Peyton Cotto

Old Man’s Cloth

El Anatsui2003

Background• El Anatsui (born 1944) is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much

of his career in Nigeria.• Anatsui was born in Anyako, and trained at the College of

Art, University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, in central Ghana. He began teaching at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in 1975, and has become affiliated with the Nsukka group.

• Anatsui's preferred media are clay and wood, which he uses to create objects based on traditional Ghanaian beliefs and other subjects. He has cut wood with chainsaws and blackened it with acetylene torches; more recently, he has turned to installation art. Some of his works resemble woven cloths such as kente cloth. Anatsui also incorporates uli and nsibidi into his works alongside Ghanaian motifs.

A bunch of ordinary objects

From what others regarded as rubbish, African artist El Anatsui has created an art collection that blends ordinary objects into a bright, extraordinary whole.

Visual

• Old Man’s Cloth hangs like a large tapestry, but when we look closer, it's easy to become captivated by the small metal fragments that comprise the work in hundreds. Arranged within a shifting grid of stripes and blocks of color, the components form their own internal maps across the surface, melding into vertical gold bands, interlocking black and silver rows, or a deviant red piece floating in a field of black.

Construction and Installation

• While Old Man’s Cloth would have been laid flat during its construction, it is contorted and manipulated during installation, so that the individual metal pieces can catch the light from every angle. This brilliant visual effect makes its humble origins all the more impressive. 

Meaning/Material

• The luminescent gold colors also recall the colonial past of Anatsui’s home country—modern Ghana was previously a British colony called The Gold Coast until its independence in 1957. The fluid movements of the work’s surface remind us of the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which carried slave-ships and traders between Africa, Europe and the New World. By bestowing his works with titles such asMan’s Cloth and Woman’s Cloth, Anatsui also makes reference to the significance of textiles in African societies, and their own historical role in trade networks.

Patron

• This piece of art was decorated, collected, and created by El Anatsui himself. Not a single person was of help when it comes to nearly all of his artworks.

Content/Material

• Alcohol was one of the commodities brought with [Europeans] to exchange for goods in Africa. Eventually alcohol become one of the items used in the transatlantic slave trade. They made rum in the West Indies, took it to Liverpool, and then it made its way back to Africa. I thought that the bottle caps had a strong reference to the history of Africa. 

Other Works of ArtCrumbling Wall

Crumbling Wall• Anatsui typically uses readily available local resources as

materials for his sculptures. In this work, he transforms old graters--once used to prepare gari, a West African staple made from cassava flour--into an architectural form of densely perforated sheets of rusted metal. The wall is in effect an homage to gari, which is often consumed as the main meal in the form of dough or a thin porridge. The production of gari is long and tedious, and the manual grater is usually only a piece of galvanized sheet metal, or even a piece of flattened can or tin, punched with three-millimeter nails that leave a raised, jagged flange on the underside.

Crumbling Wall

• The cassava pieces are rubbed vigorously against the flange with strong downward movements. This hand grating, the most painful operation in the making ofgari, figuratively represents the resilience of African traditions and peoples in the face of change.Crumbling Wall--a "monumental dirge" according to Nigerian art historian and critic Sylvester Ogbechie--can also be seen as a metaphor for the destruction and corruption evident in modern African politics and the decay of the once-beautiful structures that decorated Africa's cultural landscape

Peak Project

Peak Project• As Anatsui explains, his new series of work was

inspired by "huge piles of detritus from consumption," such as the mountains of milk tins and bottle tops that have been growing throughout West Africa due to limited recycling technology. "A lot of things which are made in Europe and America and are sent over arrive in certain kinds of packaging, for example, fresh milk comes in tins. We have our own milk too, of course, but in addition there are huge imports of milk from outside, which is accessed by way of tins." This work examines consumption and the various physical landmarks that trash generates in different parts of the world.

Peak Project

• When asked specifically about his use of milk tins inPeak Project, Anatsui remarked, "The format that I find very effective with them is piling them into heaps--or peaks, since the commonest brand is Peak Milk! They mutate effectively because we don't tie them too tightly, there is always the freedom for each piece to adjust itself. So as you lift and place them down they keep adjusting until a form firms up."