I Make Art

Description

All contemporary artworks function in a discursive margin–periphery framework validated and sustained by Western hegemonic practices, its colonial history and capitalist output and uptake, its sense of continuity. Globalised contemporary art discourses dislocate and appropriate counterflows of decolonial criticism, piling up the ever same and the newly acknowledged in rehashed canonising discourses. This layering opens up and calls into necessity interrogations of spaces of in-betweenness, calling into being the revenant. As an African woman artist of Indian descent, I make art not only within a specific situation where ‘history’ and ‘education’ has to be overhauled, but where works still only function in relation to a validatory discourse of art. Colonial mimicry – which Homi K Bhabha locates between the simultaneous success and failure of the mimetic gesture, its ‘almost-but-not-quite-ness’ – opens up oscillating spaces of in-between the closeness of mimesis and its slippage of ‘authenticity’.

I Make Art restages John Baldessari’s I am Making Art (1971) following his 1970 Class Assignments (Optional) to ‘Imitate Baldessari in Actions and Speech. Video’. Spoofing the ephemerality and spontaneity of this 1970s video artwork not only acknowledges its iconic status, but – like all works in the Western art canon – reiterates its hegemonic status against which later works are compared, contrasted, evaluated. Baldessari’s gestural playfulness, copied, repeated and appropriated by a South African woman artist, becomes a strained signifier of accumulated otherness in its repetitious shorthand indexing of Western art categorisations: I Make African Art, I Make Contemporary Arab Art, I Make Craft, I Make Feminist Art, I Make Performance Art, I Make Digital Art, I Make Protest Art, I Make Interdisciplinary Art, I Make Deconstructive Art.

The first edition of this catalouge was published on the occassion of the PhD exhibition I Make Art by Sharlene Khan at Goldsmiths College, London in 2014.