MODULE 7 INITIAL POST

Cat. 28 Scramble for Africa, WOO, by Yinka Shonibare.

14 figures, 14 chairs, table, overall dimensions:

132 x 488 x 280 cm. Comm,ssioned by the Museum ior

Afncan Art, NY. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen

Friedman Gallery, London.

162

Yinka Shonibare of hedonism, masquerade, carnivalesque and J?OWer

A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor

Okwui Enwezor: An assumption that's central to your practice is its exploration of

that imaginary space between Africa and Europe, and between colonial and post·

colonial discourse. How have those two notions played out in your work of the last ten

years? Yinka Shonibare: What I find interest ing is the idea that you cannot define Africa

without Europe. The idea that there is some kind of dichotomy between Africa and Eu·

rope-between the "exotic other" and the "civilized European," if you like-I think is

completely simplistic. So I'm interested in exploring the mythology of these two so·

called separate spheres, and in creating an overlap of complexities. This I think art

does well, because it takes you into a third area-an area of complexity that, as a prod·

uct of British colonization and therefore of what is considered a hybrid culture, opens

up a space to question the determination of Africa in European discourse.

At the beginning of my career I felt a kind of trauma about the question of loyalty, and

where my allegiance should lie. One reason my practice has evolved in the way it has

is that I concluded that this notion of loyalty to one culture is unrealistic, and in fact

very distant from the real ity of my everyday life. OE: Is it impossible to define Africa without Europe? I would tend to disagree-isn't it

in fact quite possible to define Africa without Europe? And if I invert that statement,

perhaps it isn't altogether impossible to define Europe without Africa?

YS: I think it works both ways. I consider the notion of Africa we have inherited a fun·

damentally geographical notion, and one I think alien to African culture. Take Egypt

and Nigeria: I cannot conceive of two cultures more dissimilar, yet both fit within that

geographical notion-it's just that one is more Arab and the other is less. In fact the

kinds of indigenous culture you find in sub-Saharan Africa you can't say are the same

as those in North Africa, just as, in the United Kingdom, you wouldn't dare to call the

Scottish people the same as the English; they may speak a common language but

culturally they're two peoples. The problem with this notion of Africa that is imposed

from outside is its conflation of everybody into this pot called Africa. It doesn't take

cultural nuances and differences into account.

OE: Let's talk about the early reception of your work, and the beginning of your use of

"African" fabric, with its mechanically printed designs. I am interested to hear how you

work with the convoluted route this fabric has traveled to become a sign and marker

of Africanness. What has happened since you first proposed the relationship between

its supposed authenticity and tradition, between the fabric as commodity and its fetish

status in connection to the fantasy of identity? I'm also interested in the way you've re·

worked the narrative of the fabric to comment on a range of models within modernism,

especially painterly abstraction. YS: In the beginning, since people had somehow assumed that "African" fabric was

163

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an expression of African authenticity, a lot of them were sur-

prised to learn that the fabric was Dutch in origin, was related

to Indonesian batik, and was industrially manufactured in Hol­

land and in Manchester. In the 1970s, too, progressive Afrocen­

tric political movements had reappropriated the fabric, making it

a symbol of African culture and nationalism-so some people

simply assumed that I was using it in some kind of na·1ve ex­

pression of my own Africanness (Figs. 97, 98).

Now from my point of view this assumption negated the idea of

the African artist as engaged with modernist discourse. My real

concern was to challenge the idea of the grid in Western mod­

ernism, and to reintroduce supposedly nonart material- the

functional, the ethnic other-that then would contaminate the

"pure" space of high modernism. I think my use of African fabric

to engage modernist practice was less played out, or less dis­

cussed, in the reception of my work at the beginning.

Of course I was also aware of a lot of the artists of the time: the

"Neo-Geo" artists in New York, for example, and the European

Transavanguardia, and the international neo-Expressionism of

the early 1980s, and the artists looking at the idea of pattern in

the 1970s. My own interest at this point was not just pattern as a kind of stylistic ef­

fect of high modernism, but pattern as a cultural signifier. As somebody of African ori­

gin, I wanted to question the way representation can be used as a way of marginaliz­

ing people. I also became interested in the fabric's complex history.

