Non-Synchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling's Map Paintings

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small axe 41 • July 2013 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-2323445 © Small Axe, Inc.

Nonsynchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling’s Map Paintings Dorothy C. Rowe

Born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1936, a resident of London in the 1950s, and dividing his time between London and New York since the late 1960s, Frank Bowling is one of the foremost artists of his generation. As a pioneer of abstraction during the 1970s, his work as both a painter and critic for the New York–based Arts Magazine is of singular importance to the historiography of the visual culture of the “black Atlantic.” In particular, the six essays he wrote for the magazine between 1969 and 1971, in which he meditates on the notion of “black art,” reveal the ambivalent complexities that inform his aesthetic practices as both theorist and painter, or what Kobena Mercer has aptly referred to as Bowling’s “discrepant abstraction.”1 It is the nature of the “discrepancies” in Bowling’s work that will be the focus of this essay. If catastrophe can be defined as “an event producing a subversion of the order or system of things,” how is “catastrophe” embedded in Bowl-ing’s approach to abstraction?2 The so-called map paintings produced during the same period as Bowling’s writings for Arts Magazine offer a rich field of inquiry in this regard. Cartographic outlines of South America, Guyana, Africa, and Australia haunt a series of abstract color works produced between 1967 and 1972, works that Mercer has eloquently described as enacting “a ritual of post-colonial mourning.”3 After mixed critical reception of the works in 1971, they were put into storage for over thirty years, the subsequent critical histories, receptions, and interpretations of the “map”

1 See Kobena Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling,” in Kobena Mercer, ed., Discrepant Abstraction, Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2006).

2 Oxford English Dictionary (2013), s.v. “catastrophe.”3 Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 201.

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paintings offer a resonant example of what Marxist German philosopher Ernst Bloch has referred to as “nonsynchronicity” (Ungleichzeitigkeit). While Bloch’s analysis of the paradox of the “syn-chronicity of non-synchronicity” (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen) in Heritage of Our Times (Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 1935) was specifically directed at a critique of the anomalies and confusions of the catastrophe of fascism as an economic and sociocultural formation, the suggestive legacies of his cultural philosophy extend well beyond those immediate historical circumstances.4 What is particularly redolent about Bloch’s philosophical position for contemporary cultural analysis is its nonlinear approach to time and its optimistic stance toward the possibilities for utopian futures. For Bloch, utopian possibilities could be retrieved from past forms by reactivating them in the pres-ent for the future, a strategy that may be particularly revealing in a reconsideration of the critical historiography of Bowling’s work.5

The issue of time in relation to the production and reception of artworks is one that also informs Leon Wainwright’s recent book, Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean, which takes as its focus the dislocated positions of a number of postwar artists from the Caribbean diaspora, including Bowling. For Wainwright, Bowling’s nonsynchronicity as a postcolonial British Guianese artist enter-ing the fray of the London art scene in the 1960s is a less than utopian experience. His trenchant analysis of the conditions of British pop posits it as a style founded on pride in “its belatedness and provincialism in the face of American popular culture and abstraction-focused modernism.” How-ever, as he explains, “The celebration of [British] Pop is consequently underscored by an energetic insistence on the centrality of the trope of the ‘outsider,’ and on Pop as a story of spatio-temporal alterity made good. Yet it has involved the rejection of further ‘outsider’ identities, Bowling’s not least among them.”6 Wainwright specifically argues against Mercer’s consideration of Bowling in terms of a “diaspora subjectivity,” suggesting that Mercer’s analysis “might apply just as aptly to the artists of Pop” and that Mercer “has mistaken the hybridity and syncretism associated with Pop for an ‘alternative vocabulary of diaspora.’ ”7 While Wainwright’s argument has much to commend it in terms of its overall account of Bowling’s sociocultural position in relation to the discourses of British pop art (which he aptly considers alongside Britain’s waning imperial power after empire), his argument with Mercer is, I believe, wrong footed. Mercer’s attention to Bowling’s aesthetic is intended to recover a specific vocabulary for discussing the critical significance of the map paint-ings in the present rather than accounting for their marginalization in the past, important though that certainly is. Furthermore, the map paintings are postpop works and situate Bowling beyond

4 For more on this, see David C. Durst, Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany, 1918–1933 (New York: Lexington, 2004), 1–32; and Caroline Edwards, “Fictions of the Not Yet: Time in the Twenty-First-Century British Novel” (forthcoming).

5 See Ernst Bloch, The Heritage of Our Times (Oxford: Polity, 2009). As Anson Rabinbach has explained, the discomfort of Heritage of Our Times for Marxism was that Bloch focused not on the unmasking of the ideological illusion of fascism per se but rather on what could still be salvaged from what remained positive in the ideas that fascism had misappropri-ated. See Anson Rabinbach, “Unclaimed Heritage: Ernst Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times and the Theory of Fascism,” New German Critique, no.11 (Spring 1977): 11.

