Sculpture sure ain’t what it used to be. The days when statuary was a set, rigid thing with but a single, clear meaning — Heroism! Sorrow! Love! — are gone. El Anatsui wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Sculpture should not be fixed,” says the Ghanaian-born artist, whose first solo exhibition in the United States arrived recently at the National Museum of African Art.
Even the show’s title, Gawu — a word from the artist’s native Ewe suggesting both “metal” and “cloak” — contradicts.
Like “Iron Curtain”, it calls to mind rigidity and flexibility.
Its most obvious allusion, of course, is to the fabric-like sheets the artist fashions from discarded bottle caps and aluminum neck bands that once graced liquor bottles, several examples of which are on view here.
Is it a commentary on alcohol abuse? Certainly. (Distilleries are plentiful near Nsukka, Nigeria, where Anatsui has lived and worked for 28 years.
This leads both to a ready source of raw material for the artist, who “sews” the little bits of flattened metal together with copper wire, as well as a great opportunity to witness the magnitude of his adoptive country’s consumption of alcohol.)
El Anatsui’s messages range from the environmental to the political to the economic.
So scraps of metal can represent the growing trash problem, what the artist calls the “balkanisation” of Africa by Europe, and the unequal economic relationship between the continent and the West, where the distilleries originated.
Such pungent mutability is precisely what draws Anatsui to his chosen medium. That and the ability to fold up like a bedsheet the work for which he is best known. Check out Blue Moon, a new work the artist says he brought over with him on the aeroplane.
Could there be a subtle statement about globalisation being made there? Something about the porousness of national borders?
Why not? “I regard myself as someone who has provided a set of data,” Anatsui says. How the audience reads that data is of little concern to him. Or maybe not.
Reading comes into play much more explicitly in Wastepaper Bag, a towering three-dimensional form fashioned from crumpled metal plates the artist fished out of a printer’s trash.
As with all of Anatsui’s work, there are many possible interpretations, including, most superficially, the difficulties of waste management in places such as Nigeria that have poor recycling capabilities.
But there is another, even more powerful point (which neatly ties in to the fact that Anatsui’s “tapestries” can resemble the Adinkra mourning cloths of Ghana). Look closely.
You might miss the point if you don’t lean in to read the text on some of the aluminum sheets, several of which were once used for funeral announcements. Make a note of the birth and death dates, Anatsui urges. These are people who died at age 45, maybe 50.
That, he says, points the way to the central metaphor of Wastepaper Bag. It isn’t one of overflowing landfills, though he is happy if viewers take at least that much away from his sad and strangely beautiful found-object art.
Rather, it is a message in which the wording of at least one title refers not to garbage, but to what he calls the “wasted” lives of far too many fellow Africans.
There is no better example of multiple meaning than Crumbling Wall, a richly evocative 2000 work made from scavenged sheets of rusted steel. Covered with thousands of tiny perforations, the metal was once used to manually grate cassava roots into a kind of farina that is a staple of the West African diet.
On one level, the pockmarked structure is a literal nod to the decline of traditional African architecture. Yet it also functions as a symbolic reminder of what the label text calls “the resilience of African traditions and peoples in the face of change”.
But like everything else he does, Crumbing Wall is all about what you don’t see.
Sure, it forms a barrier of sorts. Anatsui is the first to admit that you can’t see what is on the other side. But the thing is covered with holes for a reason. After all, he notes, “A wall can only block the eye, but not the imagination.”
