MICHELE ROBECCHI: ‘Flower Time’, your exhibition currently at Stephen
Friedman Gallery, takes place almost ten years after your first show there
in 1996. Quite a lot has happened over this time. You’re an MBE now…
YINKA SHONIBARE: It’s actually very interesting because I started together
with Stephen Friedman. His gallery got bigger and he expanded and I
gradually progressed within my career. Then there was the Citibank
Photography Prize (1999), the Turner Prize nomination (2004), Documenta 11
(2001) and then the funny one – I was awarded an MBE. But I started off
being fairly rebellious and I’m still rebellious in what I do. I make work
which is a critique of the establishment and power but at the same time I
was made a Member of the British Empire. There is a very specific reason why
I have chosen to keep the MBE with my name. It is a very controversial one
because for me it is a sign of looking at the acknowledgement of
multiculturalism today and how far, or not far, we’ve come as immigrants in
Britain. I very much like the idea of a name which actually sounds foreign
to British people, Yinka Shonibare, followed by MBE – Member of the British
Empire. It’s kind of a paradox.
RAPHAEL CHIKUKWA: Wouldn’t have been more rebellious refusing the MBE, like
[British Jamaican poet] Benjamin Zephaniah did in 2003?
YS: I understand why he refused it, but to refuse it after he did wouldn’t
make a very interesting point. The British Empire is over, it has lost its
power, but the legacy is still here, in terms of the imbalance of power and
so on. I don’t feel that I need to position myself in a subservient
relationship to the Empire. By embracing it and accepting the MBE, I reduce
its power. It’s also a psychological thing. Constantly running away from the
establishment is to not actually fully accept my arrival here. There are
kind of political reasons for insisting on keeping it. But I use it in a
more theatrical way now – it’s my artist name.
MR: You once defined yourself as a cultural hybrid, which I think makes a
lot of sense, given the kind of society we are living in. Why do you think
people still have a problem with this concept?
YS: Most of the global conflicts that are happening around the world at the
moment are always justified by the idea of difference. ‘I am different from
you’; ‘my nationality is very specific therefore it is contrary to your
nationality’. But if you think of globalisation and the history of
imperialism and then the history of global trade between different cultures,
it’s quite logical to see culture as much more a meeting point of different
perspectives. Even the so-called ‘British’ culture is a hybrid already of
the Huguenots and the many different people who came here. Words like ‘loot’
are of Indian origin, there are many so-called ‘British’ things that are
actually evidence of other people from other cultures being here. That’s
what I meant when I said about hybridity – the fact that there is a
mythology around ideas of pure origin or notions of nationalism which is
just a convenient way to get power and to exclude other people. But the
reality of life is that we don’t only experience things from our own
culture. And yet, we insist, on the rigid boundaries. So it’s a boundary
crossing strategy, this notion of hybridity. What I am interested in is the
way that we fabricate stereotypes. Stereotypes are made by people but
they’re not intrinsic to people, they are not natural, they are cultural
constructs. There’s that beautiful painting by Magritte which shows you a
picture of a pipe and then underneath it says ‘this is not a pipe’. This is
not a pipe, this is a representation of a pipe, right? Stereotypes work in
the same way because the image you see in front of you is that image of an
African, an image of a black man. Now, how you read that depends on the
historical stereotypes that exist before then. It does not necessarily mean
that those stereotypes have anything to do with me. That’s why I ended up
with the Dutch fabrics I use because on the one hand they are saying
‘Africa’ to people but it’s actually a construction of Africa. The Dutch
decided to produce industrially the fabrics for sale to Indonesia. And as
industrial versions of the fabrics were not so successful in Indonesia, they
tried the West African market. Traditional African textiles are actually
very different, people would make them on looms. But Africa was modernising,
it became more convenient to have money, work and buy what you needed so you
didn’t have to stay at home, making your own material. And also the fabrics
manufactured in Africa are now commissioned by Africans to be made in
Holland. What I find interesting about it is a sign of something which is
supposed to be African that has evidence of all these trade routes and
global transactions. The fabric carries with it a kind of fallacy, if you
like. I started using the fabrics to make paintings but to do the opposite
of a large heroic painting, to fragment them to smaller pieces, which then
negates this notion of the grand, big, white male, heroic object. I’m
talking more about early Abstract Expressionism like Barnett Newman and the
huge Rothkos. And of course the civil rights movement and the feminist
movement challenged this kind of patriarchal way of presenting art and so a
lot of the art that developed. Judy Chicago or Cindy Sherman were big
influences on me.