OE: So initially no one saw that you were using the fabric conceptually? It was viewed

more as an expressive, noncritical tool?

YS: Exactly. But there were of course writers who understood the underlying issues.

An article by Kobena Mercer in Frieze ["Art That Is Ethnic in Inverted Commas: On

Yinka Shonibare;' Frieze no. 25, November/December 1995] was I suppose the first

magazine article to address the conceptual and historical background of what I was

doing-to touch on the issues of painting and modernism I was

Fig. 97 Feather Pink, 1997, by Yinka Shonibare. Emulsion,

acrylic on textiles, 250 x 250 cm. (each panel 30 x 30 x 5

cm.). Collection of Art Institute of Chicago, USA.

Photo: Stephen White.

Fig. 98 Deep Blue, 1997, by Yinka Shonibare. Emulsion,

acrylic on textiles, 250 x 250 cm. Collection Worcester Art

Museum, USA. Photo: Stephen While.

concerned with. There were catalogue essays before that; I

think the first must have been in the publication for "Seen/Un­

seen;' curated by Olu Oguibe at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liver­

pool [in 1994].

At the same time, there's a kind of complicity on my own part

that I need to explain: what I'm doing is not so clear-cut. People

might assume that I have a total critical distance from my prac­

tice, but I don't think that's the case; it 's more complex, be­

cause, on one level, I challenge the denial of my African back­

ground. In other words, a part of my work has to do with

visibility-with my own attempt to make my origin visible. I have

chosen to remain in control of my own representation, and

therefore, while the use of the African fabric is on the one hand

a critical look at representation, or at what might represent the

African, it is simultaneously a celebration. So it is actually a

negation and a celebration simultaneously.

OE: How does that work, negation and celebration?

YS: Well, on the one hand I reserve the right to use satire and

humor in my work, because they disso·lve serious issues, some

164

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of which are political. Humor is a fantastic way of taming them. But on the other hand

I enjoy painting. I was trained as a painter, and I don't separate the aesthetic from the

political-the aesthetic is actually an expression of the political, right? You can do pol·

itics formally. That's a simple way of putting it; the way I do it, it's more in a kind of

challenging, carnivalesque way, in which I stick my tongue out. No group has a mo·

nopoly on aesthetics.

You have to realize that I was working against the background of the "Black art move·

ment" in the U.K. at the time, and if you can rewind back to that period you will realize

how for me the Black art movement had a lot in common with the Harlem Renais·

sance; it was a kind of artificial U.K. "re-naissance" of the Harlem Renaissance, which

did not connect with me. The African experience in the U.S. I think is different from the

Afro-Caribbean experience in the U.K.

OE: Wouldn't you say that the carnivalesque poses the question of a self-conscious

repetition of certain stereotypical modes, often attached to the idea of the non-Euro·

pean other, that you initially wanted to critique? Perhaps you're making the carniva­

lesque a point of irony, but don't you see a danger that its deployment may begin to

meet all the simplistic requirements within which the so-called black artist is sup·

posed to perform?

VS: But I always include an element of the unexpected. For example, I am well-known

for my use of Victoriana, right? And for an artist of African background to be known for

using Victoriana is a complete contradiction. I'm producing something that looks to·

tally other, but it's actually a mimicking or a "kitschivization" of the establishment­

you've got African kitsch against European kitsch. And when you collapse those two,

you're left standing in the middle wondering, Where is this guy going? Who is he

F19. 99 100 Years, 2000, by Ymka Shonibare. 100 panels,

emulsion, acrylic on Dutch wax-printed cotton textile,

painted wall. overall dimensions: 250 x 850 cm. Collection

of Ninah and Michael Lynne. Photo: Ahlburg Keate

Photography.

165

mimicking? ls he an admirer of colonial imagery, is he celebrating it? Or is he cri­

tiquing it.

OE: Which is it? How does critique funct ion when it 's easy to become ambivalent

about it? Is it possible to use the repressive morality of Victoriana and simultaneously

its kitschiness, its excess, to comment on issues of fantasy, desire, and colonialism?

