Re-dressing history. (Yinka Shonibare).

In the fall of 2000 Yinka Shonibare had a solo show at Camden Art Centre, an installation piece in "Intelligence: New British Art" at Tate Britain, and a digital work in the new Welcome Wing of the Science Museum. Suddenly, he seemed to be everywhere in London. And his reach wasn't limited to Britain. He had solo shows in New York and, in 2001, in Rome and Johannesburg. He had a piece in the notorious "Sensation" exhibition and recently won an honorable mention at the Venice Biennale. His work is eye-catching, excessive, often beautiful--but why the interest in Shonibare, and why now?

Part of the answer lies in the increased range of his art and the sophistication of his manipulation of popular icons. His work has expanded in subject matter and media over the past three years, leading to a significant body of paintings, photographs, installations, and semisurrealistic objects which comment with wit and humor on themes of history, identity, and fantasy. Sometimes he plays with scale--Jane Austen and the Brontes are presented as figurines on a tabletop, toying with their position as "giants of literature" (Fig. 3)--and sometimes with race, as in the image of the black footballers repeated throughout the fabrics used to furnish his elaborate Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (Figs. 1, 2), or the cafe-au-lait-colored skin on the huntsmen in the installation Hound (Figs. 4-6). He often uses "African" fabrics in his paintings and installations, ethnicizing in unexpected places, startling the viewer into asking, "Why are the spacemen wearing this?" and then, a moment later, "Why not?"

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For Shonibare, the cloth is an apt metaphor for the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe and how the two continents have invented each other, in ways currently overlooked or deeply buried. The basic historical joke is that while the fabric (sometimes referred to as Dutch Wax) looks "African" and is of the sort often worn to indicate black pride in Brixton or Brooklyn, it is, in fact, printed fabric based on Indonesian batik, manufactured in the Netherlands, Britain, and other countries (including some in west Africa) and then exported to west Africa, where it is a popular, but foreign, commodity. The implication, then, is that nothing is as authentic as it may seem.

This cloth has proved to be a rich and adaptable material, both literally and metaphorically. It is flexible--it can be molded and stapled into many forms, painted upon, dressed up or down, used to line walls or cover furniture--and it is rich in color and design--one can choose from thousands of designs and color combinations, with numerous historical references. Shonibare's ironic use of this printed "African" fabric, combined with Victorian signifiers ranging from overstuffed parlor furniture to corsetted dresses to a hunting party, has become a signature mark. What is African? What is European? Who creates and consumes these identities?

But his work did not always take such a postmodern tack. Shonibare was born in Britain, but moved with his parents to Nigeria when he was three. Returning to Britain from Lagos at the age of seventeen, he started art school as a painter. He explains that his interest in identity began while studying at Byam Shaw. At one point, Shonibare became quite taken with perestroika in the Soviet Union and made a series of works on this theme. An art tutor, upon seeing the series, told him that the work "didn't reflect himself very much." Shonibare went home and wondered what this meant, who that "me" could be. "I'm a citizen of the world, I watch television," he explains, "so I make work about these things." (1) Then he realized what the tutor was after: he wanted to see some element of Shonibare's identity as an African in his work.

Shonibare went on to make a series of paintings playing with these notions of identity by placing images of "African" objects from the British Museum next to those of "modern" domestic appliances, taken from an Argos catalogue. An Ife head next to a coffee maker; a Lega stool beside a telephone. "Which is me?" he asked, writing essays and creating artworks that took apart taken-for-granted notions of identity. His approach was to question identity rather than celebrate it, to tease out signifiers and toy with them mockingly. He explains that his attitude at the time was "All right, if you want African, the kind of primitive stereotype, then I will give it to you" (interview with the author, 1995).

After finishing his first degree at Byam Shaw, Shonibare completed an M.A. at Goldsmiths College, London University, the influential art school that has been home to so many of the currently fashionable young British artists, or YBAs. At Goldsmiths, known for its emphasis on conceptual work and theory, he read Foucault and Derrida. This, he insists, was very important for his work. Their approach to the deconstruction of categories, the structural problem of signifier and signified, and the idea of a power structure created through various systems of signification gave Shonibare a powerful interpretive framework for his personal experiences as an artist from the African continent living and working in London. This background led him to a visual practice that deliberately incorporated common signifiers of "African-ness" in order to deconstruct them. One of these signifiers, as Shonibare notes in an interview I conducted in 1996, is cloth:

   Ceci n'est pas une pipe by Magritte, is important for understanding my
   work. You know how his piece presents a pipe and then says it is not a
   pipe. You can't smoke it. Sometimes people confuse representation for what
   it represents. But they are not that physical thing, they don't exist in
   the world in that way. So if you see a woman walking down a road and she's
   wearing African cloth, you might think--now there's African-ness, true
   Africanity. But that cloth, those clothes, are not African-ness.

