Catalogue essay for the exhibition, Yinka Shonibare: Be-Muse, Rome, 2001. Text may not be quoted without due acknowledgment, or reproduced in any form including web-mirroring without Olu Oguibe's written consent.
However, difference, or at least the guise of difference did not always fit this narrow definition or have so definite a consequence. It did not always amount to worse neighborhood services or a call for exclusion, or worse still, expatriation. A culture that dwells on difference also distinguishes between forms and categories of difference because it operates on an economy of difference. It demarcates between tolerable difference, and intolerable difference, between benign and profitable difference, as it were, and dangerous otherness. It tolerates difference when it satiates its appetite for entertainment, or even more especially, when it serves that eternally crucial purpose of propping and sustaining its illusions of superiority and greatness. Difference that confronts its narcissism with cynicism, on the other hand, or challenges its claims to primacy and grandeur, or threatens to deface or dislodge its symbols of uniqueness and perpetual relevance, it tries to expurgate, radically and surgically, from its body-politik. In effect difference that merely services the pleasure and civic industries, difference that provides labour for the utility systems, difference that gives clarity to the nonetheless futile logic of the center and its elsewhere, even difference that by its very presence lends credibility to the culture's claims of equity and tolerance and offers proof if it was needed that there is the empire has room and heart enough for difference, that there is an edge of black in the Union Jack after all, that the metropolis is, to use the parlance of the day, multi-cultural; such difference is granted a place of indispensability in the translucent cartography of the culture of difference. This expected, requisite, difference is also fertile ground for the sharp, outsider imagination intent on taking a chance and charting its course through the labyrinths, barricades and mine fields of the culture game. Over several centuries, generations of England's outsiders have understood this, and understood it far better than the native himself, for, as James Baldwin pointed out about America, the other culture of difference, it is those who are threatened with effacement and displacement, but nevertheless are tolerated on the strength of the same argument that is employed to displace them, who understand best the illogic behind their condition. Because it is they who must prove themselves otherwise worthy of the generosity of acceptance, and must endlessly be on their guard because theirs is a treacherous condition, and must devote energy and time to unravel the curious psychology of their detractors in other to unravel, also, the intriguing complexities of their common destiny with this detractor, who have the onus of sensitivity, criticality and self-reflexity because the burden of the cross is always upon them.
Only those who must engage in a constant battle to exist, commit themselves to strategizing for their existence, and thus must dwell on, and in time understand, the ground-rules of that engagement. Those who are blessed with the privilege to take being and existence for granted, have no need to understand either themselves or those who are deprived of it. Because the metropolis has less need to question structures and patterns of existence that have served it so well, the burden of understanding falls on those who are served less well, which is why England's outsiders excel in understanding the variegations of difference in the logic of their location, and especially in the knowledge that even the quarantine of difference sometimes affords those who are intent on escaping it, the very key for their extrication. The door may be narrow and fraught with risks for in order to defy and subvert the illogic of difference, the outsider must begin with an exaggeration of his own difference. He must bear his cross in full light if he must be relieved of it, and may slip out only under the darkness of his own nakedness. Because the path is narrow and the ground treacherous, few are able, ever, to succeed at this game without becoming, in the end, nothing but that which they set out to escape, which is what they are meant to be in the first place, and to remain ever after. The outsider who must insert himself in the guarded spaces of the metropolis must do so only by playing the card of tolerable difference in the hope that it may serve as a guise for his intentions and schemes, rather than as the straightjacket that perpetually defines his being. Such is the price of the ticket.
While this knowledge is commonplace among outsider citizens of the empire's residue, it is nevertheless less apparent to those who reside outside the borders of the metropolis. For cultural practitioners who come to the metropolis in their adulthood, it requires is a period of often frustrating engagement with the culture establishment before they are able to grapple successfully with this given.
Yinka Shonibare gained visibility in the mid-nineteen-nineties by devoting himself to a thorough understanding of the languages of the metropolis, or, perhaps more accurately, the devices and strategies of its culture game, and especially the peculiar rules of the game with regard to the place and destiny of the postcolonial outsider. Paying rigorous attention to the critical discourses of the day, especially postmodernism and its minority discourses, Shonibare understood that in order to break into the culture game of the metropolis he had but few cards, few choices, few avenues or guises all of which, inevitably, required of him to submit to a test of difference, and worse still, to pass that test.
