Exhibition120 ExhibitionReview Review Yinka Shonibare MBE: Egg Fight Exhibition Review Yinka Shonibare MBE: Egg Fight

Dublin City and Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, February 26–August 30, 2009

In the words of Homi Bhabha, the from the Museum of Contemporary chief effect of colonial power is “the Art in Sydney, Australia, to the production of hybridization” or, in in New York the words of Patrick Brantlinger, and to the National Museum of “imperialisms—indeed, all master/ at the Smithsonian slave relations—are always two- Institution in Washington, DC, the way streets.”1 Few artists have textile historian and critic Jessica demonstrated this as colorfully Hemmings cautioned that there was as the British-born, Nigerian- a “danger of his brightly patterned raised artist Yinka Shonibare. His cloth beginning to feel like a striking use of batik, a wax-printed one-liner.”3 cotton fabric (which originated Earlier and more pointedly, in Indonesian design, was in 2005, the American art historically printed for the Dutch historian Sylvester Okwunodu and British export markets and is Ogbechie argued that Shonibare’s now consumed in contemporary commissioned installation for West Africa) to clothe his headless 11 in Kassel, in 2002, figurative sculptural tableaux was undermined in its efficacy as have been delighting audiences he had “exchanged a sophisticated in Europe and North America critique of Victorian claims of racial since the 1990s. Deploying what purity for a melodramatic focus Anne Hollander has termed the on explicit scenes of Victorian “symbiotic relation” between debauchery.”4 Cautious of critique fashion and art history and feminist and not wanting to initiate an egg art’s exploitation of cloth and fight, critics such as Ogbechie “clothing as subject” the batik and Hemmings have also placed fabric has become, intentionally particular stress on the serious or not, Shonibare’s leitmotif.2 intellectual rigor underpinning In 2009, as a major mid-career Shonibare’s continued use of retrospective of his work traveled batik to create something that

Textile, Volume 12, Issue 1, pp. 120–125 doi: 10.2752/175183514x13916051793677 Reviewed by Joseph McBrinn Reprints available directly from the Publishers. Joseph McBrinn lectures in Design History at Photocopying permitted by licence only. Belfast School of Art, the University of Ulster, © 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Belfast, Northern Ireland. Printed in the is as yet, most would agree, far At present I am re-reading from redundant. Indeed, without Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s question since 2000 a spate of Travels (1726), which interests solo shows have demonstrated me on a number of levels. I am Shonibare’s continued particularly interested in the inventiveness and prodigiousness. question of Gulliver’s empathy From the 2002 self-titled show at with the different cultures he The Studio Museum in Harlem, encounters. He sees that they New York to the 2004 Double Dutch are different and they see he is show at the Museum Boijmans Van different … Gulliver’s voyages Beuningen in Rotterdam, to Flower also see him becoming involved Time at ’s Stephen Friedman in internal power struggles in Gallery in 2006, and Jardin d’Amour the lands he visits but he himself at the Musée du quai Branly in is also, at various stages, Paris in 2007, culminating in his both powerful and powerless recent Antipodean–American depending on the context. Which retrospective. However, one brings us back to the question of show that elegantly showcased power and its contexts and how Shonibare’s remarkable creative we assume and in some cases abilities was a small exhibition are beholden to power. (Kent commissioned for the Dublin City 2008: 45) and Hugh Lane Gallery of Modern Art in 2009, entitled Egg Fight Ireland as a space of unresolved (based on Jonathan Swift’s satirical postcolonial hybridity, within travelog, Gulliver’s Travels), and Europe, seems an ideal location for is the focus of this review. Indeed, Shonibare’s work. In 2001, the Irish as his globetrotting retrospective public got their first opportunity opened in Sydney, Shonibare to see his work when he showed revealed: Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998) in

Figure 1 Yinka Shonibare, Egg Fight, 2009. Installation at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Mannequins, Dutch wax printed cotton fabric, leather boots, replica guns, rope, polystyrene eggs and silicon. 8½m long × 4m wide. Photograph Eugene Langan. Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery (London) and James Cohan Gallery (New York). Exhibition Review 123 the Vantage Point group exhibition him as one of the world’s leading Swift’s book, who bickered bitterly at the Irish Museum of Modern artists and commentators on because in Lilliput they broke the Art in Dublin. The show aimed the ethnic/aesthetic dimensions small end of the egg first and in to bring together contemporary of globalization (Guldemond Blefsucu they broke the big end art “informed by everyday life, 2004: 20). As the best of his first, which was Swift’s satire on addressing current issues such work does, Egg Fight continues the “battle for supremacy between as ecology, technology, popular the deconstruction of the tropes Catholics and Protestants in culture and globalization.”5 and iconoclasm of Europe’s eighteenth-century Europe.”7 The Although criticized for “not having long eighteenth century and its imposing Georgian town house an angle on anything,” the title foundations not in Enlightenment that now houses Dublin’s Hugh itself doing “little more than paper but in militarist imperialist Lane Gallery was an appropriate over the tenuous links between the expansionism, and in this Jonathan setting for Shonibare’s show as it artists,” nevertheless Shonibare’s Swift’s text proved in every way was built in the eighteenth century work was seen as having more a perfect foil for Shonibare. by Lord Charlemont, who, like than “raw novelty value.”6 Fast- The installation, although not Jonathan Swift, was a member of forward a decade and the Egg directly illustrative, contained two the Protestant Anglo-Irish elite who Fight installation at Dublin’s (headless) figures (one Lilliputian opposed the English protectionist Hugh Lane demonstrates that and one Bledfuscudian) shooting policies that left Ireland’s textile Shonibare’s sensitive, if satirical, at each other through a wall of industry in ruins.8 As well as his use of batik as a potent metaphor eggs. This visualized the war installation, Shonibare also showed in visualizing the “horrors of between the empires of Lilliput a selection of his recent Climate colonialism” has established and Blefuscu, in the first section of Shit Drawings, a series of collages

