El Anatsui: Art and Life by Susan Vogel (review)

El Anatsui has never been tortured by the tyranny of a canvas and its definition of a grid. His bottle cap tapestries, or “metal sheets,” are normally constructed by the logic of a grid, but this grid is not weighted by the psychic and historical baggage of European modern art and architecture. His work is a new grid/medium because of Anatsui’s careful calibration of how it operates as a mechanical, conceptual, and social device. Anatsui understands his art to be at once mimetic, philosophical, and communicative, an aspect of African art that has been undertheorized. Where Western art has typically required artists to choose a mimetic function, African artists refused the choice, and that refusal is part of the luminosity of Anatsui’s work.

This review is a long time coming for African Arts, as Susan Vogel’s El Anatsui: Art and Life was published seven years ago. I am not certain the reason for this, but I can say that for myself, El Anatsui’s tapestries were so dominant in/as the field when I entered into contemporary African art history that I did not notice that it had not been reviewed in our flagship journal. In this review, I will focus my remarks on what seems to be a commonality in the literature on Anatsui (even if unstated): the play of proximity and distance. It often characterizes authors’ voices as they implicitly state the credentials to interpret the work, but also characterizes the debate over whether we should read Anatsui’s work as being “African” or “global.”

Overall, Vogel’s comprehensive survey is an indispensable resource, both in its collection of primary statements and documents about Anatsui’s biography and formal development, as well as its sumptuous collection of color and black-and-white archival images. The bibliography is comprehensive, remarkable as a history of the themes and trends in the reception of Anatsui’s work. El Anatsui: Art and Life is detailed and careful in its descriptions of Anatsui’s works and presents his voice as the primary interpretive mechanism; it is surely emblematic of the friendship between Vogel and Anatsui, but also of Anatsui’s famous generosity in sharing his process. Above all, the book cherishes Anatsui’s interpretation of his overall project; Vogel’s is subsumed into his artistic voice, a point to which I will return. Vogel’s first words are that this is not a book “about theory or research” (p. 6), which generally means that her interpretations emerge unexpectedly and sporadically throughout. It is clear she did not want them to overshadow what was, by the time she wrote this, the enormous figure of Anatsui. Her approach is typical of the 2005–2011 flood of El Anatsui exhibition catalogs, monographs, and articles and her own documentary film, Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui (2011).

El Anatsui: Art and Life is divided into two thematic sections: “Life” and “Art,” which contain a total of eight chapters on various topics of the two themes. In “Life,” Vogel charts Anatsui’s career from Ghana at the Kumasi School of Science and Technology to a teaching post at Nsukka to his breakthrough on the global stage in Africa Remix and the stunning display of Dusasa I (2007) at the 2007 Venice Biennale. The chapters in “Life” are not rigorously organized, but instead meander more-orless chronologically and are interspersed with important insights that sometimes appear as sidebar discussions. The “Art” section focuses more closely on the different strategies that Anatsui has developed over his long career that set him apart from other contemporary African artists, including the important decision he made to not depict the human form in his work. It was the implied body that aligned him more closely to global minimalist and abstract practices and triggered important debates about the indigeneity of his work, discussions that Vogel notes have faded in recent years.

Though she claims that this isn’t a work of theory...