The surface is all you get from me: Identity and otherness in art

There is a certain intrigue when it comes to the ‘outcast creative’. Put simply: people like the abject outsider. It is, on the whole, far more re- warding to root for the underdog than it is to support those who are already on top.

This brings about images of the ‘Byronic hero’; the artist who mopes about on some windy hilltop, moaning on about his exile and great Romantic grief, but it also suggests that artists in an attempt to generate more interest in both themselves and their work may play up their perceived vulnerabilities. They can do this by upping the ‘working-classism’ so much associated with a Dickensian England, remarketing the struggle of the artist as a “cartoonish class war.” One of the most famous faces of the YBA (Young British Artist) movement, Damien Hirst, presents himself as a ‘class primitive’: So, in a way, the YBA’s presentation of their perceived ‘otherness’ allows for the ‘concerned privileged’ to dip their feet comfortably into the world of the outcast, thus the audience proves to the world that they truly root for the underdog.

YBAs rely on outmoded British stereotypes as the surface to their work, generating the persona of the easy- to-swallow outsider that does not too aggressively confront its own audience. According to a poll, sixty-three per cent of white Britons think that immigration has, on the whole, been a bad thing for Britain. This widespread fear of the ‘Other’ has caused a rift in the demand for abject art that celebrates the ‘outcast artist’. YBAs are able to fill this gap, by acting up their ‘Britishness’, yet still upholding their status as ‘other’. Legge describes how YBAs “opportunistically simulate lost avant-garde engagement, adopting a media-friendly ‘look’ of being shocking in the tradition of the angry young man, the working-class hero, and the punk”, from which foreign audiences have been entertained, but are relatively indifferent. If we look back at Hirst, we can see quite prominently featured in his work and his artist persona is the fact that he achieved ‘E’ in A-level art, that he is from a council estate in Brixton.

He plays this up, he is the ‘working class hero’. And yet, his work is still a “collage of quickly recognisable cliché”. In such, the YBAs create for themselves what Kobena Mercer refers to as a “cult of abjection”, a reliance on making themselves appear weak in the eyes of the ‘powerful’ art world, coaxing its audience into celebrating them, to ‘root for the underdog’.

Hirst, and his fellow YBAs, are cushioned by an army of followers in the form of critics, collectors, or gallerists, that allow them to push the boundaries more and more over the edge of ethical considerations.

Not only that, but YBAs also exhibit a sort of ‘sameness’ that has created an echo chamber so that little criticism can affect them. By being unable to criticize the YBAs due to their sup- posed ‘otherness’ (and as such, fear of being accused of being ‘pompous’) they allow the YBAs to surround themselves in a bubble where surface is all that is required to make successful art, creating an echo chamber which (perhaps unintentionally) outcasts others.

We can observe how the movements of Black and Asian British artists’ mirror some of the actions of YBAs that have been described above. As mentioned, there has been and still is a certain hostility towards minority artists due to their perceived ‘Otherness’. However, what separates black artists from YBAs is that abjection is thrust upon them rather than taken up by them. Indeed, successive generations of black artists have been received with hostility, and have suffered from the contempt of critics, galleries, and potential patrons.

Black artists are able to find some success by othering themselves and by actively taking up the role of the underdog, but many argue this causes them to sacrifice complexity. While white artists can carry on making art as they always have been, without making any show of their cultural identity, non-white artists are only able to enter dominant culture by, as claimed by Rasheed Araeen “showing their cultural identity cards.”

Black critical art theory calls for a shedding of the culture card to regain meaning and substance in individual art works, and thus to gain more respect as artists (and not as ‘Black artists’) within the art community. Rasheed Araeen argues that there is an acute struggle for non-white artists who wish to make art – just, art, in response to the contemporary movements of its time, no ‘Indian’ or ‘African’ or ‘ethnic’ art, but this has been denied to them.

In response to complaints of ethnocentric exclusion, the term ‘multiculturalism’ has been coined as a model of inclusion, and yet, it very quickly began to feel like a hastily configured problem-solving response. This too relied on the perceived ‘Otherness’ of non-white artists, although it did allow more artists be seen.

A notorious example of this was the exhibition celebrating multiculturalism in modernism, ‘Magiciens de la Terre’. 150 of the artists were of European descent and 50 of these artists were from the developing world’ The European artists chosen were trained artists, who had made a name for themselves within mainstream developments, and yet the artists from the developing world were chosen due to their folkish and tribal nature, and those artists who had been a part of Modern developments were completely overlooked, only seeking to celebrate the differences of these ‘Other’ artists than to truly give them equal visibility.

The issue that faces us now is that despite this, black and Asian artists still feel obliged to ‘play the cultural card’. Jean Fisher argues that, ‘cultural marginality [is] no longer a problem of invisibility but one of excess visibility in terms of a reading of cultural difference that is too easily marketable’. In an interview, Steven McQueen replied irritably when asked about ‘questions of visibility’, stating that he doesn’t constantly see himself as black when going about day-to-day activities, even though other people might see him as that.

“Just like everyone else I want people to think beyond race, nationality and all that kind of crap. This debate is tired, ugly and beat up … it is boring.”

When reviewing the above points, I am forced to think about my own work. I can’t deny that I have at times felt the obligation to and explore my Pakistani heritage. While, as a mixed- race person, I feel no obligation to explore my English heritage. My art is not out-of-touch with myself and my culture.

To ‘play the culture card’ and to ‘other’ my work would be to sacrifice the complexity of my work Within the upcoming generation of artists I am part of, I see that my other mixed-race or non-white peers do not focus solely on race as to do so would render little success. That is not to say that to ever make a note of one’s culture would be to make ‘bad’ art. Peers who have grown up in different countries give an international flair to their work without sacrificing all the other nuances of meaning. There is a fine balance between talking about culture and relying on culture.