File Note 160: Donald Locke

‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.’
– Audre Lorde, 1979

Critical engagement with Donald Locke’s work, from the 1970s through to the present, has frequently described his practice as ‘baffling’, ‘complex’ and ‘multifaceted’.1 Eddie Chambers identifies a certain ‘strangeness’ in Locke’s work that evades easy interpretation – a fitting observation for an artist who refused to explain his intentions. In 2008, Locke remarked ‘In the studio … you chase after this particular thing, and these chases, these searches can be described, but what I think the artist cannot do is to explain’, opening his work up to interpretation.2 Of his Trophies of Empire (1972–74), an open cabinet containing cylindrical ceramics, for example, Locke noted ‘The cylindrical shapes are “bullets”, but I have to accept that very few people read them this way.’3 His son, the artist Hew Locke, recently quipped, ‘I mean, come on, they’re phallic objects!’4

Locke Senior cited his diasporic identity as the driving force behind his ‘omnivorous’ absorption of imagery and diverse use of media.5 Born in 1930 in pre-independence Guyana, on a strip of land wedged between two sugarcane plantations, Locke grew up exposed to a system that he later recalled ‘dominated the sky; it dominated your life from beginning to end’.6 Yet the same structures of British colonial rule that shaped this environment also created pathways for mobility, enabling him to travel to England to study – then regarded as the ‘source of all things cultural, political, religious and intellectual’.7 This duality fostered a ‘double-consciousness’ – as articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903 – through which he could draw upon the formal vocabulary of Western modernism while retaining a critical distance from it.8

In 1954, a British Council scholarship brought Locke, then aged twenty-four, to the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham. This would have contrasted sharply with his earlier experience at the Working People’s Free Art Class in Georgetown, an institution that combined Western artistic training with the cultivation of a national consciousness under the colonial regime in the years leading up to independence.9 In that first trip to Britain, Locke would have encountered the subtle teleological models of progress that cast cultures beyond Western modernism’s orbit as temporally belated and their creative output as therefore derivative. He was aware of African art’s contribution to European modernism and recalls that, when he was at art school in Corsham, it was revered not as fine art but for what Locke – quoting Pablo Picasso – called its ‘raw … primitive power.’10 Locke perceived this as a compliment, but such infantilising framing, which positioned African art as a tool to propel European artists towards modernity, promoted Europe’s avant-garde at the expense of those whose works had been adopted as, in Kobena Mercer’s words, ‘kindling for a burgeoning modernism’. 11 By contrast, Locke looked to the pottery of Ladi Kwali and sculptures of Ife as ‘some of the greatest sculpture in the world’.

Pomona – the Roman goddess of fruitful abundance – appears as a recurring figure across different media throughout Locke’s career. The bronze figurine Pomona Blue (1985–86) recalls the fragmentary condition of surviving classical statuary, and reappears in the sprawling canvas Dynasty, The Birth of Empire (The Birth of Empire #2) (1989), and as photocopied imagery in Pomona (1990), later contorted in Georgia Peach #2 (1993), to give only a few examples. Locke’s ongoing

engagement with Pomona demonstrates a Surrealist tendency to manifest the unconscious mind. In Pomona he links the fecund curves of his pregnant neighbour Ruby that had imprinted on his ten-year-old mind, with the famed, rotund buttocks of the so-called ‘Hottentot Venus’, Sarah Baartman – a South African Khoikhoi woman who had been exploited as a freakshow exhibit and toured through Europe in the 1800s. Locke had sketched Baartman’s remains when they had been on display at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1955. When the figure of Pomona resurfaces in a painting such as The Cage (1990), this later reading of exploitation comes to the fore. In all instances, Locke allows these long-gestating sources to find new form.

The generative instability that marked Locke’s treatment of materials also shaped his engagement with dominant modernist conventions, most clearly in The Plantation Series (1972–76). The series of sculptures – modular constructions containing ceramic and ready-made elements that evoke the language of Constructivism and Minimalism – emerged, perhaps significantly, soon after Locke’s arrival in London. As art historian Giulia Smith has cogently argued, Locke crammed life into his grids at the same moment that Rosalind Krauss argued that grids are ‘what art looks like when it turns its back on the world’.16 Where Minimalism deflected meaning onto the space of a work’s presentation, Locke redirected meaning back into his grid structures, encoding them with Guyanese specificities. Here, the grid becomes a carceral frame, containing sugar cane and humanlike figures within a geometry that echoes the spatial logic of the plantation itself.

Similarly, Locke’s experiments with Land Art, which he preferred to call ‘land interventions’, inverted the movement’s objectives. For example, in The Journey (1973), he staged and photographed his ceramic bullet sculptures in Britain, France and Spain. After his move to Arizona in 1979, he staged Arizona Squares (1979–81) which comprised a series of black paintings arranged in the desert. Both works recall Robert Smithson’s Yucatán Mirror Displacements (1–9) project of 1969, in which mirrors were placed within the landscape to fragment and destabilise the viewer’s perception of space. Yet Locke’s engagement was quite different, using the landscape as a conceptual stage, rather than as raw material.