Nelson's Ship in a Bottle
Yinka Shonibare, MBE
b. 1962, London
'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle' is a sculpture of Nelson's flagship 'HMS Victory'. The sculpture considers the relationship between the birth of the British Empire, made possible in part by Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, and multiculturalism in Britain today.
"For me it's a celebration of London's immense ethnic wealth, giving expression to and honouring the many cultures and ethnicties that are still breathing precious wind into the sails of the United Kingdom." Yinka Sonibare, MBE. The sculpture is 3.25 metres high and 5 metres long and weighs 4 tons
Yinka Shonibare isn't nervous about how the critics will respond to his commission for Trafalgar Square's famously empty fourth plinth. What would be the point? The ship is in the bottle: there's no going back now. And how, exactly, did it get into the bottle? He grins, gleefully. "I'm not saying." Was it perhaps a hinged, fold-up vessel, one he could unfurl inside the bottle inside using those mechanical arms that park keepers use to pick up autumn leaves? He shakes his head. Or maybe the bottle's neck is sufficiently wide that he was able to slither in and out at will? "I've told you: I can't say. It's a secret." All he will reveal is that the bottle itself is not made entirely of glass (it's some kind of polymer blend); that it was manufactured, not in Britain, but elsewhere in Europe; and that a wax seal on its side will read: "YSMBE" (his initials, followed by the honour he received from the Queen in 2005). Oh, yes, and there will be a row of Union flags along its prow.
From the moment the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group wrote to him three years ago, asking him please to submit a proposal, Shonibare knew in his gut what he wanted to stick on London's highest-profile site for sculpture. "It's a huge honour to do something for Trafalgar Square," he says. "And it seemed obvious to do a work that was connected to the square in some way. I'm surprised no one has done that before. I wanted to do a serious thing for a serious space, but I also wanted it to be exciting, magical, and playful." His big idea was Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, a large-scale model of Horatio Nelson's ship, HMS Victory, from which he commanded the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The twist in the tail, however, is that this ship's sails would be made of Dutch wax, the brightly coloured African fabric that is Shonibare's trademark. "Nelson's victory freed up the seas for the British, and that led, in turn, to the building of the British Empire. But in a way, his victory also created the London we know today: an exciting, diverse, multicultural city." So his work is intended to be celebratory rather than critical? "Both. I want to make people think. I love London. I don't know any city like it. It has a unique vibe. Maybe this is just a monument to live, and let live."
Shonibare, an unexpectedly willowy man in a spiffing powder-blue jacket, is used to attention. His work has been shown in every major gallery in London (not to mention the Louvre in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and in 2004, he was shortlisted for the Turner prize. But still, the plinth commission is different. "The Turner was quite full-on. I'm a winner, not a loser, and I hated not winning. It irritated me, it annoyed me. But you move on. I was already collected, I was already making money; the Turner didn't change anything. But then came the plinth, and that was a huge compensation, and it already feels bigger than anything else. The work will be there for 18 months. So many people will see it." Where is it now? We are in Shonibare's studio in London Fields, Hackney, the smaller of two premises in which he works, and all I can see is the maquette he made when he submitted his original proposal. "It's somewhere else," he says. His face is a picture of innocence, lightly tinged with mischief.
Although he works in different media – painting, sculpture, film and photography – Shonibare's work has followed an unusually clear trajectory since he left Goldsmiths in 1991. As a student, he had been busy making work about perestroika until, one day, a tutor asked him why he didn't think about African art instead. Intrigued by the idea that he should, as a person with a Nigerian background, be expected to make only "African art", Shonibare began considering stereotypes and the issue of "authenticity". His research took him first to the Museum of Mankind and then to Brixton market. He discovered that the exuberant batik that goes by the name of Dutch wax was not, in fact, African; originally, it was Indonesian. Dutch colonialists, hoping to make a profit by selling it, had set out to manufacture the cloth commercially in the Netherlands. When their venture failed, they palmed off the surplus on west African markets, where it somehow became, over time, a kind of national costume for millions of Africans: a statement, in the 20th century, of their post-colonial independence.
