Yinka Shonibare MBE: An Aesthetic of Excess

by Hedieh Ilchi

Beware! YINKA SHONIBARE MBE is a spectacular ensemble that tantalizes one’s eyes to the point of unconsciousness. I would recommend that you protect yourselves from the infamous aesthetic fever that is permeating the gallery space. Initially, organized and toured by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, this exhibition showcases at its final destination, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, a mid-career survey of the 47 year old British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, which includes paintings, sculptural installations, photography, and video. The two levels of the museum seem to have been seized by the headless mannequins dressed in Victorian garb African style. The exhibit begins from the upper level and somehow manages to become a labyrinth before I finally find my way to the sublevel area to take in the rest of the survey. There have been efforts to unify the split-level show visually by displaying objects that reach up to the overlook area; however, the unification acts only as an enigmatic mirage for me.

Amongst the works on display, there are two wall installation/painting pieces Double Dutch, 1994, and Black Gold, 2006 that stand separate in relation to the rest of the work presented due to their decorative flatness and the absence of the human figure. My initial reaction to these pieces was questioning their formal and conceptual relevance to the rest of Shonibare’s body of work. The only common denominator between these paintings and the rest of the show is the use of the African printed cloth known as the Dutch Wax fabric that is Shonibare’s infamous signature material. In Double Dutch, 50 small rectangular canvases wrapped in Duch Wax fabric are overlaid with impasto layers of paint, displayed in 5 rows on one solid Barbie pink background. Through the repetition and the gridded arrangement of this piece, Shonibare toys with the Minimalist notions of repetition and via the use of fragments, he deconstructs and recontexualizes the Greenbergian Formalism of the heroic white male oriented AbEx painting. And, if you are concerned about his reasoning behind the Barbie pink background, let me assure you of its importance, my friends! The Barbie Pink ‘demasculinises’ the notion of the Greenbergian Modernism and steps into the world of the Postmodern. The idea of female as the ‘other’, enables Shonibare to bridge postmodernism and postcolonialism through their shared conception of ‘otherness’ in identity politics. But at last, it seems that the aura of the Modernist meta-narrative is fractured; or is it really, I wonder? To me, this whole idea is absolutely arduous to fathom. I believe that Shonibare’s attempt at fragmentation of the heroic painting, cancels itself when the fragmented canvases are de-fragmented by their placement on a monumental solid backdrop. As a result the concept of the monumental is reinforced back into this painting.

Double Dutch is as grandiose as it can be and that is not just because it takes up an entire wall at the gallery space, but because it is one of the first pieces by Shonibare that challenges the notions of Authenticity. Walking around the gallery, I start to make connections between Shonibare’s ever repeated usages of the African Fabric in relation to the historical Victorian elements. It seems as if he is creating hybrids that are by-products of the colonialism of Africa and how that forms the post-colonial cultural identity that he is a part of. The idea of hybridization even oozes from the man’s title: “Yinka shonibare MBE” Member of the Order of the British Empire which he was honored due to his services to the arts in 2005. His acceptance of the title is of course a witty and political gesture that opens up his artistic ground even further by locating him both inside and outside of a bureaucratic system. So, surprisingly enough, I discover that the African print fabric that is a stereotypical sign of exotic Africanness, is not African at all. It seems to be nothing but a colonial construction. During the 19^th century, produced in England and the Netherlands, the Dutch Wax fabric was inspired by Indonesian batiks and targeted towards the potential consumers in Africa. So, that is how the Guy Deboardian African “spectacle” is born. Therefore, the signified doesn’t truly reciprocate to the signifier and as a result a mythical pseudo-authentic Africanness is created. What Shonibare implies through his work is “what you see isn’t what you get.”

However, I would like to argue that in the post-colonial hybridized era, the idea of an authentic can be reconstructed and re-presented in terms of a hybrid authentic, which is a willing adoption and appropriation by the colonized. After all, what is still purely authentic in this 21th century cyber world of ours? The Dutch Wax might have originated outside of Africa, but its applied use and its meshing with the local construct of the culture gives it meaning. In a Wittgensteinian sense “meaning is just use” and it is the function of the Fabric that shapes its true meaning and authenticates it.