6 Leon Wainwright, Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 67–68. Wainwright is referring here specifically to the “outsider” status of working-class Yorkshire-man David Hockney and British ruralist Peter Blake in their relationship to existing institutional London establishments such as the Royal College of Art.

7 Ibid., 69; Wainwright quotes Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 185.

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the local context of Britain and British art, clearly testified to in both their content and their explicit engagement with American abstraction. They remain pivotal works in Bowling’s stylistic transition from figuration to abstraction and speak to his unique transnational circum-Atlantic identity as a Guyanese-born, British-trained artist working between London and New York immediately after the end of empire.8 The complexities of his position as an emerging artist of considerable talent during the 1960s were asynchronous within the contexts of both British institutional racism and the focus on identity politics by Black Power movements in the United States. As a doubly displaced observer entangled in both “scenes,” Bowling responded by producing a remarkable body of artworks and critical writings that are only recently being recovered for both their historical and contemporary resonances.9 As Stuart Hall has commented in his incisive survey “Black Diaspora Artists in Brit-ain,” artists of the black diaspora “stand in a more engaged position in relation to contemporary art practice, in part because the art world itself has been obliged to become more ‘global.’ ”10 It is this shift in consciousness that has opened up new possibilities for the reception of Bowling’s work in the present as no longer part of the “problem space” of racialized exoticism, difference, and iden-tity politics that dominated cultural discourse in Britain and America during the 1960s and 1970s but, rather, a historically engaged precursor of contemporary art’s cultural preoccupation with the uneven territories of geopolitics under the economic conditions of globalization.11

Bowling first visited New York in 1961, and in January 1966 he had his first one-person show at the Terry Dintenfass Gallery in Manhattan. By mid-1966, frustrated by the obstacles facing his career progression in London, he decided to move across the Atlantic and settle in New York.12 Arriving at the Hotel Chelsea in 1967, he immediately entered the most fashionable artistic milieu in the city and took up with friends whom he had met on previous visits, in particular Larry Rivers (1923–2002). Rivers was to prove an important mentor to Bowling, famously lending him the epi-diascope that enabled him to accurately reproduce and transfer the cartographic outlines of South America, Australia, and Africa that constitute the ghostly traces of figuration under the otherwise saturated color-fields of the six large “map” paintings first exhibited at the Whitney Museum of

8 Present-day Guyana gained full independence from Britain only in 1966, after a series of constitutional reforms. For more information, see Colin A. Palmer, Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

9 A selection of the “map” paintings came out of storage in 2003 for display at the 50th International Art Exhibition La Bien-nale di Venezia, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer, 15 June–2 November 2003. They were shown as part of the exhibition Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes. For more detail, see Kobena Mercer, “Frank Bowling’s Map Paintings,” in Gilane Tawadros and Sarah Campbell, eds., Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes (London: InIVA, 2003), 139–150. More recently, the Hales Gallery, Bowling’s London representatives, have exhibited one of the map paintings, Polish Rebecca (1971), at the 2013 Armory Show in New York, the painting’s first display in more than forty years. For more details about the making of Polish Rebecca, see www.halesgallery.com/news/_152/.

10 Stuart Hall, “Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 22. It is also worth recounting that Hall qualifies this potentially overoptimistic statement by acknowledging that “some parts of the globe remain, in this respect, noticeably more ‘global’ than others” (ibid.).

11 For more on contemporary art and the uneven politics of globalization, see, for example, Marsha Meskimmon and Doro-thy C. Rowe, eds., Women, the Arts, and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); T. J. Demos The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2013); Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalization and Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011); and James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharski, and Alice Kim, eds., Art and Globalization (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).

12 For further details, see Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011), 50–52.


American Art in 1971. Until this point, Bowling had been working through the legacies of pop art that he had practiced in Britain while simultaneously turning most of his attention to painting. Ground-ing himself in familiar imagery from his childhood, he began to incorporate a screen-printed image of his mother’s house, also known as Bowling’s Variety Store, as a recurrent figurative leitmotif in his new work. “I used my mother’s store as a window out of which I looked at the world,” Bowling commented in an interview with Richard Doty, a remark that immediately anchors the interpreta-tive possibilities of Bowling’s oeuvre within the structures of psychoanalysis as well as within the more hegemonic parameters of painterly abstraction in which he is usually categorized.13 It is the criss-crossing between abstract formalism, postcolonial critique, and embodied subjectivity within Bowling’s work that is of particular fascination.

