Fabric-ation
One of the opening texts for Fabric-ation
Among modern contemporary artists, Yinka Shonibare MBE is a godsend for museums. As demonstrated by the effort that the National Maritime Museum has recently put into gaining his Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. Shonibare’s work plays perfectly into museum collections as it deals with questions of the colonial past, globalization, status and power. His star is definitely firmly risen, as demonstrated by his current show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Fabric-ation. This has taken over large parts of the YSP, with a film piece, drawings, indoor sculptures and installations, as well as two new outdoor sculptures.
It must be rather terrifying as an artist (I say, admittedly, from the secure knowledge of never finding myself in such a position) to be so successful that anything you produce is put on display. It feels like Shonibare has reached this point, as Fabric-ation tries to make grand cultural points with what are essentially visual witticisms. His trademark African printed wax cotton is turned into eighteenth-century style clothes for a range of figures that apparently comment on issues ranging from fossil fuel depletion, to the Arab Spring, to climate change. The figures are either headless or have their heads replaced by objects. They all felt rather lifeless and, oddly, immaterial to me, the fabric seemed superficial. By contrast, in his film pieces (including Addio del Passato on show at YSP), when on real human bodies they gain a gravity, both physically and conceptually. The most successful, for me, is one called Odile and Odette from 2005.
Strangely, the two new outdoor sculptures felt similarly weightless. The sound of these had excited me before visiting, they look like huge pieces of his cloth billowing in the wind. But, the patterns have been blown up to an extent where they become caricatured, and I felt the cloths did not ‘billow’ rather they seemed oddly pinned to the ground. What I wanted was them to feel more like the heavy sails of Nelson’s ship. And this is where I feel some of Shonibare’s work falls down: it is too superficially connected to the issues which it claims to highlight. Where his work is so powerful is in pieces like Mr and Mrs Andrews without their heads, or the series in the YSP show of reconstructed famous suicide paintings like The Death of Chatterton. These work, I think, because Shonibare puts his fabrics into settings where they play with the iconography, bringing out hidden meaning in these original works through the material intervention of the cloth (and Mr and Mrs Andrews are even without their heads).
His work is most successful, then, in the museum context where it has depth of meaning. The opening text for the YSP show has Shonibare claim that, ‘I am protesting, you are going to invite me to your museum because the work is nice, and then when I am inside it is too late.’ But what seems clear to me is that it is only ‘nice’ within that very context, that is the irony of the fabric-ation.