Shonibare in his work deals with the idea of excess and theatricality. At the beginning of my gallery visit, overflowing aw and exuberance took me over due to the vibrancy, meticulousness, and frivolity of the work presented. However, as I reach the sublevel gallery to take in the rest of the exhibit, I find myself overwhelmed and at times numbly desensitized towards the work. In other words, the exaggerated and redundant use of the fabric seems fetishistic and conjures artifice. I am aware that Shonibare, uses this visual aesthetic as a tactic to seduce the spectator before revealing his critique of the hypocritical world we live in; however, I find a sense of hypocrisy in Shonibare’s means of critique. He portrays the notion of wealth and power and the idea of Victorian leisure to shed light on the unfortunate, less privileged and servile providers of the colonized Africa. However, Shonibare’s own method of production seems to be patronizing if you will. After all, putting his physical disability aside, he employs teams of photographers, actors, seamstresses, and more to bring his ideas into actuality. And, entertain me, I beg of you: who plays the Victorian, and who plays the less privileged in this scenario?

My head is rampaged with the paradox of love and hate, trust and distrust that I unknowingly find myself sitting in front of the screening video Odile and Odette, an approximately 14 minute digital capture created in 2005. This piece is inspired by Tchaikovsky’s celebrated ballet, Swan Lake, in which one dancer performs the roles of the heroine, Odette dressed in white, and her adversary, Odile while wearing black. In Shonibare’s inspiration, there are instead two ballerina’s one black and one white, dressed in the Dutch Wax fabric, performing with synchronized movements on the two sides of a gilded frame. They dance as if one is a mere reflection of the other in the mirror; however, the idea of reflection becomes abstract as they seamlessly switch places throughout the performance. I find myself drawn to the contemplative elegance and the lack of pretentiousness in this piece. For once, I am in a direct conversation with the artwork, void of discombobulating excessiveness of Shonibare’s tendency. Shonibare, in a more honest way, provides a manner of questioning the hypotheses of our society. The idea of good versus bad is played parallel to the notions of whiteness and blackness. The constant switching roles of the ballerina’s as reflected and reflection attempts to tenderly poke the eyes of our stereotypicality. The success of this piece is part due to the curatorial decision to visually present it in relation with the rest of Shonibare’s work, as opposed to isolating it in a darkroom, typical of screened videos. This enables to locate Shonibare’s work conceptually and formally in relation to postmodernism’s idea of hybridity.

Shonibare’s vast body of work draws on crucial issues such as imperialism, post-colonialism, globalism, and cultural identity and seem to act parallel to such aesthetic issues as excess and beauty. However, the crux of his work is its paradoxical nature that permits for fluctuating dialectics rather than congealment of ideas. It is this openness that draws me to shonibare’s work and enables me to wonder and question the works many layers.

Art Review | Cornelia Schulz

at Project 4

By Kate Demong

The eleven new works in Project 4’s exhibition of San Francisco-based artist Cornelia Schulz compel me to ask how this could be her first east-coast solo show. We east coasters have clearly missed out. I await Schulz’s future recognition in a retrospective of her paintings from the 1960s to the present so that I can become acquainted with the development of her body of work, which I should not have missed.

Schulz interlocks five to seven small canvases of varying shapes to construct abstract, non-rectilinear, paintings. The component canvases — rectangles, trapezoids, ovals, ells and pie-wedges — fit together in odd-shaped puzzles. The painting styles on the individual canvases also vary, from expressionist pours of paint, to minimalist color fields, hard-edged geometries, and layerings of abstract shapes.