Born in England of parents who had come from West Africa, Shonibare was raised abroad within a different culture, among a people whose pride and self-confidence bothers on arrogance and whose understanding of citizenship and belonging run diametrical to the British, and this self-confidence would serve him well in negotiating his place in the contemporary British culture. One may dwell a little here on the significance of Shonibare's upbringing in Lagos, one of the world's liveliest metropolitan cities.
In the nineteen-seventies, Lagos was the capital city of one of the wealthiest nations in the Third World, a nation which, though it had just emerged from a bitter, thirty-month civil war, nevertheless commanded respect in the community of nations thanks to its new-found oil wealth and its determination to transform this wealth into political mettle. Completely spared the ravages of war because the theatre of the civil war was far away in Eastern Nigeria, Lagos moved quickly to recuperate from the momentary instability that was its only loss in the war, and as the highly entrepreneurial, former rebels in the East surged back into the city, and the nation's military leaders regained the reigns of power, the city threw its doors open to the world with the promise of money, sophistication, the charm of the new, and the promise of stability. There were academics from all corners of the Third World, from India and Indonesia to Brazil and Guyana, construction engineers from Germany and oil experts from France, investors and merchants from Syria and Lebanon, immigrant workers in their millions from across the entire West African region, as well as Diaspora Africans keen to witness the miracle nation where a young army officer who was still in his early thirties had crushed a rebellion and was determined to rebuild Africa's greatest modern nation and restore the glory of the race. Lagos played host to leading musicians and performers from around the globe, including country and western stars from America, the most prominent African American performers of the day, and an emerging crop of new pop headliners from different parts of the African continent. The movie theatres were flooded with Bollywood romances and American Kung-fu action flicks, and every child knew his Jimmy Cliff lyrics and Bruce Lee kicks. Elsewhere around the country, a burgeoning popular culture was taking shape around a shared spirit of optimism and supreme confidence. The laid-back Highlife music of the nineteen-sixties yielded momentarily to a new form of guitar and lyrics driven funk and rock music before reinventing itself in an equally hard-driven, rock-influenced new Highlife as bands proliferated from city to city and the youth reveled in their new-found freedom. Among Nigeria's leaders, a scheme was in place to transform Lagos and proclaim it the capital city of the Black World. New cultural complexes and museums went up, vast constructions that ran on a seemingly depthless oil purse appeared allover the city, vehicle assemblies around the country trucked in throngs of automobiles to claim the new highways. As if to prove their determination to reclaim its status as a global city, Lagos hosted the first World Festival of Black Arts and Culture [FESTAC] in 1977, which attracted thousands of Africans and Africans in the Diaspora from hundreds of nations including the American ambassador the United Nations and former Martin Luther King aide, Andrew Young. As Nigeria's young military leaders put it, money was "no object" and exuberance was the order of the day. This was the city of Shonibare's youth, as of celebrated British writer Ben Okri, and a youth who grows up in this environment as did Shonibare and Okri, with access to popular culture from allover the world and a highly globalized consciousness and without a sense of marginal self or questionable identity, obviously developed a psyche quite diametrical to the scheming and understated, marginal, postcolonial unconscious that Britain required of its outsider citizens. Ironically, moving from Lagos to London was like moving from a free territory to a colony under a cultural mandate, a city of pretences where people know their places and live out their destinies under the powerful, ever watchful panopticon of the State.
Upon return to London, therefore, Shonibare had to relearn the rules of belonging because he was no longer the black British boy who left, he was now the aristocratic youth from Lagos come back to reclaim his citizenship, in a country where neither his aristocratic ancestry elsewhere, nor his birthright to citizenship could translated to the privilege of acceptance. He spent his years in the British art academy resisting and defying the perpetual demand for difference, struggling to refuse and refute the orthodoxies of his supposed peculiarity. Rather than produce art that represented or signified an elsewhere, as he was required to, an art that separated him from the rest and lent credulity to what he considered distracting fictions of difference, he made art that spoke instead to his affinities with the restHe moved too quickly to seek his place alongside his peers, to make his claim on nation and station, to belong by simply saying, I am. He failed.
