The erotic is a measure between the beginning of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings ... The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects, born of chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.
Audre Lorde1
Pleasure is so close to ruinous waste that we refer to the moment of climax as 'little death'.
Georges Bataille2
Rotimi Fani-Kayode created a photographic world in which the body is the focal site for an exploration of the relationship between erotic fantasy and ancestral spiritual values. In his artistic project he found the freedom to use the complexity of his experience as a resource to embark upon a journey into emotional states of being in which it is hard to tell where sexuality ends and spirituality begins. What he brought back from his travels to such nocturnal spaces are glimpses into a world illuminated by the ancient enigma of something so violent, so marvellous and so tragic as to be unrepresentable: the human experience of ecstasy.
Fani-Kayode outlined his artistic credo in ‘Traces of Ecstasy', the 1988 essay that followed Black Male/White Male, his first published collection of photographs, brought out in 1987.3 While many were beguiled by the multiple adjectives with which he sought to name his identity – a modern African artist, a metropolitan black gay man, a key figure in Black British photography – the irony is that Fani-Kayode's life and work were never about the comforts or securities of mere identity. His kaleidoscopic vision, filtering African and European elements through his camera's optic nerve, and his passionate pursuit of carnal visual pleasure, reveal instead a heightened encounter with the emotional reality of the flesh in which it is precisely the ego's ecstatic loss of identity that is celebrated. The body is transfigured in Fani-Kayode's pantheon of smallpox gods, transsexual priests and desirable black men in a state of sexual frenzy’4 to create a new, plural beauty out of what Wilson Harris would call ‘the ruined fabric of the shattered human’.5
Born into a prominent Nigerian family in the prelude to political independence, Fani-Kayode grew up across three continents – Africa, Europe and America – during the three decades from the 1960s to the 1980s that saw the world transformed by the emergence of the postmodern and the postcolonial. His biography was thus shaped by the characteristic diasporic experiences of migration and dislocation, of trauma and separation, and of imaginative return. Looking at how his aesthetic developed out of his response to the events that shaped his life, we can see that sexuality was central to the discovery of his artistic roots in the realm of the sacred, for the joyful affirmation of his love of life, which flows throughout the work, is testimony to the redemptive powers of eros.
Given the brevity of his life – and the sheer generosity of his prodigious output in a career that spanned a mere six years – we can apprehend the beauty of Fani-Kayode's artistic gift by recognising the cultural mixing that constituted it. Remembering his partner and lover, Alex Hirst reveals much about how the experience of diaspora shaped Fani-Kayode's overall approach to life, and how it cut into his critical self-fashioning as an artist when he writes that:
It is important to know that he kept faith with many of the values that his background had given him. Leaving Africa as an exile at the age of eleven meant that he was haunted for the rest of his life by a desire to get to grips with certain mysteries he had glimpsed there: in the traditions and beliefs of his ancestors. He tried to make sense of them in the context of a dislocated world, Brighton and school in the English countryside was obviously quite different from that of Lagos and Ibadan. 6
From this viewpoint, we can see how diaspora entailed a rupture between 'myself and my origins', as Fani-Kayode put it,7 opening up an abyss out of which he found the catalyst for his creativity in his commitment to same-sex passion. His paradoxical emphasis on finding one's freedom in the loss of one's origins, which are to be refound only through a journey into the body's ancestral memory, critically locates him in a space that produces 'a kind of essential conflict through which to struggle to new visions’.8 Fani-Kayode's self-representation thus foregrounds his position as an outsider for whom such a liminal place is valued for the new practices of freedom that it makes possible.
The dynamic of rage and desire was central to Fani-Kayode's vision, and formed the mainspring of his unique aesthetic. To perceive the connections between his different roles as a transcultural animateur, we need to see how this dynamic shaped his art of photographic transfiguration, in which the body becomes a site for translation and metaphor – transporting meanings across codes of racial, cultural and sexual difference; how the camera becomes both a lamp and a mirror – emitting light into the unknown and reflecting the transience of voluptuous flesh; and how the act of representation itself shifts from the moment of documentary truth to the alchemy of the photographic darkroom.
