the joke is on you: The Work of Yinka Shonibare

Often the result of his layering and juxtaposition of seemingly incongruent historical artifacts (for example high Victorian/ authentic African, modernist abstraction/ printed batik fabric) of cultural expression is registered in a way that makes it difficult for his incisive articulations of historical processes to be reduced to another cliche of identity. On such a note, it will be a mistake to view Shonibare's work as an emblem ofsocio-cultural anthropology. Examined more closely, his R ead against the dominant strain of a currently robust postcolonial discourse, Nigerian-British artist, Yinka Shonibare's work marks a clearly nuanced post- DKWUI ENWEIDR national approach in the increasingly important body of work being produced by diasporan artists in the tight confines of the global metropolis. He arrives at this juncture without the limp pose of the disenfranchised dissident, but rather through a carefully engaged critique, reflection, and elegance. I:I:!1:mJournal of Contemporary African Art· Summer/Fall 1997 It will be a mistake to view Sh0nibare's work as an emblem of socio-cultural anthropology. I work in reality cuts directly into the heart of the historical fictions of modern art, in turn becoming a question of how viewers position themselves in front of what has always been adjudged as fact/knowledge within representation. Yet his work also refers to art's unique ability to absorb questions of representation that seem to belong to other disciplines. Seductive and often colorful, Shonibare's work is about the ironies and allegories of authenticity; about the myths of race, and the complex language of distancing that is often loaded into the wobbly vessel of ethnic stereotype and colonial mimicry. Shonibare makes tableaux vivants out of what is popularly accepted as "African fabric", which in another way may also be understood as the colonial wholecloth of ethnic iconography. By deceptively offering the fabric as "African", without any mediation , except by implicating other cultural norms into his installations through quotation, he seems to be saying that if you accept so uncritically the notion of their Africaness, then surely the joke is on you. But Shonibare is not at all in telling jokes. Rather, throughout his career, he has worked assiduously to imprint a counter discourse in that increasingly alarming aporia called globalization. Offering that there are so many complex sides that underpin globalization, he plumbs the depth charts of that world, entering into its murkier depths to reveal that what you see is not always what is there. How Does a Girl Like You Get to be a Girl Like You, 1995, a work which I first saw at the Barbican Centre in London, in a show,_ which ironically enough was about African fabric, is a classic example of the slippages of meaning and recontextualizations which Shonibare plays with. In the installation, he placed on a low pedestal three exquisitely tailored dresses of Victorian design. Sculptural in their bearing, the dresses with elaborate bustle and trains are stitched together out of a patchwork of those exuberantly printed cotton ''African fabrics", as can be found in any West African market. By juxtaposing the stiff upper lip of Britishness and the prim and proper aesthetic of Victorian denouement with these colonial emblems of a supposedly native sensibility, he works to reunite two discourses which normatively define and name one as high and the other as low. The same method of interrogation equally continues in Shonibare's recent work, Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour, 1996, a mise en scene in which the artist meticulously recreated a fantasy environment of the Victorian Era. It is a scene, if we accept the fantasy of the screen adaptation of Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, of seemingly cultured and civilized conversation, passion, love, and what not. In this sumptuous and decadently ostentatious setting, Shonibare laboriously designed all the original fabrics, wallpaper, and carpet, on which the contemporary icon of a black soccer player is woven. Printed in damask by the London Printworks after the aforementioned pattern of "African fabric" the furniture comprised of a chaise lounge, ball and claw footed chair, fire screens, etc. were all upholstered in this fabric. Scrupulously employing the fabrics as ready-mades, Shonibare, also unravels within the...