Jamila's Spot: Artist pick

May 2, 2015

HUA 101

Online Assignment #6

The artist that I chose to do my assignment on is El Anatsui. El Anatsui was born in Ghana. His mom died when he was a toddler. He went to art school in Ghana. In school, Anatsui said that the letter “G” was so intriguing to him more than the other letters. There were some wooden people that Anatsui created and he took a group photograph of it. He when you’re taking a group photo, you’re thinking about kinship and it has to be close together. He preferred clay and wood which was used to make objects based on traditional Ghanaian beliefs and other objects.

Anatsui has cut wood with chainsaws and blackened it with acetylene torches. More recently, he has turned to installation art. Installation art is an artistic genre of three dimensional (3-D) works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Some of his work looks like woven cloths such as kente cloth. Anatsui includes uli and nsibidi into his work along with Ghanaian motifs.

In the interview from Art 21, Anatsui watched over young studio assistants who worked with him to create sculptures made from bottle caps. He was focused on making sculptures. He began to work with it for aesthetic properties of the caps which also can allude to the role of international commerce in African history. The materials he has used are metal, ceramic and wood. He wanted to change the art into something you contemplate, not something you used. Every piece of the art is different. That’s the whole idea—change.

Another one of his artworks was a broken pot. In Africa when a pot is broken, that’s not the end of its life. It’s a regeneration. It’s bringing about a new life. Destruction= prerequisite for new growth. It was made at a time when the economy of Ghana was at the lowest point so making the ceramic artwork was a point for positivity. Going back to the bottle caps, the colors of the bottle caps were not intentional. They just happened to represent the colors of the kente cloth fabric which is traditionally red, black and yellow. People were looking at the art like textiles and no meaning beyond that so it became a problem. The meaning behind the bottle caps is that it was liquor bottle caps. Liquor came into the culture when the European traders came to Africa for the first time. They brought items to trade with. One of the items were drinks. Eventually drinks were traded for slaves who were brought to America to grow more cotton and sugar cane to make more drinks and then shipped to Europe.