In the Event of a Thread 2012 (photo MGM)
What is happening to Contemporary Art? Lately it seems to have staked a claim for joy, pleasure, beauty and lasting meaning. Ann Hamilton’s In the Event of A Thread, which took over the Park Avenue Amory in New York for a too brief month last December, was a gleeful romp of swings and children and billowing curtains. Shouts and laughter, the ringing music of freedom and serendipity, filled the cavernous space as muttering, Beckett-gray characters sat fixated on monotonous tasks at tables piled with caged pigeons. In the Event of A Thread made a clear, significant point without having to belabor it. My spirits still lift every time I think of it.
Gravity and Grace 2010 (see credit**)
And now, El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum. Wow. Beauty. Joy. Splendor. Delight. Wonder. Awe. If you don’t immediately feel these things when you see his work, go back and start over. El Anatsui is the great African artist whose rich textured draperies crafted of crushed bits of metal detritus have taken the world by storm; Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works is his first sole exhibition at a New York museum. It’s there until April 4th - don’t miss it*. Much of the work in the show is recent and stems from an accidental discovery of a discarded bag of worthless bottle caps. The day he stumbled on that banal cache El Anatsui discovered gold - literally - though not the gold you may think I mean.
El Anatsui (image by Nash Baker)
El Anatsui, born in Ghana and raised with a Western-style education at a Christian school, has long been a professor of fine art at the University of Nigeria. As a full time resident of Africa, he is a rare ambassador of forms and ideas, inhabiting a strong, proud culture with deep traditions while also viewing it with the intellectual and historical perspective of a Westernized outsider. In videos that help narrate the exhibit, he speaks of how he was introduced to his own culture and how he works to communicate profound truths of African history.
Yida (Comb) 1994/2010 (photo MGM)
A theme of the show is ‘Non-Fixed Forms,' a key concept for El Anatsui. The best demonstration of what he means by the term comes from the earliest work on display. Several small-scale sculptures, planks of wood with burnt and punctured patterns, are deceptively simple but communicate layers of ideas. The worked surfaces of the wood, an iconic material of art from West Africa, relate to scarring patterns that appear on human skin and in traditional African sculpture; the planks therefore represent Africa itself - continent, people, and culture. These forms can be endlessly interchanged on aesthetic whim but they also carry a punch; in the shifting of divided forms El Anatsui consciously harks back to the Berlin Conference of 1884 when European powers sat around a table portioning out the African continent.
Amemo 2010 (see credit**)
It is, of course, the celebrated draperies that are the stars of the show. When El Anatsui hung one of these gargantuan wonders on the façade of a Venetian palace at the 2007 Biennale, jaws dropped and the world snapped to attention. Painstakingly crafted of those crushed castoffs - from liquor bottles, thus the debris of Colonialism (liquor was introduced into Africa to further exert European control over a degraded continent) - and twisted into blocks of color and pattern with bits of copper wire, each one looms up before you with an astonishing unearthly power and presence.
Earth's Skin 2009 (see credit**)
In Brooklyn two of them face each other across the broad central gallery: Gravity and Grace (2010) on one side, Earth’s Skin (2009) on the other. Here is the gold I mentioned - the metallic surfaces gleam and shimmer and tantalize with the subtle brilliance of purest gold and precious stones, throwing off regal and celestial associations. Present is the once powerful, gold-wealthy Ghana and great kings wrapped in swaths of colorful, highly valued Kente cloth. Another glance brings aerial maps with rivers, villages, roads and trails - a physical, historical and fantastical journey that may speak first of Africa, but just as truly propels the viewer around and through a mesmerizing universe.
Detail (photo MGM)
Folds in these tapestries create further landscapes of light and shadow. Let them entice you closer until you are nose to nose with the fabric; the closer you get the more you understand of meaning and process. Colors and brand names on the bottle caps are still clearly visible - staring ordinary in the face, you note each twist of copper wire and wonder at the alchemy by which El Anatsui transforms the worthless into the magical.
Red Block 2010 - Akron hanging (see credit**)
It was fascinating to be told by Kevin Dumouchelle, the curator of the exhibit, that El Anatsui ships these great works flat with no instructions. How they are hung, how many folds and how exactly they fall - all this is left to those who hang them. In Akron, Ohio, where the show originated, Gravity and Grace was upside down to how it is seen in Brooklyn. Two beautiful drapery pieces in the final room, Red Block and Black Block (both 2010) are especially striking in the Brooklyn presentation.
Gli 2010 (photo MGM)
Other works are just as fascinating if not as spectacularly beautiful as the drapes. Several floor constructions, including Drainpipe and Peak (both 2010), are also shimmering gold, but instead of bottle caps they are made of tops from condensed milk cans, a ubiquitous African brand named Peak. A featured work, Gli, hangs in 5 panels in the 72-foot high rotunda at the entry to the show. Gli (Wall) is the first installation piece El Anatsui has made with the bottle cap medium -–the work has a tissue-like quality that plays with the meaning and idea of walls. You are in front, you are behind; as others move in the space they disappear and reappear. Like much of Western contemporary art - The Ann Hamilton installation is a great example - the work comes to full life with the participation of ‘viewers’ - no longer bystanders but an essential part of the artist’s intention.
Waste Paper Bags 2004-2010 (photo MGM)
There are other Western art connections in El Anatsui's work - his validity as a voice of Africa is a springboard into the full conversation of art and art history, not a geographical stricture. References to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art are easy to spot - the work Waste Paper Bags (2004-2010) owes a good deal to Claes Oldenberg, but because the giant bags are made of crushed printing plates telling of people's lives and deaths they are eloquent rather than merely playful; they charm even as they speak of suffering and poverty.
Earth's Skin and Peak (photo MGM)
At 68, an age thought old in Western cultures, El Anatsui is a wise elder on fire with creativity and inspiration. Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is his sober, beautiful feast of pleasure and joy.
*If you are unable to make it to Brooklyn for the show, check to see if there is a work by El Anatsui at a museum in your area. The De Young Museum in San Francisco has a beauty - Hover II from 2004.
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/el-anatsui
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/el_anatsui/
http://www.armoryonpark.org/programs_events/detail/ann_hamilton
**Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a major grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of African and Pacific Art, Brooklyn Museum.
*If you are unable to make it to Brooklyn for the show, check to see if there is a work by El Anatsui at a museum in your area. The De Young Museum in San Francisco has a beauty - Hover II from 2004.
http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/el-anatsui
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/el_anatsui/
http://www.armoryonpark.org/programs_events/detail/ann_hamilton
**Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui is organized by the Akron Art Museum and made possible by a major grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Brooklyn presentation is organized by Kevin Dumouchelle, Associate Curator of African and Pacific Art, Brooklyn Museum.
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