Lubaina Himid at the Tate Modern on Saturday, 9th April 2022

Lubaina Himid at the Tate Modern on Saturday, 9th April 2022 

 Lubaina Himid is a painter, mainly, but she also creates sound installations and conceptual art. Himid likes to dazzle the viewer with bright colours surrounded by muted pastel shades. Her object is architecture, constructs and buildings abandoned, placed edgily near the shore, between earth and water. The sea is omnipresent in her works, receding into the distance or glimpsed out of a window, a grey void or sharply, logically blue. Her work is often flat and two-dimensional, as in her work Ball on Shipboard (2018, acrylic on canvas). Figures emerge from the bowels of a ship, engage in dialogues and dance, surrounded by a brightly patterned awning while a lone canoeist paddles by. The warm, bright colours are appealing but it seems to be pleasant decoration. The painting wants to be political but somehow the message has been blunted. Another work, The Button Maker (2001, acrylic paint on charcoal on canvas) is also concerned with the decorative effects of buttons, but the painting’s meaning seems too personal. Acrylic is the perfect medium for these works, bright, quick drying and easy to apply but also temporary, lacking the gravitas, perhaps of oils.

Ball on Shipboard

Lubaina Himid (1954 -) was born in Zanzibar and lives now in Britain where she is Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. This exhibition is a major retrospective of her work. She won the Turner Prize in 2017 and she was appointed CBE in 2018. 

Blue Grid Test

 The incorporation of musical installations at least offers us some repose, the exhibition is never silent. The first installation, just by the entrance, is apparently a DIY manual simultaneously painted and read aloud. A collaboration, it failed to signify much beyond itself or aim at any larger deconstruction. Pleasant, yet slightly soporific, classical music is pumped through the rooms, somewhat predictably, along with the sounds of crashing waves and a set of long planks, possibly signifying the skeletal remains of a slave ship. Himid’s architectural modulations, such as her series completed in the late 1990s, Plan B, evoke buildings stacked at the sea’s margins. Dazzling oranges and yellows mutate into intense blacks and the deepest purples. The artist is attempting to evoke depth through colour, yet the works remain two dimensional, flat, a stylistic imprint evoked throughout the exhibition. It is as if the artist is asking us to consider the primitive origins of art even when they indicate richer symbolisms. Works like Havana Nightschool (Plan B), (1999, acrylic paint on canvas), use text, but text and image rarely seem to match. There are some studies of boxes, in the manner of a student’s perspective practise, cross hatching, and depictions of fish-like objects, reminiscent of art college studies, rather than an artist’s studio. But these are early works, and every artist develops. 

Intriguing books about Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X lurk in boxes that we are not allowed to reach out to, touch and read. They have been removed from us to be enshrined in the cash/art nexus.

 

The installation Blue Grid Test offers us some found objects while the word blue is repeated in different languages, as if we did not know that it is blau in German and bleu in French. We are meant to be students sitting at the feet of Professor Himid, intent on filling our empty heads. Himid’s work is meant to appeal to Guardian readers, champagne socialists, fence sitting middle of the road, middle aged people, satiated with nimbyism. Indeed, The Guardian is referenced, this installation contains a single page, the obituary of a jazz musician. This is a little wink to the audience to let us know that we are alright, that we are in on it. There are banjos, mandolins, and the instrument beloved of the Surrealists, the guitar. Later we find their carrying cases and a set of small carts, an inevitable ethnic cliché implying the rudimentary nature of an African market, like photos of donkeys and carts in Ireland. 

 Himid’s four large scale canvases La Rodeur refer to an antique narrative when in 1819 a contagious, probably tropical illness caused everyone on board a slave ship to be struck blind. Thirty-nine African men and women were thrown overboard, as if by dint of their colour they became useless. The absence of text in the exhibition leaves the viewer bereft of direction, looking for clues to the meanings of works and their inferences. Thus, the work La Rodeur is so oblique that it could signify practically anything. This is yet another condescension by the artist, another knowing wink. 

 The pulley that joins sea to land in La Rodeur is the final evocation, in its mechanical intricacy, symbolising the final journey of slaves, their ultimate decimation. 

 Paul Murphy, Tate Modern, April 2022