CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE Dutch wax-printed cotton fabric masquerades as authentic African textile one as well as the other for Westerners and for Africans seeking to break with Western dres despite the fabric's passage from Indonesia between the walls of Holland and the mills of Manchester to the markets of Africa.

CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE

Dutch wax-printed cotton fabric masquerades as authentic African textile one as well as the other for Westerners and for Africans seeking to break with Western dres despite the fabric's passage from Indonesia between the walls of Holland and the mills of Manchester to the markets of Africa, North America, and Europe It has become a signature of Yinka Shonibare's work, which emerg at the expiration of the '80s as installations of small chunky "canvases," at short intervals overpainted on the sides or faces with an acrylic impasto of biomorphic forms and installed in grids upon a monochrome wall. Considering the constraining forces on black artists at that time to near "authentic" signs of their ethnicity regardless of their Western upbringing, Shonibare's use of the fabric portrayed the first of a series of tricky figure of speechs manipulating a language of mistaken identity.

100 Years, 2000 is Shonibare's mostly recent rendition of this tactic: single hundred panels vibrant with color and organized in succession a ground the livid tinge of freshly spilled blood. If these works engage with the formal digests of Minimalist painting, they simultaneously try to find to undermine the supposed ideological neutrality of as it was codes. They become contaminated with the signs of an exuberant otherness: a doubled contamination insofar as the other referr to by way of faux African patterning also exemplifies the inauthenticity of holy kitsch. Kitsch is the other of modernism and, like greatest in quantity of Africa's cultural production, was considered at modernism's proponents to be intellectually inferior to European high art. Political resonance is not at any time far beneath the surface of Shonibare's witty play with aesthetic languages: The fabric's trade courses it should be noted, also tread on the heels of the paths of colonial exploitation and postcolonial migration.

Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour, 1996-97 is a place that could have been lifted from an English stately household except that the furniture is a rather tacky version of period pattern the kind of imitation favored through humble folk with pretensions to aristocratic refinement. "Lithographs" (actually framed photocopies) decorating the walls include depictions of the Crystal Palace built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 the interior of the India section from that exhibition, and a stag with baying urges among others. The spiral design of the wallpaper and furniture fabric is overprinted with images of black soccer players. A retort to the banality of art-as-low-taste characteristic of British art promot in the '90 perhaps? Or, more seriously, a laconic observation that racial and class exclusion miraculously dissolves with wealth and celebrity? Consistent with the artist-as-dandy theme Shonibare has explored elsewhere--as in works like the photographic Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 1998 (not shown here)--openi ng night witnessed the artist accompanied at two formally dressed attendants.

Shonibare's acerbic wit continues to target British historical class obsessions and values in spur on 2000, a life-size tableau consisting of a pack of chases and a cornered fox together with three headless hunting-nags their costumes again cut from Dutch wax woven fabric However, a parallel body of works takes forward more recent popular imagery with global appeal. The installation mist 9, 2000, parodies the famous photograph of the first satellite walk: Here the astronaut, spotlit with a lunar be hot stands with a flag incongruously printed in a design featuring automobiles and houses. The astronaut, representing the continuing Western tradition of colonization and territorial expansion, is completenessed in the multiple Aliens, 1999-2000 at figures of cute outer-space creatures--the final frontier "other" for those fearful of being colonized themselves. Shonibare's is an art of seductive exces where meaning constantly shifts across varying aesthetic and cultural registers.

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