Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui by Susan Vogel (review)

Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui, written and directed by the scholar, curator, filmmaker, and photographer Susan Vogel, offers an intimate look into the life of the Ghanaian/Nigerian visual artist El Anatsui. The film features interviews and commentary from him, his colleagues, and collaborators. There are also ample scenes of the ordinary daily activities of this highly celebrated artist, whose work is known internationally. In addition to the featured documentary the video offers twenty-eight minutes of eight shorts that offer more focused and condensed versions of the larger film and are perhaps ideal for use in a classroom setting.

The film opens in Venice, with Anatsui talking with others about the many people who were needed to help him produce the piece that is to hang at the front of the Palazzo Fortuny during one of its Biennales. It then takes the viewer with Anatsui as he walks along a dirt road in Nsukka, Nigeria, where he has lived since he was twenty-nine years old. The first segment, titled “Back to Nsukka,” also includes scenes of Anatsui choosing materials for his artwork from a number of places, including tire shops and the local alcohol distillery, making phone calls, visiting an Internet café, and being photographed along with his creations by a British photographer. These scenes feature voiceovers from Anatsui and his colleagues from the University of Nigeria/Nsukka, where he teaches, and are also interspersed with shots of Anatusi’s creations hanging in galleries and close-ups of the works. The resultant composition makes for a rich display of movement, mirroring Anatsui’s description of his personal life as characterized by displacement and nomadism.

The second section, “Into the Studio,” is devoted to interviews with Anatsui’s studio manager and assistants, who talk about working with him as well as the details of the designs that they produce in a kind of piecework fashion. The viewer learns the names of several of the individual patterns that will contribute to the final tableaus and witnesses, for example, the painstaking assembling of sections made from gin bottle caps that Anatsui collects from local distilleries. Finally, it shows Anatsui directing the arrangements of different blocks of patterns into a tableau that will be reworked until the artist is satisfied that it is ready for public display.

In the section entitled “Looking Inward,” Anatsui talks about the fact that when he reached his forties and fifties he realized that he was not interested in conventional marriage. It was then that he decided that his art would be his partner and his artwork his children. The viewer is allowed into his home where, as the camera pans across books and knickknacks, Anatsui’s voiceover explains that he is not a gregarious person so his artwork fills in for him. This is the most intimate section of the film, with Anatsui discussing how he moved from Ghana to Nigeria, and showing photos of his earliest sculptures as well as some that hold special meaning for him. Toward the end of this section he talks about his upbringing. Even though he does not go into detail about the circumstances of his mother’s death when he was a child, it is clear from the prolonged silences that accompany the camera’s lingering shots of his face that her death weighs heavily on the artist.

The final section of the video, demarcated only by a brief blackout, returns to Venice and the Biennale’s opening, seemingly eavesdropping on viewers commenting on Anatsui’s works among themselves, offering opinions about the work to the filmmaker, and talking to the artist. The film ends with Anatsui walking along the red earth roads of Nigeria, crossing apparently seamlessly into the cities that he travels: an echo of the journeys that he has taken throughout his life. The director allows him the final word, in which he declares in a voiceover that...