El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness Author(s): Olu Oguibe Reviewed work(s): Source: African Arts, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 48-55+96 Published by: UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3337623 . Accessed: 08/03/2013 12:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center and Regents of the University of California are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to African Arts. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Fri, 8 Mar 2013 12:41:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions El Anatsui m Beyond Death andiotwingness chc, crete, a medium he would not return to transfiguration of concept made manifest OLU OGUIBE for almost twenty years, and from through relocation and naming. Because verisimilitude and the replication of the Andre said so, the bricks were no longer human figure, Anatsui gave vent to his mere bricks, but art. Creation had ceased predilection for the found object and to be a preserve of the hand. Now it was o many the artist El Anatsui for the restoration of conceptual depth a projection of the mind. Man, finally, had is almost inextricably associ- to sculpture. become God. He said, "Let this be art," ated with sculpture in wood, In the early phase of this process that and it was art. a medium which he has not might be described as one of self-defini- Evidently this modernist amputation only made very much his tion, the found object for Anatsui was of the artist's hand was not wholly own but also relocated into not complete in and of itself, but re- acceptable to Anatsui. In the late 1960s the site of modernist sculpture without quired the transfiguring intervention of and the early 1970s, when he taught compromise in craft or indeed in its orig- human agency in order to be translated sculpture at the University of Nigeria, inal conceptual properties. Yet the greater into sculptural form. In the twentieth cen- Nsukka, he employed as his principal part of Anatsui's oeuvre over the past tury many artists, particularly in the material ready-made wooden trays two decades is not in wood but in clay. West, had come to the found object as art which he engraved, sculpted, and paint- Anatsui began his career in Ghana in through the essentially conceptualist ed in order to transform them into wall the late 1960s, working in concrete and framework that characterized Duchamp's plaques. The mere appropriation of these much in the style of popular West ready-mades, which were relocated, in trays was not sufficient: we had to see African cement sculpture, albeit with a full form, from their originary and utili- what the artist brought to bear on his finesse and attention to verisimilitude tarian context into an exhibitionary space. material. The aim, of course, was not to more closely associated with the art Thus Duchamp's Urinal (1919) did not discount the place of the creative mind in academies. As soon as he graduated need to be retouched or redone to become conferring artistic quality on form, but to from college, he had the incidental yet art; it merely needed to be called art. Carl state that without the trace of the hand, enormously symbolic fate of assuming a Andre's bricks at London's Tate Gallery the act of naming alone is insufficient to teaching position at Winneba Specialist in the 1970s, though arranged in a certain turn form into art. Anatsui has held this Training College formerly occupied by manner in the gallery space, did not in position throughout his career. the legendary sculptor Vincent Kofi, but themselves involve any significant manu- Although he continued to work in he lost no time in defining a different al intervention by the artist; they became wood for the rest of the 1970s as well as the aesthetic and attitude to form and mate- art through the agency of the creative 1980s, Anatsui's main medium of the peri- rial. Departing from sculpture in con- intellect and the power of the word: the od was clay. Clay posed formal and mate- 48 alrican arts ? winter 1998 This content downloaded on Fri, 8 Mar 2013 12:41:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Oppositepage: 1. BrokenPot I. 1979. Ceramic interminable, dialectical alterity. Fragilis, mid-1970s and whose cosmology has (manganese body), height 59cm (23").Collec- the between become a influence on his work tionof the artist. fragmentarity, spectral space strong softness and hardness, wetness and dry- and his aesthetic, the earth is not only the Above:2. BrokenPot II. 1979. Ceramic,height ness, even liquidity and solidity. He source of all life and creation (most 30cm (12").Collection of the artist. found these properties very exciting and genealogies trace the first humans to full of sculptural and conceptual possibil- anthills); it is also the site and domain of ities, each speaking to significant aspects Ala, the earth goddess-the divinity of of nature and existence, and especially to creativity, communal balance, and moral rial challenges different from those pre- the cycicity of life. rectitude. The unborn are believed to sented by wood, and it offered possibilities The transfiguration of clay from the originate from within the earth and the that were particularly suited to his evolv- state of malleability to one of rigidity in- dead to return to the earth. In Igbo cos- ing concerns. Where beautification and the vokes natural processes of formation and mology the ancestral realm is in the resolution of form and language had been maturation. Yet the susceptibility of the depths of the earth rather than the sky, as the artist's major preoccupation, as evident rigid form to reductive transformation- in other cosmologies. The earth is cen- in the wall plaques from the period, by that is, the peculiar vulnerability of tral, therefore, to all human existence, as 1977 he had begun to reach for a deeper earthenware to destruction and recy- both source and repository, as the ulti- intellectual and conceptual content in his cling-also denotes the absence of finali- mate signifier of the cyclicity of life. As engagement with form. Having resolved ty and the presence of infinite possibility. the abode of spirits and the souls of some of the challenges of space and sculp- As the poet and playwright Ossie ancestors, it is sacred. That is why its tural idiom with the transposition of the Enekwe observed, "Although a broken deity is also the custodian of morality, object to the wall, and having redefined his pot does not return to its original shape, for there is a line that runs through social understanding of location and visual inter- it is not negated. It passes on to other lev- and cosmological harmony, and the play, Anatsui now sought to use form as an els of existence."1 Clay, as matter and fig- earth is the pivot on which the resulting interpretive medium, as a rhetorical vehi- ure, therefore connotes perenniality. superstructure revolves. This inherent cle, and to do so in line with the specific As earth, clay also embodies a strong sacredness is also embodied in clay, its properties and possibilities of his chosen element of spirituality in its constitution transformative and generative proper- material: in the case of clay, its malleability and source. Though inorganic, it never- ties replicated. For these reasons clay and its ambivalent denotation of both per- theless connects powerfully to the soil was particularly appropriate for the new manence and transience. and the land with their regenerative con- direction in Anatsui's work from 1977. Anatsui found in clay the figurative res- notations and symbolism. For the Igbo Beyond medium, Anatsui was equal- onances of both fragility and resilience, of among whom Anatsui has lived since the ly interested in pottery as a craft, and in alrican arts ? winter 1998 49 This content downloaded on Fri, 8 Mar 2013 12:41:28 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 3. Omen. 1978. Ceramic, height 54cm (21").Col- lection of the artist. the pot or earthenware as both object and symbol. Pottery making involves manual engagement, the use of the hand and fingers, a closeness with material that is peculiar in that it homologizes the body, and human agency, with matter as well as the cosmic manifests of clay as earth. It reveals the subtleties of making in a manner that is not possible with other media. Because clay is notformed in the same manner as stone or wood, because of its amorphousness, the artist is able to follow the process of its coming into form, its conversion from mere mat- ter into object, its passage from the amorphous and unmanifested into the formed. This in itself replicates the primeval moment of creation and that primal process at the core of all myths of creation by which the earliest humans or spirit beings, under the direction of the deities, formed earth and transposed it upon the virginal wetness of the uni- verse. Handling clay inescapably recalls that morning on creation day when, in Igbo folklore, the chameleon learned its tentative gait because the earth below his feet was so soft and formless that to step otherwise would have been disastrous.