MR: It’s interesting that you acknowledge Judy Chicago. That’s a name that
doesn’t come up very often.
YS: She was a pioneer. Without her, there would be no Barbara Kruger or any
of those people. Anyway, this is the context against which my work was
evolving and then there was the black art movement with Eddie Chambers and
Keith Piper. The influences on my work are actually quite varied. I am also
very interested in painting – people like Ross Bleckner, those kinds of
‘neo-geo’ painters. And then Bruce Nauman, Pop Art. I use all that. The
overriding thing is that I want to explore my own identity or the
construction of my identity but I want to do it through creating my own kind
of art. The theatrical or the aesthetic is quite central to my practise.
It’s not just about ideas. I am very interested in the relationship between
you and the materiality of the actual object. The whole project at the
Stephen Friedman Gallery is about global conflict. But it’s not just about
the war in Iraq, it’s about the rise of conflict between different groups of
people. I mean we talk about freedom of expression and it is valued within
Western societies as something very important. As an artist if you want to
have your freedom of expression, I rather think that in the context of
global conflict it’s very difficult to achieve that. I find it quite
difficult as an artist to go on and especially at this time when the art
world is doing extremely well. As an artist I don’t want to find myself in a
situation where I follow the money. I think that artists shouldn’t follow
capital – I think capital should follow art. I am not being moralistic about
the relationship of money to art. I just find it difficult to make work
without thinking about the impact, or the potential impact of global trauma
on me and my ability to continue to produce as an artist.
RC: How about Odille and Odette (2005)?
YS: I made it with the Royal Opera House. It is taken from Swan Lake. The
love story is that the prince wants to get married and he fell in love with
a beautiful woman who was a swan. There was a magician in the story who
wanted the prince to marry his daughter, instead of this woman. So the
magician (and the magician is obviously the baddie here) basically made his
daughter look identical to the woman that the prince was in love with. And
there was an agreement between the prince and the beautiful woman, whose
name is Odette, that should the prince be unfaithful to her, then he would
die, and the relationship would be over. So the prince went out with the
other woman, the magician’s daughter, thinking that the magician’s daughter
was the right woman but by doing that he broke the spell. In the traditional
Swan Lake, the magician’s daughter, whose name is Odille, wears a black
tutu, a black dress, and the other woman wears a pink tutu and in the ballet
it’s usually danced by the same dancer but when she dances the role of the
magician’s daughter, Odille, she wears black. In my film, I created a kind
of a fake mirror so that there was a black ballerina dancing opposite a
white ballerina but then there’s a hollow frame between them but they
synchronise the way they dance, so there is an illusion of a mirror. The
white woman is being reflected by the black woman and vice versa. They dance
it so well, it looks like a reflection of each other.
MR: That’s a very powerful image.
YS: It’s quite minimal. It’s two people who are different but they are kind
of the same. You can’t tell who is the baddie and who is the goodie because
it’s interchangeable. What I then did with that, with the ballerinas, I
created a sculpture called Flower Cloud, and the sculpture is mixed race,
she is a ballerina as well. But this time, she is balancing (it’s the same
costume in the film, that the sculpture is wearing), but balancing on a
mushroom cloud and the mushroom cloud is almost like an explosion. And the
mushroom cloud, in a sense, signifies the current potential for global
explosion, or global conflict at the moment. But the ballet is the epitome,
if you like, of elitist culture. So, in a sense the ballet almost
representing a kind of privileged innocence, but with the potential to
explode because the mushroom cloud is underneath it. And the mushroom cloud
is made very beautifully and is very shiny and you can see yourself
reflected in it. And then there are sculptures of two men in Victorian
clothes made out of African textiles shooting each other. They have guns in
their hands pointing at each other’s heads and that piece is called How to
Blow Up Two Heads At Once (2006) – that’s kind of self explanatory.