Shonibare began using African-print textiles in the early 1990s. He first used the cloth to replace canvas, stretching squares of various printed fabrics across square frames of different sizes, and arranging them in a grid on the gallery wall. Then he painted flat surfaces onto the fabrics, both on the sides and on the face, blurring the distinction between canvas and frame. The result was very deadpan, slick, and minimal. An early work in this style won Shonibare a Barclay's Young Artist Award in 1992, which led to a group exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London (and his first review in African Arts; see Court 1993).

Then he decided to push the notion of the exotic further, by using what he describes as "excessive" colors and paint. The pieces were mounted on a wall that was itself painted a bright color, thus both marking the white cube of the gallery and emphasizing the patterns of the textiles themselves. Now he added thick daubs of paint to the front of the panels, sometimes to the sides, using heavy impasto and deliberately crude designs. He explains that he "took out all the subtlety, and I decided that I would be deliberately primitive and exotic. Because within the `civilized' setting, one is supposed to be restrained and not go overboard" (interview with the author, 1996). (2)

The artist has continued to develop this style of painting, experimenting with scale and color in pieces like Feather Pink (1997), Deep Blue (1997), Baby Blue (1998), (3) and, most recently, 100 Years (Figs. 7, 8). The painted patterns seem uncannily to be literal representations of the printed designs without actually being so; they echo their shapes and visual rhythms to mesmerizing effect. They also turn both art historical and social categories upside down. Shonibare presents the modernist heroic canvas--the huge rectangle painted on the wall, within which multiples are arranged, is the size of a Rothko or a Jasper Johns--but then breaks it up into little pieces. He uses "ethnic" cloth, but it is an industrial, mass-produced, modern product; the paint then becomes the handmade, personal, and "primitive." The pieces are minimalist yet excessive. It is perhaps no surprise that he admires the work of British artist Helen Chadwick, who took signifiers of femininity and pushed them to an extreme. Her huge vats of melted chocolate, shown at the Serpentine Gallery in the mid-1990s, were both seductive and nauseating.

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Shonibare's developing intellectual critique was informed by his own experience of physical disability. At the age of nineteen, while doing a foundation course at the Wimbledon School of Art, he contracted a viral infection that left him completely paralyzed for a month and in a wheelchair for three years. Although able to get about, he has impaired mobility, including limited use of his left side. This, he insists, made him both more determined and more creative as an artist: "Historically the people who made huge, unbroken modernist paintings, were middle-class white American men. I don't have that physique; I can't make that work. So I fragmented it, in a way which made it both physically manageable and emphasizes the political critique" (conversation with the author, August 2000).

In the mid-1990s Shonibare began playing with the fabrics on other surfaces. In Sun, Sea and Sand (1995; see ills. in Ikon Gallery 1999:12-13), hundreds of small bowls were wrapped with textiles and arranged on the floor, creating an Op Art effect. From bowls he moved to fashioning elaborate, late-nineteenth-century Victorian dresses and corsets from African-print textiles. Sometimes the dresses were fixed to the floor, as if on a mannequin, and sometimes suspended from the ceiling, as if illustrating an imagined passage from Marquez. Shonibare's first piece in this style, How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You? (Figs. 9, 10), was shown in the 1995 "Art of African Textiles" at the Barbican Gallery, London. Purchased by Charles Saatchi, it later appeared in "Sensation," the notorious exhibition based on Saatchi's collection (at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997 and the Brooklyn Art Museum in 1999).

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The Victorian era, with its heady mix of empire and colonialism, corruption and constraint, provided a rich source of material. One of the most impressive pieces of this period is Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (Fig. 1), created in collaboration with London Printworks. A parody of "period" rooms in museums, the work presents a late-nineteenth-century parlor with a twist--the fabrics covering the opulent furniture, walls, and draperies are printed with the repeated motif of black footballers. The artist designed the fabric himself, and the historical ironies are impossible to resist, as is the work's inherent theatricality. With the external walls deliberately left rough and unfinished, it feels like a stage set where the cast has gone out for a cigarette. And it begs for a script. Who would live here? Is this the home of an "African" Victorian, or of a Victorian who has made her or his fortune from Africa?

