The object is a large scale sculpture composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of aluminum bottle caps sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. Looking at it from a distance, it will give you the illusion that it is a soft cloth, and when you approach it, you will find that it is composed of thousands of small aluminum sheets. Such materials, while seemingly stiff and sturdy, are actually free and flexible, which often helps with manipulation when installing it.
El Anatsui is the designer of these kind of metal sheets. He is a sculptor from Ghana who currently lives and works in Nigeria. He transforms simple, everyday materials into striking large-scale installations. The bottle-top hangings are handmade. You could see the traces of many hands, but none is the artist’s—with craftsmen and assistants completing essential parts. Anatsui tells the them what formats and colors he wants them to make. They select the tops they need, cut and tear them apart, and shape elements that they then wire together—or “couple”—with precut lengths of copper wire. Later, Anatsui will take loads of pictures, consider the layout on the computer and then rearrange them.
Anatsui hasn’t just turned something discarded into something beautiful. The use of these kind of materials hint at broader topics such as global consumerism and its history, including slavery.
“I saw the bottle caps as relating to the history of Africa in the sense that when the earliest group of Europeans came to trade, they brought along rum originally from the West Indies that then went to Europe and finally to Africa as three legs of the triangular trip…The drink caps that I use are not made in Europe; they are all made in Nigeria, but they symbolize bringing together the histories of these two continents.”
The New Razzle Dazzle, Art News
Anatsui wanted to “draw connections between consumption, waste, and the environment”. His metal sheets have become famous as a kind of recycling, but he does not see his activity as recycling in the usual sense—as an effort to clean up the land, to return a material to usefulness, or to avoid expending new resources. Like any artist, he chooses his material because they meet his aesthetic and symbolic criteria, they suit the way he wants to work. In art history they learned that in the cave, they painted on the cave wall, or did engravings on the walls. It means that you do art with whatever is around you. Although Anatsui did not adopt his materials in order to save the Earth, he is deeply concerned with the environment and wants his works to reflect those feelings. After the cloth phase ended in 2007, his titles increasingly touched on those concerns.
When Anatsui graduated from Kumasi, in 1969, post-independence African nationalism and cultural activism were in full swing. The ideology of indigenization embraced by artists was urgent and demanded African content and the use of local materials, implicitly those of indigenous rural life. in his trays of the early 1970s, Anatsui became one of the earliest of many West African artists to apply an African medium and process. From the’80s onwards, artists are culturally confident and became less concerned with anchoring their identity in the postcolonial nation. Instead, they think for the most part in terms of their own practices as individuals who live and work in a particular locale, yet are part of a larger global community.
Anatsui is well-known for the metal sheets. His latest bout of intense experimentation occurred in 2005-6, when, turning inward to develop his bottle-top medium and process, he developed dozens of ways to shape the aluminum disk and cylinder, opening up a seeming infinitude of ways to use them expressively. His bottle-top sculptures do not generally step out onto the floor but has a crucial relationship with the wall, on which it relies for support. It is just a decorative object and no functional use. He leaves the metal sheets open and encourages the works to take new forms every time they are installed.
A Western art critic has said that Anatsui’s bottle tops could be compared to “Duchamp‘s bicycle wheel” and “recall disparate Modernist sweet spots without quite settling into any familiar category.”
We could find deep meanings in the media Anatsui has chosen: they are sourced from his immediate environment, they have been put to intense human use. They are thought to have lost value. They are ignored, discarded or thrown away. They all have something to do with food consumption. To him, their provenance imbues or charges them with history and content, which he seek to explore in order to highlight certain conditions of mankind’s existence, as well as his relationship with himself and the environment. He therefore try to bring these objects back, to present them again in ways which seem to make them confront their former lives and the lives of those who have used them.
When I learned about Anatsui’s life and many years of art making, I deeply felt that social changes of the times have profoundly affected the artist. Especially when you come from one country, your work will often be labeled as representing that country. Even if the meaning you want to convey through the work is not limited to your country, the audience would feel that your work bears the brand of this country. I remember that when I saw an artwork, I would easily fall into the stereotype of that artist. After knowing Anatsui, I needed to correct my inertial thinking. When I appreciate an artwork, I should first think about what is my subjective feelings are, and then understand the artist’s creative intentions.