Barticabather (1966–67) combines stitched fragments of collage from earlier canvases with the “mother’s house” screen print, all set off against a multicolored ground that resembles thermal images of the earth’s surface focused specifically on Guyana (fig. 1). The eponymous Barticabather recalls the primitivist trope of the exoticized black female body familiar from the modernist construc-tions of Paul Gauguin, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Pablo Picasso, and so on, but the lineage with the European avant-garde stops there. Unlike the figures in the primitive idylls of modernist paintings in which the black female body is an empty signifier for all things exotic, Bowling’s European bather is geographically and autobiographically counterpoised against the blurred map of Guyana behind her and the insistent presence of Bowling’s “mother’s house” jutting in sharply from the left above her head. She is wrested from the pictorial net of the modernist avant-garde and resituated amid the colonial architecture of British Guiana. Similarly, My Guyana (1966–67) takes the European painterly tradition to task once more, this time in the form of homage to Francis Bacon (fig. 2). During his time in England, Bowling had frequently been compared with Bacon; indeed, he had deliberately and self-consciously referenced the older artist, although the actual form of their works was ultimately very different. For Bowling, Bacon had been “hanging round” his neck “like a millstone” during his Royal College of Art days.14 Before leaving London Bowling had painted his iconic Mirror (1964–66), an essay in self-reflection in which he “demonstratively asserted stylistic contradiction as a legiti-mate and effective expression of a complex consciousness.”15 The central self-portrait at the foot of the Royal College of Art’s spiral staircase is a clear reference to Bacon, but it jostles with a host of other contemporary references to artists, including Kenneth Noland, Peter Blake, and Ellsworth Kelly, in what Mel Gooding has referred to as a “dazzling compendium of contemporary painting styles.”16 Nevertheless, Bacon’s legacy was not one that could be lightly shaken off. In My Guyana, the screen-printed, patchworked “mother’s house” does not violently rupture the picture space in the same manner as Barticabather but instead forms a faltering flaglike backdrop to the swaying

13 Frank Bowling, quoted in “Frank Bowling Interviewed by Robert M. Doty, New York, 14 September 1971,” in Robert Doty, Frank Bowling, exhibition catalogue (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1971), unpaginated; see also Kobena Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 199–202.

14 Doty, Frank Bowling, exhibition catalogue, n.p.15 Gooding, Frank Bowling, 47.16 Ibid., 50.


Figure 1. Frank Bowling, Barticabather, 1966–67. Oil and stitched canvas on canvas, 148 × 102 cm. All images courtesy of Frank Bowling.

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Bacon-esque body of a smiling woman (we might assume it to be “mother” about to topple her walking frame, or perhaps she is simply righting herself as she tentatively steps forward, yet it more likely references several earlier paintings titled Beggar, from 1960 and 1962, rather than depicting


“mother” herself).17 There is wry humor in Bowling’s gentle satire of Bacon’s cages, one acknowledged by him as an “urge to parody,” but one that he has also noted his necessity to curb.18 In My Guyana

17 My thanks to Spencer Richards for pointing out the links to the earlier paintings. E-mail correspondence with the author, 22 April 2013.

18 Matthew Collings, “See How They Work: Frank Bowling’s Paintings; Conversation with Frank Bowling RA, January 2006,” in Frank Bowling RA Latest Paintings: A Celebration of His Election to the Royal Academy of Arts (London: Rollo Contemporary Art, 2006), unpaginated.

Figure 2. Frank Bowling, My Guyana, 1966–67. Oil on canvas, 143.5 × 120.5 cm.

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the orange ground bleeds red underneath and to one side of his elderly protagonist, like a river or perhaps another sketchy shadow of Guyana. The inconclusive suggestiveness of Bowling’s ico-nography remains deliberate. It is a distinguishing feature of his work throughout his long career, as is the pictorial vocabulary of landmass and water rendered in fields of brightly saturated color. Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog (1966) continues the compositional split already suggested in My Guyana (fig. 3). The screen-printed motif of “mother’s house” is situated in the upper register of the canvas, but the pictorial reference in the bottom section is now no longer to Bacon but to the abstraction of Noland, with a nod toward the pastel hues of David Hockney.

When viewed together, all three works—Barticabather, My Guyana, and Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog—could be read as a trilogy of personal and professional self-exploration that builds on a genesis in Mirror but extends farther in a series of moves that prepare the ground for the map paintings to follow. The “trilogy” takes us from Bowling’s painterly origins in European modernism (he wrote his graduate thesis on Mondrian, and among his subsequent writings for Arts Magazine was a review of Frank Elgar’s 1968 monograph Mondrian and frequent references to avant-garde modernism in Europe more generally) to his antagonistic painterly indebtedness to Bacon and his subsequent interest in pop, American abstraction, and color field painting.19 Each of these “moves” is in constant visual dialogue with Bowling’s origins in colonial South America, a

19 Many of Bowling’s writings and interviews are available online at the artist’s homepage. See frankbowling.com/category/writings-conversations.

Figure 3. Frank Bowling, Mother’s House with Beware of the Dog, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 143.5 × 120.5 cm.

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peculiar position of “double consciousness” for a postcolonial artist working between London and New York during the late 1960s.

