Undressing ethnicity - Yinka Shonibare

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by John Picton

Thus, How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You? (Fig. 9) was produced by Shonibare in response to a commission from the Barbican Art Gallery for its 1995 textile show. (16) Three late-Victorian women, headless as if to throw back to Europe the anonymity foisted upon Africans within colonial rule (and remember the painted-out designs of 1992), are dressed in African-print fabrics. Shonibare used both Wax and Fancy Prints, some probably of Japanese manufacture, including the "Staff of Kingship" (Fig. 10). Its appearance (Picton 1995b:141) together with hitherto unpublished evidence of its source (Picton 1995a:25) was happily fortuitous, as if to underscore the answer to Shonibare's question, How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You? This work was subsequently acquired by the Saatchi Collection, whence it appeared in "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" (Royal Academy 1997:164-65).

Shonibare later addressed another well-known if bizarre pursuit of the leisured elite: the use of dogs in chasing and killing wild animals. In Hound, first shown during the summer of 2000, at the Camden Arts Centre in north London (Figs. 4-6), three headless men in nineteenth-century dress made of the most costly Dutch Wax African-print cotton cloth, are following their dogs in pursuit of a fox. One of the hunters is dressed in "Staff of Kingship," and the cloth is mostly deep pink in color, a reference to Hunting Pink, the red cloth worn by English huntsmen. Another of the three figures wears a cloth patterned with the words "High Life," and immediately one thinks of the popular west African music of the 1950s and '60s initiated in Ghana, and of the leisure and luxury predicated upon the threefold inheritance of racism, slavery, and colonialism. (17)

Neither Hound nor How Does a Girl Like You is based upon a European art-historical prototype, unlike Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads, 1998 (though it includes fabric with the "Staircase to Heaven" pattern; see Ikon Gallery 1999:42-43), and one of his two most recent works, The Swing (Cover), based upon a Fragonard painting, and shown at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in April-May 2001. (18) In the longer run, of course, just as colonial rule was brought to an end, so too the leisure that it made possible for an elite class might be in the grasp of us all; but we should never forget those upon whose labor these possibilities were forged. Moreover, the headless figures in Hound, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, and The Swing are distinctly swarthy (a term based upon the Anglo-Saxon for "black"), suggesting, further, the hidden facts of miscegenation, more covert than overt and more widespread than we recognize. (19)

Yinka Shonibare exposes hidden realities and challenges commonplace stereotypes with irony and gentle humor. Yet he does so as firmly and as thoroughly as Samuel Johnson, who, a century before, challenged imperial and colonial history with his History of the Yorubas. (Johnson was himself Yoruba, the child of Sierra Leone repatriates, and his research, though unpublished until 1921, was completed in the late nineteenth century.) Johnson used "Yoruba" to contest colonial history, thereby participating in the invention of that modern ethnicity, while Shonibare uses African-print fabric and photography to contest ethnic, racist, and other stereotypes. Whatever ethnicity might be, the problem lies with its essentialized all-embracing interpretation, and this must be put aside. Shonibare does not reject "Yoruba" as a badge of identity. It is rather that only he can identify the circumstances in which "Yoruba" is the relevant identity to be chosen. As I have previously suggested (Picton 1991), each of us, irrespective of labels and geographies, is the locus of several dimensions of identity-and-difference; and the manner in which we interpret the world by our placing of things in it to these (and other) ends is inevitably complex and negotiable, and never all of a piece. The categories are inherently labile.