The renowned and flamboyant Nigerian-British artist, Yinka Shonibare, is currently (June 26 - September 20) exhibiting his work at the New York Museum of African Art. His exuberant works of sculpture, paintings, and photographs offer a biting and sardonic critique of colonialism, identities, and Africa. The following commentaries talk about the man and his art. PT Zeleza, Editor, The Zeleza Post
Headless Bodies From a Bottomless Imagination By Deborah Sontag
IN his Victorian house in the East End here Yinka Shonibare, the British-Nigerian conceptual artist, perched on an exercise ball at the wooden table in his book-crammed study, sipping peppermint tea and examining a shipment of faux oysters on the half shell.
A stationary hand cycle sat beside him, an electric wheelchair across from him. One of Bob and Roberta Smith's slogan paintings, "Duchamp stinks like a homeless person," hung above him, and a tuna on toast prepared by his housekeeper was sandwiched between a vase of yellow tulips and a stack of Dante volumes: "Inferno," "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso."
It was a small tranquil moment in the midst of a whirlwind time for Mr. Shonibare, whose theatrically exuberant work, with its signature use of headless mannequins and African fabrics, will be featured in a major midcareer survey at the Brooklyn Museum starting Friday. The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, large-scale installations, photographs and films.
Erudite and wide ranging, Mr. Shonibare, at 47, is a senior figure in the British art world but one who intentionally eludes easy categorization. A disabled black artist who continuously challenges assumptions and stereotypes - "That's the point of my work really," he said - Mr. Shonibare makes art that is sumptuously aesthetic and often wickedly funny. When he deals with pithy matters like race, class, disability, colonialism and war, he does so deftly and often indirectly.
"I don't produce propaganda art," he said. "I'm more interested in the poetic than the didactic."
On that gray May day in the East End, Mr. Shonibare was trying to decompress after directing a weeklong photo shoot that involved 25 live snakes, 14 nude models, 6 pigs and 2 lamb's heads. Inspired by Dante, Arthur Miller, Gustav Doré and the financial crisis, the shoot was a work in progress, "Willy Loman: The Rise and Fall," which seeks to depict what happens after the death of the salesman. (Hint: It's hellish.)
At the same time Mr. Shonibare was preparing for a trip to Jerusalem, where he is a guest curator at the Israel Museum. He was granting an hours-long interview, interrupted periodically by his plumber - "Do you happen to know where the stopcock is, mate?" - and he was evaluating the oysters for inclusion alongside a peacock with gilded beak in a 19th-century dinner party installation at the Newark Museum.
"I'm juggling a few things, yeah," said Mr. Shonibare, who in contrast to his bold and lavish work, is disarmingly gentle and restrained in person.
Because of a condition that left him partially paralyzed, Mr. Shonibare's head lists to the right, as if being tugged there by a few of his jaunty dreadlocks. This often makes it look as if he were cocking his head to see things more clearly. But that impression is misleading because, as Arnold L. Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, put it, his is the sure gaze of a "visionary" artist: "He's able to juggle so many different ideas so brilliantly and to express them in such an immensely appealing and extraordinarily visual way."
Mr. Shonibare is not without his critics in England. The London Evening Standard, for instance, has called his focus on cultural identity "labored, repetitive and a little last decade." But his work is consistently requested for exhibition and purchase by museums around the world, according to his dealers, and he is rarely without a significant show or commission. The Brooklyn exhibition is his most comprehensive to date. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, it will travel in November to the Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. From July to January Mr. Shonibare's dining room installation will be displayed at the Newark Museum.
Apart from Mr. Shonibare's gallery, which is in the tony Mayfair area, his life is concentrated in the East End, which is gentrifying but still mixed. His drawing studio is there, as are the private club where he socializes, the warehouse that he is converting into an artists' space, and his late-19th-century house. He lives alone, across the street from his 18-year-old son, Kayode, who is studying computer game design.
When Mr. Shonibare was about his son's age and just starting at the Wimbledon College of Art, he felt faint one day and collapsed. Two weeks later he woke up in a hospital unable to move. The diagnosis was transverse myelitis, an inflammation across the spinal cord, and the prognosis was grim: complete paralysis.
The following year, in the hospital and a rehabilitation center, was "my bottom, bottom period," he said. But gradually he regained considerable function, and after three years in a wheelchair, he once again walked (although he still sometimes uses a chair).
Most important to Mr. Shonibare in 1984 he was able to return to art school, this time the Byam Shaw School of Art in London, which offered some assistance.
"I found out that with a bit of help I was O.K.," he said. "I could do most things."
That Mr. Shonibare became a conceptual artist who delegates much of the production of his labor-intensive projects to a network of other artists is partly a result of his disabling illness. Another product, he said, has been a keen consciousness of his own mortality that has made him more appreciative of beauty.
The seminal moment in Mr. Shonibare's artistic formation, however, was kindled by an encounter at Byam Shaw during a period when he was "making art about Perestroika."
One day his tutor confronted him . "Why are you making work about Perestroika?" the tutor, a white Briton, asked. "You are African, aren't you? Why don't you make authentic African art?"
At first Mr. Shonibare was taken aback. "I tried to figure out what he meant by authentic African art," he said. "I didn't know how to be authentic. What would I do if I was being authentic?"
Born in England in 1962 when his father was studying law there, Mr. Shonibare was raised biculturally. His family returned to Nigeria when he was 3 but kept a house in South London, where he spent summers. Mr. Shonibare grew up in Lagos singing "London Bridges" and watching "Sesame Street." He spoke Yoruba at home, English at school. He felt privileged, not disadvantaged.
"I didn't feel inferior to anyone," he said, adding, with a laugh, "If anything, I felt they were inferior to me.'
But the tutor saw him as "someone of African origin, and there are things associated with that," Mr. Shonibare said. "I should have actually understood all along that there is a way in which one is perceived, and there's no getting away from it. And I realized that if I didn't deal with it, I would just be described forever as a black artist who doesn't make work about being black."
Right then, Mr. Shonibare said, he found his artistic raison d'être. "I realized what I'd really have to deal with was the construction of stereotypes, and that's what my work would be about."
In search of authentic African-ness Mr. Shonibare visited an African fabric shop in the Brixton market in South London, discovering, to his amazement, that the best African fabric was actually manufactured in the Netherlands and exported to Africa. Further, the Dutch wax prints, as they are known, were originally inspired by Javanese batiks.
This idea, that a fabric connoting African identity was not really African, delighted the budding conceptual artist. "The material was the idea," he said. From that point forward the African fabric was his medium and his message.
He used it first as his canvas - stretching the prints, then painting on them - and later to make his costumes, which are usually Victorian, the Victorian era being the period of British history when Africa was colonized, thus providing him not only with ruffles and bustles but also with what he called the "lovely irony" of contrasting fabric and style.
"My tutor wanted me to be pure African," Mr. Shonibare said "I wanted to show I live in a world which is vast and take in other influences, in the way that any white artist has been able to do for centuries." Mr. Shonibare came of age artistically in the 1980s, during the heyday of the Afro-Caribbean BLK Art Group, whose fierce work protested the perceived racism of the British art world. But Mr. Shonibare, living comfortably in his parents' house in London, felt no kinship with them.
"I had nothing to be angry about," he said.
For that matter, Mr. Shonibare, a born contrarian, was not constitutionally designed to belong to any art movement, not even the one with which he was associated by circumstance, the Young British Artists. Like them he attended Goldsmiths College (after Byam Shaw), overlapping for a time with Damien Hirst, the most prominent of the group. And like them Mr. Shonibare got his big break from the collector Charles Saatchi.
In the mid-1990s, at a time when Mr. Shonibare was supporting himself by working at a disability arts organization, Mr. Saatchi bought two of his pieces, for what the artist then considered an astronomical sum - about £8,000 (about $13,000 today) each. Mr. Shonibare estimates their current value as "in the six figures;" one is now in the Museum of Modern Art's collection.
