Art: The Meaning of Style: Black British Style, and the Underlying Political and Social Environment

THIS portrait of young black people in Britain is ambitious in concept, and with a lengthy title to match. Its full title is The Meaning of Style: Black British Style, and the Underlying Political and Social Environment.

But the context-setting descriptive wording in the title could just as easily have been something like, British Style, Or How We All Ended Up Looking The Same By Trying To Look Different.

Because that, by coincidence or design, is one of the underlying themes connecting at least three of the five artists in a show that has been put together by the new Art Exchange's David Schischka Thomas and marks the gallery's 18th busy month of existence.

Let's leave aside Vanley Burke's great zeitgeist-y photographs of Birmingham in the 1970s and 80s for the time being.

With Michael Forbes' hometown being Nottingham, Barbara Walker coming from Birmingham and Gerard Hanson now residing in Jamaica, the mean geographical nexus of this exhibition is somewhere between England's Midlands and the Caribbean.

Culturally, though, the issue here is one of globalisation and the way that style, and through it the expression of identity, tends to become the same everywhere.

This is an issue expressed specifically in Barbara Walker's large paintings of young black men with gold chains and clad in hoodies bearing brands and slogans.

You don't see these men's faces, and with pointed titles such as 'Construct 1' and 'Construct 2', the issue here is how youths striving to carve out a 'street' identity within their peer group end up borrowing identikit global brands and styles which make them anonymous.

It feels like a small move forward in public understanding about the tyranny of style to see this point large in paint and canvas.

And when you look at Gerard Hanson's tastefully lurid portraits of young Jamaican men, you see the same brands and slogans – the NY caps, the G-Star tee-shirts.

Then, turn around to look at Michael Forbes' colour images from Birmingham Carnival and there are young black British men clad in similar gear – whistles, NY caps, Adidas etc – while making gang-style hand signs.

I don't think there's any new thesis about the homogenisation of identity on show here, especially when dirt-poor people clad in Manchester United shirts can be seen in war and disaster-zones on TV every night of the year.

Nor is this strictly a black phenomenon, although you could argue that it was a black vernacular musical style – hip-hop – which has been the dominant style influence.

Within the exhibition, though, a grand context and back-story is given by Vanley Burke's images of African-Caribbean people in Birmingham.

Burke has been photographing Brum since the 1970s and the selection on show here includes some of the best known – the young boy on the bike with the Union flag, smiles on the dodgems at the seaside and political rallies and marches where placards read "We want Africa freed from Imperialism" and "We are our own Liberators".

The anger about exclusion was to find violent expression in the riots of the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was at the apex of her power.

But the saddest thing about these images is not that British subjects felt the need to riot, but the contrast with Burke's more recent colour images of the funeral of a victim of a gang shooting in Birmingham.

What happened to all that righteous African-Caribbean anger and fight for a better future?

The implication is that it got ground down into the utter banality and wasted energy of gang rivalry and a shoulder-shrugging acceptance of zero opportunity through legitimate channels.

How did that happen?

Meanwhile, Clement Cooper's black and white portraits from Manchester, Liverpool and Cardiff help fill the gap between the 1980s and present day; they start with Moss Side sound systems in 1985 and culminate with young Muslim men waiting to go to Mosques (some of them also clad, incidentally, in all-too-familiar sports brands).

Between these two points in time there was church attendance and a gym culture where young black men developed their physiques and learned not to show weakness by withdrawing emotion – perhaps an early model for the blank life-denying hostility of gang culture.

The Meaning of Style can be seen until April 10.