Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

El Anatsui: Art and Life by Susan Vogel New York: Prestel, 2012. 175 pp., 145 color ill. $60.00, hardcover

2019; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_r_00491

1937-2108

Delinda Collier,

Spanish Culture and Identity

El Anatsui has never been tortured by the tyranny of a canvas and its definition of a grid. His bottle cap tapestries, or “metal sheets,” are normally constructed by the logic of a grid, but this grid is not weighted by the psychic and historical baggage of European modern art and architecture. His work is a new grid/medium because of Anatsui's careful calibration of how it operates as a mechanical, conceptual, and social device. Anatsui understands his art to be at once mimetic, philosophical, and communicative, an aspect of African art that has been undertheorized. Where Western art has typically required artists to choose a mimetic function, African artists refused the choice, and that refusal is part of the luminosity of Anatsui's work.This review is a long time coming for African Arts, as Susan Vogel's El Anatsui: Art and Life was published seven years ago. I am not certain the reason for this, but I can say that for myself, El Anatsui's tapestries were so dominant in/as the field when I entered into contemporary African art history that I did not notice that it had not been reviewed in our flagship journal. In this review, I will focus my remarks on what seems to be a commonality in the literature on Anatsui (even if unstated): the play of proximity and distance. It often characterizes authors' voices as they implicitly state the credentials to interpret the work, but also characterizes the debate over whether we should read Anatsui's work as being “African” or “global.”Overall, Vogel's comprehensive survey is an indispensable resource, both in its collection of primary statements and documents about Anatsui's biography and formal development, as well as its sumptuous collection of color and black-and-white archival images. The bibliography is comprehensive, remarkable as a history of the themes and trends in the reception of Anatsui's work. El Anatsui: Art and Life is detailed and careful in its descriptions of Anatsui's works and presents his voice as the primary interpretive mechanism; it is surely emblematic of the friendship between Vogel and Anatsui, but also of Anatsui's famous generosity in sharing his process. Above all, the book cherishes Anatsui's interpretation of his overall project; Vogel's is subsumed into his artistic voice, a point to which I will return. Vogel's first words are that this is not a book “about theory or research” (p. 6), which generally means that her interpretations emerge unexpectedly and sporadically throughout. It is clear she did not want them to overshadow what was, by the time she wrote this, the enormous figure of Anatsui. Her approach is typical of the 2005–2011 flood of El Anatsui exhibition catalogs, monographs, and articles and her own documentary film, Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011).El Anatsui: Art and Life is divided into two thematic sections: “Life” and “Art,” which contain a total of eight chapters on various topics of the two themes. In “Life,” Vogel charts Anatsui's career from Ghana at the Kumasi School of Science and Technology to a teaching post at Nsukka to his breakthrough on the global stage in Africa Remix and the stunning display of Dusasa I (2007) at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The chapters in “Life” are not rigorously organized, but instead meander more-or-less chronologically and are interspersed with important insights that sometimes appear as sidebar discussions. The “Art” section focuses more closely on the different strategies that Anatsui has developed over his long career that set him apart from other contemporary African artists, including the important decision he made to not depict the human form in his work. It was the implied body that aligned him more closely to global minimalist and abstract practices and triggered important debates about the indigeneity of his work, discussions that Vogel notes have faded in recent years.Though she claims that this isn't a work of theory or research, Vogel's careful attention to the methods and the specifics of Anatsui's work is the material of theory. We are presented with an anatomy of Anatsui's late work, including a two-page spread of close-up photos of the “principle formats” of the types of bottle tops and joints he has used. This level of detail enables an understanding of the mechanics of his medium, its formal flexibility and endless permutations. Indeed, as Anatsui explains, “It's like a painter spending his whole career using one medium, oil paints or whatever” (p. 73). Vogel includes photographs of his tapestries draped over bushes and stumps as experiments in their form, taken off the wall of the white cube and molding instead to organic shapes outdoors, as well as close-up photos of studio assistants' hands joining the pieces.With a razor-sharp focus, Anatsui seemed to suddenly crack the code of global contemporary art in the early 2000s with his metal sheets, works that operated according to all of the mechanisms of art history and the market: permutation and seriality, the implied body, scale, abstraction that gives way to allegory, real and implied global networks, and Anatsui's dogged commitment to the community where they are produced. Vogel slows down the story, closely narrating the development of the tapestries and their iterations, beginning with metal cassava graters, then tin-can lids, and then finding a bag of discarded bottle tops in the bushes in 1998. The critical statement Anatsui makes is that the tops were “links between my continent, Africa, and the rest of Europe” (p. 53). The mechanics