No matter. Still possessed of that far more metropolitan consciousness that Lagos imbued in him, Shonibare's early work as a professional artist in England transcended the minuscular preoccupation with the immediate that was the predilection of his peers. He made work that was not simply in line with the period obsessions, but spoke to issues and concerns beyond the miniature territory of en vogue British and contemporary European art, work that dealt with nuclear disasters in Eastern Europe, minority experiences in America, issues in the Third World, all of which was in character with his upbringing in a metropolitan "elsewhere". However, the formal language of his work was no different from that of his immediate contemporaries, and in the culture game of the Western metropolis, this was not a winning strategy, as many other, highly talented British artists of like background have discovered. Three decades earlier, another young artist, Frank Bowling, had dwelt on same preoccupations and sought to exercise same creative liberties to speak to all that speaks back to the artist, unfettered by the constraints of period obsessions or institutional and cultural expectations, again perhaps too quickly, only to come to the same realization that to aspire beyond creative territories earmarked for the metropolis's others without careful strategizing, was to deal a losing hand in the culture game. Raised in British Guiana, Bowling studied in same class as David Hockney at the Royal College of Art in London where he is convinced that he was passed up for the gold-medal in 1962 (which went to Hockney), and was awarded the silver-medal instead. Like the young Shonibare, Bowling's interests also extended beyond the largely mundane preoccupations of his peers, Hockney's obsessions with Cliff Richard, for instance, or Ron Kitaj's formal experiments, and focused on the great, historic events taking place in the colonies. He was more interested in representing the collapse of empire, epochal confrontations between France and the Algerians, the emergence of modern nations in Africa and Asia, the events in the Congo and the death of Lumumba, although, at the same time, he sought to marry these larger concerns with the same formal experiments that his peers were engaged in. As Bowling has stated, although his subject matter was Lumumba rather than Marilyn Monroe, and some of his work was inspired by Chuck Berry and Little Richard rather than Cliff Richard, it was pop, nevertheless. However, as the "outsider" of his generation, his work was seen to lack clarity because it did not sufficiently emphasize his difference, thematically and formally. That his postcolonial, more globalized consciousness led to Lumumba and the Congo was fine, but to make pop art like the rest, or color-field paintings as he did later in New York, was to attempt to obliterate the distance that was required of him, and so, a new category was created for his work, "expressionist figuration", into which he was quarantined alongside a spent Francis Bacon, and eventually terminated as a contender in contemporary British art. Bowling lost in the culture game. A generation after Bowling, another crop of young outsiders tried to break through barricades of the British art establishment, among them Yoko Ono, David Medala and Rasheed Araeen. Ono was a pioneer of performance and sound art, Medala a pioneer of British conceptual art, and Araeen, trained as an engineer, began with minimalism before venturing into performance art and situations in the early nineteen-seventies. Again, these artists tried to circumvent or prevail over the establishment by defying the rules of engagement and refusing to play the card of difference. Because their strategy was no different from Bowlings, and their formal language, like his, was avant-garde without signifying the distance of difference, they, too, were evacuated into the margins until recently when revisionist histories have tried to recuperate and acknowledge their contributions.
Shonibare's challenge, therefore, was to devise a working strategy in order to break the code of this historical relationship, and in effect break the cycle of consignment to the margins. He had to find a way to pass the test of difference, to engage and outwit it rather than confront or defy it, and at the same time hope to break through the ranks and into the sacred space of acknowledgment without condemning himself to the irremediable location of self-immolation and caricature. This he did in 1994 with a group of paintings called "Double Dutch". In the paintings Shonibare used stretched, everyday fabric, having bought the particular line of fabric from Brixton market in South London. A considerable amount of literature has been generated around Shonibare's choice of fabric for "Double Dutch" and the fact that the "Dutch wax" fabric is made in Indonesia or Europe, patented and marketed by a firm in Manchester, England, but is nevertheless historically identified as African because it is widely used across postcolonial Africa, especially in the former British colonies of West, East and Southern Africa where it is part of everyday apparel. The paintings were presented as an installation, wall-bound against a pink background, and as individual pieces would eventually migrate to other formations and installations, such as "Deep Blue" in 1997. But the formal, postmodern devices, the use of installation or the conceptual status of the color pink as an empty signifier, mattered none whereas the loud, “tropical” design of the support meant everything. The fabrics, and "Double Dutch" attracted instant attention as galleries, museums, and curators embraced work and medium as direct references to Shonibare's African identity. Finally, the artist had endorsed the fiction of his own otherness, and in choosing an "African" signifier and language for his work, in coding his work with transparent ethnicity he had restored the distance between the native and himself and retracted his claim to a place in the center of the metropolis. Or so it seemed.