Describing the circumstances of their life together, Hirst brings us to the body and soul of Fani-Kayode's lifework when he shares his memories of the precise point at which Fani-Kayode tapped into the sources that gave shape to his project:
We lived in various parts of South London, marginalised, short of money and leading a life that was 'bohemian', not because we particularly wanted to but because that was how it turned out. Timi got a part-time job as a photography tutor. He had begun by then to work exclusively in black and white This was partly to do with cutting down on expenses. The result was far-reaching, however, in that it coincided with the start of his exploration of the relationship between erotic fantasy and ancestral spiritual values.9
Like the abiku, or spirit-child, who narrated Ben Okri's novel, The Famished Road (1991), Fani-Kayode was with us for only a short time. Although his work was under-recognised, because it was simply ahead of its time, and its development was cut short by his untimely death, we can see how the generosity of his vision contributed many wide-ranging responses to the transvaluation of cultural difference, which has become one of art's defining imperatives at the end of the twentieth century.
The Artist as Boundary Rider of Cultural Difference
In African traditional art, the mask does not represent a material reality; rather, the artist strives to approach a spiritual reality in it through images suggested by human and animal forms. I think photography can aspire to the same imaginative interpretations of life.
Rotimi Fani-Kayode10
Moving on the cusp of multiple differences, Fani-Kayode made decisive interventions at the intersection of at least three forms of cultural renascence. Although he enjoyed only one solo exhibition during his lifetime - 'Yoruba Light for Modern Living' (Riverside Studios, 1986) – his presence in numerous group shows, including 'Sacred and Profane Love' (South West Arts, 1985), 'Same Difference' (Camerawork, 1986), 'Misfits' (Oval House, 1987), 'Transatlantic Dialogues' and, with Alex Hirst, 'Bodies of Experience' (both at Camerawork, 1989), serves to outline the diversity of milieux through which his practice travelled.
As a founder member and first Chair of Autograph - the Association of Black Photographers - Fani-Kayode assumed a role that, in the ferment of the 1980s Black British arts scene, articulated the collective assertion of an autonomous agenda in the face of institutional incomprehension of the forces that were bringing about signal realignments in critical visual culture. His highly influential role in leading the break away from documentary realism, and forging new aesthetic trajectories within the constructed imagery that is also associated with his contemporaries Joy Gregory, Dave Lewis and Roshini Kempadoo, was reflected in the third issue of Revue Noire, December 1991. It was also evident in key issues of the journal Ten.8, including Bodies of Excess (1991) and Critical Decade [1992) – and in the spectacular culmination of the audio-visual anthology of black British photography, Rencontres Au Noir, first exhibited at the Aries Photography Festival in 1993, and subsequently shown as a video.
At the same time, Fani-Kayode's homoerotic nudes found a favourable reception in the context of metropolitan gay culture. From his early experiments in colour photography such as the Nude with Raffia Headdress (c. 1986) to the publication of Black Male/White Male by the Gay Men's Press,11 Fani-Kayode was an important figure in the shifts that resulted in the flourishing queer culture of the late 1980s. He was a contributor to Square Peg, and a contemporary of Grace Lau, Gordon Rainsford and other lesbian and gay artists inhabiting a space influenced by such precursors as filmmaker Derek Jarman and impresario Andrew Logan. His integral involvement in the dissemination of post-liberationist gay culture was reflected in the selection of his images in the artwork for Jonathan Dollimore's ground-breaking work of queer theory, Sexual Dissidence (1991).12 Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (1990) by Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta,13 is also emblazoned with The Golden Phallus (1989), one of Fani-Kayode's most important collaborations with Alex Hirst.
Taken together, Fani-Kayode's contributions to the transatlantic formation of a black gay cultural diaspora encapsulate his role as a migrant translator. Washington DC's black gay scene was particularly formative during his time in the US – Black Male/White Male was dedicated to 'Toni and the spirit of the Clubhouse, DC'. Of the three strands that weave across his body of work – portraits, nude studies and staged tableaux – his intimate portraits of poet Essex Hemphill, of activist Denis Carney, of musician Blackberri and of poetry-performance diva Assoto Saint, all speak of his involvement in the making of a vibrant transnational culture that was also being shaped by these artists, who were his friends. Along with the films of Isaac Julien, Marlon Riggs and Pratibha Parmar, or the photographs of Sunil Gupta and Lyle Ashton Harris, his work heralded the arrival of a new cultural politics of difference, which was not without its attendant public controversies.
