Critiquing the critique: El Anatsui and the politics of inclusion

Abstract

El Anatsui has recently achieved international fame for his large bottle-top tapestries. Much of the enthusiastic approval of this work in the popular press, however, overlooks the critical role of his earlier experiments in ceramic and wood. This selective reception of Anatsui as a ‘global’ artist, the paper argues, has a hegemonic agenda. It is grounded in the politics of inclusion, which uses multiculturalism as an excuse to uncritically include Anatsui in the genealogy of modern Western art. By equating the notion of ‘global’ with the older rhetoric of ‘universal’, the critics ignore the unevenness of global exchanges; and by treating ‘local’ as largely irrelevant, they trivialize the question of difference, which is crucial to gaining insight into the complexities of temporality and spatiality in the discourse of contemporary art.

Keywords:

• El Anatsui
• Africa
• contemporary
• art
• inclusion
• difference
• local/global
• universal

Notes on contributor

Sunanda K Sanyal is Associate Professor of Art History and Critical Studies at the Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His research interest includes politics of representation and identity, contemporary artists from former colonies in global discourses, art in nineteenth-century Europe and their colonies, and scholarship of pedagogy.

Notes

1. The show and its accompanying catalogue are both titled El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa. The show is curated and the catalog edited by Lisa Bonder.

2. For the documentary, see Susan Vogel, Fold, Crumple, Crush (2011).

3. The adverse response to his review of the show Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles at PS1 in late 2012 is a recent instance. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/29/ken-johnson-new-york-times-art-critic-racist-sexist_n_2213563.html.

4. Expression of curator Gary Tinterow, quoted in Worth (2009).

5. Susan Vogel's review, quoted in Harney (2011).

6. The exchange in Artforum in late 1984 and early 1985 was later published in an edited volume (McEvilley and Rubin 1990).

7. Synopsis of the exhibition ‘Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui’ at Akron Art Museum, 17 June to 7 October 2012: http://akronartmuseum.org/exhibitions/details.php?unid = 2700.

8. This dilemma over identity polarities and the various forms of negotiations between notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ have engaged African artists and culture critics for decades. Ima Ebong, for instance, examines this issue in her informative essay on the post-Negritude movement of Laboratoire Agit-Art in Dakar in the 1980s; see Ebong 1991).

9. For Enwezor's source, see Chakrabarty (2000).