When did a dark handsome stranger last offer you a flower? If it seems far too long ago, then take a wander down Old Burlington Street, in the West End of London, on Thursday evening. A dandified Nigerian — with a floral decoration in his still nascent dreadlocks, no doubt — will be dishing out blooms.
“I want to give people something beautiful,” he says. But he probably wants to give them something thought-provoking too, because the be-suited flower-dispenser will be Yinka Shonibare MBE, the Turner-prize shortlisted “post- colonial hybrid” who likes nothing more than to play games with preconceptions — as his flamboyant incorporation of a British order of chivalry into his name might suggest.
He was appointed MBE last year for services to art. “And yes,” he tells me with a slantwise shy smile, “some of my friends were shocked that, unlike Benjamin Zephaniah, I accepted it — though not half as shocked as they were when they found out that I was going to make it a part of my artistic identity.” He laughs. “But I like that contradiction. I always like the outside in.”
Now Shonibare is opening Flower Time at the Stephen Friedman Gallery. It is his first major London show for some time, though commissioned pieces and contributions to group shows regularly pop up all over the place (anywhere from Tube posters through the Tate to the Royal Opera House) and, over the past decade or so, his eye-catching aesthetic has become pretty familiar.
Shonibare’s trademark material is the bright printed cloth known as Dutch wax that, in the wake of political independence in West Africa when people no longer wanted to wear Western clothes, came to be seen as a mark of nationalism, of authentic African identity. “Politicians began to wear it instead of business suits,” he says.
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Shonibare — born in London in 1962, returning to Nigeria with his parents (who still live there) at the age of 3 and then coming back to London again when he was 17 — began to explore the history of this material when he was at art college. One of his teachers prodded him on to the path. “I was making work about perestroika,” he explains, “and then this tutor came into my space and said it was all very well making work about Russia but why didn’t I think about authentic African art? I didn’t understand what he meant, but gradually it dawned on me that he was talking about questions of identity, and so I started exploring my ‘African authenticity’.”
Research that began at the Museum of Mankind ended up in Brixton Market. Shonibare discovered that Dutch wax had a far from simple story. This brightly patterned batik was originally Indonesian. Dutch colonialists, hoping to make a profit from selling it, set out to manufacture it commercially in the Netherlands. But the venture was not a success. The mass-produced version did not match up to East Indies standards, so the Dutch palmed off their unwanted product on West African markets instead. There it caught on, becoming a sort of national costume for millions of sub-Saharans.
This cloth is turned into a symbolic shorthand in Shonibare’s work. It shows that to be African in the modern world is not to have some “pure” culture rooted in precolonial history, but to have an identity that has, in part, grown out of and been shaped by the very history it has sought to shrug off.
()Shonibare considers himself to be “truly bicultural”. He has a son by a former English partner and is now in a relationship with a statuesque European woman. In a 1998 photo series, The Diary of a Victorian Dandy, he presents himself as the cravatted and frock-coated hero of an histrionic succession of 19th-century scenarios. His work typically plays with the cultural trope of Dutch wax. He dresses decapitated mannequins in period costumes made out of the material and uses it to furnish Victorian parlours or to create little stuffed-toy families of stalk-eyed aliens.
Nothing is black and white in Shonibare’s world — but it’s definitely colourful. And, in his new show, he takes a dizzyingly bright look at a rather dark subject, as he extends his exploration of cultural identity, of race and authenticity, into a shadowy post-9/11 terrain. “In the past few years I have been feeling increasingly disturbed by the sheer volume of media stories about war and murder and massacre and death,” he says. “I found myself confronting some troubling questions. Could I continue to create in such a climate? Could I ignore the trauma or would it inform my work? I found, increasingly, that I couldn’t ignore it.
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“I have been aware of conflict since I was young — I was a child during the Nigerian civil war, and when I was growing up I remember seeing the consequences, the amputees on the streets, for instance — but still it seemed remote in a way that it no longer seems now.
“Even in a booming art world, when we are all travelling about, visiting art fairs and having an awful lot of fun, artists can’t help but feel the change — even if it’s only in the security measures at airports.”
Reading about artists in the First World War (Shonibare is fascinated by the role of the war artist and, as part of a project in which artists will design flags that will flutter in Jubilee Gardens next year, he plans to get together a panel to discuss it), he found out — as so often in his investigations — that there were no easy answers, that taking sides was not simple. “I was studying Nietzsche, who believed that destruction could be a creative force. And seeing the ways in which war could have a regenerative capacity, I realised that people who are pro-war and people who are anti-war can actually want the same thing: they can both want freedom and democracy; they can both want to fight for a better world. Whether you are for or against fighting, it can be a form of idealism. I wanted to explore that.
“Of course, I would prefer people to resolve their disputes politically, but I’m not a pacifist. It’s just that I wouldn’t fight — I couldn’t anyway,” he adds. As a 19-year-old student, he was suddenly struck down by a spinal virus that left him paralysed for three years.
“I can remember coming round,” he says, “and asking them for a walking stick, unable to realise that I couldn’t even move.” And, even now, after years of physiotherapy, he is physically impaired. It is a problem that he has turned into part of his personality, challenging commonplace perceptions of disability by adopting dandyish dress. “I am very good at standing up for myself,” he laughs. “But because I am not a fighter. I have chosen poetry instead.”
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His new works make plain the impasse of conflict. Two headless mannequins, each clad bow-tie to breeches in gaily patterned Dutch wax, level their duelling pistols at each other’s absent heads.
Other pieces explore the underlying issues that confuse the situation. The mineral prizes that once complicated our colonial history and now confuse its political legacy are considered in Black Gold, an installation of small circular paintings in which glittering patterns adorn a dark viscous ground. They spread like flower petals upon a huge black oil splash.
“What is good and what is evil?” Shonibare wonders in his video work Odile and Odette (named after the contrasting characters in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake). Made in collaboration with the Royal Opera House, this film shows two ballerinas — one white and one black, and both wearing tutus of Shonibare’s trademark cloth — dancing either side of an elaborate Baroque frame, each mimicking the other’s movements, like perfect mirror images, bar their skin colour, of course. The viewer stares mesmerised, hypnotised by the beat of their dancing shoes, as they constantly shift place.
Near by stands the sculpture Flower Cloud, in which a headless life-sized ballerina model — her skin a coffee colour — pirouettes atop the pedestal of a sinister black mushroom cloud, prettily turning as she balances above the abyss. The apocalyptic message is only too clear. We are living in confused times Maybe that’s why Shonibare yearns to show us something beautiful. “I want to hand out flowers as a peace offering,” he says. Let’s hope they are not those cut flowers that have been flown over from Africa: those luxury exotica that come at the cost of the environment and drained lakes and destroyed livelihoods.
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Flower Time, by Yinka Shonibare MBE, is at Stephen Friedman Gallery, W1 (020-7494 1434), from Friday