Sculptural Installations
Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, NY
February 8–August 4, 2013
“Earth’s Skin” (2007)
Aluminum and copper wire, 177 x 394 in.
Courtesy of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi
Some years ago I happened upon a book about junk art (Recycled Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap, edited by Charlene Cerny and Suzanne Seriff) and found within it a picture of the most beautifully done basket, fabricated in South Africa, out of discarded phone wire. It was so carefully done, so expertly adept, that the artistic capacity to create the work shone out against the background of its most humble and ordinary materials.
Such works not only call to mind the frivolousness with which contemporary society creates garbage, but brings into relief the contrast between that frivolousness and its curative, an aesthetic sensibility which transforms and redeems it.
El Anatsui, a Nigerian sculptor, has created – or directed the creation of – very large, drapelike constructions made out of discarded materials, mostly metal. Whether crushed bottlecaps or tin lids, they are connected meticulously. The natural diversity of colors helps to produce a variegated landscape in the overall construction, and the intelligence and taste with which areas of each construction are thematically conceived, are striking.
“Amemo (Mask of Humankind) (detail)” (2010)
Aluminum and copper wire, 208 5/8 x 161 3/8 in.
Courtesy of the artist
and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Photograph by Andrew McAllister
Courtesy of the Akron Art Museum
Obviously, no one person could really pull off this kind of painstaking and deliberate effort singlehandedly; El Anatsui supervises a workshop of people who execute his designs. The result realizes its individual vision through the hands of a community, akin to traditional quilt making.
The results are unsettlingly appealing in a wild way.
Like the tightly and carefully wrought basket that I had admired years ago in Recycled Re-Seen, El Anatsui’s pieces exhibit great discipline of execution.
On the other hand, they are rambling and uncontrolled in their overall effect, like manufactured relief maps of an imagined world, inviting one to adventure, to take a risk and enter an envisioned landscape that rises up out of the garbage of our own terrestrial one, like an ecological phoenix emerging from the ashes of the manufacturing age, beckoning us to fly above and re-vision the earth with a new perspective, one reconstructed from our inadvertently produced, yet overwhelming, waste.
– BADMan
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