VS: Well, what a lot of commentators haven't referred to in my work, even in the paint­

ings, is its aggressive nature, its symbolic beheading of power. It doesn't necessarily

look like Goya, where you see blood; nor is it necessarily abject-

OE: But the decapitation signals a critical relationship to authority?

VS: Yes, symbolically, when you take it in the context of the French Revolution and

what happened to the aristocracy.. . .

OE: But one could still say that since your figures are mannequins, their symbolic be­

heading may not register as crit ique.

YS: I want to look at my practice in the area of the poetic. Speech-direct speech, or

journalism-is sure to declare itself and its intentions clearly; that is the nature of

straight speech or journalism. The poet finds another thing, which is the use of words

to become another order of signification. Then that becomes an integral part of

speech. One has expression, but the artist can never be as sure as the critic, because

the artist is skeptical by nature, so that what is expressed is always contradicting it­

self. In other words, my work occupies the space of contradiction.

OE: Let's take that as a point of departure for the idea of trauma, and the kind of alle­

giance an artist like you is called on to show, the world you are called on to inhabit,

and the obvious issue of hybridity. You say al l these are part of what you're exploring.

Can you talk about them a bit more? For whom is this allegiance important?

VS: To talk about this, I must go back to my childhood in Nigeria and then move to­

ward my adulthood in Europe. In Nigeria I was open to a lot of experiences: I was liv­

ing in Lagos, a contemporary society, and I could watch American programs and just

basically be a citizen of the world, show interest in many things simultaneously-I did

not have to choose. Then when I moved to Europe, to my surprise, I had to choose. I

believe that my blackness began when I stepped off the plane at Heathrow. I did not

have a notion or a concept of blackness until I stepped off the plane.

I came here to study, to train as a painter. I did academic life painting and drawing, like

any other artist. And progressively, throughout my second year here, my work became

political. I started to make work about global issues because I saw myself as a global

citizen. I made work about perestroika, for example, which was going on then in Rus­

sia; I saw that the cold war was corning to an end, and I thought that was a globally

significant issue and I wanted to explore it. One of my tutors came into my space and

said, "Well, you're African, aren't you? Why aren't you producing authentic traditional

African art?" And of course, given my background, the whole notion that I would un­

derstand the concept of some pure African authenticity, or for that matter that such an

expression would be expected of me, I found utterly shocking, negating my engage­

ment with modernism and modernization as well. So I decided to explore the notion of

authenticity and what it might signify. That was when I realized that the idea of loyalty

or allegiance is always imposed by others from the outside.

OE: So for you the trauma is this consciousness of your blackness, which you had no

awareness of because you were living in a society that did not work in this racially

charged hierarchical way. The trauma is your separation from the body of your up­

bringing, and then your reinsertion into this racialized political framework of ethnicity

and difference.

YS: Yes. I think it was during my art school education that I realized I was not going to

1 6 6

be allowed to be a universal, anonymous artist-if there is such a thing; but that was

my utopian view. It was quite a revelation because I realized that regardless of my in­

ternal thoughts, the way I was perceived on the outside was different.

I also realized that I was in a double bind. If I made work about being black, I would be

considered simply an artist who made work about blackness; if I did not make work

about being black, people would speak of me as a black artist who did not make work

about blackness. I realized that in this particular, European context the priority would­

n't be your practice, it would be your race-especially at that time, when identity was

such a focus for international art. It was the time of Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger­

those issues were at the forefront. So I decided, OK, my way of dealing with this will

be to create a confusion. I will locate myself in the area of confusion because confu­

sion is actually more honest on my part, it is a closer expression of where I am. I don't

mean "confusion" negatively.

OE: So here in art school there was a second shock: the shock that you had to be a

black artist, and that being a black artist meant you ought to be working with black­

ness, in terms of form, technique, iconography, imagery, whatever. Did this professor

talk about what this authentic African thing might be, and why you were supposed to

work that way?

VS: He didn't, exactly, but I think he simply assumed that as a black African I would

want to express and make art about my condition and about Africa. That I would want

to make work about traditional African &rt. And of course I've never actually been to an

African village. I've only seen one on television.

OE: All the time you lived in Lagos, you never visited a Yoruba village?

VS: No.

OE: You lived exclusively in Lagos? You never visited other parts of Nigeria?