The other, "Double Dutch" (1994), shows one way that Mr. Shonibare adjusted creatively to his physical limitations. He could not handle huge canvases. So in "Double Dutch" he fragmented a large work into manageably sized pieces - 50 rectangles of African fabric - and arranged them in a 10-by-20-foot grid, incorporating the wall, painted an intense pink, into the artwork.
Because of Mr. Saatchi, Mr. Shonibare was included among the Young British Artists in the "Sensation" exhibition in 1997 - the show that, when it moved to the Brooklyn Museum, so provoked Rudolph W. Giuliani, the New York mayor, with a black Madonna adorned with elephant dung that he threatened to cut the museum's funds.
But Mr. Shonibare was not himself a shock artist. He was not, like Mr. Hirst, suspending sharks in formaldehyde. Rather, at a time when decorative was a dirty word, he was making works of seductive beauty whose bite was only gradually felt.
Part of the bite lay in the headlessness of his mannequins, with the decapitation that is intrinsically violent but never made graphic. Mr. Shonibare said that he conceived of the headlessness as a joke related to the revenge killings of aristocrats in the French Revolution. "The idea of bringing back the guillotine was very funny to me," he said.
Additionally, because Mr. Shonibare does not like his figures to be racially identifiable, chopping off their heads helps. (The fiberglass bodies are mixed race, "kind of coffee colored," he said.)
This does not mean that race is invisible in his art. He himself is the centerpiece of a couple of his elaborately staged photographic works, like "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" (1998). Clearly identifying with the lead character as an outsider who gains entry to society through wit and style, Mr. Shonibare cast himself as a dandy who is fussed over in bed by white maids here, looked up to at a billiards table by white associates there.
In what he calls his "zeitgeist-inspired" art Mr. Shonibare prefers to set his pieces in a different historical era so as not to be hamstrung by unfolding events. In 2003, when he was thinking about American imperialism and the Iraq war, Mr. Shonibare made "Scramble for Africa." In that large installation he positioned 14 headless - "and brainless" - men at a conference table adorned with the map of Africa, as if they were European leaders dividing up the continent in the late 1800s.
"It is possible," he said dryly, "to learn from history."
In his home on that day when Mr. Shonibare was supposedly decompressing, his studio manager, Ann Marie Peña, reviewed several pending matters with him, including details about the Willy Loman piece, which will be displayed at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London in September.
Ms. Peña showed him a photograph of the sculptor's dummy for the "car crash Willy Loman," the salesman - right after the death imagined for him - which will be positioned in a crashed vintage car at the entrance.
"Is his costume being distressed?" Mr. Shonibare asked.
"Distressed and sullied - and the shirt could be ripped," Ms. Peña answered.
"O.K.," Mr. Shonibare said after a pause. "But I don't want to be obvious. No blood or anything. And not too immaculate with the costume. He's a man down on his luck. He can't afford to keep the bling going."
Over the last few years Mr. Shonibare's stature as an artist has grown. He was short-listed for the Turner Prize, the prestigious British art award, and designated a member of the British Empire by Prince Charles (after which he promptly appended MBE to his name).
A constant demand for new work places continuous pressure on Mr. Shonibare's network of collaborators - the sculptor, costume designer, photographer and others - whose assistance he sees as part of a historic and continuing tradition in artistic studios. "In my case I have a disability," he said, "but Jeff Koons is physically fit, Damien Hirst is physically fit."
Mr. Shonibare paused, then continued: "You know, all of the things that are supposed to be wrong with me have actually become a huge asset. I'm talking about race and disability. They're meant to be negatives within our society. But they're precisely the things that have liberated me. Because they are me, what I express. So it has not been a negative thing to be who I am but a positive thing.
"Do you know what I mean?"
Decaptiva
From The New York Times June 17, 2009
Decaptivating By Richard Lacayo
Even by the standards of a globalized world, you won't find many artists more transnational than Yinka Shonibare. He was born in the U.K. of Nigerian parents, spent his childhood shuttling between London and Lagos and, for the past decade or so, has been one of those international figures whose work turns up, often accompanied by its creator, on every continent.