of the tapestries, the carefully constructed copper-wire link, is easily allegorized as Africa's place in the global network, which in the early 2000s was transposed onto the figure of Anatsui himself. Curators and critics dipped in and out of such geopolitics and caricaturing, such as Robert Storr in the Venice Biennale when he wrote that the work “is completely transcendental made out of junk. […] it has a kind of exaltation I have not seen before” (p. 82). Vogel is careful to counter these kinds of statements with words like those of Elizabeth Harney, who wrote beautifully that Anatsui's work occupies a space of tension between the sublime and the profane, attraction and repulsion (p. 82). The play of proximity and distance underlies the term “medium,” and Anatsui himself sees this operating in the basic way the body approaches the work from a distance and then moves close enough to read the labels “under our nose” (p. 83). The range of projections and identifications are afforded by the flexibility and generosity of Anatsui's work.While there is something delightfully subversive about Africa's trash being sent to pristine, white-cube galleries all over the world, Vogel indicates throughout the book that this designation of “trash” is complicated by the objects' varying commodity status and the way trash sits with classical African art. In one of the sidebar moments, Vogel analyzes recyclia in African art and how it relates to classical African art. We get a nugget of what could be a whole book in this statement: “Traditional West African sculpture virtually never incorporated worthless detritus, except to intimidate or for comic effect” (p. 89). Though it is not her intention to enter into protracted discussions of materials and how they relate to local aesthetics and their histories, these moments left me wanting the art historian Vogel to keep writing. She goes on to explain that his work ushered in a period of “used and discarded manmade objects in the early 1990s,” with a footnote to the scene in Dakar and the artist Moustapha Dimé. Here, especially, I wanted Vogel to build out this comparison between Ghana's (and Anatsui's) sankofa and Dakar's récupération according to a usable art historical apparatus. Moments like this are critical to the narratives we construct and whether Anatsui belongs to or leads crucial movements in the field of African art history.Therefore Vogel's framing, and thus her judgment, could be more obvious, as someone who has been so influential in shaping our field as the curator of Africa Explores (1991) and Art/Artifact (1988), among others. Since the advent of the field, there has been a slow-moving crisis in African art history about whether to understand contemporary art as a break from classical art or philosophically related to it, and I find this popping up throughout Vogel's book. Indeed, El Anatsui's work ushered in a change in the estimation and dissemination of contemporary African art that did not require it to perform its tradition, but neither was it comfortably historicized in terms of, say, a culturally unmarked minimalism or abstract painting. Further, Sunanda K. Sanyal's convincing review in Nka in 2014 suggested that art historians need to historicize such the cosmopolitan status of the artists we write about, as the relationship between “traditional” and “global” is more political than anything having to do with art's form or its references. Vogel calls Anatsui's metal sheet works “global,” “more universal,” going to her overall point that his work began to have purchase (market pun intended) in the larger art world. Instead of emphasizing that peripatetic cosmopolitan artists have a history and politics, as Sanyal noted, El Anatsui: Art and Life focuses instead on arguing that the works' global reach is El Anatsui's ultimate accomplishment and innovation.The global art world/market is happy to maintain its focus on Anatsui's many permutations of the metal sheets. In the years since, there have been several more major or medium-sized exhibitions of El Anatsui's work and, as a result, many reviews and catalog essays, including one at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum with an exhibition catalog edited by Amanda Gilvin and John Stomberg (2015). Anatsui's major retrospective exhibition El Anatsui: Five Decades at Carriageworks in Sydney in 2016 mainly comprised work since 2000. Anatsui's work appeared in Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa (2013–14) at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, an exhibition that was methodologically important and provides new ways forward to curating and writing about Anatsui's work (Milbourne 2013). Curators Mary Jo Arnoldi and Trevor Marchand argued that a major concern that unites many African artists is their interface with what is conceived of the “earth,” whether that be various definitions of nature, environmentalist discourse, or more classical, historical animist philosophies of art substances. Anatsui's work sat perfectly within such concerns because they move beyond his biography to the array of concerns related to the nebulous term “global.” Currently on exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, and sure to be reviewed here soon, is Okwui Enwezor's and Chika Okeke-Agulu's El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale—what has tragically turned out to be Enwezor's last exhibition. Okwui Enwezor's effect on our field was of triumphant scale; Anatsui's work was key to his story of the productive ambiguity of African art. Scholars continue to assemble a broader array of what it means to be a “global” artist beyond market viability and, perhaps correspondingly, a type of abstraction made of large scale, generous about receiving its audience's projections, bearing a specificity rewarded from close looking.