EL ANATSUI THE REINVENTION OF SCULPTURE
OKWUI ENWEZOR
CHIKA OKEKE-AGULU
7 Preface 11 Chapter 1: El Anatsui and Modern African Art 45 Chapter 2: “Go Back and Pick”: New Models of Experimentation 95 Chapter 3: The Aesthetic and Rhetoric of Fragmentation 205 Chapter 4: The Metamorphic Form, or “No Condition Is Permanent” 277 Chapter 5: The Epic and Triumphant Scale 318 Bibliography 321 Appendix 1: Narrative Chronology by Damian Lentini 335 Appendix 2: Exhibition History and Bibliography 347 List of Illustrations 354 Acknowledgements 355 Authors’ Biography 356 Index
Previous pages
1.17 El Anatsui, Garden Wall, 2011. Aluminum and copper wire. Wall component: 520.7 × 530.9 cm, floor component: 530.9 x 749.3 cm. Installed at The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, 2014.
1.18 El Anatsui, Drifting Continents, 2009. Aluminum and copper wire; 8 components, approx. 300 × 910 cm. Installed at The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, 2014.
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2.12 Ewe artist, Man’s wrapper (kente), c. 1900–20. Industrial cotton and dye, 170 × 251 cm.
2.13 Asante artist, Ghana, Western Africa, Man’s wrapper (kente), early twentieth century. Silk, 315 × 200 cm.
2.14 Adinkra symbols.
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2.15 Ibrahim El Salahi, The Prayer, 1960. Oil on Masonite, 61.3 × 44.5 cm.
2.16 El Anatsui, No Child Is Born with All His Teeth, 1973. Wood, paint, lacquer, 37.5 × 36.5 cm.
Next pages 2.17 El Anatsui, Wisdom, 1974. Wood, paint, lacquer, 40 × 39 cm.
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2.18 Dyed Fabric Wallhangings, Burnt-Scorched Wooden Wall Plaques exhibition, Institute of African Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, May 9–23, 1975.
2.19 El Anatsui, Untitled, 1978. Clay and manganese body.
2.20 El Anatsui, Broken Pot II, 1979. Manganese and glass, 30 cm. 2.21 El Anatsui, Broken Pot II, 1979 [alternative view]. Manganese and glass, 30 cm.
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Chapter 2
of the Arabic calligraphic text, to release the mythic, sacral, and pictorial elements encoded in them (Fig. 2.15),12 Anatsui subjected adinkra symbols to similar analyses of their structure, seeking to attain, as he later put it, “motor and psychic acquaintance and rapport” with them.13 In other words, at a moment when he needed to explore the archive of artistic knowledge represented by the arts of Ghana, he found a path forward from formal experimentations with adinkra and kente design and symbolism. Moreover, given their participation in a complex system of visual and symbolic communication, attention to these two art traditions afforded Anatsui a new way of seeing form, material and technique as a sculptor. Rather than the expression of formal values associated with the manipulation of volumetric form, sculpture from then on became for him a process of ordering branded, incised, scorched, cut, painted, stitched or unfixed surfaces and materials. Henceforth—just as adinkra is at once sign and design, visual expression and text—his objects frequently bridged or elided the usual boundaries of sculpture and painting, vigorous formalism and concept-driven practice, whole and fragmentary form. This is the fundamental artistic lesson of Anatsui’s Sankofa experience, and this, as we argue in chapters Three and Four, informs his work from the 1970s when he made his circular wooden trays and terracotta objects, to the 1980s and 1990s when he developed his wood panel and freestanding sculptures, and finally to the monumental metal work of the past two decades (Figs. 2.16–2.24). A Community of Artists Crucial as the Winneba years were to Anatsui’s transformation from an art student thoroughly immersed in various modes of western modernist aesthetic—as interpreted by his European and Ghanaian teachers—to a self-confident young artist convinced about the value of art forms and visual cultures of Ghana as resources for his work, he soon realized the limitations of his intellectual environment, and the possibilities that lay beyond it. In 1974, his former sculpture teacher at KNUST, the German ceramist Gerd von Stokar (1922–1986), recently appointed head of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, invited him to apply to a newly created sculpture position.14 Fortuitous as the circumstances of his move from Winneba to Nsukka might seem, the fact that it was indirectly connected to the transnational networks of the Mbari Ibadan is significant. Vincent Kofi, the most prominent Ghanaian modernist sculptor of the period and a founding member of Mbari, had been invited to Nsukka as external examiner, and it was he who, upon return home, informed Anatsui of the job opportunity at Nsukka. More importantly, Kofi had seen the robust intellectual atmosphere there led by his Mbari colleague Uche Okeke, and believed that Anatsui might find a much more supportive ground for the experimental work and new aesthetic he was developing at the time. Just as the first military coup of 1966 ushered Ghana into a period of political instability, Nigeria’s post-independence troubles, what Wole Soyinka called a season of anomie, began with election crises in 1964, the pogrom against Eastern Nigerians in 1966, the secession of the Eastern Region in 1967 and the civil war/Nigeria-Biafra war (1967–1970). Even so, the formation in 1968 of Odunke Community of Artists—a collective of writers, artists, dramatists, musicologists, poets within the Biafran enclave set the ground for the emergence of artists associated with the now legendary Nsukka School (Fig. 2.25).
