Andrea Buddensieg
Visibility in the Art World—The Voice of Rasheed Araeen
1.
Rasheed Araeen, who arrived in London already in 1964, belongs to an early generation of non-Western artists to live in the West. As a spokesman of contemporary artists of non-Western origin, he founded the journal Third Text in 1987. In the first decade of its publication, the main aim was to reveal “the institutional closures of the art world and the artists they excluded, the second began the enquiry into the emergent phenomenon first signaled by the notorious show Magiciens de la Terre of the assimilation of the exotic other into the new world art,” as Sean Cubitt summarized the goals in the Third Text Reader in 2002. Thus, the periodical witnessed and commented upon the crucial moment of the art market’s opening—rife with consequences—to a major wave of globalization in art that is today reaching an unprecedented climax. As a representative of an older generation, he had a sharper eye than the younger generation for the dangers and compromises inherent in this event. In a recent text, he speaks of “neoliberal benevolence, a facade that is difficult to penetrate,”(1) as it obscures the continuity of the conflicts and diverts attention from a new racism in the art world.
By that time he already had decided to choose “verbal language to express myself” rather than reified works or “objects.” He foresaw that his own exhibition objects would remain mute within the walls of the so-called “white cube” and thus would fail to convey their political message. When he spoke in 1999 about his own journal Third Text, he called it an attempt to “demolish the boundaries that separate art and art criticism.” He had become convinced that “art objects alone cannot penetrate the system and confront it.”(5) And he had discovered that he only could meet the expectation to be different by acting differently in that he addressed his own case also in writing. Writing was tantamount to raising his voice against the hegemonic discourse of the art world. This discourse had confined him to an ethnic stereotype that prevented him from becoming an artist in his own right.
The concept of nominalism that he explains as “art of resistance,”(6) was chosen to develop “the idea to produce art in a radically different context” and thereby also to turn it against the traditional museum. Art was to become a critical practice destined to overcome the barrier between art and life. His conception of the “everyday or nominal” did not aim at an “aesthetisized object.” He turned “the institutional space of the art world” into the target of his critical projects. On the whole, Araeen never ceased to promote art as an idea rather than an exhibition commodity, an idea located in the artist’s imagination. In this sense, he understood his “otherness” as result of a different type of imagination.
Araeen, indeed, no longer intended to act in a museum space or as an exhibition artist. His true arena would become the public space. It is there that he wanted to carry out conflicts in the open that would remain silent in the art space. Thus, he became an attentive critic of the present art museums. He came from a nation where art history had no history, but he also knew that politics usually happen outside the museum walls. In a recent paper that he delivered in March 2005, he underlined his conviction to see “art as a process rather than an object.” In this sense, he doubted the possibility for “significant art (to exist) within the bourgeois institution,”(7) especially in the museum. It therefore was the public space where he wanted to act both with his publications and with his art production intended for public sites. An important book in his career as art critic is Making Myself Visible. (8) Visibility raises the question of who becomes visible and where. Would he be the average modern artist who became visible in the art space or would he act as the “other” in a Western context? The volume assembles his artistic work and also most of his writings up to that date. In the editorial he attacks “the question of identity for the Third World artist.”(9) In earlier years, he had published the “Black Manifesto,” which first appeared in January 1978.(10) By then, he had started the magazine Black Phoenix, which, however, only saw three issues. The term Black Artist, regardless of skin color, meant the “other” in the art world. In the Manifesto, he discussed the question, “how Third World people are trying to enter the modern era or/and create their own contemporary history.”(11) Araeen’s texts, despite their singular objective and their strong voice, still are kept out of recent anthologies of contemporary artists’ writings. Neither the collection Art in Theory of 1992 nor the Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings include his name.(12) This proves that the tendency still prevails to protect the system of the Western art discourse.
In the first issue of Third Text, Araeen declares his principle: “considerations of art cannot be separated from questions of politics.”(13) Cultural identity was neither available within the official system of Western modernism nor could it be recovered by a return to “nationalist/traditional art.”(14) Despite the progressive spirit of modernism, non-Western artists still experienced “an almost total exclusion from the history of modern art.”(15) We must pay attention to his emphasis on the “history of art,” as he distinguishes it from the art market. He considers the tale of modernism as nothing but an artifact that celebrates linear progress within one culture. Exhibitions, such as the 1989 Les Magiciens de la Terre in Paris, falsified the issue by negating the modernist difference, as Araeen insisted in his critique of the exhibition.(16)
The term “ethnic artists,” so Araeen reminds his readers,(17) was coined by Naseem Khan,(18) whose father had emigrated from the Punjab in the 1930s. Araeen counters her book The Art that Britain Ignores in the same year (1976) in an essay entitled “The Art Britain really Ignores.”(19) “The so-called black problem is being confused here with the inclusion in the report of some European minorities…. The report is in itself a recipe for cultural separatism.” Araeen, instead, was concerned with the “different ways the people of different races are seen in their creative abilities.” Araeen was determined to resist total assimilation. In a 1989 exhibition, The other Story, he presented “Afro-Asian artists in post-war Britain” in the Hayward Gallery in London.(20) In his introduction, he insisted upon telling the story of all those “who defied their otherness” within the modernist space. He realized the deliberate falsity of the modernist story and agreed with Edward Said that one should “tell other stories than the official ones produced by institutions of power.”