Four years ago, when Queen Elizabeth II made Shonibare a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), his leftist friends expected him to turn the award down. Instead, he just about bolted the letters MBE to his name, but with a very broad wink. "I was always part of the empire," he says. "Now I've been officially incorporated by it."
This helps explain why his cartwheeling midcareer retrospective, which just opened at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, is called "Yinka Shonibare MBE." The show, which originated last year in Sydney and moves on in November to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, presents us with the work--sculpture, paintings, staged photographs and two short films--of a man who is both a consummate product of colonial empire and a shrewd decoder of its false assumptions.
Shonibare is best known for making headless mannequins like the ones in his How to Blow Up Two Heads at Once (Ladies). They come outfitted in 18th or 19th century dress, but in a wild-style fabric that's from another time and place altogether. It looks at first like "traditional" African patterned cloth--and it is--but the tradition turns out to be complicated. As Shonibare discovered years ago, those "African" wax-print textiles are actually produced by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the batik cloth of their Indonesian colony, then started selling them in Africa, where they were adopted as, ahem, native dress. "Even things that were supposed to represent authentic Africa," he says, "didn't turn out to fulfill the expectation of authenticity."
But as a symbol of the unstable elements that go into racial and national identities, the cloth was perfect--and it was also gorgeous. Shonibare set to work using it for his signature mannequins. Dummies in more ways than one, his headless figures are oblique meditations on the complexities of cultural identity, coming at the question from the indirect angles provided by wit, ambiguity and beauty. In his ensemble piece Scramble for Africa, the 14 life-size figures arranged around a table represent the colonial powers that carved up Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where they helped themselves to what King Leopold II of Belgium called a "slice of this magnificent cake." But in their eye-sizzling faux-African costumes, the figures offer themselves to us in the crazy plumage of the future their colonialist misadventure will create, a world so teeming and cross-pollinating that it's well beyond their grasp. And beyond ours too, though we like to tell ourselves otherwise.
That's a world Shonibare was born to navigate. At the time of his birth, in 1962, his father was a law student in London. When Shonibare was 3, his family moved back to Nigeria, but they returned to London in the summers. In Lagos, the future artist spoke English at school but Yoruba at home. At the end of the workday, his father changed from Western dress into African robes. "Being bicultural for a Nigerian is completely normal," Shonibare says. "There's nothing strange about it."
In the early 1980s, Shonibare returned to England to attend the Wimbledon College of Art, but he had been there only a few weeks when he collapsed one day in class. The cause turned out to be transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord, which for a time left him largely paralyzed. Now he can walk again, though with difficulty.
His disability hasn't stopped him from roaming freely through history. As another way of toying with the idea of cultural identity, Shonibare has featured himself in staged photographs, including a series that draws on Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. This time it's Shonibare as the man who shows a false face to the world. But as he would be the first to ask, in a world so full of falsehoods, what other kind can there be?
From: Time Magazine July 6, 2009.
Yinka Shonibare MBE @ Museum of Contemporary Art, Whitehot Magazine
Yinka Shonibare MBE is a non-pareil master of the sleight of hand. He has a way of extracting "what everybody knows" - our disregard of the disenfranchised, our vacuous obsessions, our acquiescence, our heedless longings for both temporary fixes and oblivion - and succeeds in personifying its quintessence, foiling us with his sumptuous, visual splendors. And, as in any good magic show, we play a role in which we agree to be captivated by something we know to be a ruse. Although Shonibare brings wit and winks to his dazzling art, he is deadly serious. He provokes thought and sets us straight. Well, at least while we're under his spell.