In 1967 Bowling created the first “map” painting, Mother’s House, in which the screen printed “mother’s house” in the upper register is paired with a freehand rendition of the bright yellow shape of Guyana in the foreground. This was swiftly followed by South America Squared (mixed media, silk screen, and acrylic on canvas) in which “mother’s house” is included once again in the upper register, but this time it is a barely visible trace beneath the russet red ground from which Bowling’s first fully formed epidiascope-tracing of the outlined map of South America emerges. Gooding and Mercer have both ruminated on the indexical ambivalence of the “map paintings.”20 A multiplicity of potential interpretations are engendered from their surfaces, from a psychoanalytic reading of them as “a storying of multiple separations from which the ego itself evolves”21 to Bowling’s con-sideration of them as vehicles for the articulation of formal and spatial problematics in abstract painting22 to their potential translation as acts of “postcolonial rewriting . . . directed towards a cri-tique of Eurocentrism” in which “cartographic fragments” of the world (Europe and North America in particular) are “placed under erasure,”23 something that historian Arno Peters was also about to formally propose in his 1973 challenge to the Eurocentric Mercator mapping system of the world that had been in existence since 1569.24 Yet Bowling’s paintings are resonant precisely because they are not overtly “politically declarative” but continue to hint at suggestive possibilities within different historical moments.25 Their interpretative completion is predicated on the nonsynchronous possibilities bestowed by their potential viewing subjects.

The second version of South America Squared was painted shortly after the first, also in 1967, and is a large acrylic on canvas (fig. 4). In this version, the epidiascope-tracing of the outlined map of South America appears as the only figurative motif, centrally “framed” amid a series of surround-ing abstractly colored squares in hues of red. The intimate personal symbolism, or “microcosmic memory signs” (as Gooding has called them), of “mother’s house” have now been fully displaced by the larger “macrocosmic geo-historical signs” of North America’s “other.”26 The dialogue between painterly abstraction and personal origin is retained but opened up onto a much larger field of potential signification. Although the use of maps as signifiers in paintings of the era already had some precedents in the work of Jasper Johns and Larry Rivers, Bowling’s use of the motif was a deliberate and significant differencing from them. Rivers’s Africa II (in five parts) (1963) is divided into five pictorial zones into which several specific visual tropes of “Africanness” are inserted. Were it not for the “camel” section above the three central panels, one could almost read it as an altarpiece, a triptych with a crocodile predella, a central panel, and two flanking “saints” in the form of several African heads on one side and a tribal warrior on the other. The sketchy map of the continent is

20 Gooding, Frank Bowling, 59; Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 200.21 Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 199.22 See Frank Bowling, “Another Map Problem,” Arts Magazine 45 (December 1970–January 1971), frankbowling.com/

writings-conversations/another-map-problem. 23 Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 200.24 See Jerry Brotton, “Equality,” in A History of the World in Twelve Maps (London: Allen Lane, 2012).25 Gooding, Frank Bowling, 59.26 Ibid., 58.


placed in the central “panel” and the word Congo is clearly marked. The letters, though less rigid than the stenciled letters in Jasper Johns’s slightly earlier painting Map, are nevertheless a clear reference to Bowling’s colleague and precursor.

Johns’s 1961 Map (Museum of Modern Art, New York) is a colorful subversion of a map of the United States in which stenciled state names are repeated in several places over a loose application of vibrant paint. Johns’s Map fills the visual field and exceeds it, whereas Bowling’s is a clearly defined silhouette and is neatly confined within its frame. The differences between the two modes of pictorial map-making are telling. Johns’s work appears to be an explosive, pop-inspired celebration of “Americanness”; Bowling’s is a meditation on the personal contexts of his “difference” from it. When asked by Richard Doty in 1971 what antecedents were important to him, Bowling replied:

Figure 4. Frank Bowling, South America Squared, 1967. Acrylic on canvas, 233.5 × 269 cm.

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I met Jasper Johns and he was instrumental in making me feel the situation of being an artist was not just a cul-de-sac, and that one was free to do what one liked. I was living at the Hotel Chelsea at the time and he came to visit me. I was freely drawing map shapes . . . and was very shy about showing my work; he put me at ease by saying he didn’t own maps, that I shouldn’t think twice about going out and buying maps, cutting them up and putting them together again. This attitude influenced me enormously. Shortly after, I went to Long Island and stayed with Larry Rivers. He showed me how to use an epidiascope, after which I made my first tracings of the map of South America, which was holding sway over my imagination after Guyana and Africa. From then on I used ready-mades or tracings.27

Both versions of South America Squared hover between an articulation of the global and the local; they are neither overtly political statements nor intimately self-referential ones, but they do seem to suggest an engagement with the structures of form and the history of recent American painting that also make visible the possibilities of alternative geographical perspectives.

