Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s

Art History Publication Initiative

by W. Ian Bourland

In Bloodflowers W. Ian Bourland examines the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955–1989), whose art is a touchstone for cultural debates surrounding questions of gender and queerness, race and diaspora, aesthetics and politics, and the enduring legacy of slavery and colonialism. Born in Nigeria, Fani-Kayode moved between artistic and cultural worlds in Washington, DC, New York, and London, where he produced the bulk of his provocative and often surrealist and homoerotic photographs of black men. Bourland situates Fani-Kayode's work in a time of global transition and traces how it exemplified and responded to profound social, cultural, and political change. In addition to his formal analyses of Fani-Kayode's portraiture, Bourland outlines the important influence that surrealism, neo-Romanticism, Yoruban religion, the AIDS crisis, experimental film, loft culture, and house and punk music had on Fani-Kayode's work. In so doing, Bourland offers new perspectives on a pivotal artist whose brief career continues to resonate with deep aesthetic and social meaning.

Genres: Art

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Erik]

Rotimi Fani-Kayode's photography, which poignantly tells stories and unfolds the mysteries of queerness and blackness in the 1980s is finally given a thorough voice in W. Ian Bourland's "Bloodflowers."

Fani-Kayode's work, spanning the 1980s, was a Romantic rethinking of many historical moments in art through a reapplication in an African diaspora. Bourland, through several chapters, draws the connections between Fani-Kayode's work and the Surrealists, the Romantics, the Punk Rockers, and the Black poets from London to DC to New York, and he does it in a thorough manner. Distinguishing Fani-Kayode's photography from Mapplethorpes by showing Fani-Kayode's reliance on using the mystical to give voice to black bodies and African stories within the Western canon, Bourland situates Fani-Kayode's work as a prism through which the light of art history enters and is refracted into a mythical rainbow that rethinks the canon it encounters.

Bourland, however, fails to hold Fani-Kayode's feet to the fire for failing to actively engage with the biggest political movement of his time: AIDS. Bourland attempts to excuse this behavior by re-emphasizing Fani-Kayode's Romantic methods, but in doing so he doesn't account for what AIDS taught us in the 80s: life is material because we are dying, and we are dying because society hated our material, homosexual bodies. Bourland's failure to critique Fani-Kayode in this regard is a real failure.

Unfortunately, Bourland's book falls into the academic trap of unnecessary verbosity; academic fields have jargons but much of this book was written in an intentionally opaque way that will make inaccessible to most. A book that is important for its scholarly contributions unfortunately will be read by few.