The Times How Yinka Shonibare became an art icon Rachel Campbell-Johnston 20 March 2021
How Yinka Shonibare became an art icon
The British-Nigerian artist, 58, talks to Rachel Campbell-Johnston about reappraising empire and his prestigious art award .
Image: Yinka Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 03.00 hours.
Yinka Shonibare CBE is about to have a new honour bestowed on him. On March 22 the British- Nigerian artist, who was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 2019 and adopted the acronym as part of his professional title, will be presented with the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award. A virtual gala (you can log on and register) may not be the same as a diamond-studded royal investiture but, given that the sponsor is Swarovski, you will no doubt find plenty of sparkly stuff about.
Will he be adding Art Icon to his moniker, I wonder. He laughs. Given that his work consistently subverts colonial narratives, the addition of CBE to his name was a playful irony. But he prefers to understate his latest award. “Obviously it’s an honour,” he says. “They are acknowledging my work and I appreciate that. But I don’t see myself as being any better than anyone else.”
The main reason he is pleased to accept this nomination, he explains, is because it was set up to support the Whitechapel and its impressive educational programme. What he would most like, he says, is to see the opportunities that he has had offered to as great a diversity of young people as possible.
Image: Yinka Shonibare receives the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award this month. Credit James Mollison.
However, Shonibare makes an apposite candidate for “icon” at a time when public monuments to our colonial past are finding how precarious a place a plinth can be. His work — his figurative sculptures and the Hogarthian scenarios he has created in photographs and films — celebrates the energy of his west African culture even as it lays our imperial legacies open to debate.
You have probably come across his public sculptures. They are eye-catching. Shonibare’s signature material is that bold batik known as Dutch wax. It has a layered history. This fabric was originally Indonesian. Colonial Dutch traders tried to make a profit by mass-producing it in the Netherlands. Their venture didn’t pay off. They shipped the unwanted cloth to the markets of west Africa, where it became a sort of national costume.
Dutch wax becomes for Shonibare a symbolic shorthand for a modern African identity, which, rather than being rooted in some pure precolonial past, has grown out of and been shaped by the very history that it seeks to shrug off. You will find it, for instance, on the sails of his ship-in-a-bottle replica of HMS Victory that (originally displayed on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square) now has a permanent berth outside that great temple to our seafaring past, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Its dazzling prints adorn his “wind sculptures”: the big fibreglass confections that — looking like huge pieces of fabric set aflutter by the breeze — serve as metaphors for the way in which ideas have been carried across the world on trade winds and adorn public spaces the world over (Howick Place in Westminster has one).
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The Times How Yinka Shonibare became an art icon Rachel Campbell-Johnston 20 March 2021
Image: Creatures of the Mappa Mundi — Alerion and Satyrs. Credit Mark Blower.
He is still making use of it in his most recent works, one of which will go up for sale in a fundraising auction after the Whitechapel award presentation. Quilted textiles, taking their inspiration from Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi, combine peculiar creatures with abstract forms in their patterns. In the medieval age when the map was drawn, he explains, they had to imagine what people in foreign countries looked like. These quilts, using a medium that has historical roots in African-American culture, is “about how we imagine people whom we don’t know. I am exploring what it means to be considered an alien, what it means to be imagined rather than known.”
The discussion of African identity and its concomitant critique of empire lie at the core of Shonibare’s work. He has been criticised for repetitiveness. But as a self-proclaimed “postcolonial hybrid”, his interest remains determinedly with identity politics. “I see myself as both an artist and as a black artist because both are true,” he says.
Born in London in 1962 (his father was studying law at the time), he was brought up from the age of three in Lagos. He sang the nursery rhyme London Bridge Is Falling Down and watched Sesame Street, spoke Yoruba at home and English at school, and spent summer holidays in Britain, where eventually he returned to study art and establish the career that carries him across the international map. He celebrates the richness of this cross- fertilisation in pieces that expose the myth of “authentic” culture and suggest a different point of view. “We all influence, borrow from, appropriate or criticise each other’s cultures. But if we get it right,” he says, “we respect them too. Mutual cultural exchange is what we need so that people have a better understanding of each other.”
Image: The Bird Catcher’s Dilemma
He does not agree with the willy-nilly destruction of colonial monuments. “As an artist, I am not going to condone vandalism of any kind.” It’s not that he approves of such figures as Edward Colston. Far from it. He supported that statue’s removal because he understood that it had been causing offence among local residents for some time. “But there is no blanket rule. Some historical people have done really terrible things but also been instrumental in doing some great things too.”
We need to look at each piece in its context, Shonibare believes, to initiate discussions between communities and local councils. If local people feel uncomfortable or insulted and it is decided that a sculpture should be deposed, its removal should be carried out in an appropriate manner. Deposed statues, he suggests, would be best transferred to museums, where they can be displayed with an explanation. “I don’t think it can help anyone simply to erase history. It’s better to be constructive, and the way to be constructive is to try to learn and understand. Understanding our history advances our understanding of each other. And that way we don’t repeat the same mistakes.”