False Start, Bowling’s next major map painting and also dating from 1967, continues his dia-logue with and differencing from Johns (fig. 5). Johns’s painting of the same title was made in 1959, and in many ways Bowling is picking up the new threads of his avant-garde strategy of “reference, deference, and difference” that began with British precursors in London and continued with his newfound American context in New York.28 Johns’s own False Start is another explosion of paint and texture onto which stenciled words of different colors are corralled into ordering the seemingly chaotic disarray but whose arbitrariness is deliberately foregrounded. The deployed linguistic signs match neither the color in which they are rendered nor the colored ground on which they are placed: a red “white” describes a yellow ground, while a white “orange” describes a red ground, and so on. They are what Harry Cooper has referred to as “anti-calligrams” in which “each of the color names rendered in color is a kind of calligram, a fusion of word and image . . . but these fusions declare their divorce rather than their marriage.”29 Formally, Johns’s False Start has decisive links with his slightly earlier Map. Both works are rich with thick impasto, heavy brush strokes, and dynamic patches of staccato color onto which deliberately disjunctive words are stenciled with irony and humor, a visual explosion for the eyes and the mind. The false start belongs to us, the artist, and the object. We are all bound up in its game. Bowling’s False Start, while clearly made in reference to Johns’s, is nevertheless of a very different timbre. The work marks a further departure in the development of his visual iconography, one in which the previous rigid geometric framing devices deployed in South America Squared are rejected for a sea of pure, deep, rich, and aesthetically sublime color. The faintly stenciled outline of South America still structures the otherwise extraordinary field of (blood-) red from which it emerges. The retention and significant foregrounding of Bowling’s ur-continent

27 Frank Bowling, quoted in Doty, Frank Bowling, n.p.28 Griselda Pollock first articulated the concept of a trilogy of moves involving reference, deference, and difference as an

avant-garde strategy of game-play by modernist artists. As she explains, “To make your mark in the avant-garde com-munity, you had to relate your work to what was going on: reference. Then you had to defer to the existing leader, to the work or project which represented the latest move, the last word, or what was considered the definitive statement of shared concerns: deference. Finally your own move involved establishing a difference which had to be both legible in terms of current aesthetics and criticism, and also a definitive advance on that current position.” Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 14.

29 Harry Cooper, “Speak, Painting: Word and Device in Early Johns,” October, no. 127 (Winter 2009): 59.


suggests a further dimension to the concept of a false start, rotating us full circle from a meditation on painting to a meditation on origins to one on the experiences of a first-generation postcolonial artist forging a career in the West after a violent family upbringing in a former British colony.30 The deep blood-red sea in which the outline of South America almost imperceptibly emerges as a ghostly apparition in Bowling’s False Start offers a deceptively simple field for an associatively rich array of potential signification in this extraordinary painting. The work’s title not only is a reference to Johns’s painterly precedent and an exploration of the possibilities of pure color but can be read as a critique on the postcolonial histories of Guyana’s “false start” under British rule and Bowling’s own “false start” as a child who experienced “bad memory” at the hands of his father.31 It is thus a

30 Bowling has frequently referenced the violence of his upbringing at the hands of his father in various interviews, the most recent of which can be found in the pamphlet accompanying his exhibition of works on paper for the Royal Academy of Arts in London. See Andrea Hector-Watkins, ed., Journeyings: Recent Works on Paper by Frank Bowling RA (London: Tennant Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts, 2011).

31 Bowling refers to the idea of the “bad memory” of his childhood in his interview with Richard Doty, published as an exhibi-tion catalogue on the occasion of Bowling’s 1971 Whitney exhibition of the map paintings. See Doty, Frank Bowling, n.p.

Figure 5. Frank Bowling, False Start, 1967. Acrylic on canvas, 162.5 × 129.5 cm.

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work of vast historical, political, and geographic scale, as well as an open wound of deeply personal psychic trauma. Bowling has often commented, “Color for me is very personal . . . I’m adjusting color almost entirely through emotional leads. Color plays an enormous part in my work, if not the most important part.”32

In his complex critical essay “Another Map Problem,” published in Arts Magazine in December 1970–January 1971 and written in response to an article published the previous year by Walter Darby Bannard in Artforum titled “Color Painting and the Map Problem,” Bowling articulates the relationship between the structures of paint and the depiction of maps in a way that reveals much about his own painterly concerns and procedures:

Rand McNally World Atlas, 1967, states, “. . . a map is merely an orderly system of parallels and meridians on which a flat map can be drawn. . . . Most projections are disguised to preserve on the flat map some particular property of the sphere. By varying the systematic arrangement of the latitude or longitude lines, a projection can be made either equal area of conformal. Although most projections are derived from mathematical formulas some are easier to ‘visualize’ if thought of as projected upon a plane, or upon a cone or a cylinder which is then unrolled onto a plane surface, and thus are classified plane (Azinuthal), conic or cylindrical . . .” Much of this is closer to the fact of painting as a process, with its constant drive to reiterate and assert flat-ness, as opposed to the serial implication of topology, which would accept flatness as a given in needing no assertion. Carrying this further, a more precise rendering of near-equivalents with painting as we know it through Cézanne or Mondrian would be difficult to equal.”33