VS: Not apart from Ibadan, which is a city. I've never been to an African village, so the

idea that I would have some connection to traditional African art is quite absurd. I can

express myself with things I know, but I can't re-create something that I know nothing

about.

OE: There's obviously an assumption here of what an African village means in terms of

authenticity-that the village is where all this authent ic African stuff is happening. I've

actually spent quite a lot of time in the village, visiting from the city, so the trope of the

village intrigues me. What do you think an African village looks like?

YS: Well, when I say "the village;' I'm assuming a Western point of view.

OE: OK, you've never been to such a place, so you mean the representation of an

African village.

VS: Yes, and I don't think the representation is correct- it's a nineteenth-century no­

tion. I don't think the mythical, exotic village-a holiday village for Europeans-still exists

in Africa. I also assume that the traditional African art I was expected to create was

mainly a nineteenth-century product. No society is static; even an African village will

not be the way it was in the nineteenth century.

OE: At least in the last decade or so, you've been active on the international scene.

How has your consciousness of blackness manifested in relation to the international

art world? Has your reception been any different beyond the old borders of empire?

VS: Well, the interesting thing about the evolution of my practice is that it deals with

other issues besides blackness. This is obvious from the kinds of exhibitions I've been

invited to do-the exhibition called "Heaven," for examP.'e, in Di.isseldorf and then at

Tate Liverpool [in 1999-2000]. The issues that exhibition addressed had to do with

glamour and aesthetics, so I think the issues of sexuality, masquerade, and fantasy in

my work made it seem a good fit. I tend to be invited to shows dealing with other is-

167

sues besides blackness, whether ques­

tions of art and aesthetics or quest ions of

sexuality, fetishization, and so on- issues

that artists are dealing with who may not

claim to be talking specifically about iden­

tity issues but who operate across c ul­

tures in their work. I can honestly say that I

feel privileged, because I do a lot of "main­

stream" shows that don't engage with

identity issues. Or rather, everything has to

do with identity in a way, but they're not

about colonization or colonialism. You'll

find me in "Sensation " and at the same

time in shows focused around identity is­

sues. This is one way my political ideas are

played out in the exhibitions I get invited to

do.

I'm happy not being pinned down, being

allowed to move between different

spaces, but I have no negative vibe toward

exhibitions dealing with issues of colonial-

ism. The reason I say this is that I'm aware of many black artists who will tell you that

they don't do shows about colonialism or blackness.

OE: Do you respect that?

VS: I respect choice. I think people should have choice. But it's my personal stance

that I'm not ashamed of my background. I'm proud of who I am, and I can express be­

ing proud of it. I don't necessarily want to overstate the fact that I'm proud of it-

OE: You don't want to fetishize your background.

VS: No. But at the same time I'm not hiding from it.

OE: Does the fact that you can move in and out of these zones, that your d iscursive

objects can exist in different spaces of reception and circulation, converge w ith your

old idea of being a universal, anonymous artist?

VS: The problem with the notion of the universal is that there is always an idea of pow­

er behind it. The idea of the universal-take architecture as an example, the work of Le

Corbusier or someone like that-is that you can build the same building in Africa and

in Europe without taking local nuances and cultural differences into consideration. I

don't believe in the universal as an imposed utopian idea for everybody; the local is al­

ways significant because cultural practices are always different. The universal always

involves an attempt to impose a specif ic standard on everybody. I find that quite a dif­

ficult idea to live with; I reserve the right to move freely between zones.

OE: Is it enough to reserve that right, especially in the kinds of institutional, polit ical,

social, and cultural system you're operating in?

VS: I think I would claim a degree of success. If you look at my career, and the range

of exhibitions I've been invited to, you will see that I've managed to be in the kinds of

show I would want to be in, while not avoiding-I emphasize this-not avo iding so­

called "black art" shows. If I think the show is good I will participate.

OE: If it's provocative, if it's of interest.

VS: Yes, that's my criterion.

OE: That position touches on this exhibition, which is formulated around the idea of an

African diaspora. There seems to me to be a possibility of confusion in the notion of

Fig. 10 0 Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without Their Heads,

1998, by Yinka Shonibare. Wax-print cotton costumes on

armatures, dog, mannequin, bench, g un, overall dimen­

sions: 165 x 570 x 254 cm. Collection National Gallery of

Canada, Ottawa, Canada.