In 1987, an image depicting the model Michael from Black Male/White Male was chosen for the cover of Tongues United, a poetry collection featuring Isaac Jackson and Dirg Aarb-Richards as well as Essex Hemphill and Assoto Saint.14 The book became the inspiration for Marlon Riggs' breakthrough film of 1989, Tongues Untied, which borrowed the title in a trope of intra-diasporic translation that amplified the intertextual volume by which all cultures create themselves through acts of citation and reiteration. While enriching the literary, cinematic and photographic cultures of the Black Atlantic, Riggs' film became embroiled in the 'culture wars' when a clip was appropriated as an example of publicly unacceptable imagery by rightwing demagogue Pat Buchanan in the 1992 US Presidential elections. If this suggests that art always exceeds its author's intentions, the underlying dynamics enable us to understand why Fani-Kayode's work was itself under-recognised: because its reception was bedevilled by a superficial comparison with the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.
Hirst writes that Fani-Kayode's approach to his work 'was political, but it had no manifesto beyond an anarchic desire to create something . . . that would shake the established view of the world, his own included', thus elucidating Fani-Kayode's critical perspective on what has become known as identity politics. However, the further claim that Fani-Kayode 'was not interested in being seen as a" gay" or "black" artist and especially not as a "black gay" artist'15 seems to minimise the overdetermined character of the work's reception by different audiences, and also to sidestep the subtle interplay within the work of both minoritising and universalising tendencies, which powerfully subvert the logic of mutually exclusive either/or binaries.
To see how Fani-Kayode used the hybridity of his experience as a starting point for doing something new, we should locate his specific techniques of visual interculturation in the broader art-historical context of modernism and colonialism. Here, we encounter a triangular rather than dichotomous matrix, of whose labyrinthine twists and turns Fani-Kayode was all too well aware. At the apex of this triangular relationship lies the vexed question of the mask and the historical realities that are masked by the dominant narratives of modern art in its encounter with the 'primitive'. Picasso's discovery of the aesthetic wonders of traditional African masks, fetishes and other artifacts in the storerooms of the Trocadero museum is a commonplace, but from an African point of view, such artifacts epitomised mere traditionalism and it was rather the Western aesthetic of verisimilitude that inaugurated a break in African modernist consciousness.
And there is a third strand to the story, namely the shared fascination with the image of African masks among visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Palmer Hayden, in his Fétishes et Fleurs (1926); Malvin Johnson's Self-Portrait (1938); and Lois Mailou Jones, with her Fetishes (1938), each followed up on Alain Locke's 1925 essay, 'Art of the Ancestors’,16 which suggested that an alternative apprenticeship for the New Negro could be found by turning to the formal discipline of African masks, which themselves had entered into diaspora consciousness mostly through the mediums of Western museum collections and ethnographic photography.
When he announced that, 'It is now time for us to reappropriate such images and transform them ritualistically into images of our own creation',17 Fani-Kayode spoke from his intimate knowledge of this intercultural history. Commenting on the residual dominance of modernist primitivism in the forms of ideological fixation that determined the institutional reception of his work, he delineated the complex conditions in relation to which he positioned his art.
Aware of sexuality as the hidden conduit of cultural criss-crossing between Africa and Europe, Fani-Kayode found a subversive line of flight out of the racial fetishism that dominates Western perceptions of the black body. Because his relationship to his Yoruba sources was mediated by the ruptures of diaspora, his perspective on the body was thoroughly interpenetrated by the inseparable aspects of hybridity and homosexuality that placed him as a critical outsider to the comforts of self-same identity.
