El Anatsui

I usually refrain from writing about exhibitions I see in Chelsea, but yesterday's venture prompted me to thoughtfully put pen to paper.



In particular, Eli Anatsui's visually arresting show at Jack Shainman Gallery proved to be more an encompassing experience rather than a mere passive art exhibition. The Ghanaian artist's richly textured pieces, comprised of thousands of discarded bottle caps and twisted foil wine wrappers strung together with copper wires, vibrate with life and history. Rather than hung flat, the artist requests that they be draped on the walls at the gallery's discretion so that each piece can never be exhibited exactly quite the same way again. This organic quality of the pieces is further enhanced by the strong visual of the cloth-like works snaking sinuously across the gallery walls. Denouncing the geometric perfection of the space, they challengingly hang with jagged edges in some places, softly rounded corners in others.

The dominant use of reds and golds with punctuated areas of silver (revealing the underside of the aluminum wrapping) in Anatsui's fabric-like works are reminiscent of kente cloth, which is traditionally reserved for important family or community events. Through myriad combinations of patterns, designs and color, the cloth depicts specific details of a wearer's heritage, family, culture and role in the society. Anatsui has turned this revered tradition on its head by replacing cloth with found metal debris. The artist gathered these found discarded pieces in Nsukka, Nigeria, where the artist has lived and worked for the last 28 years. The magnitude of this task and the massive resultant metal "cloths" are pointedly a testament not to a culture or or individual's rich history but to, sadly, the Western infiltration of commercialism, consumer nature and a throw-away mentality.




Jack Shainman Gallery
513 West 20th Street, New York
February 11th-March 13th, 2010

Assessing Deaccessioning

In the wake of the National Academy Museum’s announcement to sell Frederic Edwin Church's Scene on the Magdalene (1854) and Sanford Robinson Gifford's Mt. Mansfield (1859) to cover operating expenses and Brandeis University’s decision last year to close its Rose Art Museum, this latest article in the NY Times sheds no more light on the issue than has countless articles in ARTnews and art blogs. Rather than reiterate what has already been stated, I offer a different approach.

While I mourn the possibility of many art institutions ultimately succumbing to economic strain and having under-recognized artwork (and artists) disappearing into private hands, it is time that these very same organizations reassess the role of art in society. True, dwindling endowments are the major reason behind these actions but if the arts were not explicitly catered toward an elite few, perhaps they would not be as devalued as they are today and that arts would not be dictated by endowments and corporations alone. With the wealth of artistic expression comes periods of enlightenment and with a resurgence of interest in the arts, people would rally to maintain it and its ever-decreasing government funding. With organizations like the NEA, Americans for the Arts and the Department of Cultural Affairs, the industry is definitely not ignored, but very much underserved compared to other avenues that are deemed significant. Yes, for all intents and purposes, our government is in gross debt, but that is because any funding for art and social issues is re-routed toward a grossly wasteful and inefficient military budget. I acknowledge that this view is naively simplistic and is far from addressing many of the gray areas, but my point is just that: optimistically simplistic. We must ask bigger questions than "If we allow selling of artwork, wouldn't it set a dangerous precedent?" (which I'd answer with a resounding No, as do many others) toward a question of how we can ensure that art does not sink any further down our misguided priorities.