Curated by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter, ‘Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic’, which was held at Tate Liverpool from 29 January through 25 April 2010, was conceptually inspired by sociologist Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). In an interview with art historian Anjalie Dalal-Clayton, who devoted a section of her doctoral thesis to ‘Afro Modern’, Tanya Barson explained that she hoped to contribute to filling a gap in Gilroy’s reflection, which in her view lacked a deep engagement with the visual arts.¹ Although Barson was aware of a previous interdisciplinary event that took place in Berlin on the theme of the Black Atlantic, it still remained somewhat neglected in artistic institutions.² This line of enquiry opened up by the curator will be taken as an opportunity to consider the ways in which the Black Atlantic framework was deployed in ‘Afro-Modern’. How was the Black Atlantic made to be known in the exhibition? What rules were given primacy when rendering the subject intelligible?

An ambitious effort, ‘Afro Modern’ featured works by 66 artists dating from 1909 to 2009 spread across Tate Liverpool’s entire fourth floor. Alongside the exhibition, it included a programme of events at various venues across Liverpool. An online resource hosted by the University of Liverpool provides an archive of the exhibition, with catalogue essays, links to articles about the exhibition and media material.³ The geographical remit covered by Gilroy’s Black Atlantic provided the scene for a dialogue between artists, whilst specific concepts developed throughout the book were illustrated in different sections of the show. The exhibition was divided into seven chronological chapters, with the exhibition journey starting with a section entitled ‘Black Atlantic Avant-Gardes’, which sought to reassess the influence of African sculpture on modern European art. As Barson writes, historical narratives about modernist art movements tended to focus exclusively on European trajectories and to be oblivious to other artists and practices that took place simultaneously outside Europe.⁴

In the first room, the exhibition of a painting by the pioneer of Brazilian modernism Tarsila do Amaral, alongside works by European figures including Picasso and Fernand Léger, was meant to demonstrate transatlantic stylistic linkages. The Black Atlantic framework was used to develop a presentation of the Harlem Renaissance movement as a transnational and intergenerational movement, showing how artists of different nationalities and in different locations were entangled in constant dialogue. Paintings by the African American artists Palmer Hayden and Aaron Douglas from the 1920–30s were shown alongside European works from the same period. The second room of the exhibition focused on the work undertaken on dance and ceremonies by the Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren in Haiti, whose practice mixed the aesthetic and the ethnographic, and was heavily influenced by Surrealism. A third room entitled ‘Black Orpheus: Négritude, Creolization, Natural Synthesis’, explored various responses to Aimé Césaire’s formulation of Négritude ‘as an act of cultural and linguistic appropriation’ of the pejorative French term nègre, with works by the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the American Jacob Lawrence, the Brazilian Rubem Valentim and the Nigerian Uche Okeke. The fourth section entitled ‘Dissident Identities: Radicalism, Resistance and Marginality’ shifted its focus to the entanglements of art with activism in the 1960s. The Brazilian and the American contexts in particular were brought into view through the Abstract Expressionist work of the African American artist Norman Lewis, who was an active participant in the Civil Rights movement as well as through the presentation of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s work with favela communities. Works by David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Frank Bowling, Artur Bispo de Rosário, Andy Warhol, Gordon Parks and Lorraine O’Grady were also included.

The fifth room marked a shift in curatorial approach. Whilst the first four exhibition rooms sought to illustrate Paul Gilroy’s concern with transnational journeys and echoes, and followed a roughly chronological timeline, the next three rooms began to employ a more thematic approach and presented more contemporary works. Named after a central notion in Gilroy’s book, the room ‘Middle Passage’ explored the terms central image of the ship as a ‘chronotope’, ‘a spatio-temporal matrix which can be considered not only as the mobile means by which the different points of the Atlantic world became joined but also as a ‘cultural and political unit‘, as a starting point to examine some of the ways in which artists of the Black Atlantic have appropriated the image.⁵ Key works from this section included Keith Piper’s Go West Young Man (1987) and Isaac Julien’s Western Union Series No.1 (Cast No Shadow) (2007) which make connections between the Middle Passage and contemporary narratives around forced migration.

The penultimate room of the exhibition, ‘Exhibiting Bodies: Racism, Rationalism and Pseudo-Science’, featured female artists’ efforts to make ‘clear the complicity of rational science and racialised reason in the racism that underpinned slavery, which reverberates in the dissemination of imagery within Surrealism, Hollywood film, advertising and other forms of mass media.’⁶ By focusing on female reclaiming of the subject, the section of the show directed its attention to the specific ways in which the female African body was targeted, with works by South Africans Candice Breitz and Tracey Rose, Kenyan Wangechi Mutu, American Carrie Mae Weems, British Sonia Boyce, Cuban Marta Maria Perez Bravo and Cuban-Americans Coco Fusco and Ana Mendieta illustrating the benefits of a trans-Atlantic lens in reflecting on concomitant histories of oppression. The last room of the show, ‘From Postmodern to Post-Black: Appropriation, Black Humour and Double Negatives’, looked at artistic practices that make use of sampling, recycling and accumulation in order to explore ‘the complexities and ambivalences within black diasporic subjectivity’ to reflect what Gilroy referred to as the ‘polyphonic qualities of black cultural expression’ included works by American artists such as Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon.⁷ Chris Offili was the only non-American-based artist whose work was included in this final section. 