168

:liaspora in relation to African artists living in the West, and I'd like to begin our explo­

·ation of that notion with what you said about your relationship to the Black art move­

nent in England-a movement mostly constituted at the nexus of Afro-Caribbean and

l\frican-American thought around diaspora. Conversely, the notion of an African dias­

:iora that focuses specifically on a range of practices by contemporary artists from

::ast, West, North, and Southern Africa is something entirely new. How genuine do

{OU think this notion of diaspora is, and do you see yourself as part of it?

VS: This is an interesting issue. I would describe it as a distinction between voluntary

emigration and enforced emigration. I have to be cautious here, because there is such

a thing as enforced emigration for contemporary artists in Africa. But the debates

about enforced emigration trace back to slavery; one thinks of the diaspora as it is

constituted in the African-American situation, the Afro-Caribbean situation, the Brazil­

ian situation. In that sense the condition that was created by slavery is different from

the condition created by contemporary African emigration, to the extent that that emi­

gration is economic. I draw a distinction between those two. It's not that I don't have

solidarity with the people of the earlier kind of diaspora, but I draw a distinction be­

tween it and my kind of diaspora.

OE: How are your British contemporaries from the Caribbean distinct through their

historical experience of diaspora from you, and others, through the more contempo­

rary version of diaspora that you.call voluntary? How does this distinction function in

relation to your own positioning? You say that the experience of an African artist from

Africa is different from that of an Afro-Caribbean-how different are they beyond the

historical distinctions you're making?

YS: To use personal experience as an example: I'm bilingual, but my being bilingual

doesn't necessarily create a separate culture. I'm bilingual but I grew up on Michael

Jackson like everybody else. My being bilingual doesn't separate me, then, but it gives

me, I think, a kind of self-esteem and confidence. I don't necessarily mean that the

people from the other diaspora don't have those thoughts, but I think that to position

myself under the banner of the enslaved African would from my perspective rather re­

duce my assertiveness within this culture.

OE: Are you saying that Afro-Caribbeans, African-Americans, and Afro-Brazilians lack

this self-confidence? That would be a tall order.

YS: Well, you see, I can't say that. To make that statement would be simplistic, be­

cause the issue of language is complicated, and the issue of being able to trace one's

roots, which was so much explored in the '70s, has a bearing on the way you engage

with a host culture.

OE: But wouldn't one say that the Afro-Caribbean context in England and the context

of an African living in England resemble each other in that both reflect the same kind

of migration-the postwar economic migration? In that sense what you seem to be

saying may be a contradiction in terms. There is an underlying essentialism here that

is quite provocative. Is bilingualism where you hinge this distinction?

YS: I need to explain that my ability to speak an African language, or to be connected

to an African culture, is not a singular factor in my self-esteem; it's a fraction of my

makeup. It will always be a fraction of my makeup; it will never be the totality of my

makeup. At the same t ime, from my reading through the Harlem Renaissance, I un­

derstand that when you live in an oppressive society there always seems to be a

search for a piece of the missing jigsaw, a quest for some connection with your past.

It's like a child that's adopted: he somehow feels more complete if he can locate his

parents.

OE: Would pan-Africanism be a better prism through which to explore the tension in

169

the formulation of the African diaspora?

YS: Yes, I think pan-Africanism and the African diaspora have a similar kind of political

backdrop. But a point of identification is always evident in each: in fact I see those two

terms as temporal terms, one located more in the '50s and '60s, the other more con­

temporary, would that be correct?

OE: Historically speaking, no, but it's true that many would say the pan-Africanist dis­

course is exhausted. The ideal and the vision persist, though-outgrowths of the na­

tionalism of the independence movements. And pan-Africanisms did not see them­

selves as dissociated from the social, political, and cultural projects of the African

diaspora in the Caribbean, the United States, and Brazil.