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For a while, Shonibare's installation work seemed defined by this union of African-print fabrics with the Victorian period, and perhaps limited by it. However, by the late 1990s, his subject matter had expanded to include aliens and astronauts, along with elaborate spoofs of classic European high culture, from Hogarth and Fragonard to Jane Austen. New themes were introduced, such as the nuclear family (Fig. 11), and familiar themes were explored in new contexts, such as the colonial aspects of space travel. At the same time Shonibare began experimenting with a wider variety of media, including several photographic series (which he directed but did not shoot) and digital work.

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This increased range of material and method has allowed the artist to make witty yet pointed political critiques across a spectrum of cultural concerns. He has long been intrigued by Surrealism, particularly the Surrealist approach to objects. Some of his early direct nods to Surrealist objects didn't quite work. Cha Cha Cha (1997), a pair of women's shoes covered in African-print fabric and lined with luxurious yellow velvet which refers to the famous Ma gouvernant (1936), seemed more Vivienne Westwood than Meret Oppenheim (Hynes 1998a). But moving away from fashioning garments to fashioning figures, whether alien or human, real or imagined, has strengthened Shonibare's juxtapositions. And his widening range of themes has allowed him to continue putting the African-print cloth in novel contexts, keeping the ironic incongruities fresh. The resulting tableaux grow closer to the Surrealist's aim of the "chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table," although his work may perhaps always be too studied to capture the spirit of chance.

As Shonibare's range has grown, so his use of the cloth has become increasingly sophisticated. What began as a seemingly one-line joke, similar to Chris Ofili's (4) initial use of dung, has grown into something more subtle and complex. The careful eye is rewarded with visual puns and playful, ironic detail; the jokes are now as multilayered as the petticoats of a bustled dress. In Cloud 9 (Fig. 12) the flag being planted on the moon by an astronaut wearing a spacesuit made of "African" fabric is not a national flag but a flag of suburbia, a textile printed with motifs of cars and box houses. It could be America in the 1950s or the French colonial period of Babar the elephant--a celestial Celesteville. The piece wryly reminds of the links between colonization and exploration, and gently mocks the American dream of the final frontier while also allowing room for black aspiration. In Vacation (Fig. 13), which shows two adults and two children in spacesuits (complete with backpacks) on holiday, the umbrellas on the printed fabric of the adult's spacesuits are a sly reference to Surrealism.

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The artist's ability to select significant cultural images and give them a postcolonial twist has sharpened. Some of the criticisms implied in his art historical tableaux are particularly cutting. In Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads (1998; see ill. in Ikon Gallery 1999:42-43), Shonibare restaged the famous painting by Gainsborough, but the figures are dressed in African-print cloth and shown without either their estate (no landscape as backdrop) or their heads. (6) In The Swing (Cover), exhibited in a recent show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, he reinterpreted a famous work by the eighteenth-century French painter Fragonard. This piece accentuates the erotic charge of Fragonard's painting, positioning the viewer so that one literally looks up the young woman's skirts as she swings, one shoe flying. In her richly patterned, brightly colored gown, made of "African" textiles, she is beautiful and seductive--a ripe fruit on the verge of rotting. Where the body gracefully leans back in seeming abandon, and one expects to see a smiling, enraptured face, it ends. A metaphor for a powerful and decadent era? A postcolonial transformation of a famously individual figure into the faceless (and now headless) "native"? Or a reference to department-store mannequins: the female as fashion victim, and the painting as fashion plate? Shonibare, as always, leaves us guessing.

The lack of heads in Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, The Swing, and other works such as Victorian Couple (Fig. 14) is startling; it depersonalizes the figures, which become similar to dressmakers' dummies, and hints at postcolonial revenge. Only aliens and humans wearing space suits and helmets retain their heads. But even here, the heads are not visible, since the visors are blacked over. This creates a tantalizing ambiguity; a Black British guard at the Tate Britain confessed to me that he once became so curious that he tried to pry up a helmet to see underneath (but failed). In this way, Shonibare's tableaux seem a ghostly inversion of George Segal's work: what is most interesting is not the body alone, but what the body becomes wrapped in.

