Layers of Meaning in Object Art
By Michael O'Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 21, 2008
Sculpture sure ain't what it used to be.
The days when statuary was a set, rigid thing with but a single, clear meaning -- Heroism! Sorrow! Love! -- are gone. In its place? Work like the assemblages of junkyard debris in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden's "The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture," whose very title drives home the ambiguous, open-ended nature of much of the contemporary art form.
El Anatsui wouldn't have it any other way.
"Sculpture should not be fixed," says the Ghanaian-born artist, whose first U.S. solo exhibition arrived this month at the National Museum of African Art. Even the show's title, "Gawu" -- a word from the artist's native Ewe suggesting both "metal" and cloak" -- contradicts. Like "Iron Curtain," it calls to mind rigidity and flexibility.
Its most obvious allusion, of course, is to the fabriclike sheets the artist fashions from discarded bottle caps and aluminum neck bands that once graced liquor bottles, several examples of which are on view here. A commentary on alcohol abuse? Certainly. (Distilleries are plentiful near Nsukka, Nigeria, where Anatsui has lived and worked for 28 years. This leads both to a ready source of raw material for the artist, who "sews" the little bits of flattened metal together with copper wire, as well as an opportunity to witness the magnitude of his adoptive country's booze consumption.)
El Anatsui's messages range from the environmental to the political to the economic. So scraps of metal can represent the growing trash problem, what the artist calls the "balkanization" of Africa by Europe, and the unequal economic relationship between the continent and the West, where the distilleries originated.
Such pungent mutability is precisely what draws Anatsui to his chosen medium. That and the ability to fold up like a bedsheet the work for which he is best known. Check out "Blue Moon," a new work the artist says he brought over with him on the plane. Could there be a subtle statement about globalization going on there? Something about the porousness of national borders? Why not? "I regard myself as someone who has provided a set of data," says Anatsui. How the audience reads that data is of little concern to him.
Or maybe not.
Reading comes into play much more explicitly in "Wastepaper Bag," a towering 3-D form fashioned from crumpled metal plates the artist fished out of a printer's trash. As with all of Anatsui's work, there are many possible interpretations, including, most superficially, the difficulties of waste management in places such as Nigeria that have poor recycling capabilities.
But there's another, even more powerful point (and it's one that neatly ties in to the fact that Anatsui's "tapestries" can resemble the Adinkra mourning cloths of Ghana). Look closely. You might miss it if you don't lean in to read the text on some of the aluminum sheets, several of which were once used for funeral announcements. Make a note of the birth and death dates, Anatsui urges. These are people who died at age 45, maybe 50.
That, the artist says, points the way to the central metaphor of "Wastepaper Bag." It isn't one of overflowing landfills, though he is happy if viewers take at least that much away from his sad and strangely beautiful found-object art. Rather, it's a message in which the wording of at least one title refers not to garbage, but to what he calls the "wasted" lives of far too many fellow Africans.
El Anatsui, a Sculptor Who Starts From Scrap
By Barbara Pollack
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 23, 2008; Page M06
Recycling may be the eco-friendly option in the United States. But in Africa, where resources are much more scarce, recycling is a way of life and no scrap of material goes to waste. The art of El Anatsui, currently on view at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, demonstrates the creativity at the heart of African resourcefulness. With art made out of evaporated-milk cans, cassava graters and aluminum seals from the tops of liquor bottles, he has created work that has won worldwide acclaim for its power and beauty.
"A work of art reflects its origins but at the same time it should be able to reach out to people," says Anatsui, in Washington for the installation of his show. The artist, 64, was born in Ghana before its independence in 1957, but since 1975 he has lived in Nsukka, Nigeria, where he is a professor of sculpture.
His art reflects various traditions of those two countries, such as West African kente cloth and reliquary carvings, yet his work incorporates the massive scale that is a hallmark of contemporary installation art. For the past 30 years, Anatsui has been known within Africa as one of the continent's most influential contemporary sculptors. That reputation has grown to encompass international fame and an extensive exhibition schedule throughout the world.
"El Anatsui: Gawu" was originally organized by the Oriel Mostyn Gallery in Wales in 2003. It toured Europe and the United States for five years before arriving at the Smithsonian this month. It is a slim survey of the artist's work since 1999, with only eight works tracing his development since he has gained recognition in international art circles. The title of the exhibition combines two words -- "ga," meaning metal, and "wu," meaning cloak -- from Anatsui's native Ewe language. It aptly describes his iconic wall reliefs, which look like medieval chain mail or jeweled robes fit for a king.
Actually, these monumental wall hangings are sculptures, not tapestries, and many are made from thousands of strips of aluminum taken from the seals used on liquor bottles. With the help of 20 assistants, Anatsui flattens the seals and folds them into strips that are then woven together with copper wire. All of the colors come from the labels themselves, and on closer inspection the names of the brands are legible. The process is laborious and it takes almost two months to finish one work. The finished artworks are roughly 30 feet long and 20 feet high.
He began using the material quite by chance in 1999.
"The first bag of bottle caps I found thrown away in the bush," Anatsui recalls. "I went back to the place and asked people where I could find more." He discovered that the local distillery collected the seals from used liquor bottles before recycling and refilling the containers. Local merchants bought the discarded seals to smelt into metal to make huge cooking vessels for local funeral rituals. Anatsui became an unlikely competitor, purchasing huge bags of these aluminum castoffs as the basic material for his intricate constructions.
The complexity of Anatsui's undertaking becomes clear standing before the vast wall relief titled "Adinkra Sasa," from 2003. This is the darkest work in the exhibition, with hundreds of black labels woven into vast swaths. It hangs on the wall like an ominous curtain with undulating folds emphasizing the artwork's three-dimensionality. Adinkra is a type of printed cloth traditionally used in funerals. But up close, the names of the liquor brands -- Dark Sailor, Liquor Headmaster and Black Gold -- reflect a grim period in African history. Anatsui consciously pulled together all these elements -- traditional weaving, minimalist sculpture and references to the slave trade -- when he made this somber work of art.
"When I work with this medium, I have in mind that I am touching or playing around with that time in history," Anatsui says, referring to the time when sailing ships brought liquor to Africa and took slaves across the Atlantic. "Maybe the people who made the drinks chose their names for different reasons, but for me they ring of that episode."
Another major work in the exhibition is "Crumbling Wall," a 13-foot-tall, 18-foot-wide barrier made entirely from rusting perforated plates that were used to grate cassava, a staple of the African diet. "My concept of a wall is something that not only hides but reveals things," explains Anatsui. "Your eyes can't see behind it, but your imagination projects and your curiosity is aroused." The wall is not quite opaque; it is possible to see movement and shadows through its porous surfaces. Yet it feels as durable as the wall of an ancient tomb, a battered remnant from an archaeological dig. Anatsui got his materials, more than 300 graters, by visiting shops where the plates are recycled and replaced, demonstrating once again his talent for creative reuse.
Anatsui's works can be awe-inspiring when set up in spacious galleries suited to their scale. In an effort to include as many works as possible in the limited space of the gallery devoted to contemporary art at the National Museum of African Art, many of the works seem cramped and overly confined. "Crumbling Wall" seems cramped in its gallery, and it is too near "Many Moons," a multicolored wall relief with a wide range of techniques and patterns. The earliest work in the exhibition, "Peak Project," an installation of three dozen three-foot-tall cones made up of the golden lids of evaporated-milk cans, can look like a mountain range but here is confined to a corner.
This raises the issue of whether an artist of Anatsui's stature should be confined to museums and galleries solely devoted to African art. All of this work is abstract and could fit into a wide range of contemporary art exhibitions. But, for Anatsui, it is important that his work reflects its African origins.
"I think one can discern different types of abstraction from place to place, from India, from America, from South America, or Africa," he says. "If it is a successful abstraction, it should be easy to reference its source."
On a practical level, he accommodates curators, whether they are specialists in contemporary or African art. Last summer, Anatsui garnered widespread acclaim when he draped two 30-foot expanses of shimmering gold between the massive columns of the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale. In February he installed a new work, "Between Heaven and Earth," in the African wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, concurrent with a solo show at New York's Jack Shainman Gallery. His work is owned by the British Museum and the Pompidou Center in addition to the Smithsonian.
"We lobbied hard and heavy to get this exhibition here at the National Museum of African Art," says Washington curator Christine Mullen Kreamer. "Many visitors to our museum don't know that Africa has lots of creative contemporary artists that are viewed very well both on the continent and off the continent."
In addition to the works in "Gawu," she added a 2006 Anatsui work, "Nukae-I," which greets visitors at the bottom of the stairs leading to the contemporary art gallery. Here the bottle caps are twisted into ribbons, then folded into tiny circles. They are woven into a diaphanous rectangle, like lace hanging on the wall. Pointing to "Nukae-I" as just one example of Anatsui's prodigious talent, Kreamer says, "Art should stop you in your tracks, and that's exactly what El's sculpture really does."
