Dhanveer Singh Brar: Beefy's Tune (Dean Blunt Edit)

The 87 Press, 2020, Softcover, 44 pages, 22 × 14 cm

Dean Blunt is the most important British artist of the current century because he fundamentally does not care about Britain. His importance makes it shocking that such little critical attention has been paid to his work. His indifference explains it. Dhanveer Singh Brar’s Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) looks to initiate a conversation that needs to be had about Dean Blunt, about Britain (through Blunt’s indifference to it), and about Blackness in Britain (through the depth and complexity of Blunt’s feeling for it). Using the 2016 album BBF Hosted By DJ Escrow as a means of navigation, Brar hears Blunt in order to access the long contested dream of Britain’s disappearance that was conducted under the name of Black British Arts. Partial (in the sense of his relation to Blunt) and partial (in the sense of unfinished), Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) sees Dhanveer Singh Brar give the dream a grammar, if not a name.