Yinka Shonibare's Age of Reason
by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic
Yinka Shonibare MBE calls himself a "postcolonial hybrid." Born in London in 1962 of Nigerian parents who moved back to Lagos when the artist was three, Shonibare has always straddled different identities, both national and physical. Son of an upper middle-class lawyer, he summered in London and Battersea, attended an exclusive boarding school in England at age sixteen (where much to his amusement he learned that his classmates assumed that all black people are poor), and enrolled in Byam Shaw School of Art, London (now part of Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design) at age nineteen. One month into his art school studies he contracted a virus that rendered him paralyzed. After three years of physical therapy, Shonibare remains partially disabled.
These dual identities--African/British; physically able/challenged--are only two of Shonibare's acknowledged hybrid conditions. He knows that his name sounds feminine to the uninitiated, and his recently acquired title Yinka Shonibare MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) conjures up thoughts of exoticism, imperialism, globalization, and cultural confluence, just like his signature medium Dutch batik fabric.
Dutch wax fabrics, designed in the former-Dutch colony Indonesia and manufactured in Manchester, England, ended up as an export to Africa, thus inventing an "African" identity through fashion. "It's the fallacy of that signification that I like," Shonibare told Pernilla Holmes in 2002. "It's the way I view culture--it's an artificial construct." The intersection of European and African, colonizer and colonized, authentic and artificial, announces itself best through Shonibare's use and placement of this hybrid "African" cloth, especially because it is so theatrically seductive in Shonibare's elaborate installations. "I have always viewed art as a form of opera, or as being operatic," Shonibare explained in 2004. "And opera is excessive; it is beyond the real, and therefore hyper-real." For this 40-something member of the erstwhile yBa (Young British Artist) contingent, Dutch wax fabric (the real) fashioned into period Western dress (the hyper-real) encode tons of innuendo, or what the semiotic crowd calls "signifiers."
"The main preoccupation within my art education was the construction of signs as outlined in Roland Barthes's Mythologies," Shonibare elaborated in 2005. "So the idea of the theatrical for me is actually about art as the construction of a fiction, art as the biggest liar. What I want to suggest is that there is no such thing as a natural signifier, that the signifier is always constructed--in other words, that what you represent things with is a form of mythology."
Yinka Shonibare's most recent exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, Prospero's Monsters, enlists signifiers from three major works in art history: Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819), Jacques-Louis David's Portrait of Antoine Lavoisier and his Wife (1788), and Francisco Goya's "The Sleep/Dream of Reason" from Los Caprichos (1799) to address contemporary issues. The name Prospero refers to the usurped Duke of Milan in William Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1610-11). He is a magician who causes a storm to shipwreck his traitorous brother Antonio and his crew on the island of Prospero's twelve-year exile. While Prospero's plight hinges on victimization, he in turn usurps the island and enslaves two inhabitants: Ariel and Caliban. Thus "Prospero's Monsters" refers to those who wrest power and those who are colonized.
Yinka Shonibare, MBE (British, b. 1962)
(Left)
La Méduse, 2008
Wood, foam, Plexiglas, Dutch wax-printed
fabric, and acrylic paint
83 1/2 x 66 x 54 in. (212.1 x 167.6 x 137.2 cm)
(Right)
La Méduse, 2008
C-print mounted on aluminum
Image size: 72 x 94 in. (182.9 x 238.8 cm)
Framed: 85 x 107 in. (215.9 x 271.8 cm)
Edition of 10
Image courtesy James Cohan Gallery
Art © 2008 Yinka Shonibare
In the first room of the exhibition, the theme of colonization and subjugation are underscored by a model of the famous, ill-fated French frigate Méduse (Medusa, in English), here outfitted with Dutch batik sails and menaced by an artificial wave. Next to this glass-enclosed diorama, an enormous C-print photograph of the miniature ship and tempest hangs on the wall.
The Méduse ran aground (like Antonio's ship in The Tempest) off the coast of Senegal (a former French colony) in 1816. However, in the actual event, the Méduse sailed into the treacherous shoals of the Arguin Bank, close to its destination. This tragic incident symbolized the dysfunctional Bourbon regime, restored in 1815 under Louis XVIII after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, in Théodore Géricault's gigantic painting The Raft of the Medusa. In recent appropriations of Géricault's masterpiece, Joel-Peter Witkin's Raft of the George W. Bush (2006) and Kara Walker's Post-Katrina Adrift (2007), re-activate the original's accusations: administrative negligence, human sacrifice and needless suffering. It seems that Shonibare joins his fellow artists in this reference to the Méduseas a signifier.
Théodore Géricault (French, 1791-1824)
The Raft of the Medusa, 1819
Oil on canvas
491 x 716 cm (193 5/16 x 281 7/8 in.)
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The story of the Méduse also brings to mind France's slave-trade, because the French governor of Senegal, who engaged in the ignominious enterprise, sailed on the ill-fated ship and survived on a rescue boat, while most of the crew perished on a jerry-built raft. Although slave trade was outlawed in France during the eighteenth-century, the French government turned a blind eye to the practice, allowing it to continue well into the nineteenth century.
References to the Méduse and The Tempest prepare the visitor to move into the main exhibition space which features five Enlightenment celebrities: mathematician Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier, Marquise de Châtelet, philosopher Immanuel Kant, economist Adam Smith, chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and encyclopedist Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Dark honey-colored headless mannequins, which nullify racial identification, are dressed in elegant eighteenth-century attire made of contrasting Dutch batik material. Each figure participates in a contemplative drama, its own tableau non-vivant.
Yinka Shonibare, MBE (British, b. 1962)
The Age of Enlightenment, 2008
(Left)
Adam Smith
Life-size fiberglass mannequin,
Dutch wax printed cotton, mixed media
Figure: 70 x 43 1/2 x 33 1/2 in. (177.8 x 110.5 x 85.1 cm)
Plinth: 59 x 67 x 5 in. (149.9 x 170.2 x 12.7 cm)
(Right foreground)
Jean le Rond d'Alembert
Life-size fiberglass mannequin,
Dutch wax printed cotton, mixed media
Figure: 65 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 30 in. (166.4 x 64.8 x 76.2 cm)
Plinth: 59 x 59 x 3 in. (149.9 x 149.9 x 7.6 cm)
(Right background)
Immanuel Kant
Life-size fiberglass mannequin,
Dutch wax printed cotton, mixed media
Figure: 29 1/2 x 41 x 31 1/2 in. (74.9 x 104.1 x 80 cm)
Plinth: 88 1/2 x 82 1/2 x 6 in. (224.8 x 209.6 x 15.2 cm)
Image courtesy James Cohan Gallery
Art © 2008 Yinka Shonibare
Moving from right to left in a counter-clockwise direction, we see the Marquise de Châtelet at her writing desk, one arm apparently a prosthesis; Immanuel Kant without legs at his writing desk; a hunched-back Adam Smith reaching for his volume The Wealth of Nations; Antoine Lavoisier sitting in an eighteenth-century wheel-chair positioned at his desk laden with reproductions of antique beakers and vials; and d'Alembert leaning on crutches against a lectern, writing in his notebook. Real books, measuring devices, inkwells and quills grace the surfaces of desks and bookcases, which are authentic, found reproductions or expressly crafted for the exhibition. Yet amid this meticulously rendered eighteenth-century calm, exuberant pinks, reds, blues and yellows in the colonist Dutch wax fabric pop out and agitate, injecting a healthy dose of realpolitik into an ersatz Neoclassical ideal.
Yinka Shonibare, MBE (British, b. 1962)
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Asia), 2008
C-print mounted on aluminum
Image size: 72 x 49 1/2 in. (182.9 x 125.7 cm)
Framed: 81 1/2 x 58 in. (207 x 147.3 cm)
Edition of 5
Image courtesy James Cohan Gallery
Art © 2008 Yinka Shonibare
The gallery's third room presents a summation of the first two rooms, by posing a question in five different appropriations of Francisco Goya's "El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos" ("The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," or "The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters"). Here, photographs of real people, clothed in costumes identical to the ones on view in the second room, re-enact the natty eighteenth-century sleeper encircled by owls, cats, bats, and other creepy creatures which explain the absent text: "Imagination deserted by reason, begets impossible monsters. United with reason, she is the mother of all arts, and the source of their wonders."
Shonibare's photographs ask in French: "Les songes de la raison produisent-ils les monstres en Afrique/en Amérique/en Asia/en Europe/en Australie?" ("Do the dreams of reason produce monsters in Africa/in America/in Asia/in Europe/in Australia?"). This translation seems to suggest that the imposition of the Enlightenment ideals may in fact create a few demons--such as dictators "democratically" voted into power.
It has been said that Yinka Shonibare's Prospero's Monsters is a "well-worn sermon preached to the converted." This comment pains me deeply. For I believe that Yinka Shonibare's still-life dramas effectively educate the public, increasing the likelihood that more people will be enlightened by his take on cultural history and the significant role of commerce. Moreover, Shonibare's decision to cast hybridism as the star of his shows produces some form of Reason, at least for now in the twenty-first century.
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