Yinka Shonibare and the Search for Africa

Yinka Shonibare and the Search for Africa by Ellen Brooks

When British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare was told by his teachers he needed to incorporate “Africa” into his art, to relate more to his “African” heritage, he went shopping. In the Brixton markets in his home of London he found a miraculous textile called Dutch wax. Piled among second-hand clothes, and smelling of the neighborhood’s mostly African and Caribbean cuisine, Shonibare decided these textiles were exactly what had been missing from his identity. Dutch wax textiles were developed in the nineteenth century in the Netherlands, in an attempt to challenge the production of batik cloth in Indonesia. The fabrics were actually rejected by the very Indonesian market for which they were intended, leaving the Dutch and British manufacturers to try to sell the textiles in a second colonial outpost, West Africa. The contradictory nature of the textiles has become more and more integral to Shonibare’s art as his career has progressed.[i]

For Shonibare, Africa is a metaphor. It is a place, a feeling, an emotion he does not understand through his own experience, but from the presumptions of others.[ii] He seeks to exploit this convoluted sense of understanding via the Dutch wax. The textile is the perfect visual example of what happens when two cultures become (literally) interwoven with one another. The textile as African is a simulacrum, that is, it is a copy of something that does not really exist. Its “original” referent is no more than a byproduct of encounters defined historically by and for the colonizing powers. “Africa” is a distorted version of the truth, lacking any characteristics that did not serve a direct purpose for imperialists, colonizers, and the West in general. Dutch wax is a remnant of this distorted vision. The inherent joke is that it looks “African” and is “African,” it submits entirely to this false identity, without ever explaining itself. Its own confusion of identity is a perfect match for the confusion of Africa.[iii] Shonibare’s use of the textile therefore allows him to explore the larger issues without becoming too heavily draped in commentary. His own uncertainty in reference to his heritage leaves his works open to interpretation. The Dutch wax makes Shonibare’s art laugh, but it is a nervous laughter, for something is lurking behind all the humor.

Shonibare uses the Dutch wax to infuse his art with a criticality intrinsic to the subject matter itself: he dresses life-size, headless mannequins in elaborate costumes out of the fabric. His sculptural installations explore the darker side of Victorian history.[iv] This “darker side” delves into the activities behind closed doors, activities that were not part of the vernacular but restricted to a select company. Shonibare re-dresses his subjects to criticize tradition normally not subjected to scrutiny. By investigating this other side, Shonibare calls into question the history that contains this repression. For example, his 19th Century Kids series from 2000 places small mannequins on tables, each a key figure of the century (such as Queen Elizabeth, Benjamin Disraeli, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, among others) (fig. 1). He therefore opens up the unopposed role these figures play in history to further interpretation, as he not only shrinks them from life-size (calling them “kids”) but also replaces the requisite pedestal with a plain wooden table. Although Shonibare’s art varies with the accepted historical icons that he challenges, his choices are rooted in a deep understanding and appreciation of art history.

His understanding of art history allows his attacks on the colonizer’s view of Africa to be that much more potent. He chooses two images that have become a part of the sacred canon, images that can do no wrong. But the Dutch wax exposes the inconsistency that comes with a reliance on myths. Shonibare’s 1998 Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads and 2003 The Swing (after Fragonard) tackle the art historical paradigms of English landscape painting and the French Rococo (fig. 2, 3). The works stay true to the originals, yet act as a foil to expose the faulty structures. Shonibare, however, does not only challenge long-established history. He counts among his influences Sherrie Levine, Hans Haacke, Donald Judd, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said.[v] These artists and writers establish the postcolonial and deconstructive nature from which the criticality of Shonibare’s art functions.  He names giants of the twentieth century modernist art movement, Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock, as inspiration for these deconstructions. The works that explicitly deal with these artists’ traditions, although more dormant because of their abstract and still visually playful nature, allow his critique to challenge in a way his figurative constructions cannot.

Yinka Shonibare’s art relies on the joke; his works turn paradigmatic concepts of art history inside out to expose their fundamental contradiction. His jest robs modernist art history of its self-proclaimed objectivity. In the work 100 Years from 2000, Shonibare deconstructs the modernist grid (fig. 4). He covers canvases with both paint and textile, using the Dutch wax in the role of instigator. The subsequent conflict between the textiles and the paint of 100 Years introduces tension to the otherwise non-hierarchical form of the grid. It establishes the ironic key to his constructions, that is the play between the role of Western Europe as the colonizer and Africa as the colonized. The product of this tension is a more dormant agitator, the uncanny. The illusions the textiles create on the surface of the grid allow an uncanny experience to emerge from within the work itself, ultimately representing the return of Africa. In its return, the repressed exposes the ideological basis of modernism as totally reliant on the primitivism of Africa. Shonibare, with his initial desire to be playful, creates a piece that employs the very constraints that modernism has on Africa to function in an ultimately liberating fashion.

The Dutch wax, as articulation of the critical viewpoint within all of Shonibare’s constructions, introduces the postcolonial critique, but in the words of Anne McClintock, the postcolonial is “…haunted by the very figure of linear development that it sets out to dismantle.”[vi] The history of the textiles begins in colonization: it is cloth constructed by the very contact, and conflict, between the colonizer and the colonized. But their subsequent adoption as an unquestioned signifier of “Africa” in West Africa and Western Europe lends itself to a political, although simultaneously open-ended, critique of said interaction.[vii] In the grid, Shonibare uses these textiles for their initial subtlety masking (innocence) just as much for their release of conflict into the form of 100 Years. The meaning of the textiles is dependant on the convoluted relationship of Africa and modernism. They therefore stand in contrast to the grid’s “autonomy,” or rejection of dependence. Further perpetuating this irony is the fact that the modernist principles upon which the grid is constructed would not exist without modernism’s relationship to Africa. Shonibare’s title both laughs at and seriously questions this dependence: as a postmodern critique of the grid, it finds Africa from within modernism. 100 Years’s simultaneous hilarity and seriousness has a Janus-like ability to look more than one way at once.