What is at stake for all of the artists he cites in his article, both for the modernists and his contem-poraries, appears to be the danger or “hazards” of slipping into the decorative. For Bowling, the problem is far from straightforward, and he offers a spirited interrogation of the work of his artistic colleagues in relation to what he regards as potential critical misunderstandings of their work. For Bowling, much of the practice of his peers is a logical continuation of the formal discoveries of the modernism of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, not merely a response to the abstract expressionism of their immediate precursors, and he is particularly vexed by the lack of critical acknowledgment of this lineage: “It is interesting that Matisse, who used to map out his work in the sense that his cut-outs were constantly being re-arranged in a kind of charting in search of bal-ance, is never mentioned in connection with any known users of maps such as Johns and Rivers.”34 Citing Max Kozloff’s description of Johns’s 1961 Map as “an unravelled, acrimonious picture” betraying “such an indifference to geography that the United States are swamped in shrill yellows and reds and light blues, without any compensating adjustment of stroke to image,” Bowling adds:

What one sees after, and in, connection with False Start (1959) is the demand of mobile paint structures. Linear space or plane structures, which lend to a one-to-one color articulation, become considerably undermined when color is busier, more natural, more fluid. If the control of False Start is direct and intuitive, the maps with their “stepped” but natural up-and-down,

32 Ibid.33 Bowling, “Another Map Problem,” para. 11.34 Ibid., para. 14.


left-and-right, right-and-left, stuttered diagonal drifts, looping bellying lines, demand (within the rectangle) a certain kind of order that Johns seems unwilling to pursue.35

Herein lies the crucial difference between Johns’s and Bowling’s painterly practices. Johns refuses linear borders in all of his “map” paintings and in False Start; colors jostle against one another, and line is disregarded in favor of form. For Bowling, however, it is the cartographic outlines of the southern hemisphere that “order” and structure his canvases of color. Nevertheless, Bartica Born I (1968) is a much more fluid canvas than the map paintings discussed so far, and visually it marks yet another development in Bowling’s painterly style toward staining, pouring, and drip-ping paint onto canvas rather than brushing it (fig. 6). The technical challenge of working with the possibilities of paint as a material a priori of form was what particularly fascinated him then, as now:

I would say the idea with my work is to fill up the space and to try to get a picture. There are various areas where I’ve emptied the pots of acrylic paint or water or ammonia or whatever, the various liquids I work with, and rested them on the surface of the canvas, and the marks they make become structural elements. . . . All these bleeds of paint, these marks—they’re not pre-determined. All I can say is that the paint is pooling and flowing and at the corner of the canvas—with the canvas laying on the floor—I might turn the pot differently. . . . That’s not accidental.36

35 Ibid., para. 15 (italics in original). Bowling cites Max Kozloff, Jasper Johns (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967).36 Bowling, quoted in Collings, “See How They Work,” n.p.

Figure 6. Frank Bowling, Bartica Born I, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 263 × 122 cm.

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In Bartica Born I flowing verticals of pink have been allowed to drip from the top of the canvas along a blue wash. The canvas has then been inverted and the pink stripes appear as stalagmites rising from the bottom edge to pierce the centrally placed map of Africa, its paler shadow above marginally escaping the threat of rupture. The work’s title returns us to the mise-en-scène of Bowl-ing’s birthplace, but its content displaces us immediately through its absence, replaced instead by this first-time inclusion of Africa. Subjectivity is literally inscribed into this canvas through its title and simultaneously disavowed in its content.

The choice of Africa as a new leitmotif in Bowling’s work inevitably triggers associations with discourses of the black Atlantic in which Africa is the focus of symbolic redemptive return to an (imagined) originary “homeland” after slavery.37 Such critical positioning of Bowling’s work is further underscored by several subsequent works, including Night Journey (1968–69) and Middle Passage (1970), both alluding to the perils, hardships, and losses of transatlantic crossing (figs. 7 and 8). Nevertheless, the issue of Bowling’s politics in relation to the idea of “black Atlantic abstraction” is far from straightforward. Bowling’s own critical writings for Arts Magazine on the subject of “black art” did not begin until 1969, a year after he had already made several map works and almost two years before his solo exhibition of those works for one month at the Whitney. Among the writings are a series of essays spread between April 1969 and April 1971 that began with “Critique: Dis-cussion on Black Art” and ended with the piece “It’s Not Enough to Say Black Is Beautiful.” The essays were prompted by a late-1960s sociopolitical context that saw formation of several cultural pressure groups created to enact changes in the collecting and exhibiting policies of New York’s major museums, urging them to become more inclusive in their employment of more black scholars and curators and in their exhibition and collecting policies of work by nonwhite artists.38 In spring 1969 the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition began negotiations with the Whitney Museum of American Art that resulted in the Whitney’s presentation of twelve new exhibitions featuring black artists (eleven solo shows and one group exhibition).39 It was against this background that Bowling entered the debate with a series of six essays, published in Arts Magazine, specifically designed to interrogate the role and function of art criticism in relation to “black art.” He is at his most politi-cally trenchant in these essays. The word/image dichotomy is clearly differentiated in Bowling’s oeuvre between the objects of his visual practice and his radical political criticism. The tools of each medium are discovered, respected, and pushed to the limit on their own terms but remain distinct from one another; they have different jobs to do. While interpretative possibilities for the paintings remain deliberately fluid, the published criticism is acute and direct. As Kellie Jones has observed, “These articles are compelling; they are not only gauges of the cultural climate but also reveal an artist of color battling with various definitions, attempting to put his concerns into perspective.”40

