The LA Times April 6 2009, Christopher Knight
Yinka Shonibare at Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Yinka Shonibare's method in making sculpture is
labor-intensive yet simple. He buys commercially
made fabric at markets in London, where he lives
and works; has it stitched into elaborate Victorian
costumes; dresses headless mannequins in the
period clothing; and, finally, arranges the figures
(with props) into a tableau. Essentially, it's the work
of a department store window dresser.
That's one reason his sculpture is often so good -and not just because window dressing has a
venerable past, since Robert Rauschenberg,
Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol all made a living at
it 50 years ago in New York. Rather, when shown in
an art gallery, a Shonibare tableau doesn't pretend
the pristine space it occupies is not a store. Candor
is built in.
In a museum -- for instance, the Santa Barbara
Museum of Art, where his West Coast solo debut is
on view -- something slightly different happens.
Mercantile trade is an ancient practice, but art
museums were born of the same revolutionary
impulse from which modern capitalism emerged.
Shonibare's "window dressing" looks that history in
the eye.
These days, when the grotesque depredations of capitalism-run-amok are on full display
wherever you look, his best sculptures can leave you bug-eyed. Their use of common
vernacular belies their visual and conceptual resonance.
The commercial fabrics Shonibare employs are printed in gorgeous, vividly colored patterns -pseudo-African, but actually produced in Northern Europe for export. (The artist was born in
London in 1962 but raised in Lagos, Nigeria, from the age of 3.) The colorful cloth is now firmly
identified with the sub-Saharan region, but its "Dutch wax" fabrication process evolved from
Indonesian batik. It embodies a centuries-old legac y of European colonial adventures, in both
the Eastern and Southern hemispheres.
So, the textile art's consumers define the stuff at least as much as its more invisible producers.
Rather than Africans, however, the prosperous, largely anonymous European makers of the
export cloth are the ones Shonibare dresses up in all their fine Victorian splendor. The friction
sends off sparks.
"A Flying Machine for Every Man, Woman and Child" is a charming, room-size tableau that
might have popped out of an old children's book. Dad, Mom, Junior and Sis -- each dressed to
the hilt in severely tailored jackets, bustles, ruffled skirts, knickers, boots and such -- are daintily
posed on unicycles topped by multicolored, umbrella-like propellers. It's a fanciful depiction of
a romantic ideal of individually powered freedom. And it looks absurd, like Mary Poppins on
acid.
The LA Times April 6 2009, Christopher Knight
The foolishness is multifaceted, thanks first to Shonibare's exquisite exploitation of the textiles.
No garment is made from one cloth pattern or a single color. Instead, a riot of colors and
clanging collisions of luxurious patterns are stitched together, upending any presumptions of
prim Victorian propriety. Showy, aggressive wealth propels this scenic fantasy of individual
liberty, which is available only to some and certainly at a cost.
Here it's prosperous Europeans who look exotic. The group is a classic nuclear family -- a
thoroughly modern form of social organization -- and Shonibare gaily explodes its conventions.
The headless family that plays together, stays together, even if they're all contradictorily
headed in different directions. His funny flying mac hines, which will never get off the ground,
are like antecedents to the modern automobile industry, with its own petro-fueled promises of
Utopian mobility.
The show is a concise introduction to Shonibare's work, built around the flying machine tableau
(it was commissioned last year by Florida's Miami Art Museum). SBMA curator Julie Joyce
added six other individual figures and tableaux made during the last decade, plus a 32-minute
video, "Un Ballo in Maschera" (A Masked Ball) and a few other works. There's a brochure but no
catalog.
th
The lush video is very loosely based on Sweden's King Gustav III: an elegant 18 century patron
of literature and art, tellingly enacted here by a woman. Window-dressing merges with British
costume drama, happily mined by artists including William Hogarth and David Hockney, not to
mention by movies and TV.
Like a fluttery flock of caged rare birds dancing a formally constricted minuet, Shonibare's
wigged courtiers make beautiful mockery of Gus, an anti-reformer and absolute monarchist
assassinated at Stockholm's Royal Opera during a masked ball. Three times the dancers replay
the dramatic moments leading up to and including his shooting. Repetition reinforces the point
that hyper-refinement and brute force are not mutually exclusive, while clichés of masculine
and feminine behavior are just that -- clichés. The video-assassin is, like the king but unlike the
actual one in history, a woman.
The show also includes a remarkable recent work, "La Méduse" (2008), a large wood-and-glass
display case with a meticulously crafted sailing ship on roiling high seas, tossed toward
inevitable doom. It refers to Theodore Gericault's famous monumental painting, "The Raft of
the Medusa" (1818-19), with its pile of dying, shipwrecked sailors.
Gericault's painting dramatizes a notorious event, when a French frigate bound for Senegal to
retake control of land occupied by the British sailed to its destruction in a violent storm. The
officers grabbed a lifeboat, but nearly 150 crew members were left adrift for two weeks on a
makeshift raft. The few who survived brought back stories of cannibalism.
The scandal was that the ship's incompetent captain had pulled strings with French government
cronies to get his job, in which scores of innocent working people died. A field-day for the
newspapers, the story was the original "Heck of a job, Brownie" for the modern world.
But Shonibare turns the journalistic tables. For his shocking display of official malfeasance and
human disregard at the highest levels, paid for with the blood of those at the bottom, he shows
us what Gericault did not: the metaphorical ship of state, its tattered sails made from brightly
colored Dutch-wax fabric. The corrupt argument between French and British oligarchs over
colonial spoils is enshrined as the episode's driving event, not the tabloid-ready distraction of
cannibalism in its cruel aftermath.
The LA Times April 6 2009, Christopher Knight
"La Méduse" sets aside victimhood for a clear but no less dramatic look at what the perpetrators
of the crime valued most. With its monumental display case the sculpture is ready-made for an
art museum, the place where we proudly display
civilization's great achievements.
England's monarch awarded the artist the Order of the
British Empire in 2005, and he now goes by Yinka
Shonibare MBE. Yet one more wry transaction that is not
quite what it might seem to be, the badge of honor soberly
inc ludes him in the society his art appraises with such
inc isive critical candor.
"Yinka Shonibare MBE: A Flying Machine for Every Man,
Woman and Child and Other Astonishing Works," Santa
Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., (805) 963-4364,
through June 21. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; $9; free on
Sundays. www.sbma.net.