‘I’m a miserable git’
The euphoric art of Yinka Shonibare
Celebrated British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare is in town and people are in awe. It’s not just his art, which is playful and inventive and includes sculptured figures with globes of the world as their heads. And it’s not just his credentials, which include being awarded an MBE, a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in 2004; clinching the 2010 Fourth Plinth Commission at Trafalgar Square in London, for which he created Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle; being elected to the Royal Academy in 2013; and having his work in London’s Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
No, for those fortunate to have got a taste of Shonibare last week, it is his profound knowledge that won them over. It’s not for nothing that the New York Times labelled him “erudite and wide ranging”. There is also his humour. He once told the Guardian: “I’m a miserable git, I don’t know any jokes,” but he was wrong about being miserable: his art, his sense of self and his conversation all burst with humour.
At the opening of his solo exhibition, Ruins Decorated, at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg last Saturday, he delighted the crowd when he called himself “Picasso in reverse”, a reference to that artist’s appropriation of African art, and Shonibare’s own of European traditions.
In his public conversation with South African artist William Kentridge in his studio in the Maboneng cultural precinct on the outskirts of Joburg’s CBD on Tuesday evening, Shonibare again made the audience laugh.
The two powerhouse artists were engaged in a discussion, illustrated with film snippets and stills, about the similarities between their choice of subject matter, and occasionally of style too, most notably their love of opera. An additional bond was that this event was part of the Centre for the Less Good Idea, a space for experimental and collaborative work, and Shonibare provides a similar venue, Guest Projects, in Hackney, London.
The encounter was astonishing, the juxtaposition of their art almost becoming an artwork of its own, when the intellectual tone was leavened by yelps of laughter as Shonibare explained why he “never need go to a shrink”.
The merriment was bittersweet. Shonibare was answering Kentridge’s question about why he had become an artist.
“I think that if I wasn’t an artist I possibly wouldn’t be here. I don’t know if I would have survived. Because you see that I use a wheelchair. I got an illness when I was 18 that left me completely paralysed. If my art hadn’t pulled me out of that …
“That is why I never need to go to a shrink. My art is my shrink … In a way for me it is personal, it’s political, it’s a place where I can be angry, where I can shout, I can transform my anger into gold. For me … it’s a means of survival.”
With extensive rehabilitation, Shonibare overcame his initial total paralysis caused by transverse myelitis (inflammation of the spine). He was left partially paralysed (hence the tilt of his head), yet continued his art studies, first at the Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins College) before completing an MFA at Goldsmiths College.
He is brave. In 2013 he told the Guardian he had always been more cerebral “so I guess it didn’t have the devastating effect on me that it might have had on someone who was more bodyconscious”.
He was not overly obsessed with his appearance, he said, “because I know that I am not going to be taking Naomi Campbell’s job any time soon”.
Shonibare was born in London in 1962 while his father was studying law there. At the age of three he returned to Nigeria where he grew up, returning to Britain for his tertiary education. The family spent summer holidays at their home in Battersea in South London, which meant “I have always moved between both worlds … and I felt comfortable in both places”.
He told the website Culture Trip last year that he didn’t make a decision to identify with both cultures: “Growing up in Lagos there was a big awareness of British culture … and in school after the holidays there was always a certain cool around the people who came back with Harrods bags.”
His art didn’t initially reflect his dual identity. As a child he liked Impressionists such as Van Gogh and Cezanne and enjoyed drawing still-lifes for art, his favourite subject at school. As a teenager he was into Salvador Dali. The lightbulb moment came when a tutor at art school questioned why he was creating art about the Russian perestroika movement rather than “authentic African art”.
Years later he told the New York Times: “I tried to figure out what he meant by authentic African art. I didn’t know how to be authentic. What would I do if I was being authentic?”
It struck him that being black and from Africa came with certain assumptions and “if I didn’t deal with it, I would just be described forever as a black artist who doesn’t make work about being black”.
“I realised what I’d really have to deal with was the construction of stereotypes, and that’s what my work would be about,” he said.
A second major influence was when
Shonibare discovered the wax-print textiles everyone thinks are West African but were originally inspired by Javanese batiks and are mass-produced by the Dutch. This ironic mash-up matched his ideas, and the fabrics became his trademark.
They embellish his sculpture Planets in My Head, Music II (Flute Girl) on show at the FNB Art Fair in Sandton this weekend. They also feature in every artwork in Ruins Decorated at the Goodman, such as in his film Addio del Passato, which recreates an aria from La Traviata as if sung by the estranged wife of Admiral Nelson, and in the covers of the 4,000 books in his African Library.
At first the library just dazzles with colour, until you step closer and see each book is printed with the name of an African activist who fought against or spoke out against injustice — from Nelson Mandela to cartoonist Zapiro to former Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah. The dazzle has deepened, helped by four iPads for visitors to research the database to find out more.
African Library is a version of Shonibare’s British Library and American Library, both of which represent national icons of immigrant stock.
Shonibare’s trademark fabric design will also be hand-painted on Wind Sculpture, to be unveiled at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town in February. A 7m fibreglass sculpture of the same series as the one he unveiled in Central Park, New York, in March, it doesn’t move but merely creates the illusion of blowing in the wind.
Sails, colonialism, African identity — public art layered with many meanings and emotions, Wind Sculpture will put Yinka Shonibare’s artistic mark on the tip of Africa.
Ruins Decorated is at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in Parkwood, Johannesburg, until October 6
I believe that culture belongs to everybody. I am not a black supremacist, I am not a white supremacist, I am an international universal welcoming person and I want my art to express that. Yinka Shonibare at the Goodman Gallery Johannesburg opening of Ruins Decorated