El Anatsui
Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works on View Through June 28th
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Article by Cathy Breslaw
www.cathybreslaw.com
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Installation view of Gravity and Grace:
Monumental Works by El Anatsui at the Akron Art Museum, 2012. Photo by Andrew
McAllister, courtesy of the Akron Art Museum.
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El Anatsui is an African
artist who shares time between his childhood home in Ghana and Nigeria. He is a mature artist whose artistic sensibility can be traced to the 60’s and 70’s when
painters, sculptors and installation artists experimented with accessible
materials, turning their backs on tradition, and ushering
in new perspectives on “what is
art”. While travelling through the various rooms at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in downtown San Diego, viewers are struck by the massive sizes of these textile-like
wall and immersive works made with a combination of thousands of liquor bottle
labels, bottle caps, wire ties, and round tin can tops that are wire stitched
together, then fastened together with copper wire. Though the back story of the
work speaks of the cultural, economic, and social issues of colonialism,
globalism, waste, and consumerism, viewers are more caught up in the sheer
visceral reactions to the size and gorgeous shimmering flowing patterns of
gold, silver, red, blue, and brown colors woven through each piece. There is
also a series of oversized ‘Wastepaper Bags’, five to eight feet in size, made
of aluminum, and newspaper speaking to the problem of waste recycling in his
country. Two additional rooms are devoted
to
El Anatsui’s drawings and wooden wall reliefs with metal and
paint. Anatsui carves and scorches with
chainsaws and routers to gouge, torch and mark the many worn wooden slats. He
makes reference to abstract visual systems of communication in these works as
well as to the ancestry of the African people.
Though complex in their compositional elements, there is a
particular directness and raw simplicity in these wood reliefs that is missing
in the massive wall tapestries. It is interesting to note that these massive
works are created with the help of El Anatsui’s thirty assistants and that when
they are hung in the various
museums and other venues, the installers are free to manipulate
these cloth-like metal works and hang them
as they desire. This ‘global collaboration’ in both the creation
and presentation of El Anatsui’s art is a consistent underpinning of his work.
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