Pan-Africanism is many things, whether the DuBoisian African-American version, the

post-World War II Manchester-conference formulation of Kwame Nkrumah, or that of

Nnamdi Azikiwe in the '30s. There are all these different models. But beyond that I

would like to ask who your contemporaries are in this African diaspora, since it seems

quite clear in your head that it exists. You might mention Kendell Geers-who are the

others? Who are the African artists of the diaspora whose work you pay attention to,

even if you might not feel an affinity with their practices and discourses?

VS: You ask a difficult question, because I think there's a way in which curators join

people together for the wrong reasons. I also think I find affinity with a lot of artists

who are not necessarily of African background but with whom I maybe share some·

thing. I draw on those similaritie~ more than on where the artist comes from. In fact it's

an odd thing, the way you asked that question, but I can't think of an artist with a sim­

ilar experience to me who I feel is doing something similar to what I'm doing, because

I locate myself in the mainstream and at the margin simultaneously.

OE: This is obviously part of the complication that you've tried to explore. I find it sig­

nificant at a time when the political in art has the quality of a taboo. How do you think

one can effectively be political in one's practice, given the prohibitions that are at­

tached to it?

VS: A good example is Marvin Gaye, and the album What's Going On?, which op­

posed the war in Vietnam. That album was not initially accepted by Motown, Gaye's

record label, you know, they didn't want to release it because it was very political. But

formally it's an excellent album, even if you don't listen to the lyrics-formally it's won­

derful. And I think the artists who manage to combine form with content in a strong

way get through.

OE: What artists do you think do that, managing a principled, conscientious political

engagement without sacrificing artistic merit?

VS: I think about Hans Haacke, but Haacke for me is political without the aesthetic.

And this sounds odd, because I respect Hans Haacke highly and he is one of the peo­

ple I used to look at. Yet I don't find the level of aesthetic engagement that I want from

his work.

OE: OK. Leon Golub?

VS: Leon Golub I also respect highly, and I have looked at him a lot. But I find his

work-I don't know how to say this, but it feels like re-presentations of political events.

I don't feel that it is self-unraveling.

OE: You mean it's more a re-presentation of politics than political in the subversive

way of your work?

VS: Yes.

OE: So your work is dependent not on politics but on the underlying critical and ethi­

cal assumptions embedded in the political sphere-issues of representation, relations

of power, questions of agency, issues of cultural signification. These are not in a

170

Cat. 28 Detail of Scramble for Africa, 2000, by Yinka

Shonibare. 14 figures, 1 4 chairs, table, overall:

132 x 488 x 280 cm. Commissioned by the Museum for African Art, NY, Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London .

..

171

' - ""lllli; ' ' ""~- -- I-­

'

Fig. 101 a·b Dorian Gray, 2001, by Yinka Shonibare. 11

black and white resin prints, 1 digital lambda pnnt, 122 x 152.5 cm. each, edition of 5. Courtesy Stephen

Friedman Gallery, London.

172

sense topical questions but more philosophical matters insofar as the political is con­

cerned.

YS: Yes. I think of Golub, I think of Haacke, and I think no, this is actually a re-presen­

tation of politics. It's a questioning, no doubt quite a sophisticated questioning, but it

nevertheless remains a re-presentation, which is not what I'm about.

OE: Would somebody like Sherman be part of this? Kruger's work too is concerned

with the critique of media, power, the commodity sign, and so on, but Sherman works

more subtly, undermining the masculine, patriarchal assumptions of power. Her work

critically engages, if not with the subjectivity of women, then with the place of women

in the social and cultural discourse of representation.

YS: I'm an admirer of Cindy Sherman's work, but again I cannot fully identify with her,

not purely because of the differences in experience but in terms of the material limita­

tions of her practice. The spheres of practice that are deliberately embraced are also

a political statement.

OE: Let's move into those spheres: you started as a painter.

YS: Yes.

OE: And you obviously wanted to corrupt painting by moving it away from the Green­

bergian idea of a coherent, self-immanent flatness. For you, painting had to be re­

moved from this notion of flatness-from two-dimensionality as a kind of artificial

screen on which all kinds of models of thinking can be embedded. So you've moved

into the sphere of sculpture, with the. mannequins and the clothing, which pose inter­

esting questions in relation to gait, gesture, gender, sexuality, camp, and so on. You've

also moved into the cinematic, via photographs. And in all of this, while you've consis­

tently worked with notions of seriality and the index, you've also worked with tempo­

rality. Can you talk about how these different modes, strategies, and ideas come to­

gether to spejl out the critical endeavor behind your practice?