Figure 2 Yinka Shonibare, Climate Shit Drawing 7 (Triptych), 2009. Ink, Dutch wax cotton printed textile, newsprint and gold foil on paper. 50.4 cm × 434.4 cm. Photograph Eugene Langan. Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery (London) and James Cohan Gallery (New York). 124 Exhibition Review

Figure 3 Installation view of Yinka Shonibare, Egg Fight, 2009 and Climate Shit Drawings, 2009. Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane. Photograph Eugene Langan. Courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery (London) and James Cohan Gallery (New York).

that mediate on the most pressing are actually sewn. Are they more about his ideas on sewing preoccupation of the present outsourced, as so much fashion (does he favor hand or machine?), phase of globalization—climate manufacture is in the West (to as it would strengthen the many change. The imagery depicts the the Third World), or is the artist strategies and approaches he visual vocabulary of the global involved in their facture like the deploys in his complex, and economy including images of many contemporary male artists playful, deconstruction of cultural flowers, airplanes, and scraps of for whom sewing is a central and assumptions about gender, newspapers. subversive practice? The garments sexuality, class, and race and One of the most visual episodes themselves are generally very about the history, and reality, of in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, historically accurate and technically globalization. Egg Fight was a certainly for younger readers, is the accomplished, and Shonibare thought-provoking and visually scene describing the Lilliputians— has openly acknowledged his stimulating show, and perfect in “two hundred sempstresses” and mannequins’ affinities with scale and setting. Shonibare’s “three hundred taylors”—making “dressmaker’s dummies” (Hynes visualization, like Swift’s writings, Gulliver’s gargantuan clothes 2004: 398). However, with so much in the words of Sarat Maharaj (Swift 1994 [1726]: 51). It prompted critical focus on the text/textile “tend[s] to leave us less sure about me to question how the clothes complexity of Shonibare’s work, imagining power as a dominating on Shonibare’s mannequins it would be interesting to know force radiating outwards from a Exhibition Review 125 focal, colonizing source. We are 4. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, References alerted to the possibility of it being 2005. “Ordering the Universe: Guldemond, Jaap. 2004. Yinka something like a two-way, creative/ Documenta II and the Shonibare: Double Dutch. destructive process—even when Apotheosis of the Occidental Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van ‘the one’ seems to be calling all the Gaze.” Art Journal 64(1): 86. Beuningen. shots” (Maharaj 1991: 89). The work commissioned from Shonibare for Documenta 11 was Hynes, Nancy. 2004. “Yinka Notes entitled Gallantry and Criminal Shonibare: Addressing the 1. Homi K. Bhabha, 1985. Conversation (2002). Wondering Mind.” In Salah Hassan “Signs Taken for Wonders.” 5. Brenda McParland, 2001. and Dadi Iftikhar (eds.), Unpacking Critical Inquiry 12(1): 153. Vantage Point: Ernesto Neto, Europe: Towards a Critical Reading. Patrick Brantlinger, 1996. Rob Pruitt, Michael Raedecker, Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van “A Postindustrial Prelude to Daniel Richter, Ugo Rondinone, Beuningen and NAi Publishers. Postcolonialism.” Critical Inquiry Yinka Shonibare. Dublin: IMMA, 22(3): 466. n.p. Kent, Rachel (ed). 2008. Yinka 2. Anne Hollander, 1975. Seeing 6. Sarag Durcan, 2001. “Review: Shonibare MBE. Munich: Prestel. through Clothes, p. 363. Dublin 1.” Circa 96: 50. Berkeley and Los Angeles: 7. “Yinka Shonibare MBE: Egg Maharaj, Sarat. 1991. “Arachne’s University of California Press. Fight,” gallery information Genre: Towards Inter-cultural See also Nina Felshin, 1995. panel. Studies in Textiles.” Journal of “Clothing as Subject.” Art 8. The Hugh Lane Gallery has been Design History 4(2): 75–96. Journal 54(1): 20. located on Dublin’s Parnell 3. Jessica Hemmings, 2009. “Yinka Square since 1930 (it was Swift, Jonathan. 1994 [1726]. Shonibare MBE.” Embroidery known as Rutland Square in the Gulliver’s Travels. Oxford: Oxford May/June: 46. eighteenth century). University Press.