100 Years is not Shonibare’s only grid. The constructions are sprinkled throughout Shonibare’s repertoire of giant sculptural gestures, yet they are somewhat overlooked in comparison to his figurative works. His first large-scale experimentation of the form is a piece titled Double Dutch from 1994, a grid of fifty such canvases separated from one another on a salmon-pink background (fig. 5). Following Double Dutch are Feather Pink and Deep Blue from 1997 (fig. 6).[viii] The grids vary in size and color, but their general compositions are the same.[ix]  The textiles of each grid reflect an affinity for one another, that is, they call to the other swatches across the background. The grids as a progression of works are linked to one another through the meaning of their titles. Double Dutch is the most obvious allusion, yet its meaning is still layered, yet , as it not only refers to the Dutch wax that creates it, but to the doubling of the grid form that Shonibare exploits in the work.[x]

The title is synonymous with the game double Dutch, popularized by African Diaspora culture and, in turn, immortalized by Africa-American painters of the 20th century such as Ernie Barnes and Joseph Holston. Shonibare’s first grid therefore acknowledges that he is playing a game with its stagnant form. Feather Pink and Deep Blue are more exotic; the pink and blue being cultural signifiers of boy and girl. As a pair of smaller grids, they seem to go together. Because of their tandem existence their meanings can also become interchanged. The textiles Shonibare selects for these two grids are unabashedly exotic, while the reference to the feather, itself a fetish object, is not an accident. Deep Blue could reference the ocean, the unknown, which unexplored is a form of the exotic. These two grids are therefore some version of twins, but whether they are boy and girl, girls, or boys, is left open to the viewer.

100 Years is the apotheosis of Shonibare’s previous grids. Its sheer size takes the form to an unprecedented level. Its name is the most ambiguous, although undoubtedly referencing the 100 years of the twentieth century, it does not tell the viewer any further. Was it a long or short century?[xi] 100 years of colonization or modernization, or both? Working with size comparable to, or even greater, than that of the history paintings in the tradition of David and Delacroix, and within the grids of Mondrian’s modernism, 100 Years uses the ambiguity of both its title and its form to exploit the interaction of the viewer. The abstract nature of the grid allows for further agitators to surface. There is room on the planes of these grids for encounters to take place more freely than they would in a figurative work. These grids are facilitators within the overall trajectory of his work, specifically Shonibare’s largest and until this date final grid, 100 Years. This monumental work is just as powerful, if not more, than his sculptural installations. It is therefore helpful to digest the figurative constructions so that they augment, but not overlook, our understanding of what Shonibare does when he turns to abstraction. The space of the grid contains much more than it allows at first glance.

GRIDS



100 Years is a large-scale work of one hundred canvases arranged in grid form. The canvases hang on a red background thirty feet long, seven and a half feet high. The solid tone of the painted background creates channels through the arrangement of canvases. It divides the stacks of canvases, five high and twenty long horizontally and vertically, stacked five high and twenty long. Why does Shonibare use this specific format, and why on such a massive scale? To better understand what he is trying to do by creating a grid from the Dutch Wax, we must turn to the writing of Rosalind Krauss, specifically her work on these very constructions, In her article aptly entitled “Grids,” she lays forth the very principle of grids as emblems of modernism.[xii] Krauss identifies two ways in which the grid declares the modernity of art. It is either spatial or temporal, meaning it exists completely within itself or everywhere, respectively. Flatness characterizes the spatial grid; it is geometric, rigid, and decidedly unnatural. The spatial grid can be compared to a machine; it represses all that is around it into its form. The temporal grid, by contrast, can be found anywhere. Although still a grid, it does not rely on itself but merely exists within spaces, waiting to be discovered. These definitions create wholly separate forms of the grid, both of which I intend to show exist concurrently in Shonibare’s 100 Years.

Within the spatial and temporal, Krauss identifies two further properties with which grids function. They either look outward, acknowledging the existence of, in Krauss’s words, “a world beyond the frame,” or they compress that world inward, re-representing it within the grid.[xiii] These two forms are centrifugal and centripetal, respectively. The centrifugal and temporal grids align through their acknowledgment of the exterior world, while the spatial and centripetal grids reject that look and turn inward. Although formally Shonibare’s grid is centripetal and spatial, the presence of the Dutch Wax creates an acknowledgement of the outer world, and introduces not only formal conflict (between the materials of the paint and the textile) but also theoretical conflict (with the existence of a postcolonial textile within the, perhaps greatest, form of modernism). 100 Years presents, therefore, a historical re-reading of Krauss. It attacks the treatise in spite of its accuracy, demonstrating the existence of its properties while calling equal attention to the inherent myth. Shonibare knowingly engages in the rhetoric of modernism, for 100 Years is not his only grid. The previous grids employ the same formal techniques –  100 Years would not be possible without these earlier experimentations –  but what 100 Years does differently is draw on its size to take the critique to a new level.

Shonibare is aware of the modernist predecessors that Krauss cites (de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich) and uses them as historical referents references upon which to build his own grids, in the process using their own logic and structural terms to deconstruct their ideology. Shonibare exploits the grid as a representation of modernism’s history, which he calls dominated by “big, white males,” refuting a tradition that would not have accepted the Nigerian born, London-based artist, for its historically categorization of Africa as,  (incorrectly,) primitive.[xiv] As a work positioned in history to look forward and backward, it uncovers what has been lurking in the discourse, yet remaining unmentioned: Africa. The metaphor of Africa that eventually surfaces, however, forces the viewer to reconsider what “Africa” actually stands for. The inherently flawed connotations beg the reconsideration of its status as a definition in the first place. *

100 Years appears flat from a distance, a massive rectangle with patches of vibrating colors. The red background and the textiles exhibit an affinity for one another. It pulls the canvases together, drawing on color similarities so that when viewed from far away, the work could simply be one hundred squares painted onto the background. Like Krauss’s spatial grid, 100 Years looks geometric and ordered; it appears to convert the real into a flattened form. But Shonibare’s grid is an illusion. It is three dimensional. Each canvas rises from the background covered in textile and paint (see fig. 7, 8).[xv] Within this grid, the sides of the canvases have just as much presence as the tops. Shonibare’s grid exists as a deconstruction because of the introduced dimensionality. Krauss’s grids exude flatness: although they contain more than what the surface allows for, their defining characteristic is simplicity. Shonibare takes these same specifications and recreates a grid using the unlikeliest of materials to achieve new dimensions. Its play from both sides allows 100 Years to be  rigid in one view (as it confirms to the grid), only to overcome this rigidity in a second view (as it defies the very same properties.). As a work that is both painting and sculpture, it conforms to neither medium completely. Shonibare plays with the viewer’s expectations in seeing. Instead of obtaining the expected flatness by looking at his grid, the viewer is confronted by a form that pushes from the surface of the painting into the viewer’s space.

