El Anatsui Exhibits At The Rice Gallery

International Tue 02-02-2010

El Anatsui Exhibits At The Rice Gallery
By Douglas Britt/Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Installation weeks at Rice University Art Gallery are always chaotic, with assistants scrambling to help visiting artists complete their monumental commissions in time for opening night.

This week is no exception, not least because Nigeria-based El Anatsui prefers to leave the details — and much of the decision-making — of installing his massive suspended sculptures to others. The practice has roots in his decades spent teaching.

Gli Wall by El Anatsui

Gli Wall | by El Anatsui | Image/Nash Baker

“In all of my works, I regard myself as somebody who produces data for people to use,” he says. “The whole idea grew out of art education, and one of the things I came up with is that every individual is creative.”

Letting others install his works adds their creativity, along with elements of chance and a sense of freedom, to the finished pieces.

Unlike certain conceptual artists of the 1960s whose approaches his methods somewhat resemble, Anatsui isn't completely hands off — at least not here at Rice Gallery. He sits serenely in a corner, attaching thousands of metal foil collars from liquor-bottle necks, bottle tops and other discarded materials to a veillike material, occasionally getting up to offer advice.

At one point, as assistants try to hang a sculptural element from the ceiling, it crashes to the floor. Everyone gasps but Anatsui, who doesn't even look up from what he's doing.

El Anatsui creating his wall installation. Image/Nash Baker

Born in Anyako, Ghana, in 1944, Anatsui has worked with wood, ceramics and paint. But his international renown exploded during the past decade after he hit upon his signature method of cutting, folding and bending found materials from his surroundings into swatches of color and texture, then joining them with wire to create massive hanging sculptures that often resemble shimmering mosaics, curtains or tapestries.

Because the materials often come from liquor bottles, the sculptures' seductive beauty can call to mind loaded topics like addiction, globalization and even “slavery's economics, of which liquor was a key part,” as Alexi Worth wrote in a 2009 New York Times Magazine profile of Anatsui.

Now he's an art-world rock star, a sought-after participant in biennials, who has exhibited around the world. Museums are on waiting lists to collect his work. A major Anatsui retrospective,When I Last Wrote to You About Africa, will inaugurate the Museum for African Art's new building on Manhattan's Museum Mile in the fall.

Typically his sculptures hang on walls, but for the Rice installation, Anatsui wanted the work itself to function like a wall — an interest that grew out of recent visits to three cities whose histories have been shaped by fortifications: Berlin, Jerusalem and Notsie — a precolonial African city in what is now Togo. A despotic king persecuted Anatsui's migrating Ewe ancestors, who escaped the fortified city's thick clay walls by pouring used household water on an area of the wall for years until it weakened.

Installation by El Anatsui

One of El Anatsui's installations. Image/Nash Baker

Even with the installation still undergoing constant changes, you can see that Anatsui's wall is different. It's made up of the sheetlike forms to which he gravitates, calling them “the epitome of freedom.” And in contrast to most walls — and to most of his own work — it's largely transparent, obscuring just enough to provoke viewers' imaginations.

Adding to its potential richness as an artwork, the title, Gli, comes from a Ewe word that can mean “wall,” “disrupt” or “story.”

After the show closes on March 14, the work will be exhibited in Japan, where other people's choices will transform it again. And that suits Anatsui fine.
“I feel that a fixed form gets boring after a period of time,” he says. “Life is not a fixed thing.”
douglas.britt@chron.com

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