תנקה שוניברי
インカ・ショニバレ
ЙИНКА ШОНИБАРЕ

The Swing (after Fragonard)

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source: yinkashonibarembe

Yinka Shonibare, MBE was born in London and moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to London to study Fine Art first at Byam Shaw College of Art (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) and then at Goldsmiths College, where he received his MFA, graduating as part of the ‘Young British Artists’ generation. He currently lives and works in the East End of London.

Over the past decade, Shonibare has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. Shonibare’s work explores these issues, alongside those of race and class, through the media of painting, sculpture, photography and, more recently, film and performance. Using this wide range of media, Shonibare examines in particular the construction of identity and tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe and their respective economic and political histories. Mixing Western art history and literature, he asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today. Having described himself as a ‘post-colonial’ hybrid, Shonibare questions the meaning of cultural and national definitions.

Shonibare was a Turner prize nominee in 2004 and awarded the decoration of Member of the “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”. He has added this title to his professional name. He was notably commissioned by Okwui Enwezor At Documenta 10 in 2002 to create his most recognised work ‘Gallantry and Criminal Conversation’ that launched him on an international stage. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennial and internationally at leading museums worldwide. In September 2008, his major mid-career survey commenced at the MCA Sydney and toured to the Brooklyn Museum, New York in June 2009 and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC in October 2009 . In 2010, ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ became his first public art commission on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square.
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source: africasiedu

The Swing (after Fragonard)

Art history provides a rich source of subject matter for Shonibare, who since the late 1990s has transformed well-known European paintings into three-dimensional tableaux vivants with a twist. Shonibare cites the French Rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard as particularly influential. Fragonard’s paintings and sculptures are characterized by their lavish depictions of the upper class at play, pursuing love and enjoying the material comforts of their wealth.

The Swing (after Fragonard) is one of Shonibare’s best-known sculptural works. Inspired by Fragonard’s 1767 painting The Swing, it depicts the sensual abandon of a privileged young woman at her leisure. The woman’s airborne slipper, kicked high like an exclamation point as she swings back and forth before her lover, underlines the decadence of the original painting. A garter is exposed beneath her billowing dress and, scandalously, she is assisted in her tryst by a priest who obligingly pushes the swing.

Shonibare’s mannequins are characteristically presented without their heads–a playful reference to the beheading of the aristocracy during the French Revolution and the redistribution of power and land. He says: “It amused me to explore the possibility of bringing back the guillotine in the late 1990s . . . for use on the historical icons of power and deference.” He has also noted that the absence of heads in his sculptures removes direct connotations of race or individual identity.
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source: tateorguk

Summary

The Swing (after Fragonard) is an installation in which a life-size headless female mannequin, extravagantly attired in a dress in eighteenth-century style made of bright African print fabric, reclines on a swing suspended from a verdant branch attached to the gallery ceiling. Beneath her, a flowering vine cascades to the floor. The figure is static, poised at what appears to be the highest point of her swing’s forward trajectory. Her right knee is bent, while her left leg stretches out in front of her, causing her skirts to ride up. She appears to have just kicked off her left shoe, which hangs mid-air in front of the figure, suspended on invisible wire.

Yinka Shonibare’s The Swing (after Fragonard), made in Sheffield in 2001, is based on an iconic Rococo painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing (Les hazards heureux de l’escarpolette), 1767 (Wallace Collection P430), which depicts an aristocratic young woman in a frothy pink dress sweeping through a garden on a swing. In her abandon, she has kicked off one tiny pink shoe; Fragonard catches the moment the shoe arcs through the air. The woman is watched by two men; one pushes her from behind a tree, while the other lies in the foliage beneath her, precisely and mischievously placed to look up her billowing skirts.

Shonibare’s work paraphrases this scene, replicating part of the composition in three dimensions. He has preserved the woman on the swing, her shoe in mid-flight, and some of the foliage that surrounds her, but excluded the two men and much of the garden. The woman is dressed in African print fabric, representing a different kind of decorative opulence from Fragonard’s silk and lace. This creates a disjunction; the sculpture is both familiar and strange.

The artist’s intention is that the piece should be viewed straight on, with the figure seen from the same angle Fragonard depicted it in the painting. However, because the installation is rendered in three dimensions, viewers can walk around the swinging woman in the gallery space, placing themselves in the position of either of the men in the painting. The audience becomes directly implicated in the erotic voyeurism of Fragonard’s image, and, like the reclining man in the painting, can also look up the woman’s skirt. The mannequin wears knickers made of the same fabric as her underskirt.