Shonibare’s “Double Dutch”, understated and misunderstood as it is, must nevertheless stand as one of the most important works of cultural contestation in the late twentieth century because, far more than any other work in contemporary British art, it succeeds in outwitting and subverting the desires and machinations of the culture of difference. Formally, “Double Dutch” is a pleasant and lively work; not at all extraordinary in this sense, and lacking in any engaging iconography that can be gleaned from the surface of the support. Yet, this formal ordinariness aside, rarely is a work so carefully assembled, every aspect so thoroughly worked out, every element of signification so meticulously articulated, every ramification so clearly calculated and anticipated. As mentioned earlier, Shonibare found his language of difference, the wax print fabric, in Brixton, South London, known for its diverse demography, but even more so as the capital of Black Britain. Although like communities exist in other parts of London and in such other British cities as Birmingham and Manchester, Brixton bears the added exoticism of a transposed tropical bazaar with its bold store-fronts and hand-painted signs, its stocks of so-called “ethnic” foods and culinary accessories, its syncopations and cacophonies that remind the stranger of the complexities and allures of Babel, its costumes and apparels, its myriad skin hues and class complexities. Brixton obviously registers the existence and presence of communities and sensibilities far more complex, and alive, than the chiaroscuro of mainstream narratives, yet, on the surface, Brixton is the cliché of otherness, reducible, classifiable, transparent; difference per excellence. Where better to identify the marker of his own difference than in this cardboard capital of difference? And how better to do so than to locate it within the heart of the metropolis itself, conceived, manufactured, marketed and consumed? With this choice Shonibare subtly indicated how tenuous is the connection between the otherness in his ancestry, and this piece of British textile mercantilism. The signifier that would denote and inscribe his otherness is, after all, entirely British.
Shonibare’s choice of title, itself, clearly indicated that he was engaged in a game, one that he was sufficiently confident he could win because he had come to understand its intricacies and pitfalls. Again, in this regard, one couldn’t find a more aptly, more carefully titled work in all of contemporary art. So far most readers have pointed only to the possibility that Shonibare’s title, “Double Dutch”, must refer to the fact that a brand of the wax-print fabrics that where used in the paintings is known as Dutch wax. However, Shonibare’s title resonates with several, more significant meanings. In recent times Double Dutch has come to stand for a high-profile revival of the originally African Diaspora children’s game of rope-skipping, a game that was taken to the new world from Africa and for long remained a neighborhood or front-porch pass-time, but now features in international competitions. The rope-skipper stands between two people with a rope between them, sometimes two, and as they repeatedly flip the rope above her head and down again with lightning speed, skips from one foot to the other in order to allow the rope pass underneath to complete an arc, without getting caught by it. This is repeated several hundred times a minute, each arc completed in a split-second. Rope skipping is a gymnastic game in which nimbleness and agility of body, sight, and mind are requisite. The rope-skipper must not only be visually alert to the point where this becomes instinctive, her mind and body must also work with the lightning speed and rhythm of the rope if she must avoid a terrible fall. Often the rope-skipper faces only in the direction of one of the flippers, from whom she must read her cues, and only with the most acutely honed instincts can she contend with the flipper behind whom she cannot see. Unlike most other games where players are matched, the rope-skipper or Double Dutch player is caught in the middle of things, between the flippers a between the ropes, between the brisk circle of the arc, between standing, jumping, and if not careful or agile, having a bad fall. She is like a chess player who faces two opponents at once, or the lone individual contending with the cyclical turns of establishment and history in a culture of difference. She must skip without stumble.