In room after room that MCA dedicated to Shonibare for this twelve-year survey of his work - encompassing painting, sculpture, large-scale mixed media installations, photography and film - it's the installations that captivate us. Shonibare literally sets the stage for them. As he says, "It's the way I view culture-it's an artificial construct." [2] Using minimal props, he plots within each ‘set' a dramatic moment from the 18th century. Instead of actors, he strikes their poses with life-size mannequins. Shonibare conceives the unique gestures of each sculpture and delegates its individualistic molding. Other than a trio of leashed ocelots (in Leisure Lady (with ocelots), the sculptures are in human form. And headless. This is startling, at first, although with repetitiveness we become equally inured and fascinated. There's no blood or violence so even if we imagine their unique identities, subliminally the decapitations play tricks with our minds. We're caught up too with what the sculptures are wearing: lavish rococo costumes tailored from atypical fabric: kaleidoscopically patterned / brightly colored batiks. These textiles, which Shonibare buys from Brixton market in London, are the same Indonesian wax-dye type sold to Africans by Dutch traders in the 19th century. They are a recurrent visual leitmotif in Shonibare's art, tying him, as a self-described ‘postcolonial hybrid,' to his British / Nigerian background. Formally, Shonibare's ploy is to "explore ideas about African identity and the legacy of European colonialism in the present." [3] With admirable discretion, Shonibare doesn't reveal that exactly. Nor does he reveal how rampant territorial expansion and slavery by western European countries were misinterpreted by everyone except the western European countries. But, he doesn't conceal the pride, the privilege, the pleasure and the power of the aristocratic / ruling class that enabled that reality either. Currency, in its many forms, trades in illusion. And so does Shonibare.
The highlights? There are four of them. Nothing can prepare you for Shonibare's enthralling coquette in his three-dimensional reconstruction of a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, La balançoire (1767): The Swing (after Fragonard). Dressed in a flounced Dior-inspired gown, the sculpture, mid-arc on a swing, is held in the time-space of a poetic landscape. In the painting, she's watched by a young man while being pushed on the swing by a bishop, but here, she is alone, and playfully so. One court shoe is tossed in the air, a symbol of the loss of virginity. We can almost hear her laugh, high above us. Simultaneously, what seems to drop into our consciousness is something like this: once virtue - or innocence or aboriginality - is lost it can never be regained no matter how frivolous we appear to be, how proud we are or how much compensation is promised.
Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (Parasol) is a sublime component of Shonibare's carousing party-piece of a European Grand Tour outing: an explicit / illicit paradise in which his sculptures indulge in a variety of sexual proclivities in pairs (along with an x-rated trio.) Criminal Conversation alludes to the act of adultery; something that is presumably easier to do when one is travelling than back at home. Because the ‘lords and ladies' are in a fully clothed ensemble it adds a cheeky, neo-exhibitionist aspect to their pleasurable and privileged ‘conversations' and a voyeuristic one to our own proximal, gazing envy.
In complete contrast is Scramble for Africa where Shonibare conjures a decisive split-second: a judicial law that will affect a race's fate, a continent's future, the world's destiny. Seated around a table are fourteen masculine sculptures posed with descriptive intensity. One is in obvious distress and we intuit his repugnance of assent; capitulation we know will prevail because a firm hand presses on his shoulder. A bribe is offered to another, egging him on. The other figures are detached, resigned or impatient. The chairman's finger is pointed. The die - for now - has been cast and Shonibare evokes its artifice. "There's only one law for Aboriginal people. White people have other law that changes all the time." [4]
The effect of symmetry and mirror positioning in a pair of dueling sculptures in How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies) is breathtaking. Brooking no alternative, they steadfastly take their aims with pistols. This is Shonibare's ultimate trick and it metaphorically vanishes any of our remaining delusions.
Shonibare suavely exploits our all-too-human predilections and follies, and yet, magician that he is, paradoxically, what lingers most is the compassion within his art.
[1] Leonard Cohen, song lyrics from Everybody Knows http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/leonard+cohen/everybody+knows_20082809.html
[2] Yinka Shonibare, interview with Pernilla Holmes, Art News Online, October 2002.
[3] http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=15&content_id=5152
[4] (translation) Paddy Japaljarri Sims; Liam Campbell, Darby, One hundred years of life in a changing culture (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006) 20.
From Whitehot Magazine
