of local communities. You know, sort of like, you know, sort of your sort of local paper. It was going to give me my local example, but maybe you're probably in Bristol, so that makes sense. Yeah, so there's that sort of the specificity on the one hand. But then, you know, as this moves across time and space, so, you know, sort of out of Swiss Cottage and out of North London, you know, and thinking even more recently so that work was a good idea. There's this exhibit in the places here. Exhibitions that Nicke Aikens curated, you know, and as it moved in 2017 to the Netherlands or to Birmingham or to, you know, all these different venues. The ways in which those particularities and specificities are then sort of expanded and made to speak to other localities in unique ways. Sorry, that's very long. That raises that final point you made raises a really interesting question about the ways in which this work has been framed and received and critically responded to. And across its different iterations, I mean, it's, I mean, it sounds like the one response it received in the early 1970s was from that Hansen residence. But I mean, whether there was any kind of critical or art critical response at that point at all to that show. I mean, in a Swiss Cottage library, I wonder even the fact that it was in that kind of space rather than in a more established gallery space that I mean, unless that unless there was something quite interesting going on there in relation to the libraries and our space. But then what's happened to the ways in which that work has been understood in these subsequent iterations I mean, and the kind of the broader story that tells about your subject really about that relationship between black British artists and activism is quite interesting one. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things I find really interesting is that in some worlds. It's a really massive important work so as early as I can't remember the publication date I want to say 1985 six right this mid 80s, Rashid and Eddie chambers publish a conversation about black art together and Eddie chambers, who's an art historian who is also involved in the black movement in case, you know, people at all more familiar with him. He's, he's written some really fabulous books that you should definitely read. Eddie calls this work the first black artwork created in Britain, which is really, you know, that that's registering at that time is massive but again it's sort of what I find really interesting is that there's this sort of world and it's predominantly built by artists who are not just making work, but also writing about it building the critical frameworks about it and submitting it. Somebody I saw in the chat earlier referred to the black art gallery. Yeah, these sort of spaces, which in which this work was really important but I mean within a wider picture of British art history. This work didn't really register. You know, the fact that it was part of an artist for democracy, you know, it gets it's lumped in with this sort of moment in the 70s where the sort of new, you know, the left did a bunch of crazy things, and this is an example. Okay. And then the gardener who says great talk, Lizzie, thank you. How do you suggest we approach arenas earlier and less and later less political work should we take into context his period of explicit political engagement or should they be looked at, distinctly from a more formalist approach. Thank you, Jack. So how should we approach his. Yeah. Well this is this is one of the things I find really interesting about Irene is that he writes so much about practice both his own practice and sort of a wider art history. And so across this sort of critical practice that runs parallel with visual practice. He talks, you know, again about the ways in which the formal is political. And this idea that this is the sort of notion that yokes sort of figuration or collage or text or you know these these sort of different strategy visual strategies with politics. He sort of disrupts that and says well actually. Again, sort of symmetry is political, you know in this in the way that governments exert symmetry to exert control, you know that symmetry is a form of control and the same. And he's really neatly draws that line, you know again this idea that the, the, the door that slams slams in the face of the person being discriminated against. And so housing is the same door that slams the artist or the art world. So I think this is the crux of it really for me and that's that a formalist approach. And that doesn't attend to the sort of holistic thing that's happening, which includes politics and which includes, yeah, as Stuart Hall says his relationship to the work in the world is I think just, I don't know, not great art history, I think. And one, one, maybe one lot because this has just been a great introduction it's a kind of a fantastic platform for the, for the rest of the series, this talk Lizzie. It'd be great to hear your thoughts on how you decided on the topics that you've ended up using and what and whether in does does the kind of the now does does a story or the, the different stories you tell through this program. And to your eyes offer something very different to a standard narrative about the relationship between black British artists and political activism or, or is that narrative not still not yet being developed and so it's an event this is a very much in a pioneering attempt to try and do that great to get your sense of the choices you made and how it relates to an existing set of histories. Well I think one of the things I find really exciting is that this is this history is being written so as I said before you know sort of beginning, you know really early on with with art you know even you know if you think back to people like Sousa Frank Foley, of course Rashid, Irene, Eddie Chambers, Hubeyna Hameed, Sunnybrook, you know across the 20th century so much of this work has been done by the artists themselves and what I find really exciting is that, you know of course also a number of artists like Stuart Theorists like Stuart Hall, Cobb and Emerson, you know amongst many others who have been doing this work for a while now and doing it really brilliantly. What I find really exciting is that right now there's sort of a surge of activity and I'm really excited to be part of that, in which it seems like there's sort of a next generation of art historians I think there's sort of a numbers thing as well there's more of us that are doing some of this work and what I hope that this series, anyway so what I find quite interesting is you watch this happen is the ways in which this history is becoming written and the processes of how history is written and what happens and when you start to see sort of that story starting to crystallize of what bits were important and what bits weren't important and who are we going to write about and who aren't we going to write about who are we going to include in the exhibitions and who aren't we going to include and you do start and you know you see that process in real time and so what I'm hoping to do in this series is by inviting lots of different people to participate instead of just me sort of speaking to you for across this telling the story. And so we brought to bear is all of these different points of views and experiences and the ways in which those points of views and experiences have changed over, you know, sort of 3040 years. So to create an art history and I think this is one of some not personally as a scholar, what I find really exciting and important is an art history that is polyvalent, you know, which is still good and comes from and speaks to and from different, different places. So that's what I'm really excited about. We've got lots of conversations and then to your question about how we thought of how I sort of thought about the different sessions. Oh, it was really quite difficult and I had lots of sort of ideas and backups in case one didn't work then we could do this other topic and it was a lot. So what I wanted to do was try to to look at these sort of quite big moments and moments of big issues. And to see what we could do if we looked at them again through that sort of lens of the specific. So, you know, so thinking about, you know, this really pressing issue and obviously again it's been in the news, you know, only this week, around which the police treat black and brown folks. You know how do you address that in in a lecture. I don't know I don't you know how do you the ways in which artists have dealt with and reckon with that. And so I thought, you know, the best way to do that I thought and to do it with care and to really try and draw some nuances by asking an example in this case Marlene Smith to speak to a work inspired by one, one very quite famous, but certainly not sort of only instance of documented police brutality. Yeah, no, it makes a huge amount of sense. No, and this one last really interesting observation that's coming from Caroline Osborne about actually the Swiss Cottage Library. And of course, which is the setting for that first display Caroline talks about the fact that that library helps many controversial exhibitions at the stage during the 1973 woman power show which was closed by the police for showing the woman giving birth title God giving birth shows tended to be get reviewed in places like time out, Caroline mentioned so. Again, I mean at that point to the kind of intersectionality of the story doesn't it that this is, you know what's going to be so exciting is to talk is to think about the ways in which so many of these shoes and the imagery that you're looking at engage or operate in dialogue with a whole range of other kinds of other kinds of critical art practice of the kind that Caroline's just been talking about here. And the settings for these, for these displays is really fascinating. And it segues into that discussion we had in the British Art Network, someone a conference on the genealogies of black curating black curating and and the black black art and again the role artists played in curating shows of this practice through this period. Great well thanks so much Lizzie many thanks to you thanks to the PMC team who helped support this. You've given us a great introduction, a great launching pad for the series and we can't wait for next week, and by everyone has been watching to not only to return but to tell their friends and colleagues about the series because we've got some really fantastic talks coming up so really looking forward to that and thanks again Lizzie for a great introduction. Thanks everyone. Thanks Mark.