37 As astutely recounted by Mercer’s borrowing from Paul Gilroy. See Kobena Mercer, “Black Atlantic Abstraction,” 182–205; and Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).

38 See Kellie Jones, “ ‘It’s Not Enough to Say Black Is Beautiful’: Abstraction at the Whitney, 1969–1974,” in Mercer, Discrepant Abstraction, 155–56.

39 Bowling’s exhibition in November to December 1971 of six large map paintings, all nine feet high and of various lengths ranging from seven to twenty-two feet, was one of these eleven solo shows at the Whitney. For more detail, see ibid., 164–68.

40 Ibid., 166.


“Critique: Discussion on Black Art” opens with the direct observation that “the neglect of the black artist” is an openly “guilty secret” in the art scene; the essay proceeds to explore “why the black artist has contributed so little to the mainstream” and raises the question of what a definition of “black art” might be.41 Without necessarily definitively answering the questions he poses, Bowling

41 Frank Bowling, “Critique: Discussion on Black Art,” Arts Magazine 43 (April 1969), frankbowling.com/writings-conversations/critique-discussion-on-black-art, paras. 1, 3.

Figure 7. Frank Bowling, Night Journey, 1968–69. Acrylic on canvas, 328 × 269 cm.

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does comment that “what informs black artists’ work is the black experience, which is global,”42 a comment that he echoes again in his 1971 Whitney interview with Richard Doty: “I don’t believe, as a painter, in the idea of black art; but it’s obvious that the black experience is universal.” Further along in the same interview, he also remarks, “I feel very political about a lot of issues, and I’m certainly political about what it means to be an artist, an artist who happens to be black.”43 In “Critique” he also observes that “the dilemma of the black artists reaches into every sphere. Since the public is unfamiliar with his work, he is at a disadvantage from the outset.”44 “Critique” was followed up one month later, in May 1969, with “Discussion on Black Art—II,” in which Bowling puzzles again over the contribution, or lack of it, of black artists to mainstream contemporary art, specifically in relation to the American context. It is in this essay in particular that his displaced perspective as a British postcolonial subject in New York is brought to bear, most specifically in his analysis of the role of the black middle classes in America as being “trained, versed or loaded toward” Europe

42 Ibid., para. 13.43 Bowling, quoted in Doty, Frank Bowling, exhibition catalogue, n.p.44 Bowling, “Critique,” para. 14.

Figure 8. Frank Bowling, Middle Passage, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 328 × 269 cm.

© Frank Bow

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rather than toward “the American Dream: which is white.” He also traces the shift in “black art” from a position of absence to one of kitsch, to what he now terms “the real thing.”45 “Black Art III,” published in the December 1969–January 1970 issue, is the final contribution to the particular debates of the previous two essays and focuses specifically on the historiographic neglect of black artists as either nonexistent or of “lesser” quality. Yet he also comments on the recent misguided attempts to remedy this situation, commenting, “There are good works . . . but mediocre, ethnic, amateurish, irrelevant stuff is also being touted in the name of Black endeavour.”46

“The Rupture—Ancestor Worship, Revival, Confusion, or Disguise,” published in the summer of 1970, shows Bowling beginning to question the thrust of his previous essays. He suggests that perhaps he is “ill-equipped to deal with those pertinent issues . . . that[,] though slightly inside, are paradoxically almost totally outside any positive assessment of art content,” and that “quality is the only criterion from which to judge.”47 Directed at what he observes as the weak quality of a number of “black shows,” he asks whether “it is possible to put on yet another black show” given “the barrel-scraping process” with which they have been occurring.48 In Bowling’s review of two then current exhibitions, one of African American art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and one on African sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, the contemporary artists are found wanting, especially in comparison with “traditional African works,” due to the flimsy premise on which the exhibitions have been conceived, namely, race or “African-ness” rather than aesthetic quality.49 This was followed up in fall 1970 with “Silence: People Die Crying—When They Should Love,” which is Bowling’s astute but excoriating critique of the figurative impulse of “black art” as “Bad Art” due to its “conservative clinging to well tried, now creaking, now worn out, pictorial devices.” He continues: “Extremely literal in the worst sense, these works seem designed to deny the subtlety of black experience, indeed experience of any sort”; “black experience must therefore be operating on a different, more subtle level, or not at all.”50

