Angela McRobbie, 'The African Dandy'
Published in conjunction with the site-specific-project ‘Yinka Shonibare: Diary of a Victorian Dandy’ shown in London Underground Stations through October 1998.
Throughout October 1998 a large-size poster (2m x 3m) featuring the work of Yinka Shonibare will be appearing at between 80 to 100 sites in London underground stations. The image represents the first stage in a sequence of new work titled Diary Of A Victorian Dandy. The poster comprises a photographic still of a young black dandy figure who is holding forth, book in hand, in the library of a grand Victorian country house. He is the centre of attention, and is surrounded by a group of men who appear to be hanging onto his every word. At the door a cluster of maids are looking on, in admiration. The wide angle of the picture, allows the viewer's eye to range across the entire room. What she or he sees is the whole paraphernalia of nineteenth-century literature and learning, from the tall bookshelves, on the top of which are displayed a line of busts, to the solid oak desk, comfortable chairs, descending down to the floor with its woven Indian carpet. It is a richly textured image. The dandy's blue gentleman's tailored suit, offsets the darker and more sober attire of the men in the room, while the maids are resplendent in black and white.
The picture appears to be staged, as in a television costume drama, which adds a degree of tension. The viewer is being given a sneak preview, he or she is being brought right into some narrativised situation which will be revealed at a later stage. What is being shown at this stage recalls those themes which have preoccupied Shonibare from the start. These are the relation of fabric to clothing, and the relation between the body and history. In addition there is invariably a broader frame which holds these together, what Stuart Hall has called the interwoven destinies of 'the West and the rest'. In this image there is a further mark of Shonibare's interests which involves making his pictures double as stage sets. This is signalled in the use of actors (all white, save for Shonibare who has cast himself in the central role of the black dandy). However the drama being unfolded is also popular drama, and Shonibare consistently uses popular culture as a way of dealing with serious subject matter. The space in this picture which allows the viewer to see so much, is also the theatrical space which emphasises the drama, the performance and the audience. At its heart is the figure of the black man, cast in the role of the dandy.
The remaining four images which mark the second stage of this work will appear later in the coming months in a UK gallery. As a series of five they describe a day in the life of the ‘African’ Victorian dandy. This character is Shonibare's invention, and a way of experimenting with a whole series of historical questions. The dandy is a figure who is always something of an outsider, he learns all the rules of high society, endears himself with the women, and succeeds in finding a place for himself within the aristocratic circles which so attract him. He dresses to perfection, but in this too he gives himself away, he is not of the upper classes, but aspires towards them. He lives a louche life, rises late, dresses narcissistically, gambles, dabbles in literature and entertains himself with easily available sexual pleasures. He is attended to by valets and maids, whose presence in the historical picture is also a reminder of the class divisions which sustain this sensual lifestyle. However, in these five images it is the blackness of the dandy which provokes a different 'take' on an otherwise familiar scenario, one made all the more familiar by the numerous television series (all heaving bosoms and tight breeches) and Hollywood dramas.
These other images show, first, a morning scene with the dandy being roused from his slumbers by four maids and a valet. There is something excessive in this crowded scene, the artist is inviting us to comment, but not in the language of conventional class politics. By putting a black figure, for a change, not in the position of social subordination but quite the opposite, the artist is also making it more difficult for the viewer to find the right ethical or moral position from which he or she can respond. In fact it is only possible to 'read' the images by seeing the African dandy as a contemporary metaphor for the dynamics of race and social mobility in Britain in the late 1990s. This becomes more apparent as the images progress through the day. The second image is the Underground poster, it is 2pm in the afternoon and he is in the study, but not for long because by 5pm, now attired in crimson velvet, he enjoys a game of pool, surrounded this time by no less than six white males. Again they are looking to him in admiration, his presence is heroic. By 9pm he is in the drawing room in a scenario of richness and opulence. Candles glow, the women's dresses introduce paler, lighter shades which provide contrast to the dark evening suits of the gentlemen. Music is being played and we see the dandy this time in the role of social animal par excellence, here he is the entertainer, he is enjoying the good things of life. Not surprisingly the night ends in sexual pleasure. Once again he is surrounded this time by a whole entourage of semi-dressed women and men, with the valet in the background.
The reason the viewer is forced to update the images and re-locate them in a more contemporary setting is because they are historically unlikely. This is not to say that the African dandy did not exist, more that such a figure has not been put in the centre-stage in this way, in drama, literature or popular culture, then or now. Shonibare's point is presumably that he could have been there but was painted out of the official historical canvas, and if he wasn't there in body, his own heritage was there in the goods brought back and prominently displayed as signs of wealth and conspicuous consumption in the drawing rooms of the Victorian upper classes. Where did the cloth, the satins, the crisp cottons, the rich dyes which made the velvet so scarlet, the whole liveries come from if not from the world outside the Victorian home? This space was splendid, warm and inviting, it was indeed a 'country of the mind', by virtue of the labours of its others, near and far. The Victorian working classes created the comforts, while the ‘uncivilised’ populations of Africa and Asia created the wealth. But Yinka Shonibare muddies this picture and avoids didacticism by putting himself in the picture luxuriating in these worldly goods.