The sensuality of the original painting is maintained and critiqued in Shonibare’s version. The opulence of her dress and the frivolity of her gesture, swinging languidly across the gallery, make Shonibare’s figure a direct translation of the Fragonard original. However, Shonibare’s coquette has no head, which may allude to the literal fate that awaited the aristocracy after the French Revolution; only twenty-five years after Fragonard painted The Swing, the guillotine was introduced in Paris to more efficiently execute royalist sympathisers.

The mannequin’s skin is dark, and her dress and shoes are made out of brightly coloured African print Dutch wax printed cotton. Dutch wax textiles have been a signature in Shonibare’s work for many years, and represent the cultural hybridity central to his practice. The fabrics have a complex history. Indonesian batik techniques were appropriated and industrialised by the Dutch during the colonial period. English manufacturers copied the Dutch model, making fabrics in the Dutch wax style in Manchester, using a predominantly Asian work force to produce designs derived from traditional African textiles. The fabrics were then exported to West Africa, and became popular during the African independence movement, when their bright colours and geometric patterns became associated with the struggle for political and cultural independence. Today they continue to be sold in Africa and in markets in New York and London. Their designs are constantly adapted: one of the layers of fabric in the skirt in this work has a Chanel logo motif.

Shonibare was born in London and grew up in the UK and Nigeria. He describes himself as ‘a postcolonial hybrid’ (quoted in Perrella, ‘Be-Muse. Between Mimesis and Alterity’, in Yinka Shonibare: Be-muse, p.16) and the fabrics he uses are a symbol of this multi-cultural identity. By dressing one of art history’s most famous French coquettes in African print, Shonibare reminds us that identity is a construction. The magpie-like creation of identity from various historical and cultural signifiers is a key theme in Shonibare’s work. Perhaps his best-known work, Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 1998, commissioned by InIVA and reproduced on posters on the London Underground that year, is a series of photographs of the artist cavorting his way through a hedonistic day in Victorian London. The photographs portray the artist as a glamorous outsider figure with the refined sensibilities and sartorial elegance of the Wildean dandy. In a subversion of the Victorian notion of the black savage, the images glamourise black identity in a fin-de-siècle context. Shonibare suggests that the attitude of the dandy is available to be adopted and discarded like a well-made suit. Similarly, The Swing (after Fragonard) suggests that the idea of a pure or authentic identity based on traditional notions of nationality, race or class is as anachronistic as a corset and bustle.
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source: soicomvn

Yinka Shonibare MBE là một trong những gương mặt quan trọng nhất của nghệ thuật đương đại hậu thuộc địa. Anh sinh ở London nhưng lên ba đã sang Nigeria sống, sau này quay lại Anh để học mỹ thuật. Những tác phẩm điêu khắc quan trọng của anh là những đàn ông, đàn bà, trẻ con không đầu, gợi lên sự dịch chuyển về mặt thể lý này, cũng như gợi lên thứ ngôn ngữ phổ quát của toàn cầu hóa.
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source: mayartworldblogblogspot

עבודותיו של שוניברי מציגות בובות ללא ראש שכן הן סימן למהפכה הצרפתית (1789 – 1799) היות ובזמנה ראשי האריסטוקרטים שנתפסו על ידי המהפכנים- נערפו. פרגונאר איבד את פטרוניו בימי המהפכה דבר שגרם לו לפגיעה כלכלית ולאיבוד כמה מחבריו.
בעבודת אמנות זו, שוניברי ממחיש את מחיר ההנאות והקולוניאליזם. שוניברי מלביש את המתנדנדת בבגדים ברוח התקופה (צרפת של המאה ה-18) אילו צבעי הבדים ודוגמאותיהם הם של בגדים אפריקאים (אינדונזים במקור, הובאו לאפריקה על ידי הקולוניאליסטים) ואומצו על ידי התושבים.
שוניברי מציב את המתנדנדת בגן המלא והגדוש בצמחייה, מציב סבכות ויוצר אווירה של גן כמקום המשמש כמפלט לאהבה, וכן דואג שמיקום הצופה יהיה זהה לצופה של פרגונאר- המקבל הצצה אל מתחת לשמלתה של הגברת המתנדנדת.