Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Three Mug Shots in a Row, 1982. Photo-etching and aquatint on paper. Riot Series (1981-1982), Tate.
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first Brixton uprising (10-12 April 1981), I return to Chila Kumari Singh Burman's Riot Series of layered prints, made for her MA degree show at the Slade and soon after. In the context of my Greenham research project, my interest in Burman's early work originally centred around the gas mask motif, used across the Riot Series but also in other works such as the diptych Convenience Not Love (1986-1987). Alice Correia discusses Convenience Not Love in a recently published article where she traces iconographic motifs across Burman's work, as colonial infestations as well as emblems of what Correia calls 'radical narcissism', a strategy for BAME subjects to survive and thrive in 1980s Britain, and arguably in contemporary Britain too.
Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Triptych No Nukes, 1982. Etching, aquatint and screenprint on paper. Riot Series (1981-1982). Tate.
The gas mask is my chosen motif in Burman's early work. It appears in explicitly anti-nuclear anti-war works such as No More Hiroshimas (1979), and also as a stamp on and around a passport in Convenience Not Love, the mark of border control, layered with lengths of barbed wire. (Stamps are important and another thread to follow: in Triptych No Nukes it is the trefoil that gets stamped in red ink, in and beyond the frame, radiating its lethal contaminants). The gas mask is worn both by police (in Three Mug Shots) and the military (in Triptych No Nukes), thus tethering the two materially and ideologically, and suggesting that resistance to both is necessary and interconnected. Tear gas and nuclear fallout might not be in any way comparable in impact but belong to the arsenals of the same kind of regime, reliant on their military-industrial symbiotes and endemic oppressions. Secondly, gas masks look retro, especially when submitted to the complex printmaking processes that Burman was mastering at the end of her postgraduate studies: an outmoded piece of kit from earlier conflicts, they offer flickers of 'hot' wars in the cold war. And most obviously, the gas mask masks the person more fully than any uniform could. Police(wo)men become, or rather remain, just what their uniform stands for, no more and no less: a police force. In this respect, masking the police flies in the face of early Greenham's insistence on non-violence including in confrontations between protestors and authorities: 'We will not cause harm, either verbally or physically, to any person or other living thing. Especially, we will not verbally abuse those police officers [...]' (statement distributed ahead of the Embrace the Base Action, 12 Dec 1982, discussed here).
Three Mug Shots in a Row is a triptych squared: each plate contains three poses and is printed three times, after being subjected to acid baths of varying duration. In Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (London: Kala Press, 1995), Lynda Nead explores the deployment 'of iconic images of Britain in the 1970s' in Burman's compositions, and the oscillation between figuration and abstraction, in which the artist's printmaking processes acquire symbolic significance on top of the visual and material effects that they achieve. In Cut - Foot - Pupil- Uprisings (1981), also in the Riot Series, 'the photo-etching of the American policeman is dissolved in an acid bath and the resulting image is then overlaid with the lines and the lettering of a paper dress pattern. "Cut", "head", "pupil", the once innocuous instructions for the dressmaker become menacing evocations of anatomy and dissection, as the materials and techniques themselves attack the paradigmatic symbol of imperial authority. The subtitle of the piece, "Fight Dem Back", is realised by the materials and techniques, as well as by the subject of the work' (Nead, 1995, p. 33 and p. 36).
In Three Mug Shots, the acid treatment to which the uniformed police sargeant (judging from their uniform insignia) is subjected, evokes resistance -- fighting back -- but also a glimpse of what would happen to them too in the event of a nuclear strike. Similarly, Triptych No Nukes enacts a protest through representing a nuking. The photograph-cum-text fragment used for the photoetching was sourced from an issue of The Socialist Worker, which Burman used to sell and still buys, and reveals the true and often underplayed impact of a nuclear strike, just as the chemical treatment of the plate demonstrates destruction on a molecular level, as both icon and index. Nuclear annihilation is the true if terrible equaliser: in Three Mug Shots, the police sargeant poses in front-view and side-view, following the conventions of photographic records of suspects made by police upon arrest. The third pose follows a different register: the sargeant, a suspect but also a right mug (in the British colloquial meaning of a fool) holds their hands up in pointless surrender. Their gesture is reminiscent of the peace symbol designed by conscientious objector Gerald Holtom, about which he wrote: ‘I was in despair. Deep despair. I drew myself: the representative of an individual in despair, with hands palm outstretched outwards and downwards in the manner of Goya’s peasant before the firing squad. I formalised the drawing into a line and put a circle round it.’
I asked Chila Kumari Burman whether she had been to Greenham Common and she said she wished she had but never got around to it. I could see why: the Riot Series, executed over the first two years of the peace camp, were not only technically ambitious and complex but based on extensive research. They also document a cultural engagement and political activism of a different kind. Militant Women was made as the artist became involved in the production of Mukti, a multi-lingual feminist magazine by and for Asian women (1983-1987). Sidestepping the universal reach of the nuclear threat on this occasion, Burman homes in on intersectional feminist matters of life and death from across the globe, from women road builders in India, to women prisoners in England, and the impact of the Pass Law on black and Asian women in South Africa. Militant Women is a useful reminder that anti-militarism and non-violence do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Militant Women, 1982. Photo-etching and aquatint on paper. Riot Series (1981-1982). Tate.
In the title of this blog post I refer to the 1981 Brixton uprising using the indefinite article (*an* uprising), not to underplay its significance but in recognition that it is one (the first, by some counts) of many: the summer of 1981 saw a series of uprisings across England, including Handsworth in Birmingham (the 1985 recapitulation of which was famously commemorated and dissected in Handworth Songs by the Black Audio Film Collective), Toxteth in Liverpool (evoked in Burman's If There's No Struggle There is No Progress - Uprisings), and Moss Side in Manchester, while Brixton itself has been the site of multiple uprisings against racism, policing, and police racism since 1981. The publication of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (Cred)'s report a few days ago, portraying a just and equal Britain that only the most blinded-by-privilege or racist would recognise, adds the epistemic violence of gaslighting to more tangible manifestations of racist violence, and suggests that the history of mass resistance against similar oppressions and injustices, on the same sites, is still unfolding. Meanwhile, the UK government has announced its plans to increase the number of nuclear warheads in its arsenal for the first time since the cold war (the one that ended with the so-called fall of communism in 1989), and, furthermore, that it will stop publishing information on the number of warheads and missiles in operation. These two interdependent illusions of internal harmony and external threat at once support myths of national supremacy, and bring harm to people in Britain in the name of the people of Britain. We are not haunted by the 1980s as much as we are condemned to relive those years. To quote the title of another print from Burman's Riot Series, if there is no struggle there is no progress, and if there is no progress more struggle becomes necessary. In other words: no justice, no peace.
London, 9 April 2021
Chila Kumari Singh Burman, If There is No Struggle, There is No Progress - Uprisings, 1981. Etching, lithograph and paint on paper. Riot Series (1981-1982). Tate.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am grateful to Alice Correia for sharing her work on Burman before publication and discussing gas masks with me; to Deborah Cherry for introducing me to Burman's work many years ago, and to the artist more recently; and to Chila for her time, work, and wit.