El Anatsui's "Gravity and Grace" at the Akron Art Museum

El Anatsui, Red Block, 2010. Aluminum and copper wire. Two pieces, each
measuring 200.75  x 131.5." Author photo.

The tour de force show, Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatusui, recently closed at the Akron Art Museum, where it had been on display since June. The show travels to the Brooklyn Museum, to open in February 2013. It is infinitely to Akron's credit that they brought this work by the great African artist to the United States and organized the tour in conjunction with Anatsui's New York gallery, Jack Shainman. Akron was the first American museum with the foresight to collect El Anatsui even before he was included among the African artists in the 1990 Venice Biennale, where simultaneously he was discovered and received as a master by the rest of the world.

El Anatsui, Earth's Skin, 2009. Aluminum and copper wire. 177x 394." variable.
Courtesy of the artists and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo by Joe Levack, courtesy of the Akron Art Museum.

Anatsui was born in Ghana but works in Nigeria, where he keeps a large studio of assistants busy fabricating his monumental works. These are constructed only of liquor caps and copper wire. The works made from these materials began with the serendipitous discovery one day of a sack filled with liquor caps, which he took back to play with in the studio. He now acquires them not by scavenging, but through industrial recycling in partnership with a distillery.

While one can compare Anatsui's metallic draperies to any number of African, Eastern, an Western art forms and materials, they remain unique: astonishing in beauty and bountiful in metaphorical connections. The artist's statements for the the Museum focus on the poignant power of the caps as symbols: Liquor and slaves once were both commercial products exchanged on West African shores. This token of commercial ties between the Americas and Africa is likely to felt as a natural poetry to an African—as deep and simple as the blues—even if North Americans have to process the thought as history and to consult the footnotes for nuance.

 What I find almost heart-stopping about the walls draped with monumental sheets of tiny, linked metal is neither the far that they are created from humble,post-consumer materials, nor that a sobering historical link between peoples and centuries is made in the process of typing together these symbols of dehumanized souls. Both of these points—central aspects of the work—come as afterthoughts to my direct, sensory experience of monumental, glimmering, luxe hanging artworks. Anatsui discusses these in relation to painting, but I find this comparison puzzling and remote.

Anatsui produces this work in flat sheets that are constructed gradually as small units are attached to one another to create ever-larger ones. The completed work is essentially a flexible, two-dimensional sheet with shape defined by its edges, but which has no internal rigidity, like fabric. Since Amemo is not even four-square, it can appear unique with each differently oriented installation, its colors concentrated in ways that create a new work from the same cloth each time.

El Anatsui, Amemo,(Mask of Humankind), 2010. Aluminum and copper wire.
208-5/8 x 161-3/8." Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Photo by Andrew MaAllister, courtesy of Akron Art Museum.

Oni of Ife, Nigeria

Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain in
coronation robes

Especially since the works are shaped as the installers (performers? tailors? costumers?) hang or dress them, I think it's useful to understand the works are textiles into which rich designs are knitted. They are tapestries, royal robes, even decorated chain mail armor for princes and heroes. Images of robed royalty from several cultures reside comfortably in imagined proximity to Anatsui's metal tapestries. There is a mutual reflection of majesty.

Bouba Abdoulay, Sultan of Rey-Bouba,
Cameroon

18th c. Hawaiian royal cloak

Ancient Japanese armor

Skilled knitters, embroiderers, lace-makers, and weavers employ traditional common languages of stitches. The fineness, inventiveness, and value of their work are measured by their skills with their particular stitches and control over the spaces between them. Sometimes their work is dense; sometimes light and airy; and sometimes the effect depends on the a combination arising from the artist's decisions about how much tension to keep on the thread, how much to twist it, and how to anticipate the final effect as the work is in process.

Basic construction stitch of Gli

Anatsui has similarly developed a vocabulary of folded shapes for the bottle caps. His studio workers spend days simply creating deep caches of each type to serve as the basic "stitches" for the work. They assemble units of these with copper wire, and then make increasingly large units in designs the artist designates. It's comparable to patchwork quilting, an additive process of design.

Construction using both positive and negative
space.

While the viewer's impulse is to marvel at all the caps used in the work, it's also important to notice how Anatsui uses space in the pieces too. Some of the work is as dense as armor and other—the Gli, or Wall, especially—is diaphanous, even though all is assembled from the same material.

Shimmering, transparent Gli

El Anatsui, Gli installed. Author photo.

In Akron, each section of Gli was hung simply, without bunching, like a scrim on a theater set. It's easier to see through these floating walls from a distance than close up, when the eye wants to focus on details of bottle caps that stand out from the fabric's basic, repeated stitch. As I looked through one from a distance, though, toward a massive piece hanging on a the gallery wall, Gli seemed to provide a textured, golden glow that heightened the sensual appeal of the view, making it even more pleasurable to be standing just where I was, satisfied.

