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Article Excerpt
EI Anatsui's forty-year career in the visual arts has led him to explore multiple mediums and processes, working with tools such as chain saws and branding irons, and materials as diverse as milk-can tops, broken pots, and newspaper printers' plates. In the past several years, audiences throughout the world have gotten to know his most recent work--large "textile" pieces, which Anatsui refers to as sheets, made from discarded liquor tops and sewn together into intricate patterns. But these stunning red-and-gold wall sculptures are only a part of the artist's evolution.
Anatsui finished his degree in visual art in 1969 from the College of Art University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana. His work was then and remains connected to the West African cultural landscape. Indeed, most of his exhibitions have been in Nigeria, where he now lives and works. In the 1980s, Anatsui began to show his work in wood in the United Kingdom.
In 2004, when Anatsui took part in the exhibition Africa Remix, which traveled from Dusseldorf to London, Paris, Tokyo, and Stockholm, critics and collectors took note of his "cloths of gold." But not until late 2006, in an exhibition at David Krut Projects in New York, did his work receive critical acclaim in the United States. The success of his massive textile works at the 2007 Venice Biennale have made Anatsui a staple in art magazines and reviews, while his solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York early this year, Zebra Crossing, solidified his standing. His solo exhibition at the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution, El Anatsui: Gawu, runs until September 2008. In August, the artist's work appears in 3-logy, an exhibition at the Price Tower Center in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; the show explores relationships among art, architecture, and design.
Anatsui's simultaneously delicate and violent methods build up materials, while shifting them into an incongruously liminal genre: they are at once fine art, architecture, and craft. Anatsui's works dazzle the eye at first glance, and only on deeper inspection do they allow the viewer to understand a kind of language therein. The way Anatsui hangs his works pushes against the space, whether pinned inside galleries in seemingly random places, draped over elements of the natural world, or hung from the facade of Venice's Palazzo Fortuny. Anatsui creates the illusion of wall space. Woven sheets of abandoned bottle tops call to mind textiles and craft.
Recently some reviewers have asked, "Where can he go from here?" and "What's next?" I An artist can't work the same way forever, some say. It is interesting, therefore, that Anatsui's ingenious earlier wood murals have been pushed aside in the fervor for his sheets. The works in wood and ceramic show the foundations--not in material, but in concept--for his newest projects.
Throughout Anatsui's career, he has followed an attachment to the found object. For him, though, the found object is not related to the Duchampian tradition; instead, Anatsui focuses on the object's connection to the human hand. Like the invisible remnants of DNA, he says, all objects--used and abandoned--carry the deposits of the object's user. The artist uses these cast-off materials to explore unseen human connections.
Laura James: When did you realize you were interested in art?
EI Anatsui: My earliest experience with art goes back to the lettering attempts I made just after kindergarten with chalk on slate, which were admired by the school headmaster to the extent he would encourage my effort by giving me more chalk--a fairly expensive item then. I would copy the bold capital letters on the door of the general manager's office or the headmaster's office. Because I did not understand these, I regarded each of them more as an image than a letter. Their forms were intriguing and attractive. Elementary- and secondary-school art lessons were limited to painting and graphics, probably activities one could accomplish conveniently in the short periods allocated in the classroom. In the secondary...
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