Yinka Shonibare MBE

During the public discussion between Yinka Shonibare MBE and DHC/ART curator Cheryl Sim, the topic of history, or perhaps more accurately, a pluralized notion of the term, arises early on, as Shonibare, an art historically concerned artist, reminds us that art not only forms a history but is formed of it. Art, he asserts, is made in context. As such the artist is not an isolated entity but works within a moment made of a confluence of micro and macro events. In a globalized world marked by instantaneous dissemination of news (often at the expense of accuracy), a period, as well as a person, becomes increasingly defined by concurrent rather than consecutive narratives. At the time of Shonibare’s discussion around “Pièces de résistance,” at DHC this summer, the two dominant social narratives unfolding (in my mediated world) are the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the Baltimore Police (and the resultant protest against yet another Black life taken through authoritarian violence), and the devastating earthquake that claimed both life and culture in Nepal. Working within a spectrum of paradox and possibility, Shonibare provides open-ended questions that thwart a singular perspective. These two otherwise disparate events find equal resonance in a show that speaks in a measured tone to the volatility of potential—that knife-edge of a moment that cracks open a tempest of event, and the precariousness of position or class within a catastrophe that has the ability to level the playing field of such distinctions.

History, both personal and public, seems understood not as a fully formed story with beginning and end, but rather as excerpts held in memory, the most salient or repetitive of which contribute to both the formation and perception of identity. Through the construction of open-ended narratives employing shifting signifiers (his signature device being Dutch-wax fabric), Shonibare’s work reflects recent findings on the human brain’s processing of experience, which seems more accurately modelled around rhythmic sampling, similar to individual frames in a movie rather than via a stream of consciousness. A recent New York Times article (Gregory Hickok, “It’s Not a ‘Stream’ of Consciousness,” The New York Times, May 8, 2015) suggests that “from the brain’s perspective, experience is not continuous but quantized.” It is this kind of logic that gives power to a singular iconic image representing the entirety of event. At present, the “defining image” exists in the genre of photojournalism (think 9/11 or the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger). In the past this role was assumed by historical painting—a theme Shonibare plays heavily upon in the present show through alternate perspectives and adaptation of media applied to a number of art historical masterpieces. Painterly tableaux are here reinvented through installation or photographs. For example, Shonibare’s photograph La Méduse based on Gericault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819, depicts the ship (with sails of Dutch-wax fabric) on rough seas before its eventual wreck, thereby widening the scope of that historical moment beyond a sensationalist perspective of aftermath, to include the original Imperialist intentions motivating the voyage of this French-owned ship, which was destined for Senegal to re-appropriate British-claimed territory.

In the photographic series “Fake Death Pictures,” Shonibare again plays with themes of Imperialism by inserting Lord Nelson (in a Dutch-wax naval uniform) as the protagonist in re-enacted death scenes of the Romantic hero or nobleman by painters such as Manet, Henry Wallis, François-Guillaume Ménageot and Leonardo Alenza. Quantizing capital “h” history, Shonibare deftly carves discrete storylines from the continuous whole, and in curving that geometry ever so slightly, reveals the shiftiness of grand ideologies and the tendency of history to repeat itself. In this series, Shonibare is also making a statement on the tone in historical painting and its ability to both influence and depict the dominant attitudes of a given moment. Furthermore, Shonibare has an acute eye for artists who can quietly support his gentlemanly challenge to established views on history, tradition and authenticity, revealing the manner in which the manipulation of such themes can justify grander prerogatives of colonialism, for example. Le Suicidé, 1877, to which Shonibare refers in The Suicide, 2011, is a lesser known painting by Manet, which some art historians consider to be an example of the artist’s attempt to escape from tradition by portraying suicide outside the genre of history painting. The painting is made even more relevant to the discussion around context through the paradoxical fact that it is virtually devoid of narrative context. This has evoked a number of fragile hypotheses by experts as to the subject matter’s provenance. Shonibare understands the measured ratio between give and take, providing just enough clues to evoke questions rather than offering a full-formed argument. To Shonibare, the artist’s role is to provide the question, not answer it.

A similar destabilization of certainty and structure that challenges the construction of identity pervades Shonibare’s filmic works (of which there are three fine examples in the present exhibition). By playing on repetition within a backdrop of artifice reminiscent of the French New Wave cinema and in particular Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (which Shonibare does indeed acknowledge as influential), Shonibare explores the reflexivity of the film and its ability to reflect back on the filmic moment. Both Un Ballo in Maschera, 2004 (after Verdi’s 1859 opera of the same name), and Odile and Odette, 2005 (based on Tchaikovsky’s 1895 ballet Swan Lake), are visual incantations of serial and highly choreographed movement looping back on itself, as dancers move in an atmosphere unfettered by sound other than footstep and breath and the rustle of fabric. Each film reads like a controlled yet decadent dream of colour and movement, while employing the high language of the institution for critique. This statement could be extended to the entire show, which reveals the instability of identity and the precariousness of position, at the same time suggesting that any idea of conclusion may be the most disillusioned concept of all. ❚

“Pièces de résistance” is on exhibition at DHC/ART, Montreal, from April 29 to September 20, 2015.

Tracy Valcourt lives and writes in Montreal, where she is the current project manager of .txtLAB @ McGill.