Schulz’s achievement is that in each amalgamation of disparate forms, patterns, and textures, she somehow — improbably — creates a coherent whole. Perhaps this is due to the consistency in color. Pastels such as cotton-candy pink and 1930s-bathroom green meet white, black, and bold reds throughout the different elements. Or the unlikely unity may be due to Schulz’s impressive control over her materials, whether she is using oil and alkyd resin to create a surface as smooth as glass or as crevassed as a raised-relief topographic map. Because of the mishmash of shapes and styles the works capture the viewer’s attention and hold it in their clutch; when the dissimilar canvases rub up against each other, tension forms, and compelling relationships develop.

The works are small in scale (the largest measures 28” x 24”), but each offers the viewer a walk through 20^th-century art history. They reference numerous artists, from Piet Mondrian to Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Anne Truitt, Richard Diebenkorn, and Takashi Murakami. Schulz’s interest in exploring non-rectilinear canvases hardly surprises, considering she graduated from art school in 1962. The painstakingly-stretched canvases remind us, however, of why the rectangular format is the norm. Evenly-spaced seams show evidence of the labor expended to pull the canvas taut against the edges of the rounded and odd-angled wood frames. Although non-rectilinear paintings can move into the realm of sculpture, and some of Schulz’s canvases (particularly the black, gold and green columnar canvas in “Red Leaves”) recall Truitt’s totems, Schulz’s works are two-dimensional and strike this viewer as paintings.

The segments layered with poured mixtures of oil and alkyd recall Pollock’s action paintings. In contrast to the largely linear drips of Pollock’s canvases, however, Schulz’s paint pools in organic, biomorphic masses. In addition, Schulz’s technique seems less spontaneous than Pollock’s; although when poured the paint submits to chance and gravity, an attempt by Schulz to control the accident is evident.

In other segments, black lines and colored rectangles often meet at 90° angles, evoking Mondrian’s compositions. And allusions to Murakami’s paintings are many, from Schulz’s weathered canvases, sanded to reveal layers of color below the surface, to the canvases with playful overlappings of curved shapes that bring to mind the round heads and ears of Mr. DOB, Kaikai and Kiki. Even though Schulz’s works are steeped in historical references, they are strikingly fresh, unlike anything else I have seen.

One must experience Schulz’s works in person to understand their construction, appreciate their craft, and respond to the tactility of their surfaces. When up close, I found myself desperately wanting to slide my fingers along the silken surfaces and the intricately ridged pours.

At the exhibition reception on January 16^th, Cornelia Schulz — unassuming, with cropped, gray hair and a warm smile — generously described to me her process. The works seem so resolved and their pieces fit together so perfectly that one might think she first works out the compositions through drawing. This is not the case. Schulz explained that she uses drawing to brainstorm and explore potential, but the combinations of shapes come together in her mind. Visualization focuses her intention.

The process of exploring and realizing this intention then occurs over many weeks. After stretching the canvases, Schulz applies up to six layers of gesso, sanded smooth. Patience is particularly needed to make the poured canvases. Schulz must wait for each layer to dry before building depth with another pour and, ultimately, unifying the canvas with oil washes. As each pour dries it shrinks, forming organic patterning. Coral seascapes? Brains? Or an artist’s studio floor? Because of the element of chance, Schulz says, the biomorphic canvases do not always satisfy. Achieving resolution can be a struggle. Many of the works’ names reference her process of searching and surprise: “Some Conclusions Drawn,” “Learning Curve,” and “Inexplicable Events.” After completing the individual canvases, Schulz moves on to their assembly. She took one of the works off the wall to show its underlying construction: an intriguing collage of wood, canvas folds, and bolts.

One arguable fault of this exhibition is that all of the works are very similar. When approaching a painting, there is little surprise due to the consistency in the basic shapes, painting styles, and palette of all eleven works in the show. Schulz said that she will eventually shift away from the palette used to create this body of work, as she can be interested in something for only so long. Her interest in this palette, however, outlasted that of some viewers. She may have kept some gallery-goers more engaged if she had made more perceptible shifts when creating these works. But it is this overall consistency that allows the subtle shifts to surface. It allows one to notice how a work that includes a canvas with a curved edge activates the surrounding space differently than a work with solely rectilinear components, or how a work with a flat black canvas has deeper space than one without.

