ABSTRACT
Rasheed Araeen was born in Pakistan, but has lived in London since 1964. He is an artist and writer, and is the author of Making Myself Visible (Kala Press). A retrospective of his work was held at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1987. He is editor of Third Text and curated the exhibition ‘The Other Story: History of Afroasian Artists in Britain’, held at the Hayward Gallery in Dec.-Jan. 1989/90. Black Audio/Film Collective was established in London in 1983. The collective has worked on a range of projects from industrial videos to feature documentaries, including Expeditions, a tape-slide on race and colonial iconography, and Handsworth Songs, a 16mm film documentary on race and civil disorder in 1980s Britain, winner of seven international awards, including the British Film Institute Grierson Award in 1987. The collective also works in media education and as a media consultancy. It is currently producing features and documentaries for Channel Four Television. Guy Brett is the author of Kinetic Art (Studio Vista, 1968) and Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (GMP/Heretic, 1986). He was formerly art critic for the London Times, and the Visual Arts editor of the London weekly City Limits, and has contributed extensively to the art press since the early 1960s. He has written interpretive essays on Lygia Clark, David Medalla, Helio Oiticica, Susan Hiller, Rasheed Araeen, as well as texts on popular art in Chile, China, and Africa. He lives in London. Lynne Cooke is an art historian and art critic who teaches at University College London. She was written widely on contemporary art, and sculpture in particular, and has organized exhibitions including In Tandem: The Painter-Sculptor in the Twentieth Century for the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1986. Annie E.Coombes is a lecturer in the History of Art and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, London University and a co-editor of The Oxford Art Journal. She has published articles in Art History, The Oxford Art Journal, Art Monthly, and Women’s Review, and has lectured widely in America and Europe. Kenneth Coutts-Smith was born in Copenhagen in 1929, of British parents, and spent most of his youth in Britain. He trained as a painter and studied with Leger, Szabo, and Picasso in the 1950s and continued to paint throughout his life. His better-known contribution to art was as a critic and historian, as co-founder and associate editor of Art and Artists in 1965 and author of The Dream of Icarus and Dada (both published in 1970). He moved to Canada in the 1970s where he lectured, wrote, and researched on the sociology of art, Inuit art, and the demise of the avant-garde, amongst other things. He died in 1981, in Toronto, of cancer. Jimmie Durham is a Cherokee artist, poet, and political activist, who was born in Arkansas in 1940. During the 1970s he was the United Nations representative for the American Indian Movement. From the mid-1980s he was editor of the New York-based Art and Artists newspaper, during which time he was also involved in gallery exhibitions of his sculpture, in co-curating shows of Native American art, and in solo performances in several New York theatre venues, including La Mama Theater, Franklin Furnace, and
P.S.122. His work has recently been shown in Matt’s Gallery, London and Orchard Gallery, Northern Ireland. Durham’s essays and his book of poems, Columbus Day (West End Press, 1983) have been translated into several languages. He currently lives and works in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Jean Fisher is an artist, a regular contributor to major international art magazines, and has written numerous critical essays on the work of British, Irish, and American artists. Her specialities are contemporary art and cultural studies. She has cocurated exhibitions in New York and London devoted to extending the debate on cultural difference to include the particular situations of contemporary Native American artists. She lives in New York and London, and is currently teaching Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. She is also associate editor of the quarterly journal Third Text. Edgar Heap of Birds was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1954, and is a Cheyenne Arapaho artist. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts, at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia; and the Royal College of Art, London. He has lectured extensively in universities where he was artist-in-residence. An important part of his work is curating touring exhibitions of contemporary Native American art. An exhibition of his recent work was shown at Matt’s Gallery, London in 1988. Susan Hiller is an artist whose work is exhibited internationally. She lives and works in London. Signe Howell is professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo where she also is director of the University’s Ethnographic Museum. She studied at the universities of London and Oxford and has previously taught in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among a hunter-gatherer society in Malaysia and in an eastern Indonesian society. Among more recent publications are Society and Cosmos: Chewong of Peninsular Malaysia (1989[1984]), and an edited volume Societies at Peace: anthropological perspectives on peace and violence (1989). She has a longstanding active interest in contemporary art. Anna Howells studied anthropology at London University and is presently involved in a medical research project in London. Jill Lloyd is an art historian and critic specializing in twentieth-century German art. She studied in London and Berlin and currently lives and works in Paris, where she co-directs the magazine Art International. She is the author of German Expressionism: Primitivism versus Modernity, published by Yale University Press in 1991. David Maclagan was born in 1940 and currently lectures on art and psychotherapy at Sheffield University and Birmingham Polytechnic. After reading history at Oxford, he studied painting at the Royal College of Art and taught for ten years in art colleges before training in Art Therapy at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London (1979-80). He worked for five years in a therapeutic community under the National Health Service. He has written articles on myth, imagination, and psychopathology, and has carried out research on Antonin Artaud, Adolf Wölfli, and Grace Pailthorpe. He is the author of Creation Myths (Thames & Hudson, 1977). Daniel Miller is a lecturer in Material Culture within the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He has conducted fieldwork both as an archaeologist and as an anthropologist in Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, India, and London, and is currently working in Trinidad. His most recent book develops a theory of the nature of
consumption as a social process and is published as Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Basil Blackwell, 1987). Other publications include Domination and Resistance, edited with M.Rowlands and C.Tilley (Allen & Unwin, 1988); Artifacts as Categories (Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Ideology, Power and Prehistory, edited with C.Tilley (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Christopher Pearson is editor of The Adelaide Review, the largest circulation arts magazine in Australia. His other journal articles in this field include an analysis of millenarianism in the Land Rights Movement and Black Power politics. They are to be found in the 1982 and 1983 issues of Labour Forum (Australia). Desa Philippi was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1960 and studied Art History at the universities of London and Leeds. Based in London, she is now a freelance writer and associate editor of Third Text magazine. Imants Tillers is an artist who lives and works in Sydney. He exhibits regularly in Sydney, New York, and Zurich. His work has been included in several exhibitions, notably Documenta 7 in Kassel, 1982, and Avant Garde in the Eighties at the Los Angeles County Museum, 1987. In 1986 he represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and his work also featured in the television series State of the Art: Ideas and Images in the 1980s, shown in England and West Germany. He has recently finished a commission for the Dome of the Federation Pavilion in Centennial Park, Sydney. A survey of his work from 1978 to 1988 was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, 1988. Christina Toren has a PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research on symbolic space and the construction of hierarchy in Fiji combines anthropological methods and theory with those of cognitive psychology, in which she gained her first degree from University College London. Her interests centre on the relation between individual cognition and social processes. She lectures in the Department of Human Sciences, Brunel University.