In the video on the Akron Art Museum's page about Gravity and Grace, Anatsui notes that the concept of a wall is a human construct; that walls sequester, divide, and deprive people of freedom. As with his comments on the sock-political meaning of liquor bottle caps, I appreciate that this is a meaningful starting point for a conception of walls. But again, I perceive that these particular walls that he has made appear far away in their effect from the metaphors he cites. Because the walls that shimmer in this gallery are so light, penetrable, and radiant, I find thoughts of restriction or prevention the farthest ones from my mind as I view them. These walls dissolve more than they divide.

El Anatsui, Waste Paper Bags, 2004-2010. Aluminum printing
plates, paint, and copper wire. Variable sizes up to 86" high,
between 36" and 54" at base. Author photo.

Gravity and Grace includes earlier bodies of work as well, notable the Waste Paper Bags made between 2004 and 2010 from recycled aluminum printing plates. These are free-standing sculptures of monumental size, assembled from mashed but legible printing plates held together by copper wire. While recognizable in the form of carrying satchels, they have the presence of human figures. To move among them is to await your bus with anxiety in the giants' terminal The induced grief and weariness in me. To look at them is to look into a trash heap of discarded, half-burned, defaced human stories. 

Detail, Waste Paper Bags.

In these carry-alls, people carry around lives of trash. How can one feel beauty or value in a world where ugliness and waste prevail? I think the Waste Paper Bags achieve more eloquently the purported social goals of the work in bottle caps. Messages about the ubiquitousness of trash, of consumerism's ravishment of the environment, of the destructiveness of Western capitalism on rural Africa—these and other issues born of the tensions between Africa and the West appear built into the fabric and final expression of this series.


Last year I reviewed a show of truly surpassing beauty, art of the ancient Ife culture in what is present day Nigeria. Nigeria is the home of some of the most awe-inspiring and spiritual art in the world, the products of brilliant civilizations known mostly to archaeology now. As in many former Western colonies (slave ports before that), cultural identity has to be an extremely embattled question not only in the collective, but in any individual artist's soul. To have such noble local heritage, yet in the present day to live in a country so wounded by its contact with the West—this is a situation we in the United States can try only with the greatest exertions of imagination and humanity to fathom.

El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace, 2010. Aluminum and copper wire. 208-5/8 x 161-3/8." Courtesy of the artist and
Jack Shainman Gallery. New York. Photo by Andrew McAllister, courtesy of Akron Art Museum.

El Anatsui's work in Gravity and Grace addresses in just these modes the appalling divisions that must exist between his part of the world and ours. He demonstrates monumental cultural decisions to be made when reality constitutes a modern inheritance of trash and memories of ancient splendor. Gravity and grace are what he presents in this tremendous show, through a sober, dignified, and luminously humanistic mind, rooted and raised in a very specific soil.

El Anatsui, installation at Akron Art Museum. Aluminum and copper wire.
Author photo.

Is there a Message in this Medium? Consumer Materials in Contemporary Art

The Canzani Center Gallery at the Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) is now, as so often, an excellent  place to slow down and enjoy an encounter with cutting-edge contemporary art. "Supply and Demand," the first show from exhibitions director Michael Goodson, is curated by Lisa Dent, CCAD faculty member and associate curator for contemporary art at the Columbus Museum of Art. The exhibit showcases art that uses mass-produced, consumer materials in a significant way. The work was chosen from outstanding local collections.

Alejandro Almanza Pereda, White Carpet Treatment, 2009. 20x36."
Pizzutti Collection. Courtesy of CCAD.  

Alejandro Almanza Pereda's White Carpet Treatment is an exquisite work composed entirely of incandescent light bulbs, porcelain sockets, and electrical wire. It must be an especially intuitive, associative process that brings Almanza to light bulbs ("Eureka!"), for this little "carpet" shows the unusual qualities of mind and eye required by an artist who faces the almost infinite world of commodities, yet isolates the one particular item that serves his ideas. This is quite a different thought process from shopping through the departments of an art store, with its time-honored arrays of pencils, canvas, and clay.


Even in 2009, the world was embracing the CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps). Incandescent bulbs will soon be entirely off store shelves. Almanza's carpet is made, moreover, not of the bulbs one puts in a lamp, but of round, satin-finish ones used in a make-up mirror, or even on a marquee; they radiate the abundance of light that signals old-fashioned movie-star glamour. This photograph of White Carpet Treatment in a dark room—like a marquee against a night sky—reveals a pattern carved out by disabled bulbs, in this case a traditional, double diamond rug pattern. But as installed in the Canzani Center Gallery, it sits on a concrete floor in a brightly-lit room, and it hovers like a shimmering cloud.