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One of Shonibare's ongoing strengths is his ability to suggest narrative and characters without containing them. Although often linked to colonialism and identity, his pieces are not defined by this connection. "I hate conclusive things," insists Shonibare. "I think once a piece is conclusive, it's dead. The mind should be allowed to travel and have fantasy and imagination. People's minds need to wander" (in Hynes 1998b:15). This suggestiveness gives his work an accessibility and popular appeal rare in contemporary art. It also manages a sophisticated linking of narrative--albeit multiple narratives--with the highly conceptual.

The theatricality of Shonibare's work has been enhanced by his move into photography, with its references to television and cinema. Shot "on location" in an English stately home with a cast of actors and actresses, Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1999; see ills. in Ikon Gallery 1999:46-49) uses a series of five photographs to depict a day in the life of an imaginary dandy (played by Shonibare himself). (6) The luridly colored photographs, hung in large, gilded frames, play upon Hogarth's Rake's Progress and ubiquitous English costume dramas. Here Shonibare's theatrical sense becomes almost filmic--the shots look like stills from a movie set. A single image from the series was displayed in London underground stations, and at first glance it looked like a film poster. But for whose film? A biopic on some recently discovered historical figure, or a fictional fantasy?

In the recent piece Dorian Gray (Fig. 15), Shonibare delves into the darker side of the dandy. The literary and filmic references are more direct in this series of twelve large photographs (based on a 1945 screen adaptation, directed by Albert Lewin, of the novel by Oscar Wilde) than in Diary. The images are shot entirely in black and white; color enters the series only in the photograph depicting Gray's physical degeneration. He stands in horror, looking at himself in the mirror, a figure with suddenly wild, graying hair and rotting skin. Yet in Shonibare's retelling it is the death of the painter, not of the painting, that removes Gray from high society and leads to his physical transformation and death. The artist's casting of himself as Gray leads to intriguing speculation on the identity of the painter, who is white (as is everyone else depicted--except Shonibare). Is he part of Shonibare himself or a metonym for the contemporary art world that is currently so eager to embrace him?

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Shonibare links the increased scope of his projects to his winning a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award in 1998. The 30,000 [pounds sterling] prize led him to more research, new ideas, and an impressive range of new work. The painting 100 Years, made up of a hundred separate pieces, is the largest he has yet attempted. He also tried ambitious projects in new media. Among these, in addition to Diary of a Victorian Dandy and Dorian Gray, is Effective, Defective, Creative (2000), his piece for the Welcome Wing of the Science Museum in London. The result of research with fifteen pregnant women, it displays digitized images of eleven unborn fetuses, with the words "effective," "defective," and "creative" flashing in bright colors across them. (7)

Shonibare has clearly mastered a wide variety of visual idioms. The figures in his installations are reminiscent of Victorian fashion plates, Nigerian masqueraders, low-budget sci-fi films and shop-floor mannequins. Costume dramas, bug-eyed aliens, sportsmen, and spacemen are reinvented in his complex, imaginative tableaux, fed by a childhood in Lagos spent watching the Muppets and "Upstairs, Downstairs" on television. He has a knack for choosing key cultural images and giving them a sharp twist. "If you've actually lived in two cultures," he explains, "you know that there are subtle things that are read differently. If you know them, you can choose to play on these things, titillate them, deliberately be camp" (interview with the author, 1995).

But this does not mean that Shonibare or his work should be interpreted as some sort of cultural translator/translation between separate worlds; rather, it suggests that his pieces can and should be read for his skillful playing with multiple cultural norms and visual references. Throughout his career he has participated in exhibitions with explicitly British, African, or international themes. In 1995-96 Shonibare had a piece in the Barbican's "Art of African Textiles" exhibition and a painting in a show in Chelsea devoted to contemporary responses to British Op Art in general and Bridget Riley in particular. The following year he participated in the Sydney Biennale. In 2001 he has a piece in the "African" pavilion at the Venice Biennale and will also, in collaboration with the Philadelphia Fabric Workshop, rebuild the Gemini 6 spacecraft in a project called Space Walk.

