“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY, and some suggestions for our organisation, with proposals for immediate and long-range tasks,” November 26, 1974, Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.
Rasheed Araeen, “Preliminary Notes for a Black Manifesto,” Black Phoenix, no.1 (Winter 1978): 11.
By “our” I mean something gesturing towards the universal, with “particularity” as dialectical counterpoint—following Araeen’s own idiosyncratic dialectical thinking/practice. I'm grateful to Kylie Gilchrist for discussion of Araeen’s explicit use of dialectics in his work at this time.
See Peter Osborne, “Existential Urgency: Contemporaneity, Biennials and Social Form,” Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 24, no. 49–50 (2016).
I am grateful to Migrants in Culture for introducing me to un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos →.
Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (New Left Books, 1977), 13.
See Ian Sanjay Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire (Verso, 2021).
AFD cofounder Cecilia Vicuña, for instance, quickly realized that “the real thing” was happening back in Latin America. Vicuña, conversation with Courtney J. Martin at the symposium “Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy (1974–77),” February 2, 2023 →.
See, for instance, Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso, 2006); or the April 2021 issue of Chimurenga Chronic, “imagi-nation nwar—genealogies of the black radical imagination in the francophone world.”
we are the expatriates of a future world, drawing for David Medalla’s performance Tatlin at the Funeral of Malevitch, 1976. This is not to suggest that these artists should not be included in national canons but to emphasize the expansive horizons their work demands.
Dom Sylvester Houedard, letter to Jun Terra, February 16, 1975; Vicuña, conversation with Martin.
Nadine El-Enany, Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020).
Charles Hustwick, conversation with the author, June 22, 2023.
Guy Brett, “Internationalism Among Artists in the 1960s and 1970s,” in The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, ed. Rasheed Araeen (Hayward Gallery/South Bank Centre, 1989), 112. Exhibition catalog.
Richard Cork, Everything Seemed Possible: Art in the 1970s (Yale University Press, 2003).
Cork, Everything Seemed Possible, back cover.
Naeem Mohaiemen, “‘I wanted to take the documentary form and jar it,’” The Observer, September 22, 2018 →. Emphasis added.
The present text is no exception to this, and it is in good company. Chimurenga’s panoramic forays have focused on numerous seventies-era exhibitions and artist groups, including “The International Art Exhibition for Palestine” (1978) in Beirut; post-’68 artists of the Salons de Jeune Peinture in Paris; and the Japan, Asian, African and Latin American Artists’ Association (established in 1977), among others. More broadly, the cultural politics of the decolonization era and legacies of the 1955 Bandung Conference have been explored through exhibition projects including “After Year Zero: Geographies of Collaboration” (2013) and “Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned” (begun in 2019). Other recent exhibitions have centered “solidarity”—for instance “Actions of Art and Solidarity” (2021), curated by Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) and organized in collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; and “Solidarity Spores” (2020), Asia Culture Centre, Gwangju.
Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, ed. Bojana Piskûr (Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, 2019), 5. Exhibition catalog.
Peter Osborne, “Living with Contradictions: The Resignation of Chris Gilbert,” Afterall, no. 6 (Autumn–Winter 2007) →.
Quoted in John A. Walker, Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain (Tauris, 2002), 212.
Sanjukta Sunderason, Partisan Aesthetics: Modern Art and India’s Long Decolonization (Stanford University Press, 2020). I am grateful to May Adadol Ingawanij for her recommendation to look at Sunderason’s work.
The group included numerous nonartists and hosted a range of “nonart” activities, such as writing, cooking, homeopathy, poetry, education, political meetings, and organizing.
United Nations General Assembly, “Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order,” May 1, 1974 →.
Tariq Ali, The Coming British Revolution (Jonathan Cape, 1972); Patrick Cosgrave, “Could the Army Take Over?,” The Spectator, December 22, 1973. See also Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (Faber and Faber, 2002), in particular chapter thirteen on the formation of far-right “civil defence group” Civil Assistance, involving various establishment and ex-military figures.
See “THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY.”
Cecilia Vicuña, “Organized Dreaming,” trans. Christopher Winks, in Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos/Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2013), unpaginated.
David Medalla, interview by Steven Thorn, 1977, Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.
Jun Terra, correspondence with the author, July 19, 2022 and April 28, 2023.
Patrick D. Flores, “A Changing World,” in Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98, ed. David Teh and David Morris (Afterall Books, 2018), 269 and 278.