And then there is a wall painting which is called Black Gold (2006). The
background is a black splash, so it’s gloss paint, and it’s almost like you
took a big gun and shot this black paint onto the wall. So the black paint
is exploding outwards and then on top of that will be assembled the piece.
It looks like a spray of oil. And again the reason is the way that oil is
being used… Oil is slowly running out globally, and at the moment we have
some wars that are very much connected to oil and of course, there is the
issue of development. The West is already developed and so what is the
morality of suggesting that other people shouldn’t develop?
RC: I always wondered why your Victorians are headless.
YS: The reason for that is that during the time of the French Revolution in
1789, the aristocrats in France had their heads chopped off. The height of
the British Empire was the Victorian period, so I take that as a metaphor,
if you like, for privileged people or positions. When I produce the figures
I take the heads off and it’s also another deliberate strategy. If the heads
are not included then the figures are rather ambivalent as well, they are
more difficult to fix racially. It’s also a device. All of my figures are
always mixed race so you can’t really fix that – they’re more ambivalent,
more difficult to stereotype.
MR: There’s also a very strong classic element in your work.
YS: Oh yes. That’s very important. I think I can grab people’s attention a
bit more by displacing a territory they are familiar with. It’s not about
trying to make them get their heads around something that is totally removed
from their cultural territory. It’s something they know. Then they can think
‘why is he doing that?’ And also, I think I’m more likely to affect people
if I play within their own territory than if I bring in something completely
strange to them. I feel that if they can relate to it, my impact on them is
stronger. I’m obviously interested in bringing something new, but not
bringing something completely new, and all of my work is a bit like that.
There are things that people know, things that they have seen before. People
know fabrics. They are not scared of them. They can see that I am doing
something a bit different with it but it’s something they already know
about. Sometimes I think some work can be very obscure to the point that it
becomes impossible to decipher and whilst that may be valid for some people,
as an artist myself, it’s not really how I want to operate.
MR: They can be quite evocative too. A lot of ancient Greek sculptures are
headless.
YS: I think it gives more leeway for not fixing the personality.
RC: Your work is featured in a lot of African exhibitions, including the PanAfrican Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale. You’ve already answered
part of the question, but as you also represented Britain in Venice, should
people put you on the African side or on the British side?
YS: I’ve never been one of those artists of African origin who refuse to do
African exhibitions. I do both. In a way I consider myself privileged, I’ve
been showing my work in Paris at the Louvre Museum and I am the first
contemporary artist they would include in that kind of exhibition there.
I’ve shown at the Tate and MoMA in New York and at the same time I’ve shown
in a lot of African exhibitions like the Johannesburg Biennale or ‘Africa
Remix’. I just think that if the idea is good, I don’t care where the
curator is from or what the project is. I think the problem about categories
is not really mine. I have a friend of African origin himself who absolutely
refused to show in ‘Africa Remix’ because he didn’t want this pigeonholing
of African artists. For me it’s not a problem. I don’t think that one has to
exclude the other. I don’t think that just because you show in an African
exhibition then that means you can’t show at the Tate. That’s not been my
experience.
