I don't write about contemporary art but exceptions are the rule here as every place else.
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El Anatsui makes beautiful and covetable works of art out of used, metal whiskey bottle caps. Below is a profile I wrote about him which appeared in Intelligent Life magazine in Winter 2009. I've made a few cuts to remove mention of information that is now out of date. Next week, May 21, Bonham's on Bond Street in London is holding an African Art auction and one of El's metal tapestries leads the sale with an estimate of $500---£800,000. If you catch new Schiaperelli/Prada show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute have a look at the Prada dress with a big skirt made out of "African bottle caps" --clearly inspired by El's work although not credited to him. (Better yet, visit the Met's African art gallery nearby and see the real thing.)
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The art world is waking up to the brilliance of El Anatsui, who weaves beauty out of bottle tops. paula weideger meets him
He’s the tops
El Anatsui, grey-haired and softly spoken, sat across from me on a black leather sofa in the lobby of a New York hotel. We had met to talk about his large and shimmering hangings. “I see myself as a person and an African,” he began. And indeed he was born in Ghana and since 1975 has taught and sculpted at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka until his retirement last year. He was quick to grasp what I was after when I asked a question but slow, sometimes very slow, to respond. The pauses between his words, between one sentence and the next, could be very long. It wasn’t that he was worried about saying the wrong thing. Although he is a modest man, he appears solidly self-confident. His pauses seemed to exist to create spaces in which he could think. “Professionally,” he finally added, “I see myself more as an artist in the world community of art.” So he is. But the world community of art took rather a long time to confirm his view. Fortunately, he wasn’t languishing.
Anatsui has “a huge reputation”, according to Chika Okeke-Agulu, a former student of his, now an art historian at Princeton. “He is one of the best-known names in (and I mean in the inside world of) contemporary Nigerian art. He is one of the leading figures associated with Nsukka School…arguably the most influential art school in Nigeria.” Lagos, an hour’s flight from Nsukka, has long had its own flourishing gallery scene and with that, active collectors. The novelist Chinua Achebe and the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka are among those who own Anatsui’s work. The October Gallery in London has been showing his work since the mid-1990s. In 2006 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired one of his pieces for its African gallery. But it was only in 2007, aged 63, that Anatsui leapt into the heart of the wider art world. His springboard was the Venice Biennale, where he had exhibited in 1990, without making much impact.
Robert Storr, dean of the Yale Art School and director of the biennale, invited Anatsui to show two pieces in the Arsenale. Like all his current work, they were large hangings made of thousands of pieces of shimmering metal, stitched together with copper wire. They are astonishingly beautiful and not like anything done before. Some think of them as tapestries; Anatsui calls them sheets. It is common to hear them compared to Byzantine mosaics, but the differences are greater than the similarities.
Anatsui’s art is abstract. Colour, shape and light tell his story. In some pieces there are hundreds of dancing colours, while others are dominated by broad swathes of silver or gold or red. Unlike mosaics, these works are flexible; hanging free, they ripple as if they were cloth.
Anatsui was the hit of that biennale. Of the pieces in the Arsenale, one was bought by Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum, the other for the Contemporary Collection of the Met. But his most talked-about work was a commission from the Belgian collector Axel Vervoordt for the Artempo installation at Palazzo Fortuny. “Fresh and Fading Memories, Part I-IV” was draped across the façade of this moody Gothic palace (picture above). Wire fastenings were undone to let light into the upper floors — adding to the loveliness of the piece, making the sumptuous fabric look ripped. Interest in Anatsui has been building ever since.
In October 2008 at Sotheby’s contemporary art sale in London, an Anatsui tapestry sold for $610,000, a world auction record for his work. (According to art-world gossip, one of his works has sold in the Middle East for over a million dollars. Vervoordt sold the Artempo piece, but will not disclose its price.) “Three Continents”, a dazzling 2.4 metres by 4.5 hanging, the outline of which resembles a Mercator projection, is priced at $700,000 at New York’s Jack Shainman gallery. Commissions keep coming, including
“Fading Cloth” (2005), a typically shimmering piece by El Anatsuione for a 12 metres by 3.6 piece to hang in the atrium of the Bill and Melinda Gates campus in Seattle.
“El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You About Africa”, his first major retrospective, will open at the Royal Ontario Museum in October 2010. In January 2013 after a two year dealy it will finally reach New York as the inaugural exhibition at the Museum for African Art. As well as organising the retrospective, the mfaa has co-produced a 53-minute documentary, “Fold Crumple Crush: The Art of El Anatsui” by Susan Vogel director of Columbia University Global Centres: Africa. It’s an engaging, informative and sensitive look at his way of life andof working.
In the film we see Anatsui at his local internet shop, doing his e-mail. We watch the rusty red earth kick up behind him as he heads for the shed of a seamstress who will sew packaging for him. And he takes us to the spot where he first came upon a bag of the bottle tops that are now central to his work.
Many African artists prefer to work with materials found near to hand. But just why were there thousands of bottle tops on Anatsui’s doorstep? The answer has to do with recycling. Drinkers return empty gin and whisky bottles to their local distiller, where they are refilled and given new caps. There is a keen market for the cast-offs. Melted down, they are transformed into cooking pots. Thirst being what it is, Anatsui has no trouble buying what he needs.
Some 20 men work on the hangings. They sit on the floor or hunch over tables in a large, open-plan studio. The round tops are cut out, the remaining aluminium is made into strips. Each element is pounded flat and pierced. Round ones are threaded together with round ones, strips with strips. Anatsui tells his crew what colour combinations he wants. These are then put together in sections, or units as he calls them. A unit might be two feet square or smaller.
“Working with the rings that hold the caps – that is very, very slow,” Anatsui says. “A few inches in a day. But when you work with the shaft of the cap that is very fast, because the basic unit is big.” Although he used to make preparatory drawings for his wood sculpture, he does no drawings for these pieces. “Now, I place things on the floor and move them around,” he says. “When I like where it is, it gets linked up. There are a lot of permutations all along the route.”
As the tapestry takes shape it begins to look like a giant jigsaw. But there is no pre-existing image. Even the artist may not know exactly what he’s looking for
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“I am a nomad” El tells me. Since his retirement he has been making art and travelling the world inspecting sites and later installing his tapestries. Oh, and he's begun to commute regularly between Nsukka where he built a house overlooking the university and his homeland, Ghana.
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