British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

If someone says 'Oh, it's so decorative', that's a negative. But to me, it would be one of the greatest compliments someone could pay my work.  Now the decorativeness has an edge, and the dung plays a big part in that. [Chris Ofili, 1995]

Chris Ofili's 2003 Within Reach was Britain's most unashamedly, uncynically decorative showing in the Pavilion since the building's pre-war (and pre-British Council) reliance on the Pre-Raphaelites. John Millais, for example, showed at the first group show in 1895. 'Primarily through John Ruskin's promotion', Margaretta Frederick Watson writes, his painting, along with Hunt's and Burne-Jones's, 'was seen as the true 'Art of England'.'

Ruskin, the critic and social theorist after whom the British Pavilion was nearly named in 1909, had argued in The Stones of Venice (1851) that the city was a warning for England not to slump from naval power to seaside holiday resort. 'We are still undegenerate in race; a race mingled of the best Northern blood', he told his Oxford audience as Slade Professor of Fine Art in 1870, and for England to remain 'mistress of Learning and of the Arts', he continued,

this is what she must do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able.

When Ofili – a British artist of Nigerian descent – visited Zimbabwe in 1992, he 'was constantly struck by the remnants of colonialism, particularly the inequalities of black and white', according to Stuart Morgan. The country had once been named Rhodesia in honour of Cecil John Rhodes, an Imperialist with views often linked to Ruskin's. Ofili was there on a British Council Scholarship:

They give you a studio for two weeks and all your materials, and they say, 'Just do what you want, and come back with something for a show.'

He advertised what he brought back on the plane in a quarter-page advert in Frieze magazine -

ELEPHANT SHIT

On one level it's simply funny; on another it invites the confused viewer to think about the various things might be meant by the black writing on in a white space, and the strawy brown lump it represents. Europeans have a long history of mutilating African elephants for their ivory, for instance, and this reverses the dynamic: an elephant shitting on the viewer from a great height, tusks intact. In 2002 Ofili donated a painting to Whipsnade, the animal sanctuary he now sources his elephant 'donations' from, continuing the Fair Trade dynamic.

'Shit' is also a word laden with significance in hip-hop, the African-American frame of reference which is as important to him as art history, and the music that fills his studio as he paints. Cultural references in Pre-Raphaelitism were 'allusions' – to the Bible, Shakespeare, and Arthurian legend, the components of their vision of identity – in Ofili's art, though the Biblical influence stays, they're 'samples'. He described Shit Sale (1993), for which ELEPHANT SHIT served as a kind of advert, as a 'sample' of the African-American artist David Hammons' Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983). Where Hammons had riffed on the American public's innate distrust of a black man loitering on a pavement by attempting to sell them snow balls, Ofili spread his souvenirs out on a piece of fabric at Brick Lane market in East London, and in Berlin, 'just showing them, like a museum would.' He found the response telling:

They'd look at me. They'd look at the shit. They'd look at me. Then it would get to them. So it was a cycle of looking in which they put me together with the shit and created an image from those two.

Shit Head (1993) carried this idea into attaching locks of Ofili's own hair to the lumps, with all the voodoo connotations that entails, and after one passer-by assumed he was actually selling cannabis, he made Shit Joints (1995) – Rizla papers and shit. As they often do in hip-hop, samples lay on samples of other samples, and the Union Blacks he hung outside the British Pavilion in 2003 incorporated elements of Hammons' African-American Flag (1990), a doctored stars and stripes based on the Pan-African colours the black nationalist Marcus Garvey had suggested - red, green and black for African blood, natural resources and skin. Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987) can also be heard in the background; another form of sample, this time with the aim of exposing the banality of a skinhead slogan.

These colours spilled out into a Pavilion completely redesigned with the black British architect David Adjaye. They were painted on the walls, laid in the carpet, and incorporated into Afro Kaleidoscope, a glass sculpture filtering the brilliant Venetian light that streams through the skylight of the main room. A version of this appeared in the large paintings Afro Love and Envy (2002-3), Afro Red Web (2002-3), Afro Jezebel (all 2002-3) and Afro Apparition (2003) as a ball of dung in the sky, covered in coloured map pins in the same energetically-jagged pattern.