YS: I feel strongly that there's a difference between the politics of representation and

the representation of politics. I think the politics of representation and the representa­

tion of politics are simultaneously engaged when there seems to be a kind of move­

ment among one's formal strategies, so that the formal strategies are as political as

the content. In other words, if I'm not the kind of expressionist artist who is just paint­

ing, if I transfer myself into the ideas of masquerade and dressing up and the use of

costume and what those mean, there is also a point of engaging with those positions.

One thing people never talk about when they discuss my work is the idea of jouis­ sance, or the uses of pleasure. Pleasure is central to my practice, whether in the idea

of fetishism or in the tactility of the surfaces. But I think that's political, because paint­

ing, or painting in the context of modernism, is loaded in that it always signifies "pure"

art made by the expressive artist in the studio.

OE: So you were moving painting off its pedestal.

YS: Exactly, but then going farther, to work in the area of cinema, popular culture, and

also to use camouflage in terms of costume and masquerade- to move into the carni­

valesque. I see all of these things because I've never separated culture from life, in the

sense that the way you present yourself, the kind of camouflage you use, is also the

way you are marked stereoty_pically. I want to engage across all these things, and the

movement, or the freedom to move, among these different media serve that purpose

quite well.

OE: Let's talk about specific works, such as the new work Scramble for Africa (Cat. ~

28). What are the conceptual issues you want to convey?

VS: Scramble for Africa represents a period in the nineteenth century when European

trade in Africa, which had been going on prior to this period, became more competi-

173

Fig. 102 a-b Diary of a Victorian

Dandy, 1998, by Yinka

Shonibare. Series of 5 C-prints,

183 x 228.6 cm., Edition 1 of 3.

Commissioned by inlVA, Courtesy

Stephen Friedman Gallery,

London.

174

tive, and there was a question of the shar·

ing of the cake-the African resources­

among the European powers. It became

important to divide up the territory. Of

course the effect this had on the local

people was of having to be governed by

others from the outside, of colonial cultur· al indoctrination, and of economic appro­

priation. Underpinning this division was

David Livingstone's slogan of the three

C's-Commerce, Civilization, Christianity.

King Leopold of Belgium was the benefac·

tor of that slogan; he was mainly seeking

to annex the Congo for economic gain,

but he had to frame his annexation of the

Congo as a kind of philanthropic idea.

I wanted to create a work addressing this

period, not as a commemoration of it but

as an imaginary idea locating the signifi·

cance of the Berlin conference of

1884-85, which divided Africa among

five colonial powers. The sculpture is cen­

tered around a long conference table, with

fourteen figures representing the fourteen

countries that participated in the confer·

ence. As is customary when I address issues of power, the fourteen figures are head·

less. They wear Victorian men's suits made out of "African" printed fabric. I want to

produce something signifying both the absurd and the grotesque. It's a kind of exag­

gerated representation of a truly grotesque moment in African history, a moment that

to me is highly responsible for the state that Africa is in now.

OE:This returns me to the question of diaspora, which I cannot help linking to the so·

cial crisis Africa is currently undergoing.

VS:Therein lies the issue of this work, which tries to trace the trauma of diaspora and

the roots of that trauma within the African context. Now it would be simplistic to sug·

gest that one can locate the question of diaspora in one single incident-that would be

naive indeed. But I deliberately chose this particular moment as a symbolic one. From

this moment comes the expression of the work.

OE: You recently made a photographic tableau based on Oscar Wilde's novel The

Picture of Dorian Gray (Fig. 101 a·b); then you made a sculpture based on Frago·

nard's Swing, another on Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Tell me about your

engagement with the "canon" of art.

VS: I think that art of every age is political you know, it's used as a means of express·

ing certain things about the society at the time. So Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (Fig.100)

involved a representation of property by eighteenth-century aristocrats, who used

painting as a way of expressing their social status. It was a time when everyone knew

their place, you did not cross the boundaries, and only the rich had this means of ex­

pression.

