Goodman Gallery
24.03 - 02.06.2022
Something inhabits and moves underneath El Anatsui’s works; something threatening in its innards or entrails, (an) underground “new social energy,” if I may appropriate Hortense Spillers,1Hortense J. Spillers, “All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” in boundary 2 23.3 (1996), 75-141. that marks the internal world of Anatsui’s landscapes. To extend our thoughts on the internal logics of his map mapping, we can borrow from literary historian Stephen Greenblatt in thinking about “a kind of circulation…and social energy”2Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 43.4 (1990), 11-34. that allows us to read what I’m coding as the motormateriality of the work’s ‘folds.’3Please see Freedom (2021), Drying Lines (2021) and Interventions (2021).
El Anatsui’s recent show with Goodman Gallery, Freedom, made up of wood panels and tapestries, is a study of space and scale through so-called discarded and ubiquitous objects. The artist, with the assistance of large teams, moves between abstraction and figuration to interrogate and reflect on his immediate environment, human movement, and freedom.4See the exhibition text. However, my inquiry is interested in ‘movement’ of/in/under the folds (admittedly, at the expense of other formal qualities of the works), only insofar as it allows us ‘access’ into and under the works, or says something about the subsurface of the tapestry. To think of them not as static objects, but as (volatile) processes, to paraphrase John Cage,5Quoted in Gregory L. Ulmer, “The Object of Post-criticism,” in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Washington: Bay Press, 1983), 83-110. so we can make sense of what Gregory Ulmer calls the “inner logic of the object.”
The point is not to discipline this movement, but to observe it closely, read it (against the artist, if need be) and hint at its cataclysmic energy. The spirit of the work ferments and builds momentum beneath the surface, threatening to push the conceptual pillars of the show, Freedom and Sovereignty, to breaking point.
El Anatsui, Sovereignty, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.
Connections
El Anatsui’s sculptural and cartographic forms mark a latter stage in the evolution of his works made mostly of alcohol bottle cap pieces. Of course, this could be said of most mediums, but they aren’t as well travelled and charged as these. “Human hands,” the artist tells Laura Leffler James, “have left a charge on them,” leaving an “unseen bond” that binds all those in that endless chain of human interaction.6El Anatsui and Laura Leffler James, “Convergence: History, Materials, and the Human Hand—An Interview with El Anatsui,” in Art Journal 67.2 (2008), 36-53. In magnificent scale, the artist attempts to stitch together all these connections.
If Anatsui’s system of “data”7Anatsui makes this characterization in the interview above: “I characterize [my works] as data with which others are free to interact to create other ideas as well.” is meant to account for the indelible connections between those that touch the material in its circulation (which is a conversation about distance between the touches/touchers as much as it is about the nature of that ‘intramural’ relation between those doing the touching), how does the artist account for the ‘invisible’ hands of the owners of industry – or, more abstractly, Capital – who stand to benefit materially in the circulation from production to consumption? Put differently, where do we begin to make sense of the vertical nature of this relation between, on the one hand, domination and, on the other, the hands touching and exchanging the bottles and bottle caps? Considering that the artist intends the work to be a commentary on alcoholism in Africa, what does it mean then to beautify and clean up this mess, to grant coherence to it?
What we’re after is sitting with these contradictions. The site is the surface of the works in the context of the energy signified by the folds.
El Anatsui, Drying Line, 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Goodman Gallery.
Because the folds, in this instance, are a product of a curatorial rearrangement (by a White Goodman Gallery) endorsed and sanctioned by the artist (that the curators are free to create new arrangements of the works as they see fit). I cringe at the possibility that this present selective(ly) speculative intervention is running headlong towards its own dead-end. Simply put, isn’t it reckless to identify the folds as imminent rupture when/if they are White curatorial imagination and desire? (And what do we call a White desire for Black rupture?) We could think of these folds with Olu Oguibe as “chthonic uncertainty and ominous intensity” boiling beneath the work as “obliterative transformation.”8Olu Oguibe, “El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness,” in African Arts 31.1 (1998), 48-55. Or, following Cecilio Cooper’s “black chthonic,” the arrangement could be seen as a force that “circulates symbolically as a subsurface incubator for counter-culture, hell, chaos, death, darkness, indeterminacy, decay, disorder, extraction, and much more.”9Cecilio M. Cooper, “Fallen: Generation, Postlapsarian Verticality + the Black Chthonic,” in Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 38 (2022), 1-33. But does this mean these works can be freely rearranged by just about everyone, creating or/and repressing the folds as they see fit?
The artist’s response to my question would probably be an emphatic ‘yes.’ This freedom is not necessarily problematic in and of itself, nor am I adjudicating its merits per se, apart from extending a brief speculative reading of its function and logics; to think about, on the one hand, the rearrangements, the connections, the process of making the work (including the labor),10There is a moment in Convergence where James asks Anatsui about labor issues in the making of the work and he responds, “I believe you are thinking about the kind of trade-union problems in industries? No. This is a studio and not a factory situation” (2008: 44 emphasis added). What animates this dismissive response and avoidance of a pertinent political question? and, on the other, the machinations of and in the innards of the work, as signified by the folds; to read and observe the movements of the threatening subsurface force against the human drama on the surface of the work. I propose, through this splitting procedure, that it is from underneath these works that we could embark on radical readings of Anatsui’s show.
