Yinka Shonibare's Art

Yesterday, I went to Turner Contemporary in seaside Margate to see the exhibition of Yinka Shonibare's 'Empire' doublet. Although my little boy got underfoot a few times, it was still a treat. I like some of Shonibare's works. For instance, Nelson's Ship in a Bottle: a warship immured, like a genie, in a blown-up glass wine jug - a montage of art, craft, and history. But do I like everything Shonibare does with the so-called 'African wax fabrics?' Not quite. The multiplicity of colours is pleasing but not always to my taste. The polychrome overload dazzles, but not always in a wow way. Well, even if I were to paraphrase George Braque and remind myself, 'Hey, art is meant to disturb,' I am, sadly, neither disturbed nor perturbed by much of Shonibare's print art. Anyway, I think Braque overeggs the art pudding with the 'shock' saw. Art is meant to affect. Despite its colourfulness, Shonibare's vibrancy of expression falls between the stools of overwhelming and underwhelming. Whelming? Probably to a degree. (Recognising that besides the quirk of currency and incurrency, 'whelm' and 'overwhelm' are much and muchness). But to quickly double back, a few of Shonibare's works pack affect, particularly when they reach beyond hyperaesthetic chic.
By the way, is the 'African print' fabric he works with truly African? I'll look for an answer through the Yoruba lens because I, like Shonibare, am Yoruba. I don't know how the people of southwestern Nigeria came up with the name 'ankara' for the fabric - probably some Turkish traders, or 'drapers' as they might be called, used to sell them in Yoruba markets. Even so this sort of cotton print is not native to Turkey, or its city of Ankara. Maybe ankara is a corruption of Accra; the Yoruba moniker for the fabric may have descended from the capital of Ghana rather than the capital of Turkey.
The fabric has its provenance in Indonesia. It's a species of Indonesian batik. The Dutch liked the art of the design. As colonial intruders in what was then Java, or Dutch East Indies, later Indonesia, they took both the fabric and the idea back home and started to mass-produce batik in their factories. Often by way of Rotterdam, once the largest port in the world, the fabric found its way to Africa.
The issue of autochthon - that is, origin, authenticity, indigeneity - is crucial in postcolonial, post-imperial politics. Is Indonesian batik or Dutch print or ankara or African print African? One shouldn't be too bothered about this, really. Dutch interest in the cloth was and is only mercantile. And while its popularity has waxed in most of Africa, Indonesia has had a kind of fast-and-loose relationship with it for some hundred years. Would anyone escape the snort of pedantry or pettiness if they got into a huff about the roots of a certain kind of fabric? The word batik may be Javanese, but how could one know for certain that wax-resist dyeing began in Java? Might it not have begun in China? Japan? India? Finland? Or even somewhere in Africa. The tie-and-dye Yoruba adire shares cognate technology with the batik, with starch replacing wax.
Would it have looked and sounded more 'African' if Shonibare were using adire? Maybe. But what difference would that make? Probably none. Although Shonibare works on a more cerebral level, Nike Davies-Okundaye is doing wonderful things with the adire, some brilliant palettework reminiscent, somewhat, of Frida Kahlo's nature arabesques. Even so, Davies-Okundaye sometimes drifts into pastiching batik style and design. The cultural town of Osogbo overflows mainly with adire artists - artisans. Besides being intellectually do-as-you-please, I am also against pointless nativism; I don't subscribe to the bad faith of drawing the juices of inspiration from any localised parish pump. Although the batik may have its font in Indonesia or Java,  Shonibare can own it - as he has - in the same way that Africa, especially West Africa, has appropriated it, splashing the batik with narratives and themes, ranging from the dramatic to the sublime.
Shonibare's The British Library exhibited alongside The End of Empire, is fantastic. Both works are great, but The British Library 'affects' me more. Call me a bibliophile if you like, but not in the way of liking books for the sake of it, but liking books because of what I can get out of them. I have gone past the juvenile stage when I'd allow myself the indulgence of being called a 'bookworm,' or a bibliophage, literally bookeater - although there is something almost decadently scrumptious about the confection of books on the lofty shelves. But 'The British Library' must be judged beyond the book covers. It is a work about how the British Empire almost made Britain, made London, where the British Library is situated, the centre of the world. And there is something yet still 'central' about the library, the hub of cosmopolitan bookery. I have dropped in and out of the library a few times - frequenter, lately. The library: the books, journals, authors, readers, researchers, a reliquary of literaria, ancient and contemporary - it's where the world and his wife meet. And that is what Shonibare's 'The British Library' is all about how the library represents the home where the chicks of the Empire have all come to roost. The manifold colours of the books, the different shapes and sizes, and the 'multiculturalism' inherent in the names on the spines of the books: Olufemi Majekodunmi. Anne Bronte. Otto Neurath. Majita Nastasic. Indigenes. Immigrants. Émigrés. Authors. Artists. Scientists.
And concerning cultural appropriation, sometimes what Shonibare works with is described as 'African print fabric,' sometimes as 'Indonesian batik', and in the Turner exhibition, it is described, wordily, as 'Dutch wax printed cotton textile.' Which seems to have given the word 'transculture' a fresh, interesting value. This, I think, should serve as an object lesson to that ditzy African-American girl who was apparently peeved that the cool-looking Jewish dude wore dreadlocks - and sadly, on a university campus. That's profound miseducation and racial tunnel vision. She should come round and see Shonibare's humane multicoloured canvases. By the way, my children and I were the only Africans pottering around the two exhibits on that balmy mid-spring Friday afternoon. Perhaps I should have scolded the European and Asian co-potterers in the gallery: why are you looking at the works of a man who bears a Yoruba name and who wears dreadlocks!