Don't Miss Your Chance--"El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa"

Lisa Gulesserian — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:39:14 +0000

Image credit: The Blanton Musuem of Art

El Anatsui’s art is haunting. The shimmering bottle tops of his most recent pieces, meticulously netted and woven with the help of his young crew, speak of previous uses, prior intents, and pasts that pummel and prod. A retrospective exhibition of the Ghanaian artist’s 30-year career is currently on view at UT’s own Blanton Museum of Art. The exhibition, “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa,” is a wonderful investigation of the tangible ways that the past weaves itself into our present.

A few weekends ago, I roamed through the exhibition, utterly amazed and dazzled by Anatsui’s use of reclaimed and repurposed materials to make art that spoke of the history of the artist, his materials, and West Africa. One of the many standout pieces from the exhibition was Akua’s Surviving Children from 1996, which was constructed during Anatsui’s residency in Denmark.

Image credit: The October Gallery

Although Anatsui was invited to Denmark to commemorate the 200-year anniversary of Denmark’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, his Akua does more than just jubilantly praise the end of centuries of horror. His materials hint at a history of violence and oppression, as he uses driftwood from a Danish shore and nails from a foundry that used to manufacture the very guns that were used by Danes to round up slaves on the Gold Coast. The driftwood, slowly worn down by the waves, is reimagined as a group of marching people with fire-blackened faces; the nails, made at the very site that used to manufacture weapons that caused the subjugation of millions of Africans, have been reimagined as the glue that holds together the marchers. A shared past of subjugation and violence haunts the marchers who stand, defiant against all odds.

Instead of driftwood and nails, another standout piece from the exhibition, 2008’s Oasis, uses Anatsui’s signature technique of woven bottle tops from liquor bottles. The juxtaposition of the aesthetic value of a piece like Oasis (which really does feel like a drink of cool water) with the moral message (just how many liquor bottles were consumed for Anatsui to make his art?)—is staggering. As tangible representations of a community’s consumption, the liquor bottle tops—with names like “Liquor Headmaster”—are woven into a traditional art form from West Africa, cloth. The past is revisited (and possibly mourned?) through traditional weaving techniques using unconventional materials.

Image Credit: Jane Katcher / Peter Harholdt

But, as discussed in a recent talk between El Anatsui, curator Lisa Binder, and art historian Moyosore Okediji, Anatsui’s work isn’t just about mourning the past—it’s also about chance and movement. Anatsui’s bottle top weavings aren’t just social and political statements. They’re beautiful and freeform, too. The display of Anatsui’s art is left to the whims of museum curators, who choose to show us glimpses of the backs of the pieces, which often are as beautiful as the fronts. Anatsui’s work makes us gaze just a little longer; it makes us take a second look. His pieces are remade with our every glance. There is hope that the past, too, can be remade and reshaped just as the curators shape Anatsui’s art, which itself reclaims, by chance, materials that others had left for dead.

Don’t miss your chance to see “El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa” in Austin. The exhibition is at the Blanton Museum of Art until 22 January 2012.

Danie Mellor: Environmental and socio-historical ideas in fine art

Anne Bobroff-Hajal — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:52:09 +0000

Danie Mellor is an Australian fine artist whose themes integrate environmental and socio-historical concerns. His message isn't quite as "left-brained" as the ideal I'm seeking (my goal is to find art whose ideas are clear through the art itself, without a separate artist's or museum statement). But there's something to be learned from Mellor about ways to achieve that ideal. Plus, his work is so beautiful that I'm utterly seduced into presenting it here.

Mellor uses a vocabulary of indigenous Australian animals and people paired with classic English china patterns. For Mellor, the kangaroo represents (as explained by a wonderful National Gallery of Australia audio guide), "all the native animals and indigenous people who lived in this land before white settlement." As for the blue china patterns, "The English firm Spode manufactured blue and white china in the late 18th century around the time of white settlement of Australia. The famous willow pattern, adapted from Chinese ceramics, became popular at this time. It demonstrates another way in which English culture absorbed another, creating a fabricated history." Artlink Magazine described another of Mellor's works as signifying "how colonisers always get things wrong; how Europeans looking for China and its fine porcelain manufactures, stumbled instead upon the land of the kangaroo, and traded and planted ideas of racial and cultural superiority."

Dreaming Beyond Paradise (Let Sleeping Giants Lie) by Danie Mellor

Once we know the language of Mellor's vocabulary, we can feast on his images and feel some of the tragedy of imperialism's domination of native habitat and culture. This dual vocabulary of English china and indigenous animals underlies even a more complex work like "New World Order (The Visitors)," in which Mellor also uses Masonic and other imagery:

In the lessons-to-be-learned-for-artists department, the very different visual qualities of Mellor's two primary components make his work very readable. The china pattern is elegant and finely detailed. The indigenous Australian elements are live creatures painted a bit more roughly.

Color above all distinguishes the Australian from the British in Mellor's art. The imperialist element is blue and white. The indigenous Australian is warm browns and oranges. The two are on opposite sides of the color wheel, reinforcing the contrast between the two.

So fellow artists looking to communicate left-brained ideas through right-brained art might draw on Mellor's device of creating a limited, easily-graspable vocabulary whose elements have high visual contrast. The viewer will then be able to easily distinguish the components of the vocabulary.

Another lesson learned through Mellor's work is how he speaks of tragic events with tenderness, joy, and fun. This is important in fine art when it takes on difficult issues. We're only human, after all, and we need to have some reward for facing catastrophe and reasoning ways to repair it.

Mellor also illustrates the fact that sometimes the best tool to express harsh reality is actually surrealism - through the artist inventing a whimsical version of reality rather than actual reality. Mellor places a kangaroo fast asleep on the bridge of the Spode willow china pattern. He paints an indigenous Australian man raising his spear over vertiginous painted-porcelain mountains.

What makes Mellor's surrealism speak so eloquently about reality is that the elements he chooses are visual synedoches: china patterns represent British imperialism; native animals represent the indigenous Australian people, culture, and natural world. The artwork we looked at in my last post, Nina Paley's animated film "THE STORK," is based on a visual metaphor - two elements with something in common. Mellor's work is based on the contrast of two very different synecdoches. They are two great examples of visual rhetoric.

PS Since we've been talking about science in art elsewhere on viz., you might want to look at Mellor's installation at the National Gallery of Australia and listen to the brief audio description. The installation's very long title is "The contrivance of a vintage Wonderland (A magnificent flight of curious fancy for science buffs, a china ark of seductive whimsy, a divinely ordered special attraction, upheld in multifariousness)." It's a joyful/tragic riff on "artificial and didactic" old exhibits in socio-historical and natural history museums. It's accompanied by a poem by A. G. Bolam, "The Trans-Australian Wonderland:"

A wonderland of truly wondrous things

That nowhere else upon this Earth are found;

Of reptiles rare, and birds that have no wings,

And animals that live deep in the ground;

And those poor simple children of the Earth,

(A disappearing race you here may meet),

Whom whites have driven from their land of birth

To regions still untrod by booted feet.

viz. - History in art

Don't Miss Your Chance--"El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa"

Danie Mellor: Environmental and socio-historical ideas in fine art