Yinka Shonibare, skewing history with his images

By Jessica Dawson
Friday, November 20, 2009

In the alternate universe of Yinka Shonibare's artworks, Victorian ladies sport bustles of batik, Enlightenment mathematicians misplace limbs, disabled black men penetrate British society and nearly everybody loses their head.

Rewriting the history books is this Nigerian-British artist's modus operandi. Sometimes using himself, sometimes posing groups of headless, elaborately costumed mannequins (a wink to guillotined Frenchmen), he complicates the stories of haves and have-nots, oppressor and oppressed, black and white.

Yet even as Shonibare uses fantasy to sabotage history, there's something nearly fetishistic in the way that his sculptures, photographs and videos chronicle the dress and mores of the most entitled. Shonibare's fascination exposes a yearning -- his? ours? -- to be as powerful, liberated and debauched as these figures of history.

And so as we walk through the artist's lively and at times unsettling mid-career survey, "Yinka Shonibare MBE," organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and now on view on two floors of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art, a part of us can't help falling in love with the power and pleasures of the gorgeously outfitted -- and, literally, mindless -- rich.

Like an obsessed historian, the artist zeroes in on two centuries of European history, beginning around 1700. During that time, Enlightenment values gave rise to colonial acquisitiveness in the name of socializing the natives. Of particular interest to Shonibare is the parsing of Africa and the ramifications for all involved.

Shonibare himself grew up between Nigeria and its colonizer, Britain. Born to Nigerian parents in 1962, Shonibare spent his first few years in England. When he was 3 his family moved back to Lagos, where he grew up speaking English at school and Yoruba at home. He returned to England to finish high school and go to art school, and began graduate art studies at Goldsmiths College in 1989 -- the same year that bad boy YBA (Young British Artist) Damien Hirst graduated from the school. While at university he contracted a viral infection at age 19; the illness left him partially paralyzed.

After a lengthy recuperation Shonibare returned to making art and, since the mid-1990s, has focused his practice on the protean nature of identity. Now a London resident, Shonibare was designated a Member of the Order of the British Empire -- that's the "MBE" in his exhibition's title -- in 2005. It's a label he embraces with delighted irony, given that his work examines the aggressions of the very empire he now belongs to.

In his best-known work, from the early 2000s, Shonibare crafted sculptural tableaux of elaborately costumed, headless mannequins; several works from the series are on view here. All have a similar twist: The artist fashioned every waistcoat and every bustle, every chair seat and chaise, with the vividly colored, boldly printed textiles of traditional African garments.

Or are they? Patterned after Indonesian batiks, these so-called African fabrics were, in the 19th century, produced in England and the Netherlands and then shipped to the lucrative markets of Africa. What's now associated with African nationalism isn't really African at all.

A historical wrinkle like that one -- Shonibare stumbled upon it in the mid-1990s -- reveals inconsistencies that the artist relishes. When he uses the fabric -- nowadays he buys it at London's Brixton Market, where vendors sell textiles that are just as likely to be mass-produced in Asia -- it carries an implied critique of rigid standards of national identity and race.

But Shonibare's work is more complex than that.

In a pair of photo groups on view here, 1998's "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" and 2001's "Dorian Gray," Shonibare complicates matters by casting himself in the title roles of these two filmlike series. The artist appears first as the witty outsider who has entered the ranks of the privileged and later as the corrupted soul who strives grotesquely to maintain appearances.

In large-scale color pictures depicting a day in the life of this fictional dandy, Shonibare wakes to a crew of white maids who fawn over him, basks in the attention of white colleagues at an afternoon meeting and concludes his day with a bacchanalian menage a many.

In an interview, Shonibare has described this character with relish: "My dandy has a wild time, has wild orgies, but he gets away with it."

Yet hedonism has its costs. That fact is nowhere more apparent than in Oscar Wilde's character Dorian Gray, whose narcissism corrupts and eventually kills him. In a striking picture from Shonibare's 12-picture cycle, the artist as Gray regards himself in the mirror. We see Shonibare -- his head cocked rightward because of his disability -- and sense the quiet desperation of an outsider. His partial paralysis suggests the subtle and not-so-subtle injuries suffered when people become the playthings of others.

Shonibare's most recent works can't touch the complexity of these pictures. "Globe Children" examines climate change via sculptural tableau: Two children clad in Victorian garb (a nod to the Industrial Revolution's polluting factories) dance atop a globe that maps out recent warming events. The piece feels didactic. Likewise, a recent photo series that casts men of various races in the role of the sleeping figure in Goya's "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" seems rote.

Thus far, Shonibare has capitalized on historical events that resonate with contemporary issues -- the modern-day scramble to democratize the Middle East and the fall of Wall Street's titans echo in Shonibare's headless colonizers and aristocrats. Yet the most recent works, while keeping to the established formula, don't unearth new ideas. Moving forward, Shonibare will need to fight to remain relevant -- or risk getting trapped in a time warp.