Her Curved Architecture (Notes on Lubaina Himid’s view of and for our world), at the Tate Modern until July 2022
What fits where, how well or badly, is one of the central preoccupations of Himid’s unusual and riveting retrospective at the Tate
I dream of a place to share which has curved walls and curved windows looking into cool inner courtyards. There are wooden balconies on the first floor behind which are spacious simple light rooms for sleeping and dreaming, talking and reconnecting while looking out to a warm blue ocean. I long for home but will never get there. - Lubaina Himid
Our Kisses Are Petals Our Tongues Caress the Bloom…
As an opening, these words set the scene for the show: Multiplicity, intimacy, interdependence, infinity. It reads simple, but the more you look, the more you see. I am reminded of Himid’s words, that there is a ‘secret language’ that all can understand. As visitors, we are invited to enter a dreamscape that is real, a world that is at once topsy-turvy but sobering, familiar. This is without a doubt our world, but imagined by an artist who refuses narrow categorisation: Theatre maker, historian, map maker, networke, archivist, architect, time weaver, trickster. Himid is asking us to step into her painting, into her creative process, but as a creator not a passive consumer: How do we live differently? What role do each of us play to create our world?
Himid’s subject matter may be grand - history, time, space – but she is interested in what happens when we fit Grand Narratives into jelly moulds. First, the Metal Handkerchiefs (2019), a series of painted metal sheets which use Health & Safety language and draws on the style of her “kanga paintings,” these works play on the poetics of health and safety manuals, offering instructions for survival. The Jelly Mould Pavilions for Liverpool is a pretend competition to design monuments for the city to celebrate the contribution of its African diaspora to the city’s history and wealth. Her repurposing of the jelly moulds as portraiture exposes the relationship between sugar, the slave trade and Liverpool’s prosperity. It makes visible what is usually invisible, literally giving history a face. (Though I wish these were put on a table rather than on a white plinth!)
How people fit (in clothes, drawers, systems, houses, institutions, kitchens) is central to her vision. In her essay on dress in Himid’s work, Carol Tulloch uses the term ‘vessel’. Himid’s narratives are ‘composed of vessels: each garment and accessary is a receptacle that carries, holds and transports her thoughts, ideas and views of the world and how she wants to respond to it. These vessels speak through their insistence on visibility and belonging for people of the Black diaspora’. Himid pursues this theme with the series Architects/Models/Plans (1997-8) where she produces an architectural language for women. What kind of world can contain women? What kind of building? I found the painting East Wing West Wing particularly moving in this regard. Recently, all I can think about is how unfair it is that my mother – and, I suppose, by extension myself - has to fit this world and that world cannot fit her. Access to a park, a bike, and a home; a world outside that contains you in an infinite spiral. A world where we all have a country house. Places to sit outside, near trees, a house with many windows, by the warm sea… Curved architecture that evokes femininity, infinity and the pleasure of motion. A place where women do not feel the constraints of time, patriarchy or land ownership. There is an open-heartedness here that may seem easy or straightforward, but is neither.
For the woman artist, this question becomes a matter of life and death. Your survival as an artist is on institutions feeding you, nourishing, nurturing you. Of course, in our world, when you are at the intersection of multiple marginalisations, institutions rarely offer the necessary support.
After the jelly moulds and architecture, comes the installation Blue Grid Test. A collaboration with Polish artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan, this immersive sound installation had me thinking about blue in multiple ways…
Ultramarine, Cobalt, Midnight, Oxford, Cerulean, Lapis Lazuli, Navy, Indigo, Sapphire, Cambridge, Royal, Sky, Prussian, Egyptian, Woad
Tuesday is pale blue, no other day of the week is blue for me
Songs have rhythms and melodies
Patterns have shapes and colours
Can we visualise a song through a series of globally disparate patterns and open up a conversation about similarity and difference?