Ever since, Shonibare has used the fabric in his art, with dizzying results. Initially, he began mocking up entire Victorian rooms, except their chaises longues were covered, not in velvet and silk chintz, but in Dutch wax. Emboldened by the success of these experiments, he then began using the cloth in his responses to iconic 18th-century paintings, such as Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, and Henry Raeburn's Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch. In Shonibare's Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads (1998), and in Reverend on Ice (2005), headless life-sized mannequins recreate the poses of the subjects of the original paintings, only their clothes are fashioned from Dutch wax. These installations and sculptures are provocative, of course, but they are funny, too. "Yes, Reverend on Ice is funny," says Shonibare. "I wouldn't have made it otherwise. It's a parody: it's two fingers to the establishment. I do think Raeburn's painting is beautiful, but perhaps in a way that other people don't. I see a dark history behind its opulence. I think: who had to be enslaved in order for you to be able to afford a portrait painter? So it's gallows humour, too."
His work, he believes, reflects his ambivalent attitude towards the establishment, acknowledging the perversity that, sometimes, a person can find something both abhorrent and deeply attractive. In a series of photographs called Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), he presents himself as the frock-coat-wearing hero, playing billiards, lying abed attended by half a dozen servants, or posturing before mustachioed types in his library. "When I think of that era, I think about domination and repression. But I also admire things about it. I enjoyed dressing up in those clothes. I don't deny that. It's the same with my MBE: I love it."
Is he joking? "Honestly! For one thing, there is no British Empire. It's finished." There's still Gibraltar, I say. He laughs. "Also, I have a whole list of contradictions. Just because I'm a black artist, I don't want to have to stand on a soap box all the time. I admire the Queen; I love the royal family. A lot of people will think I don't really mean that. But I do. The establishment is fascinating – the idea that, thanks to an accident of birth, your whole life is laid out for you. The only thing is that I don't know my place. I'm not at all a good subject in that sense."
Shonibare was born in London in 1962, but moved with his family back to Lagos when he was three. He comes from a wealthy, middle-class background: his father was a successful lawyer; his brothers are a surgeon and a banker, his sister is a dentist. It would be something of an understatement to say that his parents were appalled when he started talking about wanting to be an artist. "I was a freak! Success is so important in Nigeria. When you're some young, tramp artist, you're considered a drop-out. During the early part of my career, I was always phoning home for money. My father would say: 'When are you going to grow up?' I was on something like £5,000 a year. I wanted a deposit so I could buy a house. I got the deposit, but, oh my goodness, the lecture!" These days, his family's attitude is rather different. "Too bad my father didn't live to see me get the MBE. He would have loved that – though it's ironic that I got it by being subversive, by being the opposite of what he wanted me to be. But [before he died] I was invited to Windsor Castle for a party, and he was so excited. I heard him on the phone saying: 'Yeah, I encouraged him to go to Goldsmiths.'"
After school in Lagos, there followed a stint at a British boarding school ("a Nigerian middle-class thing; I hated it – it was cold, and all the food was boiled, no spices") after which he enrolled at the Wimbledon School of Art. Two weeks later, however, he fell ill; a virus in his spine left him completely paralysed. "It took me three years to recover. I had to learn to walk again. At first, my mum looked after me. Then I moved to a rehab centre. It was extremely isolating. But as soon as I was back at art school [he went to Byam Shaw and then, for his MA, Goldsmiths, where his contemporaries included the Wilson twins and Matthew Collings] I started winning awards. That encouraged me. I thought: OK, I have a disability, but people can judge me by my work. It's about what I can do. In that sense, art has been like a life support system for me." Today, he walks with a stick, and his body is slightly curved. But he suffers no pain. "I make sure I keep mobile, I don't let myself get too stiff. You're only noticing because you're meeting me for the first time."
After Goldsmith's, with its notoriously critical tutors – "it's that military thing; they destroy you completely and then they rebuild you" – Shonibare found himself frozen for about two years, "unable to produce anything". In 1997, however, his work was included in Charles Saatchi's infamous Sensation show at the Royal Academy. After this, there was no stopping him. "I've been lucky. Audience response has always been good, and every time I've done a show, it has led to invitations to do three more." What role, if any, does he think his colour has played in his career? "I'd be lying if I said I had suffered discrimination, though I'm not naive enough to think it doesn't exist. But in any case, I love a challenge, so if you don't think much of me, I will do things to make you consider me more highly." What about positive discrimination? "People do that only once. They invite you, and if you produce crap they won't invite you again, full stop." On a blackboard, his schedule for the next 12 months is already chalked up. It includes shows in Monaco and Israel, in Spain and in Australia. He could not, he says, be busier if he tried.
