African Arts

In 2011, El Anatsui's Gravity and Grace (2010) was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, and Hamaya, Kanagawa, Japan. Those who saw that exhibition and encountered the work again eight years later, as it has radically transformed in the Triumphant Scale exhibition at Haus der Kunst, Munich, would appreciate the metamorphic nature of the artist's work—which is the key subject of this book by Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor. How do we rigorously engage in an iconographic study of an artwork that keeps changing in form each time it is installed? This phenomenon challenges art critics, historians, curators, and exhibition organizers who are concerned about the indexical connection between a work of art and its documentation.

It is this shape-shifting character of Anatsui's work that the authors refer to as a "reinvention of sculpture." They note that this emerged from the artist's constant search and experimentation, rooted in his cultural background and postcolonial experience, as well as the intellectual environments he encountered. They argue that the engagement with the sculptures should begin with the acknowledgment of their metamorphic forms, where every analysis is expected to reflect the state of the work at the time of encounter. To arrive at this argument, they trace, across the book's chapters, the evolution of this tendency from his earlier works in Ghana through the aesthetics of fragmentation in his wood and terracotta works, culminating in these metamorphic sculptures.

In chapter 1, "El Anatsui and Modern African Art," the authors cast Anatsui within the history of artists and intellectuals in postindependence Africa who responded, with their works, to the cultural and political debates about their new status as citizens of sovereign nations. One such is the impact of the Sankofa—return—to tradition movement in Ghana on Anatsui's practice, which they discuss in chapter 2, "'Go Back and Pick': New Models of Experimentation." Here they portray him as an artist who, from his time as a student of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, to when he moved to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka as an art professor, always restlessly searched for new ways of making art across different media. They attribute this tendency to the fast-paced changes in the artist's works between the 1980s and 1990s, during which what they call "the aesthetic of fragmentation and non-fixed form" (p. 205) in his work emerged. In the next chapter, "The Aesthetic and Rhetoric of Fragmentation," the authors emphasize how the aesthetic of fragmentation runs through all of Anatsui's oeuvre. They argue that the recent metal works are very much connected to the earlier wood and ceramic works in both principles, ideation, and the link to his Ghanaian cultural heritage.

Chapter 4, "The Metamorphic Form, or 'No Condition is Permanent,'" is where the authors explore the main argument in the book—the metamorphic nature of Anatsui's work. They argue that beyond the "chance discovery" of bottle caps that several authors have noted as the shifting point in Anatsui's practice, the discovery was instead an opportunity for the artist to resolve a conceptual and formalistic artistic problem that he has been grappling with since the beginning of his practice. For them, while Anatsui's wood panels of the 1980s and 1990s provided him with the first significant opportunity to explore the aesthetics of the unfixed form, its limitations became increasingly apparent. As a result, he was compelled to begin a new search for other media that could allow the sculpture not merely to transcend the unfixed state but to attain the status of metamorphic objects.

In chapter 5, "The Epic and Triumphant Scale," they use Anatsui's traveling solo exhibition El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale (2019–2020), to highlight the elements of monumentality, abstraction, and monochromatic color in his work. They link...