This room begins the submersion process which continues as we walk through large paintings about the sea and then into the wide sea. Refugees, the migrants drowning in our sea, were at the forefront of my mind when, in the final room, I was confronted by Le Rodeur, a series of paintings which takes a particular historical crime as its launchpad. As Historian Ella Mills summarises:
On 6th April 1819, 36 enslaved West Africans on board the illegal French slave ship Le Rodeur had weights tied to their legs and were thrown into the Atlantic. The accepted reason for this was purely financial. Two weeks into the ship’s ‘Middle Passage’, crossing from Bonny on the West African coast to the French Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe, an outbreak of ophthalmia spread among all but one of the 22 crew and 162 enslaved Africans, making them temporarily or permanently blind. Any ‘deficiencies’ among the Africans meant they could not be sold, so, due to the ship’s insurance policy covering any losses for slavers, they became more valuable dead than alive. Nearing Guadaloupe, Captain Boucher ordered the deaths of 36 people whose blindness was deemed permanent. The only reason we know of the deaths of these documented but unnamed Africans is an article in a medical journal of 1820.
Himid approaches this story obliquely, even strangely, and the effect is mesmerising. The figures are surreal, as if existing in limbo, and are dressed impeccably. Each painting asks what it means to humanise through representation, to name when we don’t have names. Crucially, the paintings resist easy answers.
Underlying the works is the question of trauma. Namely, how to represent trauma and dislocation in a way that is not traumatic or traumatising. How do we stay true to the experience of trauma without re-traumatising? In a sense, this is the definition of tenderness. It is as though Himid is intuiting a formula, a curve which takes us to (personal, historic, future) pain and back from it, showing how, when you change the container, you change everything.
In the largest room, I felt that this is a ballroom demanding to be filled; we are the dancers, the players. Or, we are in the water. Blue, in many of its allusions, is everywhere. I would love it if the programming contained plays, dramatic monologues and opera to fill this space. I also felt some key context was missing at times. There is an exhibition pamphlet but the information was a little on-the-nose and didn’t seem to get past the splendour of the art’s physical display. In her interviews, you get a sense that artmaking happens in kitchens; world history in a recipe or teacup. Though there are several paintings of Black women town planning, making art, Black men sewing – always as a collective – I’m not sure I saw reference to Himid’s own practice which involves a studio where she is happy to be interrupted by friend and colleagues. I would have liked to have entered that studio here and experienced this particular form of artmaking in person rather than only represented in the artwork.
We enter the final room where we are confronted by an abandoned bus stop. Back to reality. Have we left the space changed?
Himid’s approach has always emphasised the longing in belonging. Here, her approach is tender, gentle and welcoming. Her focus has is on an encounter that embraces. One of the strands I feel more than see in Lubaina Himid’s work is what it is like to be earnest and open hearted in a(n art) world that often favours ironic posturing. Himid’s work has always dismantled low and high art. Her work here dismantles the notion of universality and particularity. A meditation on time, memory and systems that is built on multiple, interconnected layers of unbelonging. There is the personal layer, Himid’s own personal story, moving from the island of Zanzibar to this island as a baby. There is the battle for a Black woman artist’s existence within a racist art world. There is the battle of being a Black woman in a racist world.
This brings us to certain mainstream white art critics who missed the entire point, mistaking Himid’s tenderness for neutered politeness. Laura Cumming and Jonathan Jones (both of whom write for The Guardian) had the art critic equivalent of a temper tantrum because they expected and desired spectacle from Himid (see Mathew Jones’ tweet). Jones’ review is particularly bad. Apparently Jasper Johns and David Hockney are allowed to explore the relationship between time and space, but not Himid. This despite the fact we cannot understand time and space without encountering (whether we know it or not) the western, capitalist project of transatlantic enslavement. Perhaps Laura and Jonathan were disturbed by the show because it imagined an otherwise; a place in which Black women are centred, and not them. As an aside, writing ungenerous, ostensibly erudite (but actually facile) comments and getting paid for it (tired) seems to be Jones’ modus operandi: Modern art whuuut? Contemporary art whoooo? First, the first thing you learn about the word critic is that it doesn’t mean criticising. Second, your job is contemporary art, Jonathan; stop pretending you’re so aloof from the artists you write about. It is the responsibility of The Guardian’s art editors to maintain quality control, so an email to one of the Tom, Dick or Harry editors is in order. Hettie Judah’s article is much more sensitive and expert if you’d like to read another review.
Anyway.
Go see Lubaina Himid at the Tate. The exhibition is time and mind bending, at times tender, and wonderfully clear-eyed, playful. Accept the invitation and join the masquerade…