In the past ten years, Anatsui has focused on large tapestry-like metal sculptures made up out of thousands of colourful liquor caps. Using found objects he reworks and rearranges materials and transforms them into something new without them losing their own history. His work could be described as a collage of discarded memories. Anatsui recombines them into his own, never fixed syntax, which the viewer is invited to adapt freely, bringing in his own history.
(extract from the Axel
Vervoordt Gallery press release)
On May 10th El Anatsui’s
solo exhibition Stitch In Time at
Axel Vervoordt Gallery opens. While much has been said and written about the
cultural influences that pervade El Anatsui’s work, it seemed a fortuitous
occasion to have a brief interview regarding the artist’s working processes and
their relationship to time.
El Anatsui: I work with so many
assistants and the process is more exploratory than anything else. I don’t do
drawing, or sketch, or anything. Although there are so many people working, the
process is still very slow, so slow that
you can do all your thinking as it goes on. Earlier on, I worked with machines,
like a chainsaw or circular saw, which are very fast. For that you have to have
a fairly good idea of what you are doing. For this reason I used to draw, in
order to have something to guide me. This process is so slow and organic that I
don’t need the drawing: I let the materials lead me on. And eventually I decide
to stop when I feel it is right.
Kate Mayne: You have spoken in other
interviews of working with “many hands”,
with all your assistants, that this effort is almost symphonic, and that
this gives the work a certain charge, and - even the installation crew is part
of the process because I understand that you sometimes leave the choices to
them when installing the work - would you say there is a social or almost
ritualistic dimension to the making process?
EA: Ritualistic? Yes, I think there is something
of a rite to it: you are asking people
to do this work, and every time, every day, it’s the same process. So you can
describe it as a ritual. And when the works are done, you leave it, or else you
take over and decide how it is hung… I think that is also another ritual. There
are so many rituals that surround my work and my working process.
KM: When I see the nature of the recent work I
see accumulations, a flocking together of elements, like a multitude, and in
this accumulation, it reminds me of the repetitive dimension of storytelling,
and the way in oral cultures, stories are related through the generations…
EA: And every generation adding something to it..
KM: Would you say that is also part of it?
EA: It could be.
Hesitant Rivers, 388 x 233 cm, aluminum and
copper, 2012
KM: How do you relate to time?
EA: Well… I don’t think I make myself a slave to
time. I do things when the right time comes for that. There are works that I
start with and I find that I am unable to move in a way that I like. So I
abandon it. There are a lot of abandoned works in my studio. If I feel that the
right time hasn’t come for them to move on, I hold them until the right moment
and the right idea comes and I can move them along. It is more difficult when I
have things like a commission, or a project, and then they have timeframes…they
have deadlines. They start asking you: can we have this? Those are the most
difficult times for me.
KM: But do you find that stimulating in another
way?
EA: Yes, they are stimulating in the wrong way.
(laughter)
EA: Yes, with that piece I don’t think I had
problems with time, although I was working on two pieces at the same time, one
for the Venice Biennale itself and then one for Artempo. But because I started
in good time, it went well. I did a site visit a year before, and I was working
with ideas, and tossing them round, and got the right idea that I thought I
should work with, in good time. So a year moved on. And the same with the
Venice Biennale. They told me that I have two walls facing each other and I
decided to play with male and female elements
in the media I work with for each wall respectively.
Axel’s theme, the theme of
the show, was ‘Artempo, when time becomes art’, and I was thinking of earlier art.
I have always thought that time is the best shaper of things, so for Artempo I
created a work which talks about memory. Fading and fresh memories. And my work
goes on even at the time of mounting, if I can be there… During the mounting
process, I saw that I needed to open the work up so that it would relate to the
wall of the old building. Because my materials are also fairly new, aluminum
and shiny, I decided to start tearing portions of the work and creating
openings, so visually the top portion revealed the older portions of the old
building. You could see the walls through the work. In that way you bring the
two together, the old and the new, you are faced with time in two perspectives.
Stitch in Time II, 403 x 497 cm, aluminum and
copper, 2012
KM: Could you say a little more about the
technical aspect of making the pieces. I know you’ve tried different methods of
knotting and weaving, how far can you anticipate how this will work when you
start a piece?
EA: I cannot anticipate that. It goes as far as I
can see for that day. And if I think for that day it’s enough, then I might
change the format. You have different textures or formats that have developed
over the years. You can for one night think about what format that could have,
and compliment what is there, or if what is there is beginning to be tiring,
then you ask yourself: ‘what format can
come in there in order to give it new life?’ It’s at a point like that, that
you have a failure in communication. You might not be able to come up with a
solution, the work is put on hold and a new one started.
KM: When I look at the pieces I have the feeling
it is not only our seeing that is touched but our other senses as well. It’s
very sensual; obviously there is movement suggested, and I think of sound,
because of the material…
EA: Yes, the sound is coming. With Axel’s project
in Venice, it was mounted in my absence. And when I went I saw the wind was
moving it around… I heard the sounds and they were very interesting to me.
Following that I did another piece in Berlin on a museum façade, and I played
with that idea, by deliberately having loose pieces. They are attached in such
a way that they could, at the smallest gust of wind, move, so I was exploring
the idea of movement and sound as well. And it was mounted in such a way that
wind could assail it from the back or the front; it was in the wind. It worked
effectively with that: you saw a lot of movement - in certain portions of the
work - and the rest remained silent. And then I did another work about the
ozone layer, this idea that we have an ozone layer which is torn, and the sun’s
rays are striking the earth directly without the filter of the ozone…
KM: That brings me to my next question. Form and
beauty are so intensely present in the work; at the same time I have a feeling
that meaning, the dimension of all the possible resonances, is equally present,
triggering all kinds of additional associations in the same instant. Could you
say a bit more about the political dimensions of the work?
EA: I don’t know, most of the time when I make a
statement I might not intend it to be political… it’s just like playing around
with words that you see around… people can start to put meanings into them. But
it might not be that I intended to make a political statement.
KM:
Because of the all-over effect and the repetition, I can imagine that
when you are standing in front of the work, it sort of visually wraps around
you, and the middle is at the side and the other way round too… and it seems as if there’s no up or down..
EA: Yes,
in some cases there’s no up and down.
It’s not like a painting, that you have to hang either horizontally or
vertically. Neither does one get limited to the four cornered format because it
can be altered to define its peculiar outline.
KM: We are really looking forward to see what is
going to happen in the gallery space these next few days.
EA: Yes, I am curious too to see how the works
will come out in that space.
Interview by Kate Mayne
[1] ‘Artempo, where time becomes art’, Museo Fortuny,
Venice, 2007, conceived by Axel Vervoordt and Tijs Visser.
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