‘Afro Modern’ claimed to be the first exhibition ‘to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism.’⁸ It undoubtedly provided a clear and rich demonstration that there were many artists and artistic networks deserving of being included in the modernist canon. It also granted visibility to the ways in which art has been used as a way to respond to issues and concerns shared by historically marginalised groups. However, the original question posed by Gilroy should not only be used to demonstrate that Black people have, in fact, been involved in the formation of modernity and its cultural movements. The Black Atlantic was proposed by Gilroy as an alternative prism to conceive of modernity so as to ‘produce an explicitly transnational and intercultural’ critique of it .⁹ Racial slavery is proposed as integral to Western civilisation, with the foundational relationship between the Black ‘slave’ and the white ‘master’ as an enduring structuring divide. According to Gilroy, adopting this analytical perspective allows us to visualise Black expressive cultures as ‘countercultures of modernity’, existing in the interstices of the Western modern project and its contradictions. These expressive cultures are characterised by their deployment of ‘grounded aesthetics’ which carry ‘residual traces’ of racial terror while also producing a distinct, critical and potentially emancipatory positionality from which to interact with the modern world.¹⁰ Black Music was for Gilroy the cultural form that most aptly illustrated these dynamics. For Gilroy:

The history and utility of black music (…) enable us to trace something of the means through which the unity of ethics and politics has been reproduced as a form of folk knowledge. This subculture often appears to be the intuitive expression of some racial essence but is in fact an elementary historical acquisition produced from the viscera of an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation.¹¹

Music is seen as a grounded practice that disrupts the separation between ethics and aesthetics, and thinking and being central to the project of modernity as grounded in Enlightenment rationality.¹² Therefore, a Black Atlantic perspective to study modern visual culture is an invitation to consider the ways in which Black art, like Black music, can also allow us to revise and reject modernity’s inherent processes of classification. Following this view, it could have been interesting to reconsider the need to hold on to the category of modernism when seen from the point of view of a Black artistic praxis. In ‘Afro Modern’, this category was instead consolidated. Anjalie Dalal-Clayton writes that whilst the exhibition proclaimed to demonstrate that Black and non-Western artists were equally involved in the formation of modern art forms, the panels accompanying the displayed artworks instead cemented Europe’s hegemonic position as the chief producer of modernity. Dalal-Clayton provides several examples of instances where Black artists are described as being ‘influenced by’ or ‘simply using’ already existing European styles, lamenting that the exhibition ended up stopping short of achieving a corrective reading of modernism.¹³

The framework of ‘Afro-Modern’ appears to have been one of inclusion to the centre, and not one of ‘inversion of the relationship between the margin and the centre’ as endorsed by Gilroy.¹⁴ Space was made within the museum for other types of subjects to be seen, and provided a demonstration that the category of modernism encompassed more than what it traditionally claimed to, but did not offer any new interpretive lenses to make sense of the works beyond the rules of intelligibility already established by modernist genealogies and hierarchies. This is visible in the overrepresentation of American artists. Could other points of entries into Black Atlantic artworks have been explored throughout the exhibition? And does this point to a limitation within Gilroy’s formulation of a Black Atlantic culture? The latter was noted by political scientist Michael Hanchard: 

If Afro-Modernism is a counterculture of modernity, as Gilroy suggests, is it merely an appendage of Western modernity and European modernism? Is its existence to be defined solely in terms of its critique of the West, or does its presence hint at one of several divergent paths of modernity?¹⁵

Looking back at ‘Afro Modern’, we are prompted to question the ability of the museum structure to appropriately receive the grounded critical and emancipatory qualities inscribed in Black Atlantic art forms and their potentially distinct genealogies. Through their processes of categorising and enclosing, museums – like the discipline of art history –  perpetuates the separation of ethics and aesthetics identified as central to the “master” project of modernity, and therefore acts as preservers of the hierarchies it relies on.¹⁶ Achille Mbembe wrote that ‘were the figure of the slave to really enter the museum,(…) the museum would automatically cease to be.’¹⁷ A museum of the Black Atlantic is bound to endanger the solidity of modern separations and it is a risk few institutions are willing to take. Indeed, what would the unravelling of modern divisions lead to in a place like Liverpool, which holds so much responsibility in engineering the racial terror described by Gilroy, and where the residual traces of slavery’s racial terror are encoded in the city’s walls?