I wonder if he finds conversations about multiculturalism tiresome, for all that his work invites them. I wouldn't blame him if he did. Shonibare shrugs. "Culture has a role to play. In a diverse society people have to find a way of being together, and that can only come from understanding other cultures. Otherwise, you're just fighting for space. But I'm from London, now. I've been here for 30 years. In Lagos, I would feel like a foreigner. The city has had such an impact on my work. If I'd lived somewhere else, I'm certain that my career would have evolved very differently. And I love it. I love what you could call 'vindaloo Britishness'. It's a mixed-up thing. You hear it in British music, and you taste it in British food. This purity notion is nonsense, and I cherish that." His trademark Dutch wax is, he says, a metaphor for interdependence and thus, perhaps, a metaphor for city life as well. We all pinch from one another. We take what we like, and in doing so, we are, whether we like it or not, joined together in one great and vibrant web.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Work Cited: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nelson%27s_Ship_in_a_Bottle_by_Yinka_Shonibare.jpg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/16/yinka-shonibare-fourth-plinth-trafalgar
figure 1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nelson%27s_Ship_in_a_Bottle_by_Yinka_Shonibare.jpg
figure 2: http://adventures-of-the-blackgang.tumblr.com/post/1045056488/yinka-shonibare-victory-bottle
Yinka Shonibare, MBE
b. 1962, London
'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle' is a sculpture of Nelson's flagship 'HMS Victory'. The sculpture considers the relationship between the birth of the British Empire, made possible in part by Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, and multiculturalism in Britain today.
"For me it's a celebration of London's immense ethnic wealth, giving expression to and honouring the many cultures and ethnicties that are still breathing precious wind into the sails of the United Kingdom." Yinka Sonibare, MBE. The sculpture is 3.25 metres high and 5 metres long and weighs 4 tons
Yinka Shonibare isn't nervous about how the critics will respond to his commission for Trafalgar Square's famously empty fourth plinth. What would be the point? The ship is in the bottle: there's no going back now. And how, exactly, did it get into the bottle? He grins, gleefully. "I'm not saying." Was it perhaps a hinged, fold-up vessel, one he could unfurl inside the bottle inside using those mechanical arms that park keepers use to pick up autumn leaves? He shakes his head. Or maybe the bottle's neck is sufficiently wide that he was able to slither in and out at will? "I've told you: I can't say. It's a secret." All he will reveal is that the bottle itself is not made entirely of glass (it's some kind of polymer blend); that it was manufactured, not in Britain, but elsewhere in Europe; and that a wax seal on its side will read: "YSMBE" (his initials, followed by the honour he received from the Queen in 2005). Oh, yes, and there will be a row of Union flags along its prow.
From the moment the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group wrote to him three years ago, asking him please to submit a proposal, Shonibare knew in his gut what he wanted to stick on London's highest-profile site for sculpture. "It's a huge honour to do something for Trafalgar Square," he says. "And it seemed obvious to do a work that was connected to the square in some way. I'm surprised no one has done that before. I wanted to do a serious thing for a serious space, but I also wanted it to be exciting, magical, and playful." His big idea was Nelson's Ship in a Bottle, a large-scale model of Horatio Nelson's ship, HMS Victory, from which he commanded the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The twist in the tail, however, is that this ship's sails would be made of Dutch wax, the brightly coloured African fabric that is Shonibare's trademark. "Nelson's victory freed up the seas for the British, and that led, in turn, to the building of the British Empire. But in a way, his victory also created the London we know today: an exciting, diverse, multicultural city." So his work is intended to be celebratory rather than critical? "Both. I want to make people think. I love London. I don't know any city like it. It has a unique vibe. Maybe this is just a monument to live, and let live."
