Anatsui in New York, January 2013 #2: Jack Shainman Gallery

In New York, El Anatsui shows at Jack Shainman Gallery on West 20th Street in Chelsea. It's a great space with several large rooms, all white walls and ceiling, pale grey floors, and an open layout that lets you see a couple of rooms at once. It makes a very pristine backdrop for this work and emphasizes the strong color in the materials.

(The materials used in this work are discarded plastic wrappings from liquor bottles along with thin copper wire. If you use the search feature in my blog for Anatsui, you will find many previous posts about him with a lot of information, but here is one about his show at Wellesley College that covers a lot of ground.)

Installation view from the Jack Shainman Gallery website

Anatsui's most recent show, Pot of Wisdom, ran from December 14, 2012 to January 19, 2013, and I was lucky enough to catch it on the last day along with artist friends Binnie Birstein, Tamar Zinn, and Debra Ramsay.

I was struck by the way Anatsui's work has evolved and by the experimental nature of the works in this show. It seemed to me that he was trying many different approaches and solutions but using the same materials. I found the variety really fascinating. In general, the works have more sculptural form and the areas of various patterns were very distinct because of the color changes. This made the works look more like sculpture mounted on the wall than metallic tapestries to my eye. Of course, the wrinkles and irregular arrangements that Anatsui prefers are still present in most of them and this adds still more form and presence.

To give you an idea of scale on the piece in the first photo, here is a small poster I got
from the gallery that shows the work with a person standing in front of it. 

Here's a shot that shows the dimension in the work as it hangs on the wall.

I think I'm also seeing new color in the pale blues he is using. Of course, this is not really pale blue at all - it's a darker blue print (label) with lots of white. Following are two close-ups from this piece. (you can click to enlarge)

Next is a shot of something also quite different for this type of work from Anatsui - a free-standing piece. (I believe that this one is "Pot of Wisdom.")

This is a gallery installation shot.

And here is my close-up shot of the "pot" itself:

This shot demonstrates the versatility in the way the wrappings are folded, wired and assembled into many combinations that can either look like solid woven textiles or open webbing.

Next is a gallery shot of three very different pieces at once.

You can see how strikingly different they are from each other.

Here are some close-ups and details. (I have to say that I skipped photographing a couple of pieces here because I was so fascinated by this gold work with those strange figures at the bottom. - And I was probably too busy talking to my friends.)

Besides the strange figures in the piece above, notice how the solid green/gold pieces give the illusion of  a sheen or reflective glimmer on this piece. It carries its own light within it.

Photo of me by Debra Ramsay

In the piece behind me, note the lines of green. That is an innovation that I do not recall seeing before.

Following is a close-up of the piece so you can see how the lines were formed. Also note that there are deliberate holes or voids in the work that are edged in colors.

You will see that I am not giving you titles and sizes. I did not find this information easy to come by. There were no wall labels and I did not see a price list when I went to the desk, but then, neither did I ask.

This net-like piece looks like "Pot of Wisdom" flattened and hung on the wall.

I first saw this openwork type of netting in a couple of pieces in Anatsui's show at Wellesley College although I didn't include photos of them in the post. This work has such a different feeling than the tapestry-type works. It looks like a fishing net hung on the wall, very light and airy.


Next are two pieces that I really loved.

This is a gallery installation shot.

First the blue piece with that striking black shape.

What looks like a pale blue is made from the same dark blue with white labels I showed on the first piece above. Note that black line projected above the top of the piece. Is it pointing to something? I'm reminded of a pointing finger.

And there is that little red area on the left side toward the bottom. It really calls out the red pieces within the black shape.

Then there is the patchwork-type piece.

I thought first of a map or then of a sampler of various techniques and materials


The next piece is my favorite of all. It looks like it's been splashed and dipped in paint or ink along the side. How could this be possibly be done with bottle caps and wrappings?

Showing you the overall piece and then the scale above. Now for the closeups:

In the bottom shot, if you enlarge the image, you can really see how the pieces are folded, cut and otherwise manipulated to make them do what Anatsui wants to do. This is really masterful.


At long last, here is the final piece.

The gallery shot.

My shot.

This piece is probably the most like what we have seen from Anatsui in the past, however, there are some differences: first, those strips at the top. Being an aficionado of Project Runway, I was seeing them as straps as though the piece could be worn as a garment, although it would wrap one giant of a body. But some of the African ceremonial garments are big pieces of textile like this.

Here are the strips or straps at the top.

Finally, there are several parts at the bottom where pieces with very different colors and shapes are included. They have a real look of patterning as though they are printed cloth.

So there you have it. You can see how this show demonstrated Anatsui's versatility and love of change and experimentation. We don't know when the work was made, but I'm thinking that he retired from teaching last year. Maybe that gave him more time and/or ability to concentrate on his work and plumb the material for all it was worth. We will just have to see how the work develops for the next show.

By the way, if you are in New York between now and August, you can see a large show of Anatsui's work at the Brooklyn Museum: Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui. Here's the link. It looks dramatic and extensive. Here's a link to a New York Times slide show of  works in the Brooklyn Museum show.

A Week From Hell

It's been a long, hard week here between the extreme heat and humidity and exhausting computer problems. Ultimately the heat broke a little with a good soaking rain on Saturday morning and the computer(s) are fixed and improved beyond where they initially began after nearly 12 hours of work on them by a friend who is an IT wizard. I now have a brand-new operating system on my main computer and sparkling files that have been scrubbed of all the malicious viruses, worms, trojans, and evil-doers that were lurking in them. I won't detail what actually happened because I don't want to publicize the cretin who devised the knockout punch, but suffice it to say that it was a serious blow. Anyone who would inflict such a terrorist attack for no reason other than getting some kind of smug satisfaction at wreaking havoc on the world at large deserves to fry in computer hell.

Archangel. Michael slaying the devil. (Guido Reni's archangel Michael (in the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione, Rome, 1636) tramples Satan. A mosaic of the same painting decorates St. Michael's Altar within St. Peter's Basilica.)


No, I haven't gone and gotten religion over it all, but I am extremely grateful (in general) that there are kind and intelligent people around who understand the inscrutable world of computers and that one of these great souls came to our assistance. I'm sure that India is a wonderful country, but I would much rather have a knowledgeable guy from the next town be here in person. So I'm glad to put this bad experience behind me and focus on the improvements this has brought to my dear computer.

New York, New York
Looking ahead to this coming weekend, I am making the trek to Manhattan via dear friend Binnie's in Connecticut. The Binster and I hope to rendevous with other friends in NY and see some art in the flesh. One show I would really like to see is the new Matisse show at MoMA, “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917.”

Henri Matisse, Bathers By a River, 1909-1917

The Times today had an article about the research done on Bathers By a River, a painting which they say Matisse considered one of his five greatest works. The Times has an interactive feature about the painting showing the stages of its development over eight years. Here is the link to the slide/video/audio description of the process. On that site you will also find the link to MoMA's website which has a lot more about that painting and the show in general. Unfortunately, this show does not open until next Sunday, July 18th. Perhaps I'll get back to New York before it closes in October.

The Arting Trip List

Lee Bontecou, untitled sculpture, 1959.

1. Lee Bontecou
But in looking at the MoMA site, I see that they have now have a show on of work by Lee Bontecou, one of my very favorite artists. If my mind wasn't such a sieve, I might have remembered reading about it before, but I had completely forgotten it. This would be great to see because I only know her work from a couple of real pieces and mostly from reading about it. This is not a huge show, but I'm making it a must on the arting list.

2. The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times

From the MoMa website: This exhibition addresses the artistic traces of these motifs in modern art, as well as the practice of modern myth-making, through a nonlinear, thematic representation of works, following a rough chronology from 1797 to 2008. Among the artists represented are Matthew Barney, Joseph Beuys, Paul Cézanne, Enrique Chagoya, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Willem de Kooning, Juan Downey, Max Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Arshile Gorky, Wifredo Lam, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Wangechi Mutu, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Jackson Pollock, Odilon Redon, Mark Rothko, Jim Shaw, and Andy Warhol. I'd say worth a look.

Mark Rothko, Archaic Idol. 1945. Ink and gouache on paper, 21 7/8 x 30"

3. Several other shows at MoMA
Such as Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions, 1940s to Now, Contemporary Art from the Collection, and Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography.

4. Chelsea Galleries

Including: Jack Shainman Gallery - Leslie Wayne "One Big Love" with Jonathan Seliger "Spoils", Cheim & Read, "Le Tableau," French abstraction, and many others that I will have to look up or we can just walk by and look in the window. 

Leslie Wayne "One Big Love"

Installation shot from "Le Tableau"

The last time that I visited Binnie for an arting trip, it was February and, wouldn't you know it, that Saturday was the day that there were 17" of snow in Central Park. I just hope that this time the temperature is not over 100 degrees as it was last week. I've been hot enough for a while.

P.S. Any recommendations? If you have any suggestions on shows to see this weekend, July 16 and 17, feel free to make your recommendations in comments.

Close to Heaven

Binnie and I trudged down 20th street in Chelsea with snow blowing in our faces, climbed huge snow piles and picked our way through deep puddles of slush. The streets were deserted, few pedestrians and almost no cars. We arrived at the gallery after what seemed a long trek and pushed open the glass door, bringing with us a snowy gust. There along one whole, long wall was the gleaming gold, red and black splendor of El Anatsui's work. Wow!

View as you walk into the gallery. This piece is called "Intermittent Signals", aluminum and copper wire, 132" x 420", 2009.


El Anatsui (all Anatsui, all the time)
Jack Shainman Gallery, February 11 - March 13, 2010
(Note: You can click on any of these pictures and they will open larger on a new page.)

Full view of "Intermittent Signals." Its size is so great that it envelops you when you stand in front of it. (photo from the gallery website)

The work of El Anatsui is certainly no stranger to this blog, but this is the first time I have seen it in person. No matter how many times I saw distant views or closeups in photographs or read descriptions about it, the materiality of his work was so striking to me when I stood in front of it.

Closeup showing the diversity of color that adds to the work's shimmering quality.

When you look at it closely, you see the flimsy individual pieces of aluminum that have been cut, pierced, folded, crushed or twisted and then wired together into a somewhat fragile-looking metallic fabric. This stuff rips pretty easily but  has been worked in many inventive ways to make the most of its shape and color. Sometimes you see the front of the aluminum wrapping, sometimes the back, sometimes a corner is folded down to show another color from the other side. Some pieces are cut at the corners like the ones in the image above.

The red rectangles on the right of this image have their corners folded up to expose a little bit of the silver back. Just look at the striking array of stripes, solids and various textures in the red section. The silver circles have been cut from bottle wrappings. The yellow and red circles at the left are bottle tops that have either been pounded flat or had their edges folded under. This diversity of color and shape was a revelation to me, and all I could think of was my previous experience with mosaic where choosing tiles or stones in a range of color makes the work infinitely more interesting than just having them all be the same. Surely this must also apply to painting where odd strokes of color in a monochromatic field would make the work come alive. I could only think to myself, "Duh!"


My Favorite

Here is another of the galleries, and the silver piece on the right was my favorite of all the work. (Of course I don't have its name or size.) (Another photo from the gallery website.)

This is a better view of it. (Photo courtesy of Sue Katz.)

What a fabulous, shimmery silver it was next to the bits of gold and red. It was like silver lame' or sequins.

The whole piece was mostly made from circles, and their size and variety in addition to the natural reflective quality of the aluminum were what made the work shimmer visually, even without actual movement.

Construction Notes

Look at how many connective wires there are in each of these circles - sometimes five or six - and who could estimate how many circles there are in this whole work? Each of the connections has a certain number of twists in the wire, maybe six or eight? This requires a tremendous amount of labor. In the book about El Anatsui published by Jack Shainman gallery, the names of 47 studio assistants are listed along with a secretary and a studio manager. It takes a virtual army of people to accomplish the tedious assembly of pieces.

Is this "women's work" compared to the "manly work" of Leonardo Drew? Answer: not in Africa and in many other parts of the world. Men are the weavers, dyers, tailors, and textile workers. There is nothing womanly about it and why should Americans think in gender-specific terms about work anyway, unless it's wet nursing? Making these vast metallic cloths is a different kind of labor, not involving brute strength or power tools, that can occur quietly, when seated. (By the way, I notice that all the studio assistants pictured in the El Anatsui book are young men - probably El Anatsui's students.)

Binnie and I were noticing the way in which the work is mounted on the wall. At the top there is a rod and there must be some kind of pocket that the work is threaded on to. Then to make the draped folds, drywall screws are drilled into the wall and the piece hooked onto them - such a simple method. I did notice that the screws had been painted to approximate the color of the aluminum pieces around them.

Creative Hanging Ability

I thought the folds that the gallery put into the works were very lovely. The info sheet that they gave out says that El Anatsui is happy to have galleries and museums make up their own folds, but he does prefer horizontal folds or ripples to vertical ones. Apparently some curators find that this freedom to display the work as they wish is contrary to their training and mind-set. El Anatsui is no Sol Lewitt: he gives no instructions. "Museum people are trained not to be creative," Anatsui says (according to the gallery's handout). "I find that very frustrating."

I can testify to the lack of creativity at one museum: the piece of El Anatsui's ("Between Earth and Heaven") that the Met has on display in the African textiles exhibit is hung on a wall painted a gold color that absolutely sucks the life out of the work. Whoever came up with that color lacks an understanding of color relationships (and a sensitive imagination).

Shadows

Although I had read references to the shadow patterns that the work casts, I had not seen them in photos. But you can see through to the wall when you stand in front of a work, and if there is much space between the piece and the wall, you see the shadows the patterns make, sort of a filligree of shadows.

A beautiful effect that adds to the work's volumetric feel.


Preciousness

I have written before about the relationship of El Anatsui's work to traditional African weaving patterns and methods as well as to ceremonial robes and textiles. Seeing these vast, golden cloths in person reminded me of the post I had written comparing his work to the golden Byzantine mosaics I've seen in Italy. In person El Anatsui's work looks both precious and trashy (don't strike me dead). You stand away from it and it's precious; you go up close and it's trash (fascinating but trash). This makes for a very contemporary use of  cast-off materials, but is a utilitarian practice not new to African art or to El Anatsui apparently.

In the Anatsui book, there are photos (which I'd love to show you) of bags full of collected bottle caps and wrappings waiting to be recuperated into art. (I like that word "recuperated" which comes from the essay about El Anatsui by Elizabeth Harney.) The works in progress are spread out on the floor of the studio and assistants sit on low stools, boards or the floor itself to assemble the pieces. They also walk and sit on the works in progress since the whole floor is covered by them. In El Anatsui's studio, the work is not precious, and I find this to be true in most artists' studios, including my own. The question of  just when art takes on the quality of preciousness is something to ponder.

While I was ordering my book, we happened to look at the price list for the show. The works were very expensive - several of them over a million dollars each - and four or five of the million-plus titles had red dots beside them. Binnie asked the gallery assistant if they had been bought by museums or private collectors and was told that the purchasers were private collectors. This shocked us when we thought not only of the enormous prices but also of the size of the walls needed to show the work.

What must it be like for El Anatsui at the age of 66 to strike it rich big time after a life of teaching, making art, building his resume and then one day he finds a trashbag of aluminum bottle wrappings and WHAMMO, he's an art star! Of course that's not quite how it all happened, but now he can afford 47 assistants if he needs them and be welcomed around the world as a master. He must feel close to heaven.

Addendum

"Transit", 2002, by El Anatsui, size unknown. Constructed from 15 separate pieces of wood carved into patterns with power tools and colored with "colorants taken from his environment", according to the University's website. This image is also from their website.

I just came across this image through a post on Venetian Red about mudcloth. The VR post led me to the University of Iowa Museum which collected this work by El Anatsui. Interesting to see how this work, so closely related to Kente cloth, evolved into the current metal works. The website quotes Anatsui's comment about materials:  "Art grows out of each particular situation and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever the environment throws up. I think that has been happening in Africa for a long time…"

Another Fave Showing in NY

El Anatsui at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
February 11 to March 13

El Anatsui, "Intermittent Signals", 2009, found aluminum and copper wire, 11 feet x 35 feet

(All images in this post courtesy of the Jack Shainman Gallery website)

El Anatsui is a native of Ghana, head of the sculpture department at the University of Nigeria-Nsukka (UNN), where he has taught since 1975. He was born in 1944, has influenced many young artists in Nigeria and West Africa and has become very successful with his metal cloth works made from pieces of found aluminum wired together with copper wire. 


I was wowed by his work the first time I saw it online and have posted a couple of times in this blog about him (for instance, here and here).  I also did a longer post here about the origins of el Anatsui's work and how it relates to Adinkra and Kente cloth. With all of this, I have never seen his work in person, and I'm so looking forward to it seeing it at the show that opens next week. The gallery also has a large catalog of el Anatsui's work available (see their website) and I'm gonna get me one.

"Three Continents", 2009, found aluminum and copper wire, 8 feet x 16 feet

What appeals to me so much about his work is first of all its beauty and golden mosaic-like quality, but also the fact that it's made from found and recycled material, that it has a very physical presence, that it resides somewhere between flat painting and volumetric sculpture and that el Anatsui has very definite meanings and emotional associations motivating his work.  The huge size of the works are also enveloping (I imagine), and, ever practical as I am, I really like that they probably fold up and take relatively little space to ship and store.

"Fading Scroll", 2007, found aluminum and copper wire, 8 feet x 39 feet

"Fading Scroll" detail

What I didn't mention above is the "textileness" of the work; that is, his pieces are like giant, metallic pieces of cloth. Textiles play such a large part in the African heritage (indeed in human heritage) that we are often unaware of the important place they hold in every culture. They are so ubiquitous that we don't see them for what they mean or symbolize.

An example of the more muted-color kente cloth woven in Ghana by the Ewe people, which is el Anatasui's heritage

In regard to Africa, Kente cloth has come to represent Africa and African heritage. El Anatsui's father and brothers wove kente cloth in his native Ghana, and he has said about his own work: "I have discovered only much later...that cloth has been a recurring theme or leitmotif, and it is featured in so many dimensions." The specifically African textiles of Adinkra and Kente "communicate cultural and philosophical meanings, social codes of conduct, religious beliefs, political thought and aesthetic principles."  (quoting from the Fowler Museum, UCLA, website about "GAWU", el Anatsui's show.)

Untitled, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 144" x 192" (the first one I've seen with so much black in it - my favorite color)

Besides this deep foundation in textiles, the meaning in el Anatsui's work also derives from the materials he uses - aluminum labels and wrappings from the local Nigerian brands of whiskey, rum, vodka, brandy and other liquors. He says his works "encapsulate the essence of the alcoholic drinks which were brought to Africa by Europeans as trade items at the time of the earliest contact between the two peoples." The brand names of the Nigerian liquors have their own connotations, for example, Chairman, Dark Sailor, King Solomon, 007, Top Squad, etc.

"Bleeding Takari II, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, about 13 x 19 feet

(I tried to find out what this referenced and learned that the Takari are/were northern Nigerian immigrants in northern Sudan, but I could not discover what social or political events el Anatsui really referred to with the bleeding.)

This piece was just called "Installation View 2007" at the Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy, and I assume it was installed at the 2007 Biennale. This speaks to me so much of Africa - huge, beautiful and full of of holes where the fabric is unraveling because of war, famine, AIDS, poverty, political unrest and deliberate disregard by the rest of the world.