Lily deSaussure (A.U. MFA, 2008), co-director of Project 4, first viewed Schulz’s work in San Francisco and thought it would be a perfect fit in the stark, white-walled, light-filled interior of Project 4's new space on 14^th and U. And deSaussure was right. Another of Schulz’s successes, however, is that her works would be equally at home in a less austere space. I can see, for example, the jumbles of forms and patterns playing off the ornamentation of a Victorian interior. Schulz’s elegant works, quiet yet complex, would command interest in any setting.

1353 U Street, NW, 3rd Floor; December 23, 2009 – January 23, 2010

A Critical Review: In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes Before the Digital Age

By Sarah Miller

This show on display in the West building of the National Gallery holds an ambitious goal: to present, through pieces from the permanent collection of the museum, the evolution of photographic processes since its origins, thus covering approximately 170 years of work in this medium. The tone is immediately given: the processes are the guideline, the intention is didactic. The show is purposefully hanged chronologically, starting in the first room with the 19th century discovery of the medium, followed in the second with the first half of the 20th century's expanding explorations in black and white, and ending in the third room with the second half of the 20th century's use of color. This curatorial choice of presenting an overview spanning over a large expanse of time is of no surprise in such a location, as this historical basis allows the museum to display the varied highlights of its collection in a perfectly rational way.

And here comes what must have been the main struggle in setting up such a show: how does one find a balance between the rational and the sensitive, the Apollonian clarity of the argument (the evolution of processes) and Dionysian freedom of the medium (the expression in each piece). In other words, how does one find a balanced way to underline technical components without overshadowing the aesthetic quality and specific implications of each work on display, or extracting them from their context.

I must admit that my first experience of the show resembled that of watching a movie with subtitles, where the eye is at first caught to the writing and distracted from the visual frame. Each label is indeed rich with explanations, and one easily gets caught up in them (in a positive way, re-freshening one's knowledge), with the potential danger of reading more than looking. This aspect is accentuated if one takes the time to look at the accompanying catalog where the 27 processes, to be exact, are presented in alphabetical order. The book thus becomes a referential tool rather than a literal catalog with illustrations of the work on display. It becomes a manual, organizing facts which may be found in generic textbooks on photography, instead of recording an event, the reunion of a certain selection of works from a certain place at a certain time.

Though the explanatory aspect of the show is definitely present, it is luckily not completely overwhelming. No facsimile darkroom was set up, nor were any devices such as developing tanks, pans, enlargers, drying racks, nor were any papers, glass or negatives displayed. Thus I do feel the focus can still be kept to a certain extent on the works themselves.

The first photograph on entering the show perfectly epitomizes the issue raised here and illustrates the curatorial decision of explaining photographic processes whilst trying not to make a purely cold technical statement or being too demonstrative. The piece in question is Under the Dark Cloth, Monument Valley, May 27, taken by Mark Klett in 1987. It seems like most visitors barely notice this lead-in photograph and jump to Talbot's Lace, missing the introduction. This gelatin silver print is interesting in several regards. First of all, it presents a mise en abyme as it is a photograph of a photograph being taken: a shot taken from “under the dark cloth”, looking through the view finder of an old fashioned camera, showing the landscape of the American West upside-down. The basic operation of the camera obscura, ancestor of modern photography and known since the Renaissance, is therefore astutely recorded. This piece hence becomes a picture of the original darkroom, the one where the outside world reflected itself upside-down through a tiny hole of light, the one which helped Canaletto draw Venice's perspectives, and which even before that, was discussed by Aristotle. But this piece is certainly not simply about documenting a process as it carries a somewhat melancholic feeling, bringing into a contemporary image both the memories of the camera obscura, and the grandeur of nineteenth century landscapes. Layers of time echo through the piece, just as the composition is itself filled with echos: the frame of the picture is repeated in the rectangular frame of the view finder. The photographer's hand positioned on the latter with a thumb raised upward resonates with the famous anthropomorphic rocky form. The light-skinned human hand detaches itself on the dark ground of the curtain, while the dark natural shape of Monument Valley is cut out on a clear sky. This photography is particularly well chosen for the general theme of the show as it is demonstrative and expressive all at once.