Shonibare, an unexpectedly willowy man in a spiffing powder-blue jacket, is used to attention. His work has been shown in every major gallery in London (not to mention the Louvre in Paris, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York), and in 2004, he was shortlisted for the Turner prize. But still, the plinth commission is different. "The Turner was quite full-on. I'm a winner, not a loser, and I hated not winning. It irritated me, it annoyed me. But you move on. I was already collected, I was already making money; the Turner didn't change anything. But then came the plinth, and that was a huge compensation, and it already feels bigger than anything else. The work will be there for 18 months. So many people will see it." Where is it now? We are in Shonibare's studio in London Fields, Hackney, the smaller of two premises in which he works, and all I can see is the maquette he made when he submitted his original proposal. "It's somewhere else," he says. His face is a picture of innocence, lightly tinged with mischief.
Although he works in different media – painting, sculpture, film and photography – Shonibare's work has followed an unusually clear trajectory since he left Goldsmiths in 1991. As a student, he had been busy making work about perestroika until, one day, a tutor asked him why he didn't think about African art instead. Intrigued by the idea that he should, as a person with a Nigerian background, be expected to make only "African art", Shonibare began considering stereotypes and the issue of "authenticity". His research took him first to the Museum of Mankind and then to Brixton market. He discovered that the exuberant batik that goes by the name of Dutch wax was not, in fact, African; originally, it was Indonesian. Dutch colonialists, hoping to make a profit by selling it, had set out to manufacture the cloth commercially in the Netherlands. When their venture failed, they palmed off the surplus on west African markets, where it somehow became, over time, a kind of national costume for millions of Africans: a statement, in the 20th century, of their post-colonial independence.
Ever since, Shonibare has used the fabric in his art, with dizzying results. Initially, he began mocking up entire Victorian rooms, except their chaises longues were covered, not in velvet and silk chintz, but in Dutch wax. Emboldened by the success of these experiments, he then began using the cloth in his responses to iconic 18th-century paintings, such as Thomas Gainsborough's Mr and Mrs Andrews, and Henry Raeburn's Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch. In Shonibare's Mr and Mrs Andrews Without Their Heads (1998), and in Reverend on Ice (2005), headless life-sized mannequins recreate the poses of the subjects of the original paintings, only their clothes are fashioned from Dutch wax. These installations and sculptures are provocative, of course, but they are funny, too. "Yes, Reverend on Ice is funny," says Shonibare. "I wouldn't have made it otherwise. It's a parody: it's two fingers to the establishment. I do think Raeburn's painting is beautiful, but perhaps in a way that other people don't. I see a dark history behind its opulence. I think: who had to be enslaved in order for you to be able to afford a portrait painter? So it's gallows humour, too."
His work, he believes, reflects his ambivalent attitude towards the establishment, acknowledging the perversity that, sometimes, a person can find something both abhorrent and deeply attractive. In a series of photographs called Diary of a Victorian Dandy (1998), he presents himself as the frock-coat-wearing hero, playing billiards, lying abed attended by half a dozen servants, or posturing before mustachioed types in his library. "When I think of that era, I think about domination and repression. But I also admire things about it. I enjoyed dressing up in those clothes. I don't deny that. It's the same with my MBE: I love it."
Is he joking? "Honestly! For one thing, there is no British Empire. It's finished." There's still Gibraltar, I say. He laughs. "Also, I have a whole list of contradictions. Just because I'm a black artist, I don't want to have to stand on a soap box all the time. I admire the Queen; I love the royal family. A lot of people will think I don't really mean that. But I do. The establishment is fascinating – the idea that, thanks to an accident of birth, your whole life is laid out for you. The only thing is that I don't know my place. I'm not at all a good subject in that sense."
Shonibare was born in London in 1962, but moved with his family back to Lagos when he was three. He comes from a wealthy, middle-class background: his father was a successful lawyer; his brothers are a surgeon and a banker, his sister is a dentist. It would be something of an understatement to say that his parents were appalled when he started talking about wanting to be an artist. "I was a freak! Success is so important in Nigeria. When you're some young, tramp artist, you're considered a drop-out. During the early part of my career, I was always phoning home for money. My father would say: 'When are you going to grow up?' I was on something like £5,000 a year. I wanted a deposit so I could buy a house. I got the deposit, but, oh my goodness, the lecture!" These days, his family's attitude is rather different. "