ART-TRIBUTE:Weaving and other Practices… El Anatsui
We continue our Tribute with El Anatsui (1944), one of the most highly acclaimed artists in African History and foremost contemporary artists in the world. He is using resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculpture that defies categorisation. The use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work can interrogate the history of colonialism and draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment, but at the core is his unique formal language.
By Efi Michalarou
El Anatsui was born in Anyako, in the Volta Region of Ghana. The youngest of his father’s 32 children, Anatsui lost his mother and was raised by his uncle. His first experience with art was through drawing letters on a chalkboard. In the late 1960s, as a student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, El Anatsui was introduced to various formal modes of sculpture by the program’s mostly European instructors, ranging from academic realism to modernist abstraction. After Kumasi, Anatsui commenced research into traditional and folk design and the arts of Ghana which helped him develop fresh approaches to sculptural form. Inspired, for example, by the woven patterns and graphic symbols respectively of the kente and adinkra cloths, sculpting became for him not so much the manipulation of mass and volume as a process of organising abstract shapes, lines, textures and colors as well as negative and positive space, no matter what the medium. Ariving in Nsukka, Nigeria, in 1975, Anatsui redefined sculptural objecthood as pictorial and planar, and constituted by fragmentary and unfixed elements. This aesthetic of fragmentation became an enduring characteristic of his work as a sculptor. In describing a major series of works in clay and wood respectively as “Broken Pots” and “Pieces of Wood”, Anatsui emphasised both the objective condition of his working material and sculpting as a rigorous process of collating, connecting, juxtaposing and joining distinct components of his artistic media. In 1980, while on a studio residency in the US town of Cummington, Massachusetts, Anatsui discovered the chainsaw as a carving tool. Over the next few years he learned to work with the aggressiveness of the cutting instrument, to control and exploit it. He sees it as a metaphor for the colonial destruction of indigenous African cultures. However, instead of carving solid wood blocks (with the sole exception of the monumental work “Erosion” (1991)), Anatsui developed a relief format consisting mainly of plain planks, usually of different types of tropical woods. At the turn of the millennium, several chance discoveries and significant public commissions changed the direction and scale of Anatsui’s practice. The first of these discoveries occurred around 1997, when the artist began to develop an interest in the formal possibilities of the discarded metal cassava graters. Anatsui’s first cassava graters work: Toflokowo (Empty Barrels, 1998), which he exhibited at the 9th Osaka Triennial won the Bronze Prize. Almost concurrent with this discovery was Anatsui’s first experiments with used printing plates; whose fading colors and semi-legible messages imbuing these materials with a connection to specific personal or cultural histories. 1998 was also the year Anatsui made two remarkable discoveries. The first was a pile of discarded milk can lids in the bushes. He promptly began transforming these into expansive sheets, shaping each of them into a series of free-standing sculptural forms that could be adapted and scaled according to their space of display. The second discovery was of a discarded bag of liqueur bottle tops. After several months he decided to stitch them together to form a sheet, the colors of which reminded him of traditional kente cloths.
