and safety guidebook that
complete the piece. To a
moody Stawarska-Beavan’s
soundtrack of sighing
machines and groaning
technology, the reciting Himid
manages to turn factory prose
into something unexpectedly
poetic. “Allow for short
breaks,” she suggests breathily
to the soft toing and froing of
a saw. “Work from
underneath,” she whispers,
suggestively, to an image of a
pulley. Masculine instructions
are being repurposed with
feminine rhythms.
Even better is the show’s
masterpiece, a 2020 work
called Blue Grid Test in which a
mysterious frieze of household
fragments — bits of furniture,
some books, bits of piano, a
banjo — are arranged along
the wall and held in place by
a line of blue decoration that
stretches around the room
like a horizon at sea.
No one mentions slavery
or shipwrecks, but they pop
immediately into your
thoughts. No one mentions
music, but still you feel its
presence as the band plays on
and the vessel sinks. All the
time Himid’s deep and
seasoned voice is intoning
variations on the word “blue”
in French, German and English.
This is art working in the
manner of some jazz improv.
In her earlier life Himid
studied theatre design, and
the way she uses sound to
imply profound stuff without
ever describing it and to blur
one experience into another
seems to me to involve the
use of deep-seated theatrical
skills. The result is a show
in which all the bits feel
intimately connected like
a giant installation.beautifulburstingwithcreativity
At the top I mentioned
some caveats. What are they?
Well, m’lud, I have a problem
with Himid’s paintings. They
comprise a large chunk of the
display and work well enough
on a smaller scale, notably
with the black faces painted
inside a set of secret drawers,
or the so-called Feast Wagons,
old-fashioned wooden carts
on which she has painted a
cast of foreign beasties, like
those lethal spiders that pop
up occasionally in bunches
of imported bananas.
But the folk art
simplifications that bring
directness and urgency on
a small scale look inelegant
and clunky when transferred
to the big history paintings
that complete the event. On
an enlarged scale the folky
figures look wooden rather
than charming. The acrylic
colours bring moods that
belong on posters. And the
fluency of her thinking hits
the immovable rock of her
stiff wrists.
These, though, are small
caveats. Everything else here is
bursting with ideas and packed
with fine moments. cLubaina Himid, Tate Modern,
London SE1, until Jul 3What was
once explicit
is nowadays
implied
Frieze frame Above: Blue
Grid Test (2020). Left: Man
in a Shirt Drawer (2017-18)© LUBAINA HIMID28 November 2021 21