Shonibare says he has sometimes felt pressure to "be black" in his work--a stereotyped blackness, based on notions of the primitive and the exotic that are very similar to, but not exactly the same as, notions of "African-ness." At a gallery talk in London, a young Black British woman asked him if he had a problem with being black. He replied that he didn't have a problem with being black, but he did have a problem with other people's ideas of what being black should mean for his work. Shonibare explained that as an artist one works from one's own personal experience, which for him included being "an African living in Britain," but that he struggled against "any preconceived notions of what I might do as a black painter." (8) Early in his career, he accepted such terms as African, Nigerian, or Black British "as long as they are not used as a means of fixing me.... I don't feel that I am location-less or colourless because, if I do, I am immediately denying myself very fundamental aspects of my on visibility.... I don't subscribe to the notion of anonymity" (interview with Clementine Deliss, March 6, 1992). Often in his work he uses his knowledge of these various categories of "identity"--African, European, British, Nigerian, black, modern, primitive--to play them off each other and, ultimately, undermine any notion of a fixed, essential identity. (9)

The hundred fragments in 100 Years are composed of textiles stretched into multiple minirectangles arranged on a grid and hung within a large rectangle painted directly onto the gallery wall. The panels are painted on the front, on the sides, or not at all, giving them an improvised, personal feel incongruous to the modernist grid. The effect is visually stunning--the eye plays with planes, moving inside and out in a shimmering shift reminiscent of Bridget Riley but with more depth, both visually (the pieces stand out from the wall) and metaphorically. Shonibare's ability to suggest pattern and affinity--in the arrangement of the panels, in the choice of textiles, and in the painted motifs--where none formally exists is remarkable. They are a deliberately random mix, yet the overall effect is coherent and intensely beautiful. Perhaps this is the "identity" we should be aiming for in the twenty-first century--an eclectic, self-mocking, part handmade, part industrial, fantastical thing; a formally ordered yet very personal improvisation, with some elements that are self-chosen and others imposed by stereotypes or the whim of history.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2001.]

(1.) From a talk by Yinka Shonibare at "Yoruba: Diaspora and Identities." Conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, November 1997.

(2.) For a further discussion of this, see Mercer 1995.

(3.) Feather Pink, Deep Blue, and Baby Blue are illustrated in Ikon Gallery 1999: 16, 50-53.

(4.) Chris Ofili is one of the few YBAs who did not study at the theoretical hothouse of Goldsmiths; he trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

(5.) For a discussion of land, heads, and identity in Gainsborough and Shonibare, see Gould 2001.

(6.) Diary of a Victorian Dandy, funded by the Institute of International Visual Arts, was shortlisted for the Citibank 1999 Photography Prize.

(7.) The women agreed to allow images of their unborn children to be used for the piece, It explores one of the moral dilemmas introduced with advances in medical technology--whether or not to carry to full term a child who is developing medical problems or "defects" while in the womb.

(8.) Gallery talk given by Yinka Shonibare during the exhibition "Rhapsodies in Black: Art in the Harlem Renaissance," Hayward Gallery, London, 1997.

(9.) His "Portable Personal Histories" (1997) project emphasizes the malleable, fictional aspects of identity. It involved eight people from Birmingham, each of whom made his or her own museum display case, selecting their own materials. At first the displays seem quite straightforward, a cross between an American-style "memory box" and something from a local history museum. But then doubt creeps in. Are they describing themselves? Or a fictional someone else, whose life is portrayed in the box? Shonibare himself created the box of "Mary Beth Regan," an imaginary African American cowgirl.

References cited

Court, Elsbeth. 1993. "Yinka Shonibare: Finalist, Barclay's Young Artist Award," African Arts 26, 1 (Jan.):79-81.

Gould, Trevor. 2001. "Building a Landscape," ESPACE 51. Proceedings from Conference on Places for Sculptures, Montreal, Dec. 1999. Also available at www.espace-sculpture.com/espace/conferen.html.

Hynes, Nancy. 1998a. "The Process of Perception: Approaches to the Visual in the Work of Osi Audu and Yinka Shonibare." Paper delivered at Association of Art Historians (AHA) "Identities" Conference, April 3-5. Exeter

Hynes, Nancy. 1998b. "The Fop's Progress: Nancy Hynes Talks to Yinka Shonibare," Untitled (Autumn 1998) 17:15.

Ikon Gallery. 1999. Yinka Shonibare: Dressing Down. Birmingham (England).

Mercer, Kobena. 1995. "Art That Is Ethnic in Inverted Commas," Frieze (Nov.)

NANCY HYNES is a freelance writer and art critic based in London.

JOHN PICTON is Reader in African Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He worked for the Government of Nigeria from 1961 to 1970, and for the British from 1970 to 1979, when he moved to SOAS. He is also a consulting editor of African Arts.