The title, White Carpet Treatment, suggests a couple of locutions, "red carpet treatment" and "white glove treatment." The Red Carpet is where the principals of marquee glamour pose in the spotlight, even though they are shadows of real royalty for whom the red carpet was first unfurled. White glove treatment is the painstaking care with which important people are treated. Almanza's VIP carpet, however attractive, is reduced to symbol only, though: it cannot be walked. It is brittle glitter only, barely big enough to stand on. What a brilliant use he's made of lightbulbs—soon to be as outdated as glamour and royalty?

Jim Hodges, Study for a Brighter Light,2002, 32.5x25" framed. Collection of Dave and
Nancy Gill. Courtesy of CCAD.

Study for a Brighter Light, detail

Study for a Brighter Light by Jim Hodges (2002) mounts a "broken" (carefully cut) mirror on paper in a manner that can suggest either that it's exploding, or that its shards are being pulled back to the center for reintegration. Study is a work that almost eludes the viewer, there is so little to it—it has just enough frame to hold it together, and it's hung on a white wall in a room where the mirrors reflect yet more white wall. But this succinct work challenges the viewer to hunt around for something to see. The effort is rewarded over and over. It's actually bursting with subtle events, from the way the paper's matte finish and the texture serve as a black hole behind the mirror's shining reflections; to the sharp sparkle given off by the cut edges of the glass; to the surprising discovery that the "empty," flat paper in the middle can feel like a light source. I don't think, though, that Hodges was inspired by a mass-produced object when he made this. It feels more like the mirror was a collage material that, in combination with paper, could reveal his subject: light.

Jeff Sonhouse, Meeting at the Crossroads, 2003, 65x75." Pizzuti
Collection. Courtesy of CCAD.

Sonhouse, Meeting at the Crossroads, detail.

Similarly, Jeff Sonhouse's colorful, aggressive double portrait, Meeting at the Crossroads (2003), is an exceptional painting enhanced by the use of burnt book matches to represent the Afro-styled hair of the subjects. Sonhouse takes pains to dress his fashion-conscious conjoined twins in luxury pinstriped suiting and silk ties. One twin wears a match-book fox stole. The clothing is all painted with trompe l'oeil finesse. In fact, it took some discipline not to touch the painting to determine whether the suits were made of paint or collaged cloth.


Since the close, painted imitation of reality is one important element of Sonhouse's painting, the use of real products (obvious pretenders to reality) stands in a different relationship to the whole than in a work like Almanza's light-bulb sculpture. Here the mixed-medium is the message, and would seem to support interest in mixed personalities, mixed identities, and mixed social roles. Does an Afro made of matches mean something "real" and incendiary—"in your face?" Does a trompe l'oeil pocket handkerchief suggest the elusive, inscrutable reality to be guessed at?


In her catalogue essay, "Marginal Cost," Dent tells us, "'Supply and Demand' examines the work of artists who...contemplate the necessity of the things we think we cannot live without. As the economic health of modernized nations has become more and more dependent on the production and distribution of commodities, developed countries have found themselves drowning under the weight of consumer goods. Many visual artists have found this situation as an opportunity to consider the consequences of a global economy and the possibilities for creative outlets."


The works I've mentioned don't do that. Two works by Brazilian artist Vik Muniz do. Muniz has gained fame not only for work like the pieces in this show, but for his film, Wasteland, which documents his efforts to improve conditions for trash-pickers in Rio de Janeiro. 

Vik Muniz, Orestes Pursued by the Furies, 2006, 53x40." Collection of
Chuck and Joyce Shenk. Courtesy of CCAD.

Vik Muniz, Medea about to Kill
her Children, 2006, 50x40." Collection of
Mary Kidder. Courtesy of CCAD.

Orestes, Pursued by the Furies (After Adolphe Willam Bouguereau, a late 19th-century academic painter) and Medea, about to Kill her Children (after Eugene Delacroix) are both from Muniz's 2006 series, "Pictures of Junk." Seen from a distance, each photograph resembles a muted-palette version of a painting with a dramatic classical subject. Upon approach, the viewer discovers that the "painting" in large-format photograph of a scene described in junk, laid out in enormous space on a warehouse floor. Orestes, Medea, and the other figures are outlined in chains, cables and ropes; shadows are made by more or less dense arrays of washers or nuts; and the higher and lower values, the shapes in the background, are formed of rusted paint cans, engines, bottles, tires, barrels, crates, hardware, ladders, furniture, appliances...anything inorganic and mass-produced that can be thrown out by one party and salvaged by another. With this paraphernalia, Muniz undertakes to reproduce canonical paintings of ancient Greek myths that are known to us through the great tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. Centuries of highest culture translated and retranslated from one elite medium to another until it's on the concrete, defined by junk. Culture shock, anyone?

Vik Muniz, Medea...Detail, interior of figure showing use of washers.

"Supply and Demand" is a fairly pristine show. The two Muniz pieces excepted, the rest of the work--even the Sonhouse painting--makes sparing use of materials. Even if they were pulled from the trash heap, the elements of each work have been purposefully selected to invoke ideas. Muniz's work is different because he doesn't use trash as metaphor for something else, and he uses lots of it, indiscriminately. In his photographs, the junk is junk, barely sorted.

Vik Muniz background includes typewriter, propeller, muffler.

Neither Orestes, Pursued by the Furies nor Medea, about to Kill Her Children protests the heaps of junk, however. Where Muniz the man is apparently involved in social action to improve the lives of people who have to survive off trash; and though he does this by making art works like these and selling them, it doesn't add up that the artworks themselves protest the existence of the junk or constitute activism. The piquant point in this work is the contrast between trash and cultural treasure. Depending on where one stands, either junk or the art canon may be deplored; either may be valued. But about recycling, or the excess of abandoned consumer goods, I think there is no political statement in the works themselves.

U.S. first class postage stamps, 2011

Recycling, consumerism, and over-population are pressing social issues, so it's reasonable that they would interest contemporary artists. It's incorrect to assume, however, that discarded and repurposed commodities are the subjects of art they appear in. For many middle-class Americans in the early 21st century, junk of the sort Muniz depicts induces  mixed feelings. There's the guilt and anxiety we feel about our roles in a wealthy and wasteful society. But guilt conflicts with aesthetic tastes formed by the culture's elevation of what is by now called simply Design. We never imagine well-designed goods as part of the junk stream, no matter how many broken plastic Eames chairs or shapely Crate and Barrel Plexiglas canisters are thrown out. We make socio-economic and aesthetic assumptions when we think about trash.


For others, on the other hand, consumerism's cast-offs represent abundance and play. Tinkerers, flea market optimists, antiquers and collectors will take the risks of finding golden needles in the flotsam and jetsam. They believe not in recycling, but in alchemy.

Jean Tinguely, Heureka, at Zurichhorn. Photo by Roland zh.;
licensed under Creative Commons.

The Dadaists exuberantly appropriated anything they could reimagine. The Swiss sculptor, Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) made kinetic sculpture from his enormous collections of industrial parts and equipment. He was a satirist of mass production in fact, but his work is now beloved more for its antic whimsy than for its sly commentary. It's comparable to movie maker Jacques Tati's anti-industrial irony in the figure of M. Hulot. Hulot's humanity is radiant in any generation and circumstance.

Simon Rodia, Nuestro Pueblo, detail,
Photo by Polylerus; licensed under Creative
Commons.

Along the same lines, outsiders and artists working in folk traditions have always re-purposed consumer goods as art materials. Simon Rodia's Watts Towers (Nuestro Pueblo) are built from found objects secured to armatures of pipes and mortar. They incorporate cast-offs from a pottery factory, bed frames, and soda bottles. Rodia scrounged materials himself; his project attracted found contributions from many interested people.

Bill Miller, JFK Freak Flag,14x20." Courtesy of
the Lindsay Gallery

Contemporary artist Bill Miller works with folk motifs but isn't motivated by necessity to salvage linoleum from buildings facing the wrecking ball. In JFK Freak Flag, old linoleum patterns put images of the 1960s into a context of folkloric "bygone days." Space travel, the Peace Movement, and iconic images of the Viet Nam war are mythologized—both augmented and de-clawed at the same time. The linoleum lends the feel of the '30s or '40s. That aura of a time even farther away, a period of greater simplicity, adds to the poignancy of Miller's work.


Especially in the Third World, discarded consumer goods are recycled into striking, useful items by crafts workers who profit by their sales. These photographs show how of newspapers that are rolled and used to make mats. The coin purse is made of woven candy wrappers. But these charming works, unlike those sponsored by Vik Muniz, fetch $5, not tens of thousands. Why? They are consumer commodities, not art, that singular commodity that few can afford.


When it comes down to activism—doing something about the proliferation of trash—workshop artisans have it over the artists: They are consistently and systematically doing something to reduce the junk heap. They're trying to earn a living, but their occupation is all about the materials. 


Obsolescence; death; waste; greed; abundance; material display: These are all themes for art. Many materials can be used to express them. The connection between materials used and ideas arising from a finished work of art is a result of the artist's skill. It's unlikely that reassigned materials will tell the story by themselves.


"Supply and Demand" is a terrific show. Dent's catalogue is printed as a glossy pamphlet the right size to carry and read—or to ignore—while viewing the show. Refreshingly, there is not a single label in the gallery. Whenever you're ready for discussion, you have a booklet with the thoughts of a deeply informed person who's been reflecting on contemporary art for her whole career: the ideal interlocutor. My disagreements with Dent on some points are a sign of the show's strength and ability to engage. She gives us great work and pitches guiding ideas. The table's set for a smorgasbord; let the viewer step up.