While his central interest in the body as a boundary rider between material and spiritual worlds is one shared and explored by other contemporary diaspora artists - in sculptural works such as Rene Stout's Fetish #2 (1988), or Alison Saar's Lazarus (1988), and in the photographic I-Traits (1989) series by the Jamaican-Chinese artist, Albert Chong - it could be said that Fani-Kayode's reframing of the body owes more to the insights afforded by the subversive potential of the homoerotic. On this view, Stuart Hall's lucid observations clarify the interstitial approach by which Fani-Kayode's vision pierced into the hyphenated spaces of the in-between:
The black male body becomes the locus for a number of intersecting planes of meaning. The hieratic, carefully ritualised posture of the figures, their central framing, the deliberate use of costume, body decoration, and above all, masks, reference Fani-Kayode's exploration of his Yoruba background . . . Yet this 'African' plane of reference is, almost immediately, subverted by other meanings and languages. The symbolism hovers between a public or collective, and a more private and personal, set of codes.18
These 'other meanings and languages' come from Fani-Kayode's mastery of both mainstream Western modernism and the subcultural codes of modern gay iconography. Elements from the latter (such as cropping and posture) clearly inform his more formalistic nude studies like Knave of Spades (1987) or Joining of Equal Forces (1987). while the mise-en-scene in a work such as White Bouquet (1987) articulates a call-and-response reworking of Manet's Olympia (1863), which through a point-by-point reversal of the racial and gendered positions in the original composition, also reveals the light touch of Fani-Kayode's sense of humour. Viewed from behind, a white man offers flowers to a reclining black man: not only are the power relations of mistress and servant liquidated by homosexual sameness, but Olympia's defiant gesture of withholding has been subverted, or perverted rather, into an act of giving - the gift of flowers now defines the relationship between the two figures rather than the outward gaze towards the viewer that provoked the initial outrage in response to the painting.
Although the man in the pictures is often Fani-Kayode himself, the work transcends the autobiographical or confessional as his mode of framing foregrounds the ‘I’ of embodied experience over the 'me' of a finite self. What results in the play of condensation and displacement is the carnivalesque of the mask, highlighted in such works as Ebo orisa (1987) and Farewell to Meat [Carnavale] (1987). By de-polarising the ego's boundaries of Self and Other, the mask seeks not to conceal an identity but to liberate heterogeneous elements from the psyche and allow them to communicate with each other as the self plunges through the limit-experience of sexual pleasure into the realm of the undifferentiated – t he primal chaos out of which eros emerges.
As Stuart Hall continues:
The faces are all 'masked'. In his most compelling erotic image, Technique of Ecstasy, the face, concentrated in desire, is finally hidden from the viewer's gaze. Fani-Kayode 'subjectifies' the black male, and black sexuality, claiming it without making it an object of contemplation and at the same time without 'personifying' it. Because the masking is not a compositional trick, but an effect drawn from another iconographical tradition, the truncation of the body condenses the visual effect, displacing it into the relation between the two figures 'at rest' with the weight, the specific gravity of concentrated sexual pleasure, without translating them into fetishes."19
In place of the sharply defined subject/object dichotomies that we encounter in the scopophilic force of Robert Mapplethorpe's work, in which the black body is fetishised to ward off the threat of the ego's loss of control, in Fani-Kayode's phantasia the viewer's look is cruised, caressed and seduced in the masquerade by which the protection of the gods is requested. It is the representation of such an act of propitiation that recurs across his tableaux when the converging sightlines brought to bear on the body create the sensation of 'hovering' between two worlds.
In this structure of feeling we can trace what Nathaniel Mackey would call a 'fugitive aesthetic', borne of a restlessness that refuses the illusion of certainty in its search for ontological renewal l.20 Fani-Kayode's conjuring of erotic fantasy and ancestral memory thus moves us into a place that is beyond psychology – because it de-territorialises the ego's boundaries – and into a place beyond good and evil, which is to say, a somewhere other than that circumscribed by Christianity.
Communion: Love will tear us apart
The diagnosis does not establish the fact of our identity by the play of distinctions. It establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recovered origin, is this dispersion that we are and make.
Michel Foucault21
For thinkers like George Bataille, sexuality is seen as but one route into the realm of the sacred – itself a word derived from the verb 'to sacrifice'. While religious codes seek to regulate those human experiences that culminate in ecstatic ego-loss, in which selfhood is given up and torn apart in what could be called 'the ecstasy of communication', the disciplinary apparatus of sexuality in the modern West can be seen as a secular enterprise in which the residual elements of ancient sacrificial rites transmute into the symbolism of sado-masochism.