This is an anti-essentialising move, pursued with some humour. It resists the requirement of gravity and realism on the part of the black artist. It also refuses the moral expectation of goodness and lofty idealism in black characterisation. The African dandy enjoys the pleasures of the flesh unrepentantly. Shonibare is performing another double take here. He alerts us to the overarching whiteness of popular fictions; 'bodice rippers' like Georgette Heyer's novels which feature an endless stream of cads and dandies. But he is also looking for an iconography which can incorporate black figures as good and as bad as their white counterparts. At the same time he is exploring the fascination and attraction which, as various cultural theorists from Frantz Fanon to Homi Bhabha have argued, are part of the dynamic of racial antagonism. At every point in his day the black dandy is being looked at, he is the centre of attention. He is the object of desire, admired for his extravagant dress, his elegance, manners, etiquette and social skills. He is literally surrounded by admirers.
It is this adoration which provides the link to the present. What is the place of the black super-hero in contemporary culture? How do successful black men and women survive when they reach the top? The dandy image at the centre of these pictures recalls a number of black British figures, like the tailor and fashion designer Ozwald Boateng or Chris Eubank, the boxer who now, like so many other wealthy celebrities, has a 'country pile' and makes regular appearances in the pages of Hello! magazine. Eubank is always immaculate, dressing up for every occasion including those presumably where it is de rigeur to dress down. This seems also to be Shonibare's point, that just as the working classes of the post-war years still paraded in their Sunday best, while the middle classes spent the weekends in casual fashion, this same pattern is repeated in the hierarchy of taste to which black people are also subjected. But if they cannot get it right, if on questions of taste, and there is always some hidden agenda, there is also value in the excessive, in the over-the-top dress of certain young black men and women today, in the lycra, gold jewellery and bright coloured 'batty riders' of ragga girls, and in the Versace splendour of rappers and MCs. Shonibare's foregrounding of fashion and dress as part of his visual world makes the point vividly that fine art now draws on and is energised by the ordinary and the everyday.
Shonibare is certainly one of the most interesting artists working in Britain today. He first captured the attention of critics with works which inverted the axioms of modernism. In the 1994 installation titled Double Dutch he used patterned African print or batik (usually understood as ethnic fabric), instead of canvas. With this as his background he then proceeded to create a series of fifty panels. This choice was not just to make some polemical post-colonialist point, but rather to do something more complex. The fabric print intersected with Shonibare's abstract markings on its surface. This culture clash also drew attention to the history of the print itself. Indonesian in origin, it was and still is manufactured in Manchester and exported to Africa for use in traditional dress. The cultural flow which the artist is concerned with, is not understood narrowly in terms of what 'the rest' gives to the West. Nor is Africa represented as a coherent, unified kind of ethnicity. Africa is also diverse, stratified, and culturally coded. Shonibare has spoken in interviews of the multiplicity of influences he was exposed to growing up in Lagos ('Hawaii Five-0...James Brown....the Sugar Hill Gang...') before coming back to England to study.
Britishness also provides a key theme in the work. As bell hooks has written, it is important to see how 'whiteness' exists in the black imagination. Here we see how Britishness exists in the black imagination. Shonibare embarks on a series of trips or historical journeys in his work. In the Victorian Philanthropist's Parlour (1996) he created another Madame Tussaud-style stage set, this time using batik as upholstery. The Victorian love of fabrics, including the heavy textured prints used in domestic furnishings such as wallpaper, curtains and drapes, sofas and armchairs, cushions and chimney guard, are all replaced in this piece with the same African print, this time incorporating on its surface the images of black football heroes. The layering technique where a historical setting is turned into a stage set, so that it begins to look like a heritage-style recreation of the real thing, provides a mechanism which allows Shonibare to make his point. In neither the original nor in the contemporary 'living history' museums, is there any attempt to divest Britishness of its own ethnic purity, or expose it to its own historical hybridity. In the exhibition Sensation Shonibare’s work stood out for this reason. The Victorian women's dresses made up again in African print, and exhibited as though they were in the V&A Museum, demonstrated how for black artists working in Britain today, the cynical 'post-ironic' style of most of the yBas, has little resonance. A sense of history is a necessity and a resource.
Yinka Shonibare's current work achieves a remarkable cross fertilisation between seriousness and light-heartedness. To engage with history and theory need not mean abandoning the field of entertainment. History is also there on the pages of Hello! By putting the black hero of contemporary popular culture into a nineteenth century setting he is insisting on the importance of bringing history into current art practice. But this is never heavy-handed because Shonibare is also allowing himself to be decadent. The Diary of a Victorian Dandy marks a moment of pure fantasy and indulgence in the black imagination.