In my abstract work I'm interested in looking at Abstract Expressionism and what it

represents in relation to power, which is always at the center of my practice. I've

looked at a number of eighteenth-century practices in the same way. Fragonard's

Fig. 103 Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour, 1996·97, by

Yinka Shonibare. Reproduction furniture, fire screen, car·

pe~ props, Dutch wax-print cot1on textile, dimensions vary

according to installation. Collection of Eileen and Peter

Norton, Santa Monica, USA Commissioned by London

Printworks.

175

Swing was a frivolous representation, a painting commissioned by a wealthy noble­

man to depict his mistress. It was very frivolous indeed, then, except that the luxurious

life-style of very wealthy people was always, inevitably, based on slavery or some oth­

er kind of exploitation. The people with this life-style could only afford to commission

this frivolous artwork through the sweat of others.

OE: I see a connection between The Picture of Dorian Gray and the (2001) televi­

sion-series version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, where there is this interesting

moment when the very ill, feverish son of a plantation owner in the Caribbean is al­

most on the brink of death, in a state of hallucination, and he sees in his room the har­

rowing, subhuman conditions of the slaves who were working for the benefit of this

stately mansion there in England, Mansfield Park. The series, though fictional, opens a

window onto the contradictions of empire. But one sees it through a refracted frame

of secret drawings. The connection between these two worlds of master and slave

becomes unraveled in scenes of the rape of the women on the plantation, the brutali­

ty of the overlords in the Caribbean, and the representation, on the other hand, of the

tranquillity and civilized noble life of the aristocrats in Mansfield Park, far from the

squalor of the New World. So is this part of your obsession with Victoriana? Victori­

anism was a morality play turned into an ethics: a way on the one hand to hide excess

and brutality behind a facade, and on the other to expunge the memory of this highly

restrictive, repressive morality.

YS: I think you've touched on what is central. The same is true of Gainsborough: a

contradiction always lies behind the pleasure and excess on the surface. That pleas­

ure and excess are nearly always underpinned by exploitation, but the interesting

thing for me is the notion of complicity: I clearly would enjoy the trappings of aristoc­

racy. I cannot morally justify how they come about, but I know I would enjoy them-I

consider myself a hedonist. I also don't believe for one moment that one's blackness

should mean that one should always be on the margins of society, or suffering in some

way. This is an important political stance in my practice.

OE: Let's look at some of the political issues underlying hedonism and representation.

It's almost as if some of your ideas were premised on an excavation of the corrupt

moral universe within which representations like the Fragonard are embedded. In

which case I ask, are you a moralist? Because that would seem to contradict the po­

litical dimension that the work is trying to explicate.

YS: Well, in The Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (1996-97) (Fig. 103), say, you

don't necessarily know what my position is. I present you simply with a Victorian par­

lor that has African footballers printed on the wall.

OE: That could also signify labor, the usage of the black body, its commodification­

blackness as a sign of brute force.

YS: But I don't declare whether the Victorian philanthropist was black or white.

OE: You don't, but given the representations you've embedded there, and the objects

and props, one would presuppose that.

YS: Yes, but then Diary ofa Victorian Dandy (1998) (Fig. 102 a-b) shows a black man

at the center of a depiction of the Victorian period. So when we talk about the ques­

tion of morality it is not so clear....

OE: Your ideas of masquerade, hedonism, fantasy, and camouflage come through in

Diary of a Victorian Dandy. But the work could also be said to be part of the broader

interest that many artists have with fiction. For me what makes the iconography of Di­

ary of a Victorian Dandy so shot through with contradiction is the centrality of the

black figure in all these different moments of the day. And what underlies that work is

the question of blackness as anathema to that social world.

176

VS: Without sounding evasive, I don't consider myself a moral artist: I don't think I

make resolved or closed statements. My work is read in contradictory ways, some­

times by the same critics, and I enjoy that. I have certain contradictions within myself

because of my upbringing, and those contradictions-genuine, nonironic contradic­

tions within my own person-find expression in my practice.

OE: How do you work to resolve them?

VS: I think the value of resolving something is overstated. I don't necessarily think that

resolution is what a poet should be seeking.

177