He is disappointed that British society has not adapted to multiculturalism much more quickly. In 1998 he created Diary of a Victorian Dandy, a series of photographs in which he, the sole black man, played the period- costumed hero at the heart of a clichéd succession of 19th-century scenarios: waking to the fawning ministrations of bustling maids, commanding the attention of colleagues in an afternoon meeting, indulging (rather to the butler’s disapproval) in orgiastic after-dinner antics with his friends. To see these images now, almost a quarter of a century on, is to find what seems nothing less than a photographic precursor to Bridgerton, the hit TV series that (quite apart from all the sex) posits an alternative history of a racially integrated society.
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The Times How Yinka Shonibare became an art icon Rachel Campbell-Johnston 20 March 2021
Image: Shonibare’s replica of HMS Victory, outside the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Credit Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.
Shonibare hasn’t watched the programme. He has been busy during lockdown, he explains. Partially paralysed (at the age of 18 he was struck down by a spinal virus that left him unable to move for three years), he has to take care of his health. But as ever determined that his physical problems should not define him, he has been working in the garden studio of his home in Hackney, east London, orchestrating a sold-out show in New York over Zoom, preparing for a mid-career retrospective in Salzburg, designing quilts on the computer, communicating with his team in Nigeria working on an ecological project outside Lagos (it involves reforestation, which he hopes will help to offset his carbon footprint) and beginning to think about the memorial statue to David Oluwale — the homeless British- Nigerian man whom Leeds police harassed and hounded before his death by drowning in 1969 — which he has been commissioned to make.
Shonibare is saddened that our society hasn’t moved on from such appalling scenarios much faster. “I don’t feel that we have got very far. I would have imagined that the whole debate about race would have moved far further in the 30 years I have been working. I don’t feel happy about that.”
He has been in a mixed-race relationship — with Rachel Sorrill, a jewellery-maker — for several years. The divisive opinions that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex rouse are long outmoded, he suggests. “Why should anyone be accepted or not accepted? We are all equal. Who’s accepting who? The moment we talk about acceptance you are already suggesting that there’s some kind of hierarchy there.” But although he doesn’t condone any sort of racism or misogyny — “I think we should call that out any time that we find it” — he keeps his counsel about what he thinks of royal quarrels. “All of us have to be cautious before we make comments about other people’s families,” he says.
“I don’t want to be a self-appointed representative of black and ethnic minorities. But I do believe that you are not necessarily your past. You have to know about it, but you can also move on from it. I prefer to think about how to go forward.”
Shonibare is about to be raised on a metaphorical pedestal but perhaps it is less importantly an “art icon” that we will see there than a determined optimist, an artist who has spent the past 30 years insisting that, as he puts it, “we should be allowed to just be who we are”.
Where to see Yinka Shonibare’s art - Jade Cuttle
Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle Originally exhibited on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, this oversized ship-in-a-bottle replica of the HMS Victory, on which Horatio Nelson died during the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, is now docked in Greenwich, London, on permanent display. Evoking the style of traditional African dress, its 37 brightly patterned sails infuse African identity and independence into the narrative of colonialism. National Maritime Museum, London SE10, reopening May 17
Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 19.00hrs The tongue-in-cheek reinterpretation of A Rake’s Progress by the 18th-century painter and caricaturist William Hogarth features Shonibare in each photograph, playing the role of the dandy surrounded by servants — an ode to excess, frivolity and decadence that inverts the stereotype of otherness. It will be included in the exhibition A Very Special Place: Ikon in the 1990s. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Jun 18-Aug 30
The British Library This dazzling display of more than 6,000 books has each volume bound in the bright patterns of African wax print fabric, the artist’s signature material. The names of first or second-generation immigrants to Britain who have made significant contributions to British culture and history are celebrated in gold print on the spines of 2,700 of the books. Other titles are unmarked, leaving space to commemorate the immigrants of Britain’s future. On permanent display. Tate Modern, London SE1, reopening May 17
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The Times How Yinka Shonibare became an art icon Rachel Campbell-Johnston 20 March 2021
Wind Sculpture, Howick Place, London Resembling the fluttering sails that transported slaves from one territory to another, this chequered fibreglass wind sculpture evokes the restless pursuit of freedom. It responds to the history associated with Howick Place, named after Viscount Howick, the prime minister whose government enacted the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833. London SW1
African Spirits of Modernism In this solo exhibition, described by Shonibare as “Picasso in reverse”, the artist will contrast European classical antiquity with African artefacts from Picasso’s collection. The exhibition also showcases exuberant quilts, three hand-painted sculptures depicting mythological creatures and a new series of African masks that considers the artist’s identity as a “postcolonial hybrid”. Stephen Friedman Gallery, London W1, Jun 4-Jul 10
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