In Brett’s account, “the paintings convey a great sense of adventure in the large-scale collective undertakings of irrigation systems, terracing climbing the mountains, the density of healthy crops. And at the same time delight in the small scale—the workers’ tea cups, a book, a newspaper, shoes left behind to enter the soggy field—material details of real life.” G. Brett, “China’s Spare-Time Artists,” Studio International 189, no. 973 (January–February 1975), 14. See also Peasant Paintings from Hu county, Shensi Province, China (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976).
J. Terra, “‘From the Masses to the Masses’: The Art of David Medalla,” unpublished manuscript, 1972.
Caroline Tisdall, “Chinese Agitscape,” The Guardian, December 15, 1972.
Adrian Rifkin, “The Chinese Exhibition at the Warehouse Gallery,” Artscribe, no. 5 (February 1977): 17.
Tisdall, “Chinese Agitscape.”
Jill Drower, 99 Balls Pond Road: The Story of the Exploding Galaxy (Scrudge Books, 2014).
Medalla, “The Exploding Galaxy,” 1968. Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.
Their trip was financed by film producer, director, and underground patron Sylvina Boissonnas, who also supported other members of the Galaxy with travel to India and various other projects. I am grateful to Eva Bentcheva for sharing her research on John Dugger’s experience of this time.
Drower, 99 Balls Pond Road, 339.
Medalla, “On the Elements of Democratic and Socialist Culture,” March 3, 1972; John Dugger, “On Participation,” February 22, 1972. Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.
Artists for Democracy: El Archivo de Cecilia Vicuña.
Stephen Pusey, correspondence with the author, April 27, 2023.
“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY.”
“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY”: “Historically, English imperialism systematically destroyed or denigrated the national cultures of its colonies; how did the English imperialists launch cultural aggression against the culture of the working classes at home in England?”
“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY”: “Among the non-English people who work in England, what effective roles do their different national cultures play in resisting the cultural penetration of the English bourgeoisie?” The unrealized exhibition also planned to involve cultural-political groups working in Britain such as Cinema Action, Red Ladder Theatre Company, and May First Movement, among others.
Accabre Rutlin, communication with the author, July 6, 2023.
Blackman does not appear in Lynn MacRitchie’s footage of the opening, although not all parts were captured on film. Lynn MacRitchie, correspondence with the author, July 27, 2023.
Chapeltown News, no. 18 (July 1974) →; and Imruh Bakari, conversation with the author, June 15, 2023.
For a detailed account and documentation of the performance, see Rasheed Araeen, “Paki Bastard,” Black Phoenix, no. 2 (Summer 1978).
Lynn MacRitchie, conversation with the author, October 7, 2020.
Cabral’s lecture was published as Our People are our Mountains: Amílcar Cabral on the Guinean Revolution (Committee for Freedom in Mozambique, Angola and Guiné, 1972).
See Amílcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture,” in Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings (Monthly Review Press, 1979).
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 129.
“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY.” Emphasis in original.
“THE AIMS OF ARTISTS FOR DEMOCRACY.” Emphasis in original.
Drower, 99 Balls Pond Road, 44–45, which describes the scene around London’s UFO club.
The planning document includes a call to AFD members from working-class backgrounds to lead study meetings and seminars with a view to “informing all members on the working class struggle in England.”
Paul Overy, “Other Stories,” Art History 20, no. 3 (1997): 494.
AFD were awarded £250 in 1976 for “The Hand in Life and Art,” and five hundred pounds in 1977 for “Vernacular Art in Camden.” A request of five thousand pounds per annum to rent a new premises following the group’s eviction from Whitfield Street, made directly by Medalla to Peter Bird, assistant art director at the Arts Council, was refused. See Arts Council of Great Britain, “Value for Money: Thirty-Second Annual Report and Accounts 1976/77”; and Peter Bird, letter to Lord Esher, May 27, 1977, Guy Brett collection, Tate Archive.
Adjusted for inflation, the total is equivalent to around five thousand pounds in today’s money. The proceeds of the sale were a contentious issue for some time, with Lord Escher and Roland Penrose earlier insisting that the donation be made to Amnesty International. The circumstances around the subsequent decision to divert the funds to MIR was the basis of a bitter split in the founding AFD group.
Ann Jones, No Truck with the Chilean Junta!: Trade Union Internationalism, Australia and Britain, 1973–1980 (ANU Press, 2014), 50.
This is an edited version of a text that is part of the publication Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77, published in 2023 by Afterall in association with Asia Art Archive; the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; documenta Institut; and the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg.