Undressing ethnicity - Yinka Shonibare

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by John Picton

The comfort of knowing which side of the fence you are is being constantly thrown.

(Shonibare 1992)

.... his work tricks the mind, by first making it comfortable with its own contradiction, innocence, and ignorance, and then by quickly deflating those sentiments.

(Enwezor 1999:8)

Shonibare's work registers the invalidity of borders.... He subverts notions of traditionality through parody ...

(Oguibe in Enwezor 1999:11)

Over the past ten years Yinka Shonibare, an artist of Nigerian origin working in Britain, has achieved a very considerable measure of international success. (1) I am interested in examining some aspects of his work and in showing how that work can be seen to address the taken-for-granted status of ethnic categorization in the literature on African art. My title is an obvious play on "Dressing Down," the name of Shonibare's 1999 retrospective exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (see Ikon Gallery 1999). I first met the artist at a talk he gave at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, early in 1992. (2) Later that same year we saw his installation at the Serpentine Gallery (see Shonibare 1992; Court 1993); but the story as presented here begins in Chicago in February 2000.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock had invited me to the Art Institute of Chicago to participate in "In Context, In Depth: A Symposium about Yoruba Art and the William B. Fagg Photographic Archive." She organized this event to celebrate the Institute's acquisition of two sculptures by Areogun of Osi-Ilorin (see Picton 1984a, b) and a set of William Fagg's field photographs. I arrived in Chicago with a day or so to spare, and after visiting the Yoruba display, a first-rate installation of sculpture and masquerade, with Fagg's photography, I was taken to see the set of photographs by Yinka Shonibare entitled Diary of a Victorian Dandy. They were not on show in the Yoruba or Africa galleries but in rooms devoted to contemporary art; not "contemporary African art" (with all due respect, only the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., has been that daring) but "contemporary" as understood in an international sense. That usage in reality means Europe and America, though Latin America just about makes it in these days, and there is the occasional visitor from Japan, India, and South Africa. (3) The Shonibare photographs were on loan on the recommendation of Okwui Enwezor, who is, among many other things, an adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Institute.

In the other gallery I had just seen photographs of Yoruba people and things, taken by an Englishman, that provided a necessary element of the documentary requirements of the sculpture and masquerade on display in the context of museum ethnography. In this gallery I saw photographs of an English household, a fiction authored by a Yoruba man, that provided for the exposure of one of the secrets of nineteenth-century English prosperity and leisure: their dependence upon the hidden presence and work of black and African people. This exposure was achieved, of course, by Shonibare himself, placed within the picture as the dandy.

What was I to make of all this? Was it yet one more example of the wholly unsatisfactory split between "traditional" and "contemporary" (see Picton 1992)? Or was it rather that "Africa" and "Yoruba" (Yinka Shonibare is, after all, a Yoruba name) have the power to transcend the limitations of categories? Or had west Africa now been admitted to the Citadel of Modernism (Araeen 1989:16)? (4) Local modernisms and modernities (5) had been put in place in west Africa since the 1850s and throughout the twentieth century, pioneered in Freetown by the African American photographer Augustus Washington (1820-1875) (Viditz-Ward 1999; Willis 2000) and in Lagos by the painter Aina Onabolu (1882-1963) (Fosu 1986). The problem for me was that I knew enough to bring Shonibare and Areogun together as both (what we now call) Yoruba, and yet the connection I perceived was not obvious within the works themselves. Perhaps the confusion was wholly mine. Is there, indeed, any necessary connection between the art and life of a late-twentieth-century modern city such as Lagos (where Shonibare spent his childhood) and of a village a generation or two earlier and close to the northeast margin of what we now call the Yoruba-speaking region? There are no simple answers to any of these questions.

Photographs from Diary of a Victorian Dandy, curated and produced by the Institute of International Visual Arts, had been seen on station walls throughout the London "tube" during October 1998. At the same time (see Atha 1998) the Tabernacle Gallery in west London exhibited an installation by Shonibare entitled Alien Obsessives: Mum, Dad and the Kids (Fig. 16), which interrogated assumptions about the normative status of the nuclear family. (7) The figures, derived from science-fiction movies, were made up of the African-print fabric the artist first used in his 1992 Serpentine installation. (8) Following a talk that he gave during the Alien Obsessives show, he was asked by a heavily dreadlocked man: "Where is Africa in your work?" Shonibare's response was bold, indeed shockingly so: "I don't give a toss about Africa!" He immediately qualified this by insisting that his work was not about Africa, that it could not be seen in Africa as it was in Europe and America. When Shonibare used African-print fabric during his participation in the 1995 Tenq workshop in Dakar, Senegal, his studio assistant protested that people could have been wearing the cloth. Shonibare's response was to return to the market and purchase some more, which he then gave to his assistant to distribute as he thought fit. In other words, his work was about being in London; and as such, it was concerned (among other things) with the deconstruction of stereotypes, most especially of black and African people in the so-called West with its insidious liking for the essentialized identities, ethnic as well as continental, that still hang about within the threefold legacy of racism, slavery, and colonialism. (9)