It is within this space that Shonibare’s grid is temporal; it acknowledges the world exterior to it. By existing in both the spatial and temporal worlds at once, 100 Years challenges Krauss’s definition of the grid; it mocks its simplicity and its self-proclaimed perfection. 100 Years attacks the objectivity of modernism. In its deconstruction, the work exposes the contradiction inherent to modernism; the movement’s existence as inextricably tied to an interaction with Africa. To paraphrase Edward Said, whose monumental Orientalism Shonibare has read, Africa was Western Europe’s other version of itself.[xvi] The interaction relied on interdependency, yet claimed a separation between East and West. How can an entity such as the grid, founded in this dependent modernism therefore claim to be autonomous? Shonibare arrives at this question in 100 Years, and attacks it using the Dutch wax as a tool that has a similar interdependent history.

The Dutch wax is always present in the grid, whether it is visible or covered with paint. The innate contradiction within the textile that amuses Shonibare corresponds to the contradictory nature of his grid. The textile connotes the same sense of interdependence brought forth in 100 Years. The meaning of the material as “African” through mutual (yet very different forms of) adoption in the West and Africa is multi-leveled and conflicted. No matter where Dutch wax is viewed from it can appear different, yet it is always “African.” The material’s innate criticism of culture as constructed by contact rather than origin opens up Shonibare’s art for questioning. The textile allows the viewer to question and re-think the “accepted” history of the art Shonibare creates, adding a postcolonial criticism to otherwise established traditions. As a viewer approaches 100 Years with such questioning, it becomes evident that even a modernist concept so secure in its status is not safe. Shonibare further perpetuates the confusion by painting over the textiles. Each canvas is painted on either the side or the top with motifs that echo the patterns and colors of the Dutch wax; when viewing from a distance the difference in material is nearly indistinguishable. Within the grid, therefore, the textile acts as a foil to painting. While the painting refers to the grids of modernism, the textile serves as a referent to the “Africa” that made it all possible.

The opposing materials of the grid allow it to move, their similarities and differences keep the conflict in flux. The paint and textiles articulate movement with their repetition of colors, motifs, and patterns. The subtlety of the abstract form requires an extended gaze at the composition. The required multiple views of the work force a physical movement around it. It cannot be understood from a single vantage point. The work is interpreted differently by every viewer, from every vantage point of the piece, a process that keeps the piece in flux. Shonibare creates 100 Years to operate in a flux; he creates a piece that is equally elusive in its visual properties as in its contextual properties. Understanding these characteristics, a viewer can now see how this abstract work of art is playing with history and the world around it, just as much, if not more than, Shonibare’s figurative constructions.

But something is lurking in this playful deconstruction. The spatial grid, as an instrument of modernism, represses all that is around it into its own structure. By confronting modernism, Shonibare exposes an uncanny feeling within it. Looking at 100 Years evokes a strange sense of recognition, something is not quite right. Our view of the work is somewhat skewed. We view art, as in the world, through windows, framed by our own experiences. Krauss sees a “symbolist window [within grids] like a trauma that must be repressed.”[xvii] This window is what allows the temporal grid to exist everywhere, yet the window is repressed within the grid. This act of repression is similar to how our windows repress all but the framed view we control of the outside world. As Shonibare deconstructs this idea of the grid, he sets this window free from within it. 100 Years is both spatial and temporal, after all. What we feel as a result of this release is the uncanny. The symbolist window, or mirror, is opened up. It may have been hidden inside the grid’s form, but it was always present.

Krauss’s phrase “repressed trauma” connotes a sense of anguish; any act of repression produces such emotions. By engaging in a playful attack on modernism and the grid, Shonibare reveals trauma as the product of the repression within the grid. The paint and the textiles create a meeting point of conflict in the grid which results in the repressed coming into view. By facilitating a space where the uncanny and the grid both function, Shonibare creates a conduit for the viewer’s unconscious. He employs the textiles within the format of the grid as a foil to the paint, which can be made to adhere to the grid’s strict regimentation. In this act Shonibare seeks to set into flux, to deconstruct, the repressed understanding that hides behind our myths of one another.

MR. AND MRS. ANDREWS

Before delving deeper into the uncanny nature of 100 Years, it is necessary to step back and look beyond the grid to Shonibare’s figurative deconstructions of paradigmatic art concepts. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without Their Heads is a direct reference to Thomas Gainsborough’s 1750 painting Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, on display at the National Gallery in London (fig. 2, 9). Calling this image “…sacred, almost spiritual,” Shonibare chooses Gainsborough’s piece because of its accepted status as high art.[xviii] He then blows up Mr. and Mrs. Andrews’s hallowed existence, from the original two by four foot painting to life-size. Gainsborough’s work seats the Andrews in the foreground of their property. The move establishes their symbolic position as owners of the land, and at least half of the painting’s composition is devoted to its representation. The English landscape genre privileges land above all other possessions. It is a celebration of a part of life that holds a spiritual meaning within British culture.[xix] By the 18th century it was evident that the relationship with the land could produce serious economic benefits, since land can be tailored to fit the needs of its owners. Therefore Gainsborough’s painting is not only a product of this ideology, but a reinforcement of it.

  In Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads their vast property does not exist. Not only are Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their heads, but they are without their land. By re-representing the Andrews stripped of their possession, Shonibare calls into question the relationship between owners and their land. Without land, the Andrews have nothing over which to exert their powers of ownership. They are deprived of the very relationship that defines their existence. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads therefore demonstrates what happens when the object of repression is removed from underneath the hierarchical relationship, what remains is the realization that the relationship was one-way and entirely idealized in the first place. Ann Bermingham finds Gainsborough’s conversation pieces replete with formal techniques intended to control the viewer’s understanding of composition, so that “rather than direct the eye through the landscapes, they contain it, delaying or actually frustrating its journey to the horizon.”[xx] Gainsborough’s composition exists within itself, as it, not the viewer, controls the view. The control over the outcome of the process of looking is reminiscent of the history that accompanies the English landscape genre. It evokes colonization, as colonizers entered foreign lands with a specific, pre-determined outcome in mind. Colonization is, similar to the relationship with the land, characterized not by a sense of mutuality, but by the colonizers (owners) taking whatever they desired. [xxi] Although a force during Gainsborough’s era, the focus of British colonization in the 18th century was on North America and India, as Britain had, at this point, not seriously turned its sights towards Africa.

Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads references, via the textiles, the greater global movement of colonization. By turning outwards, it mocks Gainsborough’s self-contained, tightly-restricted composition that he sets loose in the re-creation. Composed in an entirely different medium of sculpture and textiles, the colors and patterns upset the balance inherent to the original work. The Andrews’ wearing of Dutch wax introduces a relationship of which they are less in control.[xxii] The textiles are a referent of “Africa,” and their subsequent visibility seems to strangle its wearers. Their lack of a property to control creates imbalance in the work. The Andrews are still present, shotgun and hound intact, but they have nothing over which they can exert their control. Such imbalance contrasts directly with Gainsborough’s landscapes, scenes that John Barrell explains are meticulously rendered in perfect harmony.[xxiii] Barrell sees Gainsborough’s art as a demonstration of the idealized relationship with the land. Within their structure the paintings reflect the ideals of mutual appreciation and working together, nothing is left without a place. The further formal choices of Gainsborough, which focus the viewer’s attention within the picture frame, makes the composition self-sufficient, continually calling back to this harmonious relationship. Shonibare’s work breaks from this desire for a relationship that was in fact never true.

Gainsborough’s use of the painting medium as a reinforcement of imperialist and colonialist ideologies is not revolutionary. The English landscape tradition was founded on such ideologies, and even as they faded in and out of respectability the tradition continued to represent the landscape as if nothing had changed. It regarded the relationship to the land as genuine, when in fact it was completely fictional. The tradition as representative of a real relationship was therefore perpetuated by an underlying sense of nostalgia, for even if the relationship was not perfect at the moment, the paintings could be used to recall (or invent) a previous time in history when the relationship did work. [xxiv] Nostalgia, therefore, is a perpetrator of this false relationship as it acts to suppress the qualities of the relationship that do not verify the myth.

The post-colonial critique that the textiles represent in Shonibare’s construction upsets this nostalgic myth. In Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads, the irony of the textiles is parallel to the irony in recreating an image from the English landscape tradition without the actual landscape. Similar to their presence in the grid, the textiles introduce formal conflict and expose the contradictory nature of the relationship between the possessor and the possessed. The conflict recalls Said’s definition of relationship between the Orient and Occident as a power relationship reliant on Western hegemony. Shonibare’s view upsets the idea of a mutual give/take and respect between the two sides. For although both sides of the contact benefited at some point, the outcome exposes a clear dominant force. That force is always the colonizer. Shonibare replaces the nostalgia inherent in the tradition with the joke of the textiles, and in the process discloses the major shortcomings of the relationship.[xxv]

These relationships are perpetrated by nostalgia as form of repression within the landscape tradition.[xxvi] It acts to repress the innate contradiction of the relationships in favor of the traditional idea of the peaceful countryside. Bermingham explains that the English landscape tradition represented the land “as the image of the homely, the stable, the ahistorical.”[xxvii] Land was a way to avoid change, to ignore instability. Because it can be fitted into a predisposed outcome, land represents this stability. If possession of the land is equated to the process of colonization, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads is a physical demonstration of Said’s explanation that the Orient became the Orient simply because it could be repressed into that definition. The Orient, or non-Western ventures in general, became repositories for myths because they were viewed as entities to be cultivated. Shonibare’s work, in contrast, does not function linearly, it doe not contribute to the myth of the colonizer’s history. It is therefore to able to deconstruct the stability inherent in the landscape tradition, by acknowledging its importance and then exposing what the relationship would be without a primitive object to repress. But Shonibare’s work has no land and therefore the inanimate object of repression in Gainsborough’s painting does not exist. The lack of land makes room for the real object of repression, Africa, to be present in the work.          

Shonibare’s act of depriving Mr. and Mrs. Andrews of their heads is not to be ignored. The intentionally headless mannequins can be interpreted in numerous ways: as reminiscent of the guillotine, as a commentary on identity, but in the most basic sense, Shonibare’s constructions would not have the same eerie presence if they had heads.[xxviii] By depriving his mannequins of their heads the artist is depriving them of the ability to think, essentially rendering them without ownership of themselves. By recreating Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their heads or their land, he is doubly disempowering them. Shonibare removes the two distinguishing traits of Gainsborough's original work to underscore the conflict in the piece. The headless mannequins help to enforce the contradiction made by the removal of the land. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads’s expose the English tradition’s reliance on power relationships (and their positions as owners in these relationships) so that a viewer is forced to acknowledge the innate contradictory nature of such relationships.

Furthermore, although the textiles signal “Africa,” it is not the primitive Africa of colonial nostalgia, but a metaphoric Africa, a result of encounters based on the domination and control of colonizing powers. The “Africa” that surfaces as a sign of the repressed articulates the innate reinforcement of this power complex. To explore Bermingham’s use of the term “homely” further, we can employ a more specific connotation. In her analysis homely refers to the comfortable recognition of home, a reassuring sense of one’s place. The connotation applies to Gainsborough’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, who are seated at ease in their property. Shonibare’s Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, by contrast, is not comfortable and has no such sense of home. The removal of the land from the work has created Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads to be un-homely. The rejection of place within the Andrews work is similar to the rejection of the grid within 100 Years. Both elements are instrumental to the original works of art that Shonibare references, and therefore from where Shonibare deconstructs art historical paradigms. The exposure of ideological shortcomings in the tradition is central to Shonibare’s works. They seek to overturn accepted icons of history. In doing so Shonibare rejects the “homely” in favor of that which is unhomely.

THE UNCANNY



The unhomely is a direct translation of Freud’s unheimlich, better known as the uncanny.[xxix] Present in Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads, the uncanny operates uninhibitedly within the abstractness of 100 Years. Freud calls the uncanny an aesthetic experience that infers a strange sense of familiarity. When viewing 100 Years the work is continually repeating itself, the very affinity that the textiles exhibit make the process of viewing seem as though it has happened before. The uncanny of 100 Years therefore originates in the “Africa” evoked by the textiles within the grid. As the repressed, it rises from the grid, and its eeriness catalyzes the breakdown of structure. Only when the grid is broken can the repressed return. The Dutch wax acts as the post-colonial critique of modernism’s inherent reliance on Africa. As Europe’s surrogate self, it contains qualities that are only seen when bestowed on another. Africa represents that which has been repressed. It is, in Freud’s words, “… nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar… and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”[xxx] Africa returns furthermore in the very form of modernism by which it was repressed, like a ghost.

The representation of Africa within the grid takes Africa out of its established home on the periphery; it seems out of place in modernism. Historically, Africa’s existence was not one of fitting within this structure, but existing as a separate structure on the outside. Said sees this outside structure, however, as no more than collection of myths. It is furthermore a collection that explains the colonizer rather than the colonized. These myths would never allow Africa into the middle of their history, yet that is exactly what 100 Years does. The grid is totally compiled from the textiles, from the myth of the primitive “Africa” that they represent. Shonibare is not forging a new, uncharted territory, however. The repressed returns by playing off of the interdependence of the grid’s form, as it simultaneously overcomes the structure. Shonibare employs the grid to reveal the faux-objectivity of the structure itself. In doing so, he demonstrates how categorization fails to repress that which actually part of the categorizer, that is, the colonizer can only repressed the colonized for so long. The grid’s refusal of any influence but its own enforces the repression of Africa. By solely defining itself from within its own parameters, the grid simply outsources that which it does not want to claim; it keeps the repressed, repressed.

The introduced conflict upsets the decentralized grid, as the uncanny infuses the smallest details of 100 Years. Because Shonibare paints the organic motifs to mimic the textile, the paintings become reflections of Dutch wax.[xxxi]These reflections are clustered across the one hundred canvases, creating an unbalanced composition. In certain places the repetition is even more deliberate. But instead of both canvases allowing the textile to be visible from the top, one canvas is painted on top, while the other has painted sides. Best viewed at an angle, it gives the illusion that the canvases float closer to one another across the channel of the background (fig. 10). The shared pattern threads the canvases together, allowing the squares to take on another dimension. The illusion tricks the eye into believing that the canvases are not self-contained: they bleed across the red background into one another. These strange connections that bridge boundaries within the grid’s surface perpetuate the sense of the uncanny.

Cut from the same cloth, but never the exact section of a pattern, the textiles echo one another. They reoccur throughout the piece as though it is a coincidence that they are in the same place at the same time. It is not a coincidence. No canvas is an exact copy of another, yet they contain referents to each other, calling out across the red space of the background that divides them. This interaction could be drawn into the living realm: as humans we are cut from the same cloth. Yet instead of choosing to recognize the similarities, we pick out the tiny differences as a way of further isolating ourselves from one another. On the surface of 100 Years the textiles and paint move freely within one another, allowing for similar groupings to fall apart as easily as they are formed. The flimsiness of these divisions can be drawn in comparison to the attack on culture as an artificial construct that Shonibare alludes to in all of his art.[xxxii]

The flux of 100 Years exposes its lack of a fixed place; the work is pulled in directions. The textiles themselves have no fixed place. They are adopted both in West Africa and Europe; they therefore have not one home, but many. The lack of a single place to call home can be construed as form of unhomely. The idea of home is a myth much like that of Africa; it may be dreamt of, yet rarely realized in such form. The feelings of recognition throughout the work are explainable by the textiles’ many homes; 100 Years is able to exist in more than a single place at once because of these homes. In Freud’s discussion of the uncanny he uses an example of being lost in a strange village yet returning to the same square over and over. 100 Years creates a similar sense of return, each view of the grid uncovers the same repressed sense of Africa. The uncanny is the return of the repressed; the return of feeling of familiarity that perpetuates conflict. The presence of the textiles in their ability to create a perfect grid, while simultaneously overcoming its formal constraints, fuels this uncanny. When introduced to the grid, the Dutch wax, itself being innately contradictory, exposes contradictions in modernism that would otherwise continue unprovoked in the grid.

VISION OF MODERNISM

Shonibare’s choice of subject matter to deconstruct is (art) historically obvious, yet the overall neatness of his works allows the attacks to have a subversive quality. His deconstruction via the grid, in comparison to figurative works, is initially so discreet that the attack can be undetected by viewers.[xxxiii] Regardless of the subject matter he chooses to deconstruct, the artworks contribute to an overall break down of power complexes. The deconstruction of power in works such as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads becomes more abstract – essentially harder to find, or more repressed – as modernism and colonization operate at full strength in the 20th century. Shonibare’s work with the grids, beginning six years before 100 Years was made, establishes a dialogue. It is a conversation that takes the grid to levels at which, which even Shonibare’s had never before functioned.[xxxiv] By engaging with modern criticism Shonibare employs the very repressor of Africa itself. Working from the post-colonial context of his textiles, Shonibare takes on the unquestioned status of modern art, Clement Greenberg’s notion of the artist as god, the myth of the Abstract Expressionists, the belief that art is an objective entity all unto itself. [xxxv] His works are decidedly open-ended. They lack a single decisive solution or message, a deconstructive view that takes cues from Shonibare’s reading of Derrida. The art additionally plays off Hans Haacke’s explorations with the foil, and the appropriation of Sherrie Levine. [xxxvi]

Shonibare does not add the textiles to the grid. He is not adding “Africa” to “Modernism.” What Shonibare is able to do via the criticality of the Dutch wax is create a grid that breaks through the requisite modernist flatness into three-dimensionality. As in his transformation of Gainsborough’s painting to headless, life-size mannequins, Shonibare pushes his re-presentation of the grid into the space of the viewer. Taking his constructions to the three-dimensional level immediately forces them to be viewed differently. The sides of the canvases must be taken into account, for the material changes unexpectedly, as if to counter the inevitability of a modern grid. Briony Fer writes that modernist criticism structures itself to repress that which does not conform to its rubric, into the “optical unconscious” that harbors the underlying fantasies of modernism.[xxxvii] The textiles, themselves swatches of unconformity, represent exactly what modernism does not want to show. 100 Years, as the return of the repressed, does not harbor these textiles below the surface, instead they exist as a key structural component of the grid.

The return of the repressed in 100 Years exposes “Africa” as inherent to modernism and, by extension, colonization and imperialism. Yet “Africa” returning via the very modernism that repressed it can seem problematic. It is Shonibare’s playful approach to his works that allows them to function within this forbidden space. Speaking more generally about his work he explains why he wants his pieces to look neat, that he wants his viewer to “…not even realize that I am protesting… and then when I am inside [the museum] it is too late.”[xxxviii] Shonibare’s usage of accepted icons to exploit those very same icons is a move that takes it cues directly from Hans Haacke. Haacke’s Guggenheim piece from 1975, never actually shown because of its controversy, was a collection of documents detailing the intertwined interests of the museum’s Board of Directors, sponsors, and artists, in an effort to explore the underlying corruptness in the activities of these different groups. [xxxix] Haacke’s overtly confrontational works often gained more press for what he did not show than what he did, but regardless he drew attention to overlooked roles of the artistic society. Like Haacke, Shonibare not only draws attention to that which can go unnoticed (in Shonibare’s case passively accepted), but also to his deconstruction of the need to fit into a pre-disposed mold or idea. Haacke’s works existed within a museum, they required its presence to operate, yet they took the conversation outside its walls, allowing complications to stir the controversy.

Learning from Haacke, Shonibare makes a conscious decision to have his works look put-together, staying away from the grotesque or the overtly political. His decision to make the art “acceptable” comes with a second, more subconscious decision. The subtlety of the work, although a strength, cannot be controlled. The conflict of Shonibare’s art is not always visible at first glance, evident in 100 Years, which seems to be a perfect grid from far away. But once realized it is further explored, further investigated, it becomes evident that 100 Years rejects the very modernism that it recalls. Undoubtedly, Shonibare’s work is political, but it functions just as well when the joke is not understood. If a viewer does not comprehend the joke of the textiles, or the compositions that Shonibare is deconstructing, then the reaction perpetuates the myth, and instead of the viewer laughing, Shonibare will.

To better understand the subversive tactics of 100 Years, it is useful to look at the work in comparison with the modern, abstract art from which it breaks. 100 Years and its surface illusions create constructed chaos for the viewer. Shonibare exploits the inability of the viewer to encompass the whole piece into a singe view. His red background of 100 Years is a direct reference to the gigantic rectangular canvases of the Abstract Expressionists. The inability to encompass it from a single vantage point is eerily similar to what Fer sees in Jackson Pollock’s 1949 Out of the Web (fig. 11). Pollock cuts out sections of his oil and enamel painting on masonite to reveal the rough surface beneath. As layers of paint are revealed, the levels of materials confront the initially flat surface. Fer argues that this trick demands an “ideal viewing position” that cannot actually be obtained.[xl] She identifies two aspects of this control: the painting surface and the shapes of the cuts. In Shonibare’s work the viewing process is similarly controlled by the surface and the shape of the canvases. Pollock and Shonibare play the same game, using the space to create these illusions and demand many views of the surface.

Shonibare’s conflation of the viewer’s sight allows each of the one hundred canvases to appear flat while in fact being three dimensional. The shift that occurs between the properties plays off the obsession with flatness of Greenberg’s modernism. Greenberg characterizes the quality as “the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.”[xli] The actual dimensionality of 100 Years stands in contrast to the flatness of the compositions of artists such as Piet Mondrian (fig. 12). Mondrian’s Composition No. 2 exudes the modernism that Shonibare works against. In search of equilibrium, Mondrian’s art is an example of purity, inner complacency, and a renunciation of the real. With perfectly balanced compositions, the fineness of Mondrian’s grids creates a space independent of outward challenges, smoothing over the opposites that meet at the picture plane. What distinguishes Shonibare from Abstract Expressionism, from Neoplasticism, is his use of more than just paint and canvas. The Dutch wax pulls the grid of 100 Years to a completely new and different critical level.

The post-colonial as a critique sees the modern as inherently flawed, whose (once-realized) shortcomings precipitated postmodern and postcolonial ways of thinking.[xlii] Greenberg writes that at the foundation of modernism is continuity, “without the past of art… such a thing as Modernist art would be impossible.”[xliii] 100 Years at first appears to continue this past work into the twenty-first century, but subsequently folds the tradition on top of itself. While its title looks back at arguably the most formulative century in the history of art, the work itself is not an homage. 100 Years interrogates history, it uses the past and the present, looks forward and backward, to expose the innate contradictions that come with a modernism completely reliant on (yet repudiate of) myths. Shonibare does not invoke history with an obvious scene of colonization (although he would in 2003’s Scramble for Africa, fig. 13); his commentary comes in the less overt form of the grid. It is a subtle, but nonetheless direct, attack. It’s subtlety means that Shonibare’s grids are often overlooked as a threat. The passing of Shonibare’s grids in favor of his more representational pieces is a further example of the effects of modernism’s marginalization of what does not conform to its strict standards. And it is on this very repression that 100 Years thrives.

The presence of “Africa” via the textiles induces the return of the repressed within modernism. Ironically, Fer finds Dutch critic Herbert Henkels’s reaction to a Mondrian work, in which he invokes the “oriental,” as a response characterized by an uncanny sense of strangeness.[xliv] In reference to Shonibare, such a “feeling of strangeness,” from an encounter with 100 Years, underscores its uncanny nature. By exposing itself as the object of the repressive nature of modernism the “Africa” in 100 Years asks the viewer to reconsider what “Africa” is being exposed. For at the same time, this “Africa” is a creation of colonization, dependent just as much on the relationship as the colonizing power. It is, to reiterate Said, a structure composed of nothing more than a pile of myths, so fabricated that if the truth were to be revealed, they would simply blow away.[xlv] The repressed that returns is therefore not an authentic Africa, ass our only concept of it exists in the form of this relationship, and it cannot function, is not permitted to function, in any other way.

The formal qualities of 100 Years demonstrate the presence of the primitive myth. Not only are the textiles and paint indistinguishable from one another at a distance, but the thick layers of paint actually go further to disguise the textile. Without careful examination of the piece, a viewer would not know that textile is underneath the paint. The opaque paint acts to cover the textiles, representing the modernist covering of the myth. But between the paint and canvas the textile is always present. The choice to leave tops and sides exposed, the act that discloses the presence of the Dutch wax, shows the reliance of modernism on “Africa” to exist. The textile is a definite part of the grid. Modernism therefore does not come without its relationship to Africa. In exposing “Africa,” however, the criticality can only go so far. The postcolonial of the textiles is haunted by the very structure of modernism that it deconstructs. The uncanny feeling is irresolvable; no sense of closure can be obtained from viewing 100 Years. Its deconstructive nature may break down the grid, but leaves in its wake more questions than answers. Perhaps this outcome is all that we can obtain from the return of the repressed. It is therefore a reminder that the universal “truth” we constantly seek is no more than a pile of myths constructed to make us feel more at home in interactions with which we have no precedence.

A FRAGMENTED CONCLUSION

Discussion of myths undoubtedly leaves us searching for some sort of truth. Yet 100 Years makes evident that the discourse has always been about modernism, and its inherent inability to acknowledge its influences. Even when this contradiction is exposed in postmodern works such as 100 Years, the “Africa” that is left is nothing more than a confusing relationship, as the Dutch wax willingly perpetuates the myth. The ability of 100 Years to both expose and continue the myths of modernism is a play on our reliance on a completely fabricated process of understanding. The work and textiles themselves can be whatever the viewer wants them to be. Shonibare’s art is open ended, liberating in its absence of a single answer. He makes no attempt to control how a viewer sees his work. It is entirely possible that a viewer could pass by 100 Years, think it is flat, not understand the textiles, and move on. This reaction, or lack thereof, does not take away from the piece. It thrives on its viewers not being able to get the joke. Achille Mbembe references the power of fake identities, and in regards to the repressed Africa within modernism fake identities, myths, and confused understandings are all that exists.[xlvi] But as if to insert hope into that finding, Mbembe describes contemporary African experience as nothing if not unique because of the fragmentation that it comes from.

100 Years is this fragmentation.[xlvii] It represents the 20th century in Africa, now in pieces because of its precarious relationship to the West. The work appears to be ordered – the grid being the pristine image of modernism – but beneath its polished structure lays the trauma, repressed since the beginning. As the work initially engages with the modernism of the 20th century in a playful way, it consequently exposes the repressed as a product of this uncanny interaction. The grid acts as the container for this flux of a relationship; it is entirely fragmented, yet appears to pull itself together. The grid is much more sinister than it allows its viewers to see. It constraints have been overpowering “Africa” since colonization, since the discovery of its desirable primitivism. Mbembe calls our own discourse a “prison,” a reference to the way modernism structures itself as a falsely defined objectivity.[xlviii] Shonibare himself remarks that his move from grids to circular paintings, such as Maxa and Line Painting from 2003, was marked by his not wanting to be “constrained” by the grid anymore (figs. 13, 14).[xlix] It is indeed ironic that the very person who breaks the grid, still feels constrained by its suffocating properties.
What is this Africa we are looking for? Will we ever find it? To paraphrase Mbembe’s commentary on language, as well as nearly all postcolonial discourse, we need to create new ways of looking before we can expect to find anything new. The ambiguity of 100 Years begins this process; its utter disregard for the viewer is what allows it to function in a state of flux. Although it cannot be encompassed in one view, it can do nothing to control how many views of it we get. The surface, replete with illusions, can be completely ignored, or completely overwhelming. In the process of looking, the piece urges the viewer to reach forward and backward for its references. And from it, all we can assume is that we have not yet found what we are looking for, that we must keep searching.

[i] Nancy Hynes sees Shonibare’s choice of Dutch wax as “what began as a seemingly one-line joke… has grown into something more subtle and complex” see Nancy Hynes “Re-dressing History” 34 African Arts No. 3 (2001): 63.

[ii] Shonibare, who was born in London, raised in Lagos, and later returned to London for schooling, articulates this sense of confusion saying that his “blackness began when [he] stepped off the plane at Heathrow” see “Yinka Shonibare in Conversation with Okwui Enwezor” in Laurie Ann Farrell, ed. Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (New York: Museum for African Art, 2003). 166.

[iii] Along this confusion of identity conversation, Shonibare himself likes to say he has never visited an African village therefore he refuses to create art about something he knows nothing about, see Farrell (2003).167.

[iv] The titles of such works are nearly self-explanatory: Boy/Girl and Girl/Boy (1998), Gay Victorians (1999), Affectionate Men  (1999), and Gallantry and Criminal Conversation (2002)

[v] Shonibare explains that he seeks to exploit the gallery system like Levine, Judd, and Haacke, while he read Derrida and Said in school at Goldsmiths. In accord with these postmodernists, Shonibare explains that his work attempts to tackle the accepted standard of artists such as Pollock and Mondrian, among others. See Jaap Guelmond and Gabriele Mackert “To entertain and Provoke Western influences in the work of Yinka Shonibare” in Jaap Gulemond et al. Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). 36-38.

[vi] Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995). 10.

[vii] Manthia Diawara explains that “the politics in Shonibare’s work lie here in his interpretation of consumption and identity formation in the postcolonial era” begging the interpretation that “we are what we consume” see Manthia Diawara, “Independence Cha Cha: The art of Yinka Shonibare,” in Jaap Gulemond et al. Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004). 20.

[viii] Hynes cites the existence of another grid, Baby Blue, from 1998 see Hynes (2001). 62.

[ix] The differences among the grids are immediately noticeable in their size. Double Dutch consists of fifty canvases, while Feather Pink and Deep Blue only have twenty-five apiece, therefore making them much more manageable to view. In contrast, the one hundred canvases of 100 Years (one for each year of the 20th century), doubles the already large Double Dutch, and overwhelms the viewer no matter how large the gallery space (for even if a one can back up infinitely, the flux of materials is lost to this distant view).

[x] Shonibare also played on the idea of the double in an exhibit called “Double Dress,” which showed in 2002 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Studio Museum in Harlem, continuing in 2003 to Helsinki and Milan.

[xi] A reference to Okwui Enwezor’s 2001 Short Century exhibition, a “retrospective” of art of the entire continent of Africa, whose title drew its meaning from a quotation of Ghanian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah. (Munich: Museum Villa Stuck, Berlin: Martin Gropuis-Bau, Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, and New York: P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center)

[xii] see Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 9-22.

[xiii] Krauss (1985).18.

[xiv] Gulemond and Mackert, (2004). 37.

[xv] This three dimensional intrusion into the viewing space is reminiscent of Donald Judd, whose repetition of metal boxes affixed to the walls began the conversation with the mysterious space between sculpture and painting.

[xvi] see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

[xvii] Krauss (1985). 17.

[xviii] Gulemond and Mackert (2004). 41.

[xix] Ann Birmingham writes that “the English saw their landscape as a cultural and aesthetic object” see Ann Birmingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860 (Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1986). 9.

[xx] Bermingham (1986). 35.

[xxi] McClintock elaborates this process of taking in her discussion of colonial enterprise as a solution for the crisis of the “male imperial identity” see McClintock (1995), 25-30.

[xxii] Hynes has previously explored the role of the cloth as a signifier of colonial relationship, calling it an “apt metaphor of the entangled relationship between Africa and Europe, and how the two continents have invented each other.” see Nancy Hynes “Addressing the Wandering Mind” in Hassan, Salah and Iftikhar Dadi, eds. Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading. (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2001). 396.

[xxiii] Barrell characterizes Gainsborough’s technique as one of “egalitarianism” see John Barrell, The dark side of the landscape: The rural poor in English painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980). 39.

[xxiv] The use of the term nostalgia is not meant to simplify the argument, for as Marianna Torgovnik writes, the postcolonial is challenged with “more at stake than a colonialist denial of the complexity of primitive societies or a nostalgia for the lost simplicity of the past” (see Marianna Torgovnik, Gone primitive: savage intellects, modern lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 244.

[xxv] Nostalgia as a propellant of representation is not unique to English landscape painting. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir finds that works by Kinshasa painters such as Cheri Samba hold many “second” meanings for their native Congo audience. One of these meanings is that of a “nostalgia for ‘tradition’” of the idyllic rural narrative. see Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 30.

[xxvi] Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner find a similar act of repression in African tourist art, explaining that the genre has been popularized because it submits to “the myths of authenticity and primitivist nostalgia that flourished during the Victorian period” see Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, “Art Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter Phillips and Steiner, eds. Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 16.

[xxvii] Bermingham, Ann (1986). 9.

[xxviii] The reference to the French revolution, or the guillotine, via the headlessness of the mannequins is noted in conversation with Shonibare (see Gulemond and Mackert (2004). 35-41.). The exploration of identity in his works, more broadly and including the subject of headlessness, is explored by many critics, the most notable among them being Hynes (2001), 60-65, John Picton “Undressing Ethnicity” 34 African Arts No. 3 (2001): 66-73, and Diawara in Gulemond, et al. (2004). 17-23.

[xxix] see Sigmund Freud “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol 17. Tr. James Strachey. (London: The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1955). 23 Vols.

[xxx] Freud (1955). 241.

[xxxi] In a footnote, Picton describes the fifty front-painted panels of 100 Years as showing “bacterial, fungal, and insect infestations, the hidden dangers always lurking behind a taken-for-granted order.” These paintings therefore evoke the uncanny themselves. ee Picton (2001),. 94.

[xxxii] Interview given with Pernilla Holmes, “The Empire’s New Clothes” Art News Online Oct 2002. Available http://www.artnews.

com/issues/article.asp?art_id=1202>> 11 Oct 2008.



[xxxiii] Although the work has been shown since its creation in 2000, the most recent home of 100 Years was the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The subsequent New York Times review calls the work “benignly decorative” while his figurative work showing concurrently at the NYU’s Grey Art Gallery is decidedly “toothier.” see Karen Rosenberg, “African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns from a Rich Palette” The New York Times 10 October 2008. C32.

[xxxiv] It is important to note that a grid exists from 1999 called (after Prince’s 1983 hit) Party Like it’s 1999. This grid preludes 100 Years’s reference to the 20th century, that it’s time to “party” presumably because the century characterized by colonization in Africa is over. Why Party did not end Shonibare’s experimentation with the grid is an interesting aside: the grid is only half the size of 100 Years, with a more playful teal-colored background. It is therefore less of a commemoration than 100 Years, less of an image of repression, and more of an “ignorance” by way of celebration. Perhaps 100 Years is Shonibare’s way of saying that even though we are in a new century it does not solve the problems from the past century.

[xxxv] Shonibare explains that “Clement Greenberg’s idea of the artist as God, or the artists as the originator of pure expressionism is not really something that works for my generation” in Jaap Gulemond, et al. (2004).37.

[xxxvi] In a survey aptly titled Framing and Being Framed, Haacke’s attempts to “desacralize art” are deemed to demand the “…dialectical foil of the art environment to provide the necessary contrast” see Haacke, Hans. Framing and Being Framed: 7 works, 1970-75 (New York: New York UP, 1975). 136. Levine’s exhibition After Walker Evans first showed in New York in 1981. She hung photographs of the well-known, Depression-era Walker Evans photographs, no longer subject to copyright laws, taken directly from a catalog of his works. Levine did not alter her reproductions, therefore introducing a multi-faceted critical view of the very system of principles that art history privileges.

[xxxvii] see Briony Fer, “The Cut,” in Fer, Briony, On Abstract Art (London and New Haven: Yale UP, 1997).

[xxxviii] Gulemond and Mackert (2004). 41.

[xxxix] Haacke’s catalogue describes the conflict between the museum and its sponsors as “endemic,” that it revolves around the (polar opposite) visions of a very select group of people. see Haacke (1975). 149-50.

[xl] Fer (1997). 99.

[xli] Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” in Art and Literature: An International Review. No 4 (Spring 1965). 195.

[xlii] It is necessary to add the commentary of Kwame Anthony Appiah here, who asks if the “post” in postcolonial is the same as the “post” in postmodernism. While he sees a similarity among the two criticisms in their commoditization of art and notions of hybridity, he believes linking the two it ignores the fact that there are different colonialisms and the different levels through with cultural superiority are enforced, see Kasfir, (1999). 14.

[xliii] Greenberg (1965). 201.

[xliv] she explains that in Henkels’s analysis a “…sense of foreignness experienced in the oriental is set against the impression of something sacred,” in “Decoration and Necessity: Mondrian’s Excess” in Briony Fer, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1997). 35-6.

[xlv]Said, (1978). 6.

[xlvi] see Achille Mbembe, “Experience, Uncertainity, and the Power of the False” in Gulemond et al. (2004). 121-127.

[xlvii] Shonibare himself refers to the work as a fragmentation of big abstract painting see Gulemond and Mackert (2004), 37.

[xlviii] Mbembe (2004), 127.

[xlix] Gulemond and Mackert (2004), 37.

1.     19th Century Kids (from left:     Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and  Mary Shelley)         2000

kid.png
kid1.png
kid2.png
MacGregor et al. Yinka Shonibare, MBE (Munich, New York: Prestel, c2008).


2.    Mr. and Mrs. Andrews without their Heads          2003
gainsheadless.png
MacGregor et al. Yinka Shonibare, MBE (Munich, New York: Prestel, c2008).


3.    The Swing (after Fragonard)    2001
swing.jpg
MacGregor et al. Yinka Shonibare, MBE (Munich, New York: Prestel, c2008).

4.    100 Years          2000
100years.jpg
John Picton “Undressing Ethnicity” 34 African Arts No. 3 (2001): 66-73,


5.     Feather Pink      and      Deep Blue        1997
feather.jpg
deepblue.jpg
http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_Africa/web/E39867.jpg     http://www.worcesterart.org/Images/Collection/Photos/Curatorial/1998.122.jpg

6.    Double Dutch     1994
doubledutch.jpg
Jaap Guldemond, et al. Yinka Shonibare: Double Dutch (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004).

7.     Close up, to see paint                 (100 Years)
doubledutchcu.jpg


8.    Donald Judd      Untitled 1965
judd2.png
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~ldk29/ARCH101/DonaldJudd_1968.jpg


9.    Thomas Gainsborough  Mr. and Mrs. Andrews           1750
gainsborough.jpg
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=ng6301


10.   Side View,  notice affinity in  textile across canvases              (100 Years)
100yearsside.jpg

11.   Jackson Pollock Out of the Web            1949
outoftheweb.jpg
http://www.earlham.edu/~vanbma/20th%20century/images/pollock%20out%20of%20the%20web%201949.jpg


12.  Piet Mondrian                Composition No. 2      1922
http://www.fiu.edu/~andiaa/cg2/mon_13.jpg


13.  Scramble for Africa       2003
scrambleforafrica.jpg
http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/MillHillEssays/2005/images/africa_scramble.jpg

14.  Maxa      and      Line Painting      2003
linepainting.jpg


MacGregor et al. Yinka Shonibare, MBE (Munich, New York: Prestel, c2008).



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