Less known to most people today, Double Dutch also refers to a largely extinct language game very much like Pig Latin, popular among young boys in different parts of the West sometime in the 20th century, in which players applied a set of code combinations in order to encrypt their speech. In many cases the code involved the replacement of certain elements of syntax, all consonants in a word, for instance, with a whole word or prefix, such that the original words became not only incomprehensible to the non-initiate but almost unpronounceable, also. In other to speak intelligibly in this idiolect, Double Dutch speakers had to be extremely agile, mentally and verbally, to be able to insert the right letters in all the right places with sufficient speed to form speech. They had to know, almost encyclopedically, where the requisite consonants or vowels occurred in the spelling of each word, even as they spoke, making this adolescent’s pass-time one of the most challenging language and mind games possible. Like rope skipping, linguistic Double Dutch was also a performative art, perhaps more cultic and rarefied, in which players had to be smooth with their elocution, carry themselves with the exclusive airs of a high-minded cult, and have flawless command of the diction of their esoteric circle.
In either of its two metaphorical meanings Shonibare’s title was a sleight of hand, a reference to a cultural acrobatics in which the player is a master of the game. In choosing his title Shonibare announced his entry into the culture game of the metropolis, and indicated his readiness to bring the requisite mental and performative sophistication to the game. He would proffer a fiction of difference, like the devil’s hand in a card game, and he would play with the nimble fingers and mind of a master card-player, but ultimately, his winning card would not be from his sheaf of cards, but from his opponent’s. Double Dutch.
It is particularly significant that in the history of contemporary British culture, Shonibare is unique because, though he is not alone among Britain’s outsider-citizens in submitting to the test of difference, he is nevertheless one of only very few who have engaged and passed this test by consciously offering only a fiction of difference. Among his contemporaries a few other artists come to mind in the past decade or so who have also played the difference card, but did so by not only offering difference, but also believing in the fact of that difference. In the mid nineteen-nineties, another painter, Chris Ofili, quickly rose to fame by making garish, dot-paintings prodded on balls of elephant dung. Ofili’s dot-paintings, very different as they were from his very powerful early paintings, were largely inspired by brief exposure to contemporary Australian aboriginal paintings exhibited in an exhibition called Aratjara at London’s Royal Festival Hall complex. His use of elephant dung was in turn inspired by the work of American conceptual artist David Hammons, who had used balls of elephant dung in his own work several years earlier. As part of his narrative of difference, however, Ofili attributed his source of inspiration to a brief trip to Zimbabwe in Africa where he witnessed elephant dung in use. In truth there are no traditions of use of elephant dung in Zimbabwe, but by making this fictitious, exotic connection to Africa, Ofili hoped to, and indeed succeeded in, claiming the distance of difference that was required to grant him allowance within contemporary British art. The less careful reader might find more parallelism than none, between Ofili’s fiction of difference, and Shonibare’s. On the surface, both artists appear to have outwitted the establishment by playing to the exoticist desires of the metropolis. Both had employed fictitious signifiers, in either case most likely taken from within Europe itself. However a very significant distinction appears when more careful attention is paid to each artist’s narratives of their practice. Shonibare makes every effort to remind the viewer that the so-called African fabrics that he introduced to this work with Double Dutch is in fact, not African at all, but a pretend marker of exotic distance that was conceived and manufactured outside Africa. As he points out, “African fabric, exotica if you like, is a colonial construction. To the Western eye this excessive patterning (Difference) carries with it codes of African nationalism…a kind of modern African exoticism.” Ofili on the other hand has equally made a point of insisting on the authenticity of his trope, the elephant dung, by tying it to Africa, the land of animals where the people venerate animal dung, as the director of the Brooklyn Museum in New York argued in Ofili’s defence in 1999 after the painter’s work came under attack for profanity and bad taste. While Shonibare’s trope of difference is not only transparently fictitious, but also critical of the demand for difference, Ofili’s on the other hand claims authenticity in an exercise of self-exoticism that merely reinforces the demand. Ofili reinscribes the fiction of his own otherness without critique.
