Dutch Wax/Is That Jazz?

So much love for Yinka Shonibare. One of my favorite artists ever. I just finished reading this great interview with him. Please check out his work. His explanations are so much better than anything I could write about it.

Like here's what he says about artifice and art:

To be an artist, you have to be a good liar. There’s no question about that. If you’re not, you can’t be a good artist. Basically, you have to know how to fabricate, how to weave tales, how to tell lies, because you’re taking your audience to a nonexistent space and telling them that it does exist. But you have to be utopian in your approach. You have to create visions that don’t actually exist yet in the world—or that may actually someday exist as a result of life following art. It’s natural for people to want to be sectarian or divisive. Different cultures want to group together, they want to stick to their own culture, but what I do is create a kind of mongrel. In reality most people’s cultures have evolved out of this mongrelization, but people don’t acknowledge that. British culture in reality is very mixed. There’s a way in which people want to keep this notion of purity, and that ultimately leads to the gas chambers. What I am doing may be humorous so as to show the stupidity of things. But at the same time I understand that the logical conclusion of sectarianism is Auschwitz, or the “logical” in its starkest manifestation. So even though these works are humorous, there’s a very dark underlying motivation.

Here's one of my favorite pieces of his, Vacation:

Source

As the article linked above mentions, the variant uses of Dutch Wax print fabric in his work draw on many different meanings as he re-contextualizes them, often in Victorian/Colonialist reimaginings. Not only is his art aesthetically stunning, and the craftsmanship is impeccable, the depth of the work--at once visually arresting, sociopolitically provacative, wryly playful, with his unmistakable artistic signature--is truly special. Plus, I find his work to be immediately accessible and interesting, which so many estoeric and boring artworks ( or the manner in which instutions present them) lack.

Note: The title of this post plays with Gil Scott-Heron's film entitled Black Wax/Is that Jazz? The latter part (an afterthought of the main film) of which you can watch here. It also deals with compartmentalization of genre, artistic nomenclature, and the problematics of purity. Might Shonibare and Scott-Heron have anything to say to one another? I wonder...