The statement they made with ‘Africa Remix’ is an illustration of global
politics. In many African countries, with the exception of South Africa,
it’s not that easy to have a sustainable career as an artist. Maybe in
Nigeria and Ghana a bit, or in Senegal. The francophone countries are
actually better. A lot of African artists find that they have to relocate
themselves in the West as a result of this. I am not suggesting that you
have to live in the West to be an artist, there are several artists living
in Africa who have managed it and who do well but you will find that in most
cases they do other things in order to survive. I think that it’s more of an
economic problem. The priorities when you have economic problems and wars
are different, it’s more difficult for those countries to focus on
developing their visual arts infrastructure. And if you think about the
visual arts infrastructure in the West… I was actually thinking about it the
other day… you’ve got the art publications, the critics who actually
legitimise the work, the auction houses, which are, as you know a billion
dollar business, then you’ve got the various art fairs, the biennials… The
majority of African artists are thrown into a very particular socio-economic
situation which creates the way they have to work.
MR: A lot of your work is about memory, which is interesting to me because I
think there is a lot of short term memory loss around at the moment.
YS: I was thinking about that. The first time I made something in relation
to war was a project I did at the Tate Britain called Un Ballo in Maschera
(2004) which was a film about a Swedish King who was shot at a masked ball.
I was thinking about a contemporary issue, because this king was fighting
wars in Russia and Denmark and there was opposition to him at home, so there
was a conspiracy to murder him, and at that time I was drawing parallels
between something that happened historically and a contemporary situation.
So sometimes I find that I can express something in a non-biased way. The
use of history gives me distance.
MR: It’s what people do with science fiction too. They can afford to deal
with contemporary issues by projecting them into the future.
YS: Exactly. Our perspective of what is actually happening now, in another
20 years time, will be a bit different. We are very wrapped up in all of
these things right now so it’s always very difficult to disentangle them.
It’s very confusing. But I always find that if I take history or if I step
back, it’s a strategy of distance of avoiding being over-sentimental. If you
get too specific, you can become over-emotional in the work which doesn’t
give you the distance the work needs.
RC: If you look at some of your works as you enter an exhibition space, it
looks like you are walking into a circus.
YS: Well, that’s very interesting because when you talk about the idea of
circus, I would relate that to the notion of performance and performance is
very much one of the strategies I use. If you look at things like Diary of a
Victorian Dandy (1998) where I actually performed with a lot of other actors
and we had our photographs taken, and then there is Dorian Gray (2001) which
is based on Oscar Wilde’s story, I’m dressing up again. The performative
element, or the circus element if you like, is the spectacle, which is a
strategy I use. My Documenta piece was very theatrical too. There’s this
suspended carriage from the ceiling and people having sex openly all around…
It’s totally outrageous. There’s definitely a deliberately performative
aspect to the work, as a kind of strategy. It’s about trying to find a
playful way to engage with serious issues. I guess you could put it that
way.
RC: I understand you will be having a show at the Victoria & Albert Museum
next year. Do you have any ideas on what you’re going to do?
YS: Yes, the reason is that it’s a celebration of the abolition of the
slavery act in 1807. I thought about it very strongly, and well, the history
of slavery it’s not a very nice history and the legacy of it is absolutely
terrible and it’s still with us today, but I’m not interested in the idea of
black people as victims. My idea is the following: slavery was very big in
Liverpool. There was a slave trader in Liverpool called Foster Cunliffe. I
discovered that his grandson was also a very wealthy person who was very
interested in leisure activities. I think its was the18th Century, he
started the Archery Club in the UK. They’ve given me this very beautiful
room at the Victoria & Albert Museum - the 18th Century Music Room from the
Duke and Duchess of Norfolk’s House on St. James’s Square, it’s totally over
the top, it’s baroque, it’s gold-leaf, and it’s very nice. The piece is
called Sir. Foster Cunliffe Playing, and he’s firing this arrow. And when
you see this piece of this guy just playing with his arrow, you think,
‘what’s this got to do with slavery?’ but then underneath this surface of
play and enjoyment is the blood of other people. So that’s my way of getting
round that idea.
YINKA SHONIBARE, MBE’S ‘FLOWER TIME’ IS ON AT STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY
UNTIL 13 JANUARY 2007
RAPHAEL CHIKUKWA IS A CURATOR AND WRITER BASED IN HARARE
MICHELE ROBECCHI IS SENIOR EDITOR AT CONTEMPORARY