Ofili’s self-emollition finds parallels in other areas of contemporary British culture such as literature. Among England’s most celebrated outsider writers, the names of Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipul and Booker Prize winner Ben Okri quickly come to mind. Naipul, a Trinidadian of South East Asian descent who went to England in his youth and rose through the ranks of British culture to bring England its only Nobel prize in literature in nearly half a century, equally devoted his career as a writer to the methodical reinscription of fictions of postcolonial rupture and subalternity. Caustic and unsparing in his devastatingly degrading portrayals of all peoples of colour, Naipul prides himself in having privileged knowledge of the inherent, genetic inferiority of such peoples whom in one of his books he refers to as “slave people”. Throughout a long and distinguished career as a postcolonial raconteur in the metropolis, Naipul has never been able to find a singular redeeming virtue in any society or culture outside Europe, least among his own people. For this, and the impeccable style in which he couches his disdain for his own, Naipul has earned acceptance and celebration in the West. His fiction of difference is not a critique of the culture game, as was Shonibare’s, but rather a wholehearted submission to it. This we find echoed and perpetuated in the writing of Okri, who, like Shonibare, was born in England and raised in Lagos, only to return to England in his youth to settle and practice. Okri abandoned the critique of the metropolis and its culture game very early in his career, to devote himself to narratives of postcolonial chaos and irremediable violence and catastrophe. In his novels and stories, he separated himself and the societies of his ancestry from the theatres of civility, and thus endorsed the fiction of his and their irrevocable difference. In time Okri earned his place among the West’s celebrated chroniclers and interpreters of postcolonial maladies.
To find a close parallel to Shonibare’s masterful subterfuge in “Double Dutch”, one might look to another era and another culture where difference was required of the outsider-citizen as a price for acceptance. In 1927, the young Duke Ellington received a contract to perform with his band at the celebrated, whites-only dance Harlem, New York revue, the Cotton Club. In other to sell the band, his manager, a fellow named Irving Mills, billed Ellington’s music as a new form of exotic revelry called Jungle music. Under the guise of this label, however, Ellington who by the way disapproved of the label, was determined to prove to America that not only was the music far from primitive or savage, he as its purveyor was in fact America’s most sophisticated and innovative composer of his time. It was while headlining his music at the Cotton Club as “Jungle music” that Ellington composed his first master opus, Black and Tan Fantasy, a complex blues odyssey in he paid tribute not to the all-white Cotton Club where people of colour could play but could not be served or entertained, but instead to Harlem’s mixed-race dance clubs known as Black and Tan, where all the complexity of America could come together and manifest without distance or emphasis on difference. Ellington, so-called king of Jungle music according to the Cotton Club, nevertheless concluded the composition with a quotation from Chopin’s Funereal March, which was to prove prophetic with regard to the fate of America at the end of the nineteen-twenties. In composition after composition Ellington paid tribute to the complexity of America and in turn critiqued the jaundice of hierarchizing categories between the races. He strived to prove that his music was America’s music, the chronicle and tablature of America’s experience and history, and not the music of “others” come straight from the jungle. Like Shonibare’s “African fabric” nearly a century later, Jungle music was his trope of difference, but with that trope he would consistently and articulately critique the culture of difference.
Having broken the code of the culture game, Shonibare subsequently transformed his use of fabric into a signature, a product identity, again manifesting his sophisticated understanding of the devices of success in the metropolitan culture industry. This signature he has freely applied to the interpretation of a broad gamut of themes that range from his fascination for the figure of the style conscious, smart and conniving outsider of Victorian society, the Dandy, which in itself is quite significant, to reinterpretations of classics of Victorian art, literature and taste. Having earned the liberty to circulate and contemplate within the spaces of the mainstream, which is a unique liberty, indeed, Shonibare quickly moved on from the preoccupation with difference, a theme that in fact, never had priority in his work, and has since ranged from visual essays on science fiction and space travel, to contemplations of communal memory, and in-between. To get to the depth of these works, including Shonibare’s reinterpretation of the intellectual romance between the writer Henry James and the Danish artist, Hendrik C. Andersen, which is the centerpiece of this catalog and exhibition, will require another occasion and another essay. However, it was “Double Dutch” that made everything possible. In “Double Dutch”, his most important work to date, Yinka Shonibare artist broke through the displacing barricades of metropolitan contemporary culture and now is able to claim his place as citizen by saying, I am.
copywright © Oguibe 2001 | Back to Texts Online | Back to Olu Oguibe Homepage
Olu Oguibe is a senior fellow of the Vera List Center for Arts and Politics in New York, and author of Uzo Egonu: An African Artist in the West and The Culture Game, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Oguibe is an artist, art historian, and independent curator of contemporary art.