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It's Cheap to Run
| At school I thought
the word Jewish was slang for stingy. Nigger was the name of my Gran's
dog. I owned a golliwog. One time I even copied the picture of the
golliwog off the jam jar as a boyhood homage. We told a lot of racist
jokes, sexist ones too. In fact, cruelty was an essential ingredient
of most of our fun. And if anyone was particularly stupid, there was
always someone ready to quip that they were 'as thick as a nigger's
lip'. Racism, sexism and bigotry were everywhere, and yet I didn't
know anyone who regarded themselves as racist, intolerant or prejudice.
This is a common enough tale, I guess, but the irony - if that's not
too soft a word for it - still strikes a chord for me. Shaheen Merali
is the artist of that chord striking over and over, making the entire
culture reverberate to its sound. Popular culture is a special kind of carrier of social prejudice; it conceals the values it perpetuates. Racist sit-coms, for instance, are well known for converting hate into charm - and it is impossible to tell whether the hate has been subverted or affirmed in the process. Merali shakes the familiarity off these popular representations of race and hands them back with knobs on. That is to say, he picks up the almost imperceptible racial cues embedded in culture and re-presents it as racial. In previous work Merali adopted the privileged setting of the vitrine, or showcase, as both a high-brow artistic convention and the site of the museum's display of ethnic material and racist ideology. Putting the cultural detritus of commodity popularisations of racism in the place of tribal and ritual objects collected by anthropologists and other colonial visitors transforms the vitrine into a wishing well in which Merali throws the currency of racist populism as a gift to the gods. The glass case thus becomes a screen on which otherwise overlooked racist content is projected. Life size black paper constructions of iconic black individuals such as Naomi Campbell falling off high heels at a Vivien Westwood catwalk show take Merali's interventions out of the vitrine and into the social relations of the public space itself. These flat, hybrid accumulations of scraps are elegant representations of the racist desire to witness the fall of black celebrity. The comic effect of falling, of pratfalls and slapstick generally, has always been spiked with malice and aggression, but the particular content of that ill-will has rarely been articulated with the precision that Merali's racial inflexion brings to it. Abstract truisms about the universality of sin and so forth (commonly referred to in the anti-universal terminology of colour - 'everyone has a dark side', for instance) and our glee in the face of others' misfortune, are made trenchant in the specific political context drawn out by Merali's black paper collages. Not just because of the pleasure in the fall of its content, though: the black paper collage itself occasions a giggle because it contains a pinch of violence in its formalised erasure. Merali's enormous inflatable golliwog, likewise, elicits nervous laughter, but this time because the cuddly icon of the domestication of the colonial other has returned in the form of a giant. Merali's golliwog does not merely reveal the secret racial content of popular pleasures, however, his sedition is as seductive as the culture he unravels. |
FEATURE
| Previously published and written by Dave Beech |