If one manages not to be overwhelmed by the didactic aspect of the show and allows himself to forget the possibly claustrophobic feeling created by this reunion of almost two centuries of work in such a small place, one must then deal with another issue: a great number of works are famous images which a viewer with a minimum of photographic culture will immediately recognize, and what is immediately recognized becomes invisible. The Baudelaire portrait by Carjat struck me the most in this regard, as I associated it directly to the cover of my copy of the Fleurs du Mal and had difficulties truly looking at it for its intrinsic qualities . However, the placement of this portrait at the epicenter of the show was very interesting and seemed meaningful in regards of another issue: the status of photography as document or art. I found myself looking back and forward at two pieces curiously hanging face to face: a portrait by Diane Arbus and Baudelaire's taken by Carjat. And there was the shifting point: For the first, the name of the photographer came to my mind, for the second, it was that of the portrayed. However, Baudelaire's portrait is no less art, as it functions just as an anonymous religious icon would. Indeed, though photography records every little detail under the light at the moment of the shot, the end result is never a replica of life and always becomes something else: the portrait by Carjat is not Baudelaire, but part of the myth created around this figure, now established as the father of modernism. The photography thus becomes a signifier, as much as a painting would be.

As a last point, I would like to comment on the chronological organization which allows a clear development to be shown, but does on the other hand come with constraints and an unavoidable limitation: it does not leave much space to display the multiple discoveries explored within one given process. It places the processes on a time-line where each of them is fixed and anchored to a point, becoming part of the past and revolved as soon as the next process is discovered. The whole creative range sparked from a specific technique, from its invention to the present day, stays concealed. In this regard, I was lucky enough, shortly after my visit at the National Gallery, to travel to the Metropolitan in New York where an other photography show entitled Surface Tension is currently on view. This exhibit focuses on contemporary artists addressing the question of tension between the photograph as a window with illusionist depth, and as a physical two-dimensional surface. No chronology guides the viewer yet examples of cyanotypes, gelatin silver prints, polaroid, chromogenic prints, along with digital images are all on display. The most recent piece of the show made in 2008 by Chrisitan Marclay is in fact a cyanotype, which is the first process shown at the National Gallery with Ferns by Anna Atkins. Thus older discoveries are re-actualized and the possibilities they engendered seem open-ended.

Furthermore, this show at the Metropolitan explores not only technical processes but also other creative processes such as scratching, burning, or painting on the photograph. Lucas Samaras' Photo transformation may illustrate this the best, as the artists scratches the wet emulsions of the instant print while it is developing. The specificity of the polaroid as a process thus become very explicit through this work., much more so than David Levinthal's large piece Untitled (from Mein Kampf) which was, according to the label at the National Gallery, an example to observe evidence of the peel apart process (the viewer was advised to look at the edges of the photograph to notice the visible traces of the peeling). Looking at the process in this perspective in this particular case became a sterile activity. The Metropolitain show was liberating and complimentary to the National Gallery as “process” in this parallel context no longer strictly designated technical invention, but rather inventive ways of using technique.

Finally, one last questionable aspect concerning a chronological decision may be raised: that of stopping the show “before the digital age”, as though the new age ended the old. The old being the darkroom, where manipulations are complex and timely, the new may appear to be defined through this implicit opposition as easy and instantaneous, which is interestingly what early photography was considered to be (in opposition to painting which was considered much more tedious and time consuming). Without going too far into this interpretation, we may also notice that the title “in the darkroom” is not strictly followed as several of the processes included in the show have no relation to the darkroom and avoid it altogether. It is indeed the case for the early cyanotype , or the photogenic drawings by William Henry Fox Talbot, or even with the later Polaroids. Hence, instead of an implicit opposition carried through the title between the “Darkroom” (which is not rigorously respected) and the “Digital Age” (which stands as a great enigma-taboo), it would have been interesting to introduce an opening on digital photography, and maybe develop the idea of a continuum with the precedent processes.

Upcoming Reviews

The season of reviews has officially begun. The Contemporary Theory and Criticism class has selected 11 exhibitions in Washington DC to critique. Over the next few days, we will be posting these reviews in full. Stay tuned!

AU Alums and Faculty Featured in Chelsea Show: Diverse Painting to the Max

AU alum Kate Gartrell reviews a show featuring AU Alumni and Faculty.

In her New York Times piece “Post-Minimal to the Max” (Feb 10, 2010), Roberta Smith critiqued the recent overabundance of blockbuster museum exhibitions by big-name post-minimalist artists. Citing MOMA’s current Gabriel Orozco retrospective, The New Museum’s recent Urs Fisher show, and The Whitney’s Roni Horn retrospective, among others, Smith argues convincingly that major NY museums have developed a peculiar myopia in the kind of work they showcase:

…regardless of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.

If Orozco’s lonely cardboard box and yogurt tops were getting her down, Smith ought to have hopped the subway to Denise Bibro Fine Art in Chelsea, where a recent show of work by alums and faculty of Chautauqua Art School would have provided a generous antidote. “Chautauqua: A Continuum of Creativity,” featured works by 25 faculty and 25 alums of the long-running summer program in its 100^th anniversary year. Owing to the school’s strong tradition in painting, most of the 50 artists represented are painters, and a number also have ties to American University’s art department. The diversity of painting styles represented, however, speaks as evidence not only of a vibrant and multi-generational painting culture, but also of a pluralist educational philosophy at work in the two institutions.

As an alumna myself of AU’s MFA program, I often tell people that one strength of the program right now is its diversity. Retaining its traditional base as a “painter’s” painting program, AU has evolved to include faculty trained in modernist, post-modernist, and contemporary art theory and practices. AU faculty represented in the Chautauqua show are Don Kimes and Stanley Lewis. The list of one-time AU visiting artists in the show includes Julie Langsam, Elena Sisto, Glenn Goldberg, Charlie Hewitt, and Stephen Westfall. In one stroke, this handful of artists represents the continual presence of modernism (Hewitt’s expressive abstractions, and Westfall’s minimal and op-art pieces) and its questioning by a new generation (Langsam, who shows us the “setting sun” of modernism, led a provocative seminar at Chautauqua last summer).

“Pluralism” and “diversity” may sound like buzzwords, but let’s not underestimate their relevance in the context of art education. Particularly at the graduate level, students are often engaged– and rightly so – in evaluating what they’ve been taught previously, deciding what to hold on to and what to set aside. Artists or not, most people go through a similar process in their 20’s in relation to their parents. As students we have the right and responsibility of exposure to a range of possibilities. I often reflect that I could have gone to a more stalwart (formalist) “painting” program than American, but if I had, I would have missed making an informed and enthusiastically affirmed decision to paint as I do.

AU student alums included in the show are Heidi Leitzke (Italy Program), Whitney Kovar (BA), Jeremy Long (Italy Program and MFA), Amber Scoon (Italy Program MFA), Alyse Rosner (MFA), myself (MFA), and Dan Steinhilber (MFA). The diversity and strength of their work suggests that these young artists used the plurality of AU and Chautauqua’s painting cultures to push their work towards deeper individuality. From Scoon’s textured lead sculptures, to Leitzke’s imagined undersea-scapes, to Long’s Piero-esque interiors, their work reveals a process of absorbing influences to hone an individual vision.

As the show at Bibro Fine Art suggests, Chautauqua and American remain two places in an “anything goes” art world where students can go to begin absorbing and making sense of contemporary painting’s diversity. Those who share Roberta Smith’s misgivings about post-minimalist monotony in the city’s museums can take comfort this diversity. Now if only MOMA would sit up and take notice…