2.22 El Anatsui, When I last wrote to you about Africa, I used a letterhead parchment paper, there were many blank slots in the letter.... I can now fill some of these slots because.... I have grown older, 1986. Wood, 186.4 × 140.7 × 7.3 cm.
2.23 El Anatsui, Yam Tendrils, Symbols of Tenacity, 1989. Assorted tropical hardwood, paint, lacquer, 31 × 90 cm.
Chapter 2
Odunke’s origins could be traced to Mbari Ibadan and share with the latter a connection to the communalist ethos and transmedia manifestation of many African art forms. Led by some of the artists who in the prewar years participated in the interdisciplinary programs of the Mbari Enugu—itself modeled after Mbari Ibadan—the Odunke group, through its collectively produced dramas and individual literary and art works of its members, according to the literary scholar Chuma Azuonye, “contemplated the possibilities of new artistic idioms in poetry and the visual arts through which the Biafran nightmare could be recreated for humanity in all its squalid grandeur.”15 In other words, the group was as committed to art as a medium for revivification and translation of socio-political experience in time of war as it was to formal invention and critical discourse. At the war’s end, Odunke moved to Nsukka, where in the next few years, along with the Chinua Achebe-led Okike Arts Centre, it constituted an unprecedented arena of significant artistic and literary production that Anatsui met when he arrived in 1975. Besides the vigorous interdisciplinary atmosphere sustained by Odunke and Okike (Fig. 2.26)—famed for its eponymous literary journal, and for organizing, in 1981, the Okochi Festival of poetry and minstrelsy performances—the art program at Nsukka was even more resonant to Anatsui, given his earlier attraction to the Ghanaian Sankofa movement and his own research and experimentation with traditional arts and crafts (Fig. 2.27).16 Already in 1972, when Uche Okeke, a founding member of Mbari Ibadan and leader of the Art Society a decade before, arrived at Nsukka, he led a group of artists—mostly from Eastern Nigeria—in a systematic transformation of the curriculum, from its earlier western academic orientation, to a focus on the formal, technical and conceptual possibilities of African art and design for new art in Nigeria and the continent.17 By 1975, experimentation with Igbo Uli body art and mural designs had secured the school’s reputation as a home for contemporary artists in search of new approaches to form and design based on vigorous analysis of indigenous models. (Figs. 2.28 & 2.29). Thus, when in 1974 Anatsui learned of Uche Okeke and the Nsukka program, he saw a fresh opportunity to advance his work among an exciting community of artists driven by ideas like the ones that motivated the Sankofa movement in Ghana. Along with leading artists of the Nsukka school, namely Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, Chuka Amaefuna, and Chike Aniakor, Anatsui explored Uli aesthetic—specifically, the emphasis on the lyrical line, the dynamic orchestration of negative and positive compositional space, and decorative, abstract and semi-abstract motifs associated with the Igbo art form (Figs. 2.30–2.34). Yet in combining this new Uli aesthetic with the work he had begun at Winneba on wooden trays and adinkra symbols, he expanded the formal repertoire and cultural geography of the Nsukka school whose work, until then, was tied to Igbo Uli art and design. A few years later, as if taking cue from Anatsui’s intervention, Udechukwu introduced the nsibidi script of the Ekpe secret society of the Efik, Ejagham and Ibibio peoples of southeastern Nigeria into his Uli-inspired drawing and painting (Fig. 2.35). By 1980, at which point Nsukka’s reputation as the leading art school in Nigeria was secured, Anatsui had begun research into various indigenous West African and African scripts and syllabaries, among them Vai and Bamum scripts, respectively from Liberia and Cameroon, and aroko symbols from southwestern Nigeria. This environment of insistent experimentation in the art department with Nigerian and African decorative, symbolic and scriptural forms— happening as it were alongside the intellectual ambience of Okike and Odunke at Nsukka—catalyzed
2.24 El Anatsui, Hovor, 2003. Aluminum bottle tops and copper wire, 609.6 × 548.6 cm. Installed in El Anatsui: Gawu exhibition, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, 2007.
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