Following the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis as it passes 'beyond the pleasure principle' to discover the primacy of masochism as self-shattering jouissance, Leo Bersani has argued that, 'the self which the sexual shatters provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power'.22 The alternation of top and bottom that is ritualised in extremis in sado-masochism merely makes visible the subject's oscillation between self-abolition and psychic tumescence, which Bersani regards as the polar matrix of eroticism, We thus come back to the group of works bequeathed by Fani-Kayode to discover that, however hard we look, we cannot find the masochistic portrayal of the crucified body that lies at the origins of Christianity.
Although the accoutrements of sado-masochism are present in such works as Epa Burial, Punishment and Reward, and Bondage (all 1987), the Christian belief in the redemptive power of pain is markedly absent from the work. The symbolism of the cruciform figures centrally in the work of numerous black male artists of the African diaspora. When we consider its recurrence, from Aaron Douglas' The Crucifixion (1927), through David Hammons' Injustice Case (1970), to the skinless, skeletal bodies that inhabit the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, it may seem that in a world that has tragically condemned black men's bodies to be overburdened with more symbolic meanings than any mortal could ever hope to bear, the sacrificial offering of the cruciform body expresses a belief that freedom can be found only in death.
In his last work and testament, posthumously entitled Communion (1995), Fani-Kayode worked with Hirst, who died in 1994, to bring back to us a vision of redemptive renewal that is powerfully and almost unbearably charged with the feeling of having been executed in the presence of death. And yet in honouring the mortality of flesh, these visions from another world23 emit an aura of calm - 'the tranquillity of communion with the spiritual world' – that arises from the energies of the Yoruba spiritual value of ashe, a term that historian Robert Farris Thompson translates for us as 'cool' when he writes:
The notion of coolness in Yoruba art extends beyond representations of the act of sacrifice and acts or gestures of propitiation. So heavily charged is this concept with ideas of beauty that a fine carnelian bead or a passage of exciting drumming may be praised as 'cool'.24
A man masked with a bird-like visage looks out to us, his penis suspended on a piece of string. The Golden Phallus, which is part of the Communion suite, brings together each of the elements that are illuminated by the' cool' glow of Yoruba values, which flow through the code-switching of Fani-Kayode's secular translation. The work is at once an ironic expression of how black masculinity has been weighed down within the West with the symbolic duty of being rather than merely having the phallus. As Essex Hemphill put it in his poem, Black Machismo:
When his big black dick is not erect
it drags behind him,
a heavy, obtuse thing, his balls and chains
clattering, making
so much noise
I cannot hear him
even if I want to listen.25
It also encodes an icon of ancestral memory, which offers the antidote that preserves the possibility of beauty, for the ororo bird signifies the presence of Osanyin:
To the degree that we live generously and discreetly, exhibiting grace under pressure, our appearance and our acts gradually assume virtual royal power. As we become noble, fully realising the spark of creative goodness God has endowed us with – the shining orara bird of thought and inspiration – we find the confidence to cope with all kinds of situations. This is ashe. This is character. This is mystic coolness. All one. Paradise is regained, for Yoruba art returns the idea of heaven to mankind wherever the ancient ideal attitudes are genuinely manifested."26
Without seeking to romanticise the issue of Fani-Kayode's complex relationship to his Yoruba origins, we can appreciate how his chosen 'techniques of ecstasy' open a portal into the universal mystery of the indissociable connection of sex and death. Numerous homosexual artists have visited this liminal place within their work, and perhaps the more relevant precursors to Fani-Kayode's exploration of the genealogies of unconscious erotic phantasy in the coils of ancestral memories and their associated mythologies would be the Trinidad-born Geoffrey Holder, whose Adam (1980) reworks the Biblical narrative of Genesis. Another would be the American photographer George Platt Lynnes, whose Birth of Dionysus (c. 1942) derives from a reinterpretation of Greek myth in the light of his surrealist configuration of the male nude. In all three instances, it is a quest for sources of renewal that leads to the erotic, which Audre Lorde once called 'a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognised feeling'.27 Invoking Eshu-Elegba, the Yoruba god of indeterminacy, Fani-Kayode shares with us the hope of rebirth that his life and his work embodied:
Esu presides here, because we should not forget him. He is the Trickster, the Lord of the Crossroads, sometimes changing the signposts to lead us astray. At every masquerade (which is now sometimes called Carnevale, a farewell to flesh for the period of fasting) he is present, showing off his phallus one minute and crouching as though to give birth the next. He mocks us as we mock ourselves in masquerade. But while our mockery is joyful, his is potentially sinister. In Haiti he is known and feared as Baron Samedi . . . And now we fear that under the influence of Esu's mischief our masquerade children will have a difficult birth or will be born sickly. Perhaps they are abiku – born to die. They may soon return to their friends in the spirit world, those whom they cannot forget. We see them here beneath the caul of the amniotic sac or with the umbilical cord around their neck or wrist. We see their struggle for survival in the face of great forces. Esu's phallus enters the brain as if it were an asshole. He drags birth from the womb by means of a chain gangling from his own rectum. These are examples of his 'little jokes'. These images are offered now to Esu because he presides here. It is perhaps through him that rebirth will occur.28
1 Audre Lorde, 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power', in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: The Crossings Press, 1984), p. 54.
2 Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality [Erotisme: mort et sensualité] (London: John Calder, 1962).
3 Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Black Male/White Male (London: Gay Men´s Press, 1987).
4 Fani-Kayode, ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, Ten.8, vol. 2, nº 3 (Birmingham:1988), p. 70.
5 Wilson Harris, quoted in Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966-1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon, 1992), p. 174.
6 Alex Hirst, ‘Unacceptable Behaviour: A Memoir’, in ‘Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989), A Retrospective’, exhibition brochure (London: 198 Gallery, 1990).
7 Fani-Kayode, 'Traces of Ecstasy', op. cit, p. 39.
8 Ibid.
9 Hirst, op. cit.
10Fani-Kayode, 'Traces of Ecstasy', op. cit., p. 38.
11 Founded by Aubrey Walters and David Fernbach, key activists in the UK gay liberation movement of the 1970s.
12 Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: From Augustine to Wilde, from Freud to Foucault (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
13 Tessa Boffin and Sunil Gupta (eds.), Ecstatic Antibodies: Resisting the AIDS Mythology (London: Rivers Dram Press, 1990).
14 Martin Humphries (ed.), Tongues United (London: Gay Men's Press, 1987).
15 Hirst, op. cit.
16 Alain Locke, 'Legacy of the Ancestral Arts' (1925). in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro New York: Athenaeum, 1977).
17 Fani-Kayode, op. cit." p.39.
18 Stuart Hall, in 'Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955-1989) A Retrospective', op cit., [emphasis added].
19 Ibid.
20 Nathaniel Mackey, 'Other: From Noun to Verb', Representations, no. 39 (Berkeley: Summer 1992).
21 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge [L'archéologie du savoir] (London: Tavistock, 1974).
22 Leo Bersani, 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', October, no, 43 (New York: Winter 1987). See also, Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
23 Fani-Kayode, op. cit., p, 38.
24 Robert Farris Thompson, 'Black Saints Go Marching In: Yoruba Art and Culture in the Americas', in Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy, (London: Vintage, 1983).
25 Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (New York: Plume, 1992). pp. 72-3.
26 Robert Farris Thompson, op. cit.
27 Lorde, op. cit., p. 53.
28 Fani-Kayode, 'Abiku - Born to Die', in Kate Smith and Kate Love (eds.). The Invisible Man, exhibition brochure (London: Goldsmiths Gallery, 1988).
Originally published in Rotimi Fany-Kayode & Alex Hirst, edited by Mark Sealy and Pascale Martine St. Leon, Paris: Editions Revue Noire, 1997. © Kobena Mercer. Reprinted with the kind permission of the author.
Kobena Mercer is a writer and critic living in London. He is the editor of Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, and Discrepant Abstraction (all published by The MIT Press and inIVA), author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.
Rotimi Fany-Kayode, Golden Phallus - © Autograph APB. Thanks to Indra Khanna for providing the image.
|