April 1971 saw the publication of Bowling’s final essay specifically dedicated to the consider-ation of “black art.” “It’s Not Enough to Say ‘Black Is Beautiful’ ” continued his polemical stance, opening with the declaration that “the problems of how to judge black art by black artists are not made easier by simply installing it,” a further jibe at the intellectual weaknesses of some of the recent exhibitions of “black art” critiqued in his previous essays but also at the weaknesses of the art criticism that underreceived them.51 In a wittily acerbic observation of the critical reception of Mel Edwards’s solo show at the Whitney, held in March 1970, Bowling comments on the Ducham-pian tradition to which Edwards refers but which was completely missed by the critics in favor of a

45 Frank Bowling, “Discussion on Black Art—II,” Arts Magazine 43 (May 1969), frankbowling.com/writings-conversations/discussion-on-black-art-11, paras. 1, 6.

46 Frank Bowling, “Black Art III,” Arts Magazine 44 (December 1969–January1970), frankbowling.com/writings-conversations/black-art-111, para. 8 (italics in original).

47 Frank Bowling, “The Rupture—Ancestor Worship, Revival, Confusion, or Disguise,” Arts Magazine 44 (Summer 1970), frankbowling.com/category/writings-conversations/the-rupture-ancestor-worship-revival-confusion-or-disguise, para. 1.

48 Ibid., paras. 2, 4.49 Ibid., paras. 6, 7.50 Frank Bowling, “Silence: People Die Crying—When They Should Love,” Arts Magazine 44 (September–October 1970),

frankbowling.com/writings-conversations/silence-people-die-crying-when-they-should-love, paras. 3, 6. 51 Frank Bowling “It’s Not Enough to Say Black is Beautiful” Arts Magazine 45 (April 1971), frankbowling.com/writings-

conversations/its-not-enough-to-say-black-is-beautiful, para. 1.


politicized reading of the “barbed wire and chains” as a comment on his black ancestry. For Bowl-ing, Edwards’s work “was like taking the Classical tradition and Humanism by the ear and making them face reality from the inside,” but, referring to the critics, Bowling notes, “The trouble is, if your gaze is elsewhere, only an act of violence will redirect you. . . . Tangling with barbed wire hurts.”52

Carl Hazelwood and Mel Gooding have both been tentative in their assertions about Bowling’s stance in relation to so-called black art, prompted by the sociohistorical and institutional contexts in which Bowling was working and exhibiting his map paintings and also by the ways Bowling’s paintings exceed the politics of representation. “The proliferation of socio-historical referents has prompted some critics to consider Bowling’s black Caribbean body as a political site of complex postcolonial desire,” Hazelwood observes. “But he seeks for himself only a private and individual poetic identity not an ideological one. The artist’s concerns are more personal and intimate than that.” The Manichean binary that Hazelwood sets up, however, between personal and political, is undermined by his further statement: “The titles of paintings, which mention various friends and family, give a clue to his scale of interests. We understand names are not meant to be descriptive, but the combination of title and painting can be evocative in a poetic sense.”53 Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman (1968) is a brilliant example (fig. 9). Continuing his tradition of homage, Bowling completely explodes the potential of color field painting as simultaneously a formal and political possibility. Painted in the three colors of the Rastafari flag—red (the blood of the martyrs), green

52 Ibid., para. 17.53 Carl E. Hazelwood, “Frank Bowling—Finding Salvation,” in Frank Bowling: Recent Paintings (New York: Spanierman

Modern, 2012), 5.

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Figure 9. Frank Bowling, Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 236 × 129.5 cm.


(the plenitude of the land), and gold (the wealth of the continent), which also happened to be the colors of the newly independent Guyana’s flag—the painting bears a title that is, of course, a refer-ence to Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? (1968). This was in turn Newman’s “final repudiation of Mondrian’s insistence on the primaries.” As Gooding comments, “Bowling was pro-posing not only other colors (with other connotations, perhaps), but new uses for abstraction, uses less freighted with the higher symbolism or existential earnestness that characterized Newman’s rhetoric.”54 The evocations suggested by Bowling’s titles are wide ranging, as Hazelwood observes, and they do not allow the viewer the ease of binary categorization between personal or political, figurative or abstract, black or white. Indeed, when asked by the Victoria and Albert Museum to take part in their celebration of Black History month in the early 2000s, Bowling responded with the familiar glint of irony: “How about some white paintings?”55 Bowling turns everything on its head, questions categories, and subverts the order of things. Catastrophe as subversion is Bowling’s métier, and he thrives on its pictorial suggestiveness.

54 Gooding, Frank Bowling, 65.55 Collings, “See How They Work,” n.p.

Non-Synchronous Cartographies: Frank Bowling's Map Paintings

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