‘Fading Cloth’ by El Anatsui at the Saint Louis Art Museum
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
The work of West African artist El Anatsui, who has said artists based in Africa suffer from an “invisibility syndrome,” may now be seen in St. Louis.
On Tuesday the Saint Louis Art Museum announced the acquisition of his piece “Fading Cloth,” which is currently on view in the museum’s Sculpture Hall.
El Anatsui was born in Ghana but has spent most of his professional life in Nigeria, where he has been professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka since 1975. Though he often makes his sculptures with chainsaws and precision power tools, “Fading Cloth” was fashioned from discarded metal liquor bottle tops that were flattened and stitched together using copper wire.
Both the simple technique and the castoff, manmade materials are departures for the artist.
“All along, I’ve worked with media that are naturally found and organic like wood and clay,” he told Denrele Ogunwa of the African Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
“In Africa, we are a people of the earth. My people are people of the earth, and when I came to Nigeria I found the Igbo among whom I’ve lived are people of the earth, too. We have Legba, which is our earth goddess, and they also have Ala.”
The materials of “Fading Cloth,” however, take the piece far from the native soil and earth spirits of Africa to suggest the brutal commerce of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
“‘Fading Cloth’ serves as a historical reference to contact between Europe,
Africa and the Americas,” said Charlotte Eyerman, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum.
“Textiles were traded in West Africa by Europeans in exchange for gold and slaves, and liquor was a major commodity traded by Europeans for slaves. A work such as ‘Fading Cloth,’ which simulates fabric with packaging from liquor bottles, weaves together a range of social, historical, political and aesthetic references specific to West Africa.”
El Anatsui has acknowledged that he uses history in his work, but as a point of departure, like a raw material.
“If I seem concerned with history, it is not that I want to relate history per se,” he has said.
“I think I’m more like trying to play around with the effects of that history or where that history is eventually consigning the continent and its people to. Rather than recounting history, my art is telling about what history has provoked.”
Though this provocative piece of art has traveled to St. Louis (via the October Gallery in London, which represents him), El Anatsui has no intention of uprooting himself from Africa.
“Art is something that is environment-based. It takes its roots from a certain soil,” he has said.
“For instance, if you take a tree that thrives in the tropics and plant it in a temperate clime, it might not survive. The same can apply to an artist. If what you derive your nurture from is not much in the new environment, you might find it difficult to create.”
Admission to the Saint Louis Art Museum is free to all every day. For more
information, call 314.721.0072 or visit www.slam.org.