The new paintings were also informed by a very different attitude to music, than that of, say, Ivon Hitchens or Ceri Richards. As he told the African-American curator Thelma Golden, they can be seen in light of the mixture of intellect and feel in jazz -

with Afro Love and Envy I was trying to push the red as far as it needed to go in certain areas before it needed to flip to a green. It's a bit like when you are listening to a great harp solo in an Alice Coltrane track, where the strings are really gliding along through the track, and then Pharaoh Sanders might play a horn that kind of interrupts things, and then it falls back into the harp. In a way, what I'm trying to say is that it's about a feeling for a colour, rather than what the colour might necessarily represent.

This painting is of the scale and format he'd become associated with in The Upper Room (1999-2002), an immersive installation, designed with Adjaye, of thirteen paintings: twelve monkey apostles, and a monkey Jesus, propped up on balls of elephant dung. The Tate, who controversially acquired it in 2005, quoted Ofili explaining

monkeys may be godless but […] rhesus macaques display a deeper degree of compassion for each other than do human beings'

Even the title of Ofili's Biennale held out more hope than that, as he explained in the sign-off for the accompanying catalogue:

Peace, love and unity.

Within reach.

The paintings sustained a vision of a kind of African Eden, featuring a couple of lovers, 'imagined human beings in a painted world', taken, Ofili legend has it, from a dry-cleaners' coathanger. Gestures like the lines centring on the kiss in Afro Red Web (2002-3), make it the centre of the universe, but 'love is a blissful state, but it's not a utopia', he's said. The linen surfaces were inlaid with map pins, creating the sense of a huge, flat, piece of jewellery, a colonialist prospector's map, or a voodoo doll. Smaller gouaches and watercolours took the opulent beauty as far as inlaid gold leaf.

As the repeated 'Afro' prefix suggests, the aesthetic is a stylised identification with the 'Black is Beautiful' ideas of the Sixties and Seventies, which seemed, Ofili told Thelma Golden, 'really relevant again.' As Kodwo Eshun points out, this is a politicised sense of beauty:

a 9 inch kinky Afro or a 12 inch natural Afro compelled you to hold your chin up, extend your neck muscles, crane your head back and look down your nose with a regal, intimidating bearing.

His verdict on the show was that 'the paintings are happy here.' The critics agreed; Richard Dorment wrote 'usually an oasis of cool understatement, for once those lovely rooms [of the British Pavilion] pulsated with hot colour and blissfully sensual imagery.' In any other year it would have won a prize, Sarah Kent added, articulating what many, in the context of the Iraq War, had come to think:

The British and American pavilions by far the best in the Biennale, but anti-war sentiment seems to have influenced the prize giving.

This seems ironic, given the show's 'post-Imperialist sensibility', to borrow a phrase from the British Council's then Director-General, David Green. It proved Ofili correct in his belief that 'the paintings stay the same, only the meanings shift through time and place and between people.'

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources
Chris Ofili, Within Reach [Venice exh. cat., 3 vols.] (London: British Council, 2003).

Peter Aspden, 'Does this look like the best way to sell Britain?', Financial Times Magazine – Weekend, 26th July 2003.

Will Bennett, 'Elephant dung artist gives a little back', The Daily Telegraph, 22nd February 2002.

Elleke Boehmer, ed., Empire Writing (Oxford: OUP, 1998).

Sophie Bowness & Clive Philpot, eds., Britain at the Venice Biennale 1895-1995 (London: The British Council, 1995).

Richard Dorment, 'Britain turns up the heat', Daily Telegraph, 18th June 2003.

Richard Dorment, 'The chosen one', Daily Telegraph, 14th June 2003.

Kodwo Eshun, 'Plug Into Ofili', Chris Ofili [exh. cat.] (London: Southampton City Art & Serpentine Gallery, 1998).

Sarah Kent, 'Venice, vidi, vici', Time Out London, 2nd- 9th July 2003.

Paul D. Miller, 'Deep Shit: An Interview with Chris Ofili', Parkett 58 (NY & Zurich: Parkett Publishing, 2000), pp. 164-169.

Stuart Morgan, 'The Elephant Man', Frieze, Issue 15, March/April 1994.

Marcello Spinelli 'Decorative Beauty was a Taboo Thing', Interview, London, 23rd March  1995.