Yinka Shonibare in conversation with Kathryn Smith (continued)
KS: Tell me about your work at 'Shape' in London.
YS: 'Shape' is an organisation that provides access to the arts for people who are usually left out. That would include elderly people, disabled people, people in prisons and homeless people. The way it works is that I used to send artists into day centres, where elderly people go, to do a painting workshop for example. It doesn't have to be people who've ever done painting before, you know? They have singing or dance workshops, and I would write a report about how the artist got on in that situation. It was a way of taking the arts into the community, and I was the co-ordinator of this project for six years. I had to give up the job when things got too busy, but I really enjoyed it. I wouldn't have stayed that long otherwise. It worked out that eventually I had no holiday. Every holiday was for travelling to an exhibition of mine, or to show something somewhere, so I decided that it wasn't really possible to have both.
KS: And you do some teaching?
YS: Occasionally. I get invited to do tutorials with students, but I can't take up a lot of my teaching invitations.
KS: You went to Goldsmiths in London, a school that has produced some rather famous art stars. Tell me about the legendary "Goldsmith's conveyor belt"?
YS: [laughs] What! Well, I don't think there is such a thing as a conveyor belt, because the college can't do everything for you. It can provide you with a platform, but it's up to you whether you take the opportunity or not. But of course, if you are within that college, you have a context in which you can get heard and get seen, so if you use it well, it can work very well in your favour. At the end of the day, you have fantastic facilities, but it's still up to you as an artist. When I finished at Goldsmiths College, I was picked up from my show at the college and I was put into an exhibition called the Barclays Young Artist Award, in a prestigious space - the Serpentine Gallery. And that was my first public show. So that was really amazing for me, and if I hadn't been at Goldsmiths, I wouldn't have been taken. You see what I mean? Certainly in my year, I would say that maybe 3% of my class are doing really well.
KS: How familiar are you with the South African art scene, and the recent controversies that have circulated regarding the representational politics debates?
YS: Well, I know William Kentridge, of course, and Kendell Geers. They both work with the Stephen Friedman Gallery in London, which is my gallery. And I know David Koloane, as he was in London for a while, and I know Pitika Ntuli. He was really trying to get me down here, but it didn't happen. And I know Beezy Bailey because I went to college with him in London. Other than that, I know about the controversies surrounding the last biennale. But you know, a lot of it is linked to the cultural boycott, and I think a bit of tension or friction at this point is good, as it actually creates culture.
KS: Point taken. But with regards to Okwui Enwezor's essay 'Reframing the Black Subject', I think a lot of what he said was taken personally, which is not a good thing, but it did wrench people out of a certain complacency post-new democracy.
YS: What was the article? I didn't read it.
KS: He took several South African artists, all white females, to task for representing "black bodies", accusing people of "speaking for the other". And people understandably got offended, as they felt their work was severely misread in the context of the essay. Whether Enwezor's agenda was expedient or not is too complicated to get into here.
YS: Yeah, and what I said earlier about conflict is that it does create tension that makes people think, and knock them out of apathy, and I think that right now, you are in a very interesting stage in your development, given the history of South Africa. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, say, over the next 10 years, and what actually happens culturally, even with the lack of funding. Because that generates its own culture. People become more entrepreneurial. In America, they don't have public funding, but they created their own foundation system - a corporate sponsorship system.
KS: We do manage to do a lot with very little, and people are quite good at fighting for what they need.
YS: Well, you know, in London the best art happened during the recession. The best art never happens when there's a lot a money around. The whole cultural renaissance in London now is a result of a very right-wing era, you know, Margaret Thatcher and so on. All the young British artists you hear of came out of all that deprivation. Culture thrives best under those circumstances. People who don't have an excess of wealth tend to be more creative, because they have to find a way around difficult situations.
KS: That's true, but many South Africa artists, and artists from previously marginalised areas, whether it's Asia, South America or India, are frustrated when their work becomes validated simply because it comes from these geographical and political areas. From my experience, work is often valued as South African first, not art that happens to come from South Africa.
YS: I think that that will come, yeah? When I first started showing my work, people used to say to me "Are you sure you're getting this exhibition because of the quality of your work, or you're getting it because you are a black artist?" And what I used to say to them is "Don't worry, right? Just let me first get the exhibition, and I'll deal with the other issues later." So that's basically how I operated, until I got to a point where now I'm showing in all the mainstream spaces in these exhibitions with all the most famous American artists. But in the beginning, yes, I got these small shows, but they provided a platform where I could say what I needed to say. It doesn't matter what kind of platform, it was still a space. And so I think at this stage it will be like that. And people will realise that you can't keep doing this "South African artist" thing forever. And people who provide such exhibitions will become wary also, and so it's a transitional thing, and they will start looking for more. It's organic, so there's no point fighting it. Let them pick people up because of that. It's like all these dot com companies - there are so many, just because it's the internet. When the market has rationalised, all the really good ones will stay. Everything else that is rubbish will go. The system will correct itself.
KS: We get frustrated when the work is defined nationalistically. While the phenomenon of the YBAs (Young British Artists) exists, the work is not defined in the same way - you know what I mean? For example, in your 'Diary of a Victorian Dandy' series, those scenes are British - Victorian - but they are also broadly colonial - of that era.
YS: Yeah, exactly. It's a global phenomenon. Canada, Australia, America, South Africa - they all have this colonial relationship. As "citizens of the New World", they were all formed by this. And it's a situation that needs addressing in art. So I place myself in these situations.
KS: Do you perform your Victorian dandy persona 24 hours a day?
YS: Uh, no! I'm working, girl, I'm working! [laughs]
KS: In a review I read of a show at the Camden Arts Centre, there seemed to be an element of performance there, with you walking around, followed by two children dressed as Victorian page boys, one holding your drink and the other your chair.
YS: Yes, and at my most recent show in London, I had two blonde drag queens following me around in much the same way.
KS: Have you worked with live performance, or with video, or do you stick to more object and image-based practices? There seems to be strange attitude abroad with artists from Africa working with technology, even if it's as simple as a photograph, where the work is either not "authentic" enough, because if you're African, you should make carvings or something�
YS: [laughs]
KS: ... or it's accepted unconditionally, as the "progress" of the so-called Third World.
YS: Yeah, I know. But I would go more for the quality and content of the work, instead of focusing too much on form. That kind of "progress" attitude is terrible. I'm in a context where it's flooded with this technology work. I'm not that impressed by a lot of it. A lot of my pieces are completely dependent on what I'm trying to express. In the future, I may make a film, I don't know. It depends completely on my thoughts.
KS: The 'Picture of Dorian Gray' series was very cinematic, very Hitchcock.
YS: Yeah, that was me touching on film. So I take it as ideas grow. You know, I prefer my process to be organically led, rather than fashionable. In that sense, you have to be very independent minded, very focused regardless of what's in and what's not.
KS: With regards to the tableaux of reconstructed paintings, for example Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads, how does this relate to your earlier comment about hyperreality, obvious politics aside?
YS: I think it's more to do with that really - parody, being bigger and better than the real thing - much more theatrical. So it's kind of operatic.
KS: Melodramatic?
YS: Yeah, definitely.
KS: And what of your role as executioner - you having the license to chop people's heads off at will?
YS: [laughs] Yeah, that's my joke about the French Revolution and the guillotine, and class systems. Mr and Mrs Andrews are an icon of the aristocracy, so it follows that if I'm parodying it, I can take off their heads. In art, if you look at surrealism and the fragmentation of the body, and violence, the body becomes fetishised - you know the work of Hans Bellmer?
KS: Yeah.
YS: So my works, in a sense, do follow Surrealism, and that whole thing. It is rather surreal to encounter such an image. As a movement, it was very radical in terms of what it did.
KS: It's having a bit of a resurgence at the moment, in a good way, that doesn't have anything to do with Dali and all that crap.
YS: Yeah, none of that Freudian dream stuff!
KS: There is an implicit violence in what you do which is at first downplayed, and then heightened by the visual seduction of the work.
YS: You see, I love contradiction. That work, Mr and Mrs Andrews, looks harmless. It's very beautiful, but of course there is a violent act within it. It's not as pleasant as it looks. And that's what I like. As you unravel what's going on, it's not as inherently pleasant as you thought. There are dangerous things happening, questions. And when I said earlier that I don't want my work to be dry, academic work - I don't want people to feel they have to read 5 000 books to understand what's going on. Because some works are like that. You feel inadequate that you haven't read every book in the world. And I don't want my work to be part of that.
KS: There is definitely a critical economy around artists who touch on issues around postcolonialism, as you do. Your work has been written about at length within this system. Do you feel co-opted towards an agenda beyond your control, or do you feel this has been to your advantage - or both?
YS: In a sense that's why I actually like this dual thing where people who don't know anything about the discipline get as much as people who want to write complex texts about it. So if they want to do that - and as you know there's this whole industry around critical writing and critical texts - if that's what they do for a living and that their job and it pays the rent, they can do it. I'm not bothered. At the end of the day, whether you and I like it or not, when the artist is not in the gallery, the work has to speak. That is my biggest concern, my main interest.
KS: Do you read the material that is written about you?
YS: I can't read it all, it's impossible. More and more seems to be generated. I read the occasional thing - if they are a friend and they've written something. But in a sense, the work is part of history, as I use history, I use what's out there, so it's obvious that people will find some kind of affinity. I only make the kind of work I make because of the discourse of postmodernism and the time that I'm working in. I don't have to be a slave to it - I make work out of it. And that's why I'm an artist and they're writers!
