Re-dressing history - Yinka Shonibare

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by Nancy Hynes

In the fall of 2000 Yinka Shonibare had a solo show at Camden Art Centre, an installation piece in "Intelligence: New British Art" at Tate Britain, and a digital work in the new Welcome Wing of the Science Museum. Suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere in London. And his reach wasn't limited to Britain. He had solo shows in New York and, in 2001, in Rome and Johannesburg. He had a piece in the notorious "Sensation" exhibition and recently won an honorable mention at the Venice Biennale. His work is eye-catching, excessive, often beautiful--but why the interest in Shonibare, and why now?

Part of the answer lies in the increased range of his art and the sophistication of his manipulation of popular icons. His work has expanded in subject matter and media over the past three years, leading to a significant body of paintings, photographs, installations, and semisurrealistic objects which comment with wit and humor on themes of history, identity, and fantasy. Sometimes he plays with scale--Jane Austen and the Brontes are presented as figurines on a tabletop, toying with their position as "giants of literature" (Fig. 3)--and sometimes with race, as in the image of the black footballers repeated throughout the fabrics used to furnish his elaborate Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (Figs. 1, 2), or the cafe-au-lait-colored skin on the huntsmen in the installation Hound (Figs. 4-6). He often uses "African" fabrics in his paintings and installations, ethnicizing in unexpected places, startling the viewer into asking, "Why are the spacemen wearing this?" and then, a moment later, "Why not?"

[FIGURES 1-6 OMITTED]

For Shonibare, the cloth is an apt metaphor for the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe and how the two continents have invented each other, in ways currently overlooked or deeply buried. The basic historical joke is that while the fabric (sometimes referred to as Dutch Wax) looks "African" and is of the sort often worn to indicate black pride in Brixton or Brooklyn, it is, in fact, printed fabric based on Indonesian batik, manufactured in the Netherlands, Britain, and other countries (including some in west Africa) and then exported to west Africa, where it is a popular, but foreign, commodity. The implication, then, is that nothing is as authentic as it may seem.

This cloth has proved to be a rich and adaptable material, both literally and metaphorically. It is flexible--it can be molded and stapled into many forms, painted upon, dressed up or down, used to line walls or cover furniture--and it is rich in color and design--one can choose from thousands of designs and color combinations, with numerous historical references. Shonibare's ironic use of this printed "African" fabric, combined with Victorian signifiers ranging from overstuffed parlor furniture to corsetted dresses to a hunting party, has become a signature mark. What is African? What is European? Who creates and consumes these identities?

But his work did not always take such a postmodern tack. Shonibare was born in Britain, but moved with his parents to Nigeria when he was three. Returning to Britain from Lagos at the age of seventeen, he started art school as a painter. He explains that his interest in identity began while studying at Byam Shaw. At one point, Shonibare became quite taken with perestroika in the Soviet Union and made a series of works on this theme. An art tutor, upon seeing the series, told him that the work "didn't reflect himself very much." Shonibare went home and wondered what this meant, who that "me" could be. "I'm a citizen of the world, I watch television," he explains, "so I make work about these things." (1) Then he realized what the tutor was after: he wanted to see some element of Shonibare's identity as an African in his work.

Shonibare went on to make a series of paintings playing with these notions of identity by placing images of "African" objects from the British Museum next to those of "modern" domestic appliances, taken from an Argos catalogue. An Ife head next to a coffee maker; a Lega stool beside a telephone. "Which is me?" he asked, writing essays and creating artworks that took apart taken-for-granted notions of identity. His approach was to question identity rather than celebrate it, to tease out signifiers and toy with them mockingly. He explains that his attitude at the time was "All right, if you want African, the kind of primitive stereotype, then I will give it to you" (interview with the author, 1995).

After finishing his first degree at Byam Shaw, Shonibare completed an M.A. at Goldsmiths College, London University, the influential art school that has been home to so many of the currently fashionable young British artists, or YBAs. At Goldsmiths, known for its emphasis on conceptual work and theory, he read Foucault and Derrida. This, he insists, was very important for his work. Their approach to the deconstruction of categories, the structural problem of signifier and signified, and the idea of a power structure created through various systems of signification gave Shonibare a powerful interpretive framework for his personal experiences as an artist from the African continent living and working in London. This background led him to a visual practice that deliberately incorporated common signifiers of "African-ness" in order to deconstruct them. One of these signifiers, as Shonibare notes in an interview I conducted in 1996, is cloth: