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plement to the film text. While we might surmise (or glean from the
director s notes) that the writer and director were familiar with feminist
social psychology, Butler s writing brings out what is already there but
remains liminal, mysterious and opaque (the sources of anger and pain)
which are illuminated by her account of  gender trouble .
Yinka Shonibare: African Dandy
Okwui Enwezor writing about the work of the British and Nigerian artist
Yinka Shonibare argues that  Shonibare s work is about the ironies and alle-
gories of authenticity and the myths of race, and the complex language of
distancing that is often loaded into the wobbly vessel of ethnic stereotype
and colonial mimicry (Enwezor, 1997: 96). Shonibare s art exists therefore,
in a relationship of close proximity to cultural theory. The circuits which
connect Shonibare with Bhabha are discernible, although neither refers
directly to the other. We can pick up traces of the writing of Gilroy, Hall and
Bhabha in Shonibare s interviews and comments, but not in a way which
suggests a mechanical application or simply pedagogic influence.
Shonibare emerged as part of a generation of so-called  young British artists
which has tended to repudiate the Marxist, feminist and anti-racist writing
which influenced many artists who came to prominence from the mid-
1980s onwards, including the film-maker Isaac Julien, the artist Sonia
Boyce and photographer David A. Bailey. Shonibare took part in the con-
troversial Sensation exhibition in 1997-8 alongside Damien Hirst whose
antipathy to the political values of the previous generation is well docu-
mented. Like his counterparts Steve McQueen and Chris Ofili, Shonibare
resists the box of having to be  too black but, more so than both of these
Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 117
Homi Bhabha s Resistant Subject of Colonial Agency 117
other black British artists, Shonibare enters into an elaborate playful dia-
logue with the pressures on someone like him to engage directly with
ethnicity. His playfulness, however, is not embraced at the cost of politics;
he maintains both simultaneously, with work which is seductive, humorous
and politically challenging. He engages with male sexual pleasure and
licentiousness. He plugs into aspects of popular culture (his African Dandy
work owes something to the black dandyism of Prince), he is constantly
interrogating the racial stereotype, and by tactics of displacement and
replacement he subverts it with enjoyment (as in the Dandy series of photo-
graphs). Shonibare is best known for his prolific use of a kind of cotton wax
print (found by him in Brixton Market South London) usually assumed to
be African in origin but in fact the product of a complex production history
which incorporates Indonesian techniques of wax printing taken up by
Dutch companies in the late 18th century which in turn was copied by
manufacturers in the north of England and subsequently modified for large
African markets. Shonibare then dresses his work in this fabric and in so
doing moves easily between sculpture, painting, fashion,  tailoring , instal-
lation work and  tableaux vivant photography. The work as a whole is
possessed of incredible energy and exuberance. Shonibare leaps about with
obvious enjoyment from one project to the next. One piece of earlier work
titled Double Dutch (see the cover of this book) played back the tropes of
modernism, inflected as it has been with so-called primitivism, by means of
a series of 50 or so abstract blocks or squares set on a candy pink wall; the
squares were, however, dressed in the Dutch wax print, which were in turn
painted over by Shonibare. Following this there has been a prolific output,
the best known of which include sculptural headless mannequins (or shop
window dummies) dressed in Victorian styles, but constructed and pre-
sented in a riot, or cacophony of Dutch wax cotton. Sometimes the prints
themselves incorporate images taken from contemporary popular culture or
else they refer to current political issues. Shonibare clearly loves history, is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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