Third Text

16 August 2024

Paul O’Kane

‘Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere’, Hayward Gallery, London, 18 June — 1 September 2024

Tavares Strachan, Black Star, 2024, installation view in ‘Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere’, Hayward Gallery, London, 18 June – 1 September 2024, photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery

As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past
strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History: IV’ ^[1]

London’s Hayward Gallery is large, prestigious and famously brutalist. Much of it is inherently dark and slightly sombre, but in the title of his show Tavares Strachan promises ‘There Is Light Somewhere’, and so we enter trusting the artist to reveal it. Strachan’s installations command space with a sense of pride and authority that trigger respect from the viewer and ignite admiration for the artist. He takes the cavernous Hayward in his stride, deploying works in diverse media from a twenty-year span that always look cohesive. Several works dated 2024 appear to have been made for this show, and on reflection one stands out as most memorable of all. It captures our attention as we rise from the gallery’s crepuscular ground-floor into its higher level where light cascades through a huge panoramic window. Outside, one of the Hayward’s flat roofs is flooded with water to give the illusion of supporting a four- or five-meter-long model of a twentieth-century steamship. An outdoor breeze gently ruffles the water’s surface, giving life to the illusion as a few manufactured bubbles add to the sense of motion and direction. This turns out to be South and slightly East, or ‘towards Africa’ as the accompanying information tells us. This piece, titled Black Star (2024), represents twentieth-century Black leader and activist Marcus Garvey’s vision of the Black Star Line, a Black-owned and run shipping company, which would, or could (it remained a failed, probably sabotaged speculation) develop ethically profitable business and cultural trade between Africa and its diaspora in the USA. Though Garvey’s ambitious venture did not prevail, and while his many audacious contributions to twentieth-century debates remain controversial, Strachan here rescues this episode from the shadows of history and offers an affirmative representation of Garvey’s vision, providing the present with a charming rendition of a failed twentieth-century dream.

This reshuffling of history, in ways that bring new hope and energy to the past, is typical of the works in Strachan’s show, and much more of this productive revisionism is on display. It can be found in the artist’s spectacular Six Thousand Years (2018), where an almost overwhelming array of niche micro-knowledges, pertaining to the backstreets of Black history, has been gleaned, laid out on pages, framed in Perspex and built into high, luminous walls that surround and detain us, as if within a book that has become an environment. All this towering information – too much to digest and most of it too high to reach and read – forces us to trust in those pages most conveniently available at eye level, but this denial of our curiosity might also lead us to desire access to The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility (2014–18), a massive tome, closed, bound, elevated and displayed at the centre of the installation like the holiest of books and said to contain the same information found on the surrounding walls.

Tavares Strachan, The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility, 2014–18 (centre), and Six Thousand Years, 2018, installation view in ‘Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere’, Hayward Gallery, London, 18 June – 1 September 2024, photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery

The complexity, scale and grandeur of these two combined works – Six Thousand Years and The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility – might now urge us to step back and assess the whole, noting the form, rhythm and pattern of the assembled text and images and appreciating the gleaming white context provided by the pages. Although Strachan’s organisation might appear meticulous and conscientious, it nevertheless exposes the fact that history remains stubbornly resistant to order. His works invoke Gustave Flaubert’s novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881), in which the titular protagonists make repeated Quixotic attempts to contain and organise all the knowledge made available to them as privileged dilettantes at the heart of late nineteenth-century French modernity, only for them to see their every system return them to contemplations of chaos. In truth, neither the expansive book format, nor even the infinitely rhizomatic internet, will ever effectively grasp, pin down and make sense of history, no matter how ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ our taxonomic technologies become. And so, while Strachan’s own encyclopaedia here might echo the original, absurdly over-rational French-Revolutionary Encyclopédie ­– initiated by Voltaire and his peers – it tends to turn the Enlightenment aspiration to ‘know all’ inside-out and thus into a folly. By presenting a unique and idiosyncratic archive, which contains much that has been ‘invisible’ and has gone unknown, it inevitably implicates all that yet remains unknown, or is, in fact, unknowable.

Tavares Strachan, Intergalactic Palace, 2024, installation view in ‘Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere’, Hayward Gallery, London, 18 June – 1 September 2024, photo by Mark Blower, courtesy of the artist and the Hayward Gallery

On the upper level of the Hayward, Strachan invites us to enter Intergalactic Palace (2024), a kind of thatched hut or communal hall. This is not the first time that the artist has built a room for us to enter, and in which to learn and study, but this time it is not so explicitly or visibly an archive. At first sight it seems more of a place for assembly and shelter, in which to rally and convene a community. At the heart of its welcoming structure stands a podium surmounted by a DJ’s decks and mixer, apparently sprayed with a unifying coat of metallic paint but looking as though it is cast in gold-patinated bronze. Either way, the decks and mixer are rendered inoperative, silent and still, becoming more symbolic as a result, and inevitably referring to the crucial part played by music as the lifeblood of Black cultural identity. To illustrate this, torn and weathered fragments of sheet music, including examples of jazz, soul, blues and reggae, are hung around the underside of the shelter. They contribute a slightly abject element to this otherwise upright and assertive exhibition, but also move us, as only music can, when we recognise titles of much-loved songs and the names of their illustrious performers or composers.

Lingering in this space, one can hear, occurring at regular intervals, a looped sound montage played through discretely mounted speakers. The tone is enhanced by an acoustic effect caused by the shape of the sheltering dome, and as the soundtrack builds, a series of ring lights turn on, one by one, like stars appearing in a night sky. They brighten the shady space and provide one more – this time literal – way of illustrating the promising title of Strachan’s show. The soundscape features recognisable voices and classic clips of significant events in Black cultural history, making further affective impact on us as memorable words and familiar timbres convene in the air like so many sonic monuments. These famous voices might then turn our attention to a decorative railing that circles the DJ’s podium and is augmented with the sculpted heads of Black cultural and political heroes. Several of these figures appear as busts in other parts of this show, some rendered approximately life-size, others massively enlarged, like fragments of a once decimated culture now returning to stand tall. Others appear only in the form of the disembodied voice recordings described above. The noble roll call includes Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Marcus Garvey, Haile Selassie, King Tubby, Steve Biko, Mary Jane Seacole, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mohammed Ali, Gil Scott Heron, Sydney Poitier, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Bob Marley, Josephine Baker and Derek Walcott, among others. Together, they populate a Black pantheon that is celebrated and consolidated everywhere in this show. 

Ultimately, Strachan uses ‘There Is Light Somewhere’ to demonstrate that history is a workshop, where there is always work to be done. History is never just a record kept or a story told. Artists and commentators at the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, who no longer feel contained by the superficial ‘contemporary’, nor blinkered by the rhetorical promise of modern progress, might feel freer than ever today to discover, play and experiment within a history once described by Nicolas Bourriaud as ‘the last continent to be explored’. ^[2]  While this metaphor might seem to perpetuate a colonial model, its image of history as a place remains useful, as it encourages us to occupy, inhabit, liberate and decolonise history itself, to exploit its seemingly limitless resources in order to help us build a more fair and just society. And this hopeful vision provides another glimpse of that elusive ‘light’ in Strachan’s title, towards which he points a way.

^[1]    Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Schocken, New York, 1985, p 255

^[2]    Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, Tate Publishing, London, 2009, p 15

Paul O’Kane is an artist, writer and senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL). Paul published his book History in Contemporary Art and Culture with Routledge in 2023. Since 1997, he has published numerous professional pieces, including articles, essays, reviews, and a group of artists’ self-published books via eeodo publishing. His writings have often focused on Black and Asian artists working in London, appearing in Third Text's refereed journal, in Third Text Online and numerous other platforms, including Art Monthly. He occasionally writes an online art writing Blog titled ‘Only You’. Paul's long-running seminars ‘Technologies of Romance’ and ‘A Thing of the Past?’ (on history in contemporary art) contextualise the impact of today’s ‘new’ technologies on art, life and culture, while using history to interpret and theorise our times. In 2009 Paul completed a PhD on the theme of ‘Hesitation’, writing as an artist in the department of History at Goldsmiths College, University of London.