What are the ways by which a curator can build an engaging narrative around the works of an inventive, witty artist? Should it be historically laid out, tracing the shifts? Should it rotate around visual complexity? Or, cluster the artist’s concerns?
Yinka Shonibare, the flamboyant 47-year-old Nigerian-British artist honoured with an MBE, is showing at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Sadly, the exhibition has been unable to use the excellent opportunity to allow his body of work to follow a coherent narrative. Indeed, the display becomes not a means of showing Shonibare’s oeuvre, but wrestling with it, even subverting it un-selfconsciously, every now and then.
Shonibare’s work over the decades has explored the colonisation of Africa. One of his favourite devices is using brightly-coloured, printed fabrics we associate with Africa. Their origin lies within a colonial trade triangle — an Indonesian batik-based fabric that the Dutch would then sell in Africa. So lucrative was this business that anthropologists and entrepreneurs went across Africa to understand local taste better so that they could deepen the market. For Shonibare, it’s another form of colonialism — being pushed into a trade triangle that does not create wealth for one partner. In his works, he uses such fabrics, dripping with symbolism, repeatedly, as if to exorcise the fact of having been occupied economically.
Shonibare’s works take on a dramatic and poignant hue as he fits these dresses, cut along fashionable 19th century patterns, on to headless mannequins. By creating such bodies — but not individual identities — he expands the topography of plunder. Ironically, most such fabric is still manufactured overseas and the few local factories there are are said to be run by Indians. This illusion of the local muddies the work, and adds to it an uncertainty that rings through much of the works, particularly the more recent videos.
The cultural incongruities he designs are not limited to dress alone — his practice of quoting artists from the European tradition create similar tensions. In one of his most exciting works, he borrows from a Fragonard painting, creating a sculptural work with his wax-print fabric dress. The fabric contains Dior logos, at once transporting Fragonard’s luxury-loving France into the contemporary consumptive. Is this still supported by Africa? Many other videos, installations and sculptures underscore the idea of the good life and plunder as its basis. Not only does Africa clothe the beautiful people, it clothes them fashionably.
His new works follow the historic inevitability of the social presence of the colonised, and its discomforts. A series of photographs on the British dandy underscore the point. A dark man — played by the artist himself — becomes the focus of attention of a clutch of white nurses and domestic assistants. It could well be reality, but Shonibare seems to suggest an element of fantasy in such images.
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But the experience becomes complicated, perhaps unintentionally: when the works on the first floor are done with, a viewer comes out into a traditional African art section —masks and totem poles. It doesn’t seem to be part of the curatorial intent. It is bewildering, if not an unhappy experience. Is Shonibare a regional African artist?
Of course, this show has three venues, of which two are in the United States. It’s hard to plan for a show that diverse spaces must accommodate. Yet, I can’t help but ask, is his work the next generation of art practice after masks? Was he somehow squeezed into an invented “national pavilion”? Many non-Western art traditions don’t subscribe to art as a product initiated in formal art schools. But subscribing to that worldview in the Brooklyn Museum for the work of a distinctively contemporary art practitioner reinforces and ironically subverts Shonibare’s narrative. It would be the same as displaying Subodh Gupta right next to an unrelated section comprising wooden Buddha carvings. It also makes me wonder what Shonibare might himself say. Perhaps he’d be indifferent, perhaps amused. Perhaps it would push him to intervene in the traditional art section and extend the boundaries of his work. Or, perhaps, he may simply enjoy the provocation this setting provides.