I am often confused about what to make of exhibitions that clump geography and a concept, a la museum classifications. For example, “Old masters from Bengal”. It’s a signal about what has been framed and how. It’s like saying “Women sculptors from Delhi”. What is it about this - or other combinations - that is particular? This same confusion pervaded when I read about a show, “The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles/Recent Art”, at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery.
My own thoughts hardly got sorted out, but the show was rivetting. The artists used irony, history and popular culture to create their art works. The curators here teased out connections.
Before I begin to sound cynical, here is a clarification. African textiles have been widely discussed for what they mean to the identity of being African. They seem to be the cultured person’s alternative to photos of AIDs orphans. The show was looking at how this identity — thrust upon people from that continent or assumed by them for various reasons - is reflected in art practice.
As always, the better-known artists were the predictable eye-catchers. El-Anatsui, written about in this column earlier this year, created the Ghanian kente (he is Ghanian himself) fabric from old metal caps and cans. In doing this, he not only alluded to a tradition of textiles, but also a newer one of local artistry where ash trays, lizards and toys are all carved out of old soda cans. More interesting are his wood carvings, where he creates textile-weave surfaces laced with dyes. In an instant, he dislocates the medium.
Others seemed to defy the curatorial idea. Nigerian-British Yinka Shonibare’s “19th Century Kid (Charles Dickens)” is a dressed-up mannequin in Victorian clothing made of African prints. It served as a double entendre. Most of the African textiles we are familiar with are made for consumption by Africans in other parts of the world.
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The earliest of these were made in Holland where the popular batik-feel was created from what is now called the Dutch wax textiles made by the Dutch and the English. The visual image of Africa is then given to it by the Western world, as part of its economic regime. Now, it is being parodied.
Relatively unknown is South African Lolo Veleko whose street fashion, shot against grafitti and rough landscapes, borders on fashion shoot-style work. His images are about textiles but with a new, raw, edgy feel that is local and also instantly universally comprehensible.
Textiles are an important part of a broader African identity in everyday life. But this show, more than ever, forces us to ask: who put them into the African artistic toolkit? Most artists draw from their context - whether that is an immediate stimulant or a familiar childhood symbol. How consciously do artists linked with the African continent dip into these images? Or is it that, like Indians who have compulsive spirituality thrust upon them, a pan-African symbol is being read into their work?