the royal art of yinka shonibare, in the september issue of pitch magazine

www.pitchmagazine.org

Inverted Commas: Yinka Shonibare, MBE
Sarah Kessler with Alexander Provan

My now lapsed keffiyeh fixation began on the streets of Copenhagen, where I noticed packs of attractive young blond women shopping, going to the cinema, and biking to and from university, all with black and white patterned scarves loosely draped around their pale necks. I knew that these textiles were in some way Middle Eastern, and that Yasser Arafat wore one, and that perhaps a red one might signify something controversial. This was my rudimentary understanding of the garment’s cultural significance. What really interested me, though, was the edgy role of the keffiyeh in the context of Danish fashion. The palpably foreign, ethnically coded scarf substitute lent these impeccably Scandinavian girls an aura of cool, even sexy, subversion.

Neither the contrast nor my reaction was anything new. Think of Irving Penn photographing his wife in a turban. Browse Said’s Orientalism and its progeny. But the question remains: why fall in love with the keffiyeh over the kimono? The first time I laid eyes on Yinka Shonibare’s work (at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s reinstallation of its contemporary wing last September) I had a similar thought: why fall in love with wax-printed cottons over the keffiyeh?

Upon seeing the MoMA’s presentation of ‘How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You?’ (1995), I did a triple take. First I saw exotic sculptures, then dressmakers’ dummies adorned in African finery, then, finally, a scene recalling Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Sumptuously clad and anonymous, Shonibare’s otherworldly creatures haunted MoMA’s vaunted halls. My most tactile impression was the same desire I had felt in Copenhagen—to wear what is by definition not of one’s own world, or to don selected parts of another world. While my keffiyeh fixation may have arisen from my Jewish upbringing, which endowed the fabric with a thrilling hint of blasphemy, why not take on other “others” as well?

Shonibare may be best known for his textile-based work, which often pairs the long interred (but far from forgotten) regalia of a stuffy British upper class with brightly colored, heavily patterned wax printed cottons, seemingly African in origin. High-necked Victorian-style dresses and ruffled cravats are re-imagined—the forms remain the same but the medium differs almost violently, incorporating saturated hues, organic and geometric designs, and the occasional appropriated high fashion logo, all realized immaculately and modeled by headless mannequins. The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer depicts a technologically augmented future devoid of national governments. Society is organized by cultural preferences and identifications, among other things, and the day’s elite clique of the moment is a community of “neo-Victorians” located on the coast of China. These superior beings have embraced a sort of haute conservatism, corsets with élan and decadence with discipline—they might as well be on today’s runway.

In the worlds of Stephenson’s techno-cultural elite and Shonibare’s cheeky pastiche, questions of cultural origin and innate symbolism are eclipsed by those of cultural displacement and the subsequent draining of the symbol’s purity. The poles of Orientalism have given way to the nodes of globalism. Shonibare’s fabrics, to which he sometimes adds his own flourishes, are designed in the Netherlands and only marketed in Africa—in the artist’s brave new world, to look like Africa is at once uncomfortably close to and worlds away from the real thing. The object and the viewer (or the wearer) are no longer of distinctly “other” worlds, and the original world is no longer of itself.

Apart from his three-dimensional tableaux, which range from Henry James (1843-1916) and Henrik C. Andersen (1872-1940) (2001) to Three Graces (2001) to The Swing after Fragonard (2001), his answer to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 painting The Swing, Shonibare has used similar fabrics to create multi-panel abstract compositions displayed on the wall in grid formations, as well as to upholster dollhouse furniture. He has experimented with tribally patterned shoes, and even dildos. Whether children’s or adults’ toys, the effect is one of an alien presence, an invasion of sorts. The effect is also, almost incomprehensibly, one of “everything in its right place.” This same contradiction is present throughout Shonibare’s work in all media.

Dorian Gray (2001), Shonibare’s twelve-part still-frame version of Albert Lewin’s 1945 screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s timeless tale, as well as his 1998 photographic “essay” Diary of a Victorian Dandy, both feature the artist himself as inexplicable protagonist. Diary functions as a sort of “day in the life” portrait of the excesses of foppish existence; Shonibare lives it up surrounded by adoring and sycophantic friends, lovers and servants, a knowing glint in his eye. In Dorian Gray the artist assumes the role of dandy blinded by vanity, who ultimately destroys his own image (and thus himself) when it manifests traces of the corruption of his soul.

In the photographs, the alien finds a host—Shonibare, whose impressive acting ability cannot go unremarked. Though mired in a veritable sea of whiteness, he appears utterly at home in his surroundings, at once outsider and native, and again, all scenes are flawlessly executed. As the narratives unfold, it becomes eerily apparent that though Shonibare’s figure is in front of the viewer, he is behind everything—the costumes, the lighting, the sets, and even his own image. Shonibare’s charged identity is his most decisive prop, and he wields it accordingly.

His seemingly innate prowess in shaping his own character, or at least in convincing his audience of all the different characters he might be, explains Shonibare’s deep kinship with Oscar Wilde, and with the general ethos of the dandy. Wilde’s oeuvre demonstrates an obsession with the human process of self-construction and its attendant benefits and drawbacks. While The Picture of Dorian Gray emphasizes the “cons” of dandyism, much of his work engages the idea that “producing” one’s identity can create misunderstandings that lead to interesting and provocative multiplicities. A first-rate dandy, Wilde (a gay man before it was fashionable) was able to create a unique self-image that permitted him to act out taboos that might otherwise have been shunned outside the spheres of literature and theatricality. Shonibare works similarly, employing his objects and his image, already injected with meaning by his viewers, towards an unfamiliar end. The glossy final product that results confounds our assumptions of singularity.

Shonibare has said, “I am actually producing something perceived as ethnic in inverted commas, but at the same time the African fabric used in my work is something industrially produced and given its cultural origins, my own authenticity is questioned.” Ethnicity, too, can exist in an abstract form, as another commodity manufactured in a number of locations, carrying only the stamp of its most recent port of departure.

Asking that his written name be followed by the designation “Member of the British Empire,” Shonibare doesn’t mourn or celebrate the confusion of worlds or the dilution of culture. In fact, his work profits from the ironic levity of someone who is a member of the global elite with the indelible stamp of the excluded, a multinational artist who retains the exoticism of his skin color and childhood home alongside the advertised MBE accreditation. Born in England, raised primarily in Lagos, and educated in England from age sixteen, he appears to move fluidly between borders, embodying the producer on the periphery, the designer in the metropole, the model on the runway, and the consumer in the marketplace or gallery. Furthermore, he gets away with lampooning them all, and having them buy it.

Operating in the rarified realm of one who can flaunt and flout power, Shonibare presents an essentially futuristic vision—a world in which the increased mobility exemplified by his own personal history permits a picking and choosing of outfits and identities; an arena of limitless play rather than old-fashioned hybridity. Claiming all rights as an artist, Shonibare, as Wilde and Baudelaire did before him, maps his own world with fragments of those he has traversed, all the while looking toward the camera.

Writers and politicians from Mario Vargas Llosa to Tony Blair have heralded multiculturalism as a matter of volition, urging various degrees of assimilation as the proper point of graduation for the millennial generation. The neo-Victorians at the top of the social ladder might just look down and shrug, kimonos hanging from their walls, illuminated by track lighting. Those who envisage the future usually provide us with surprisingly lucid pictures of our own past, albeit in altered form. Yinka Shonibare’s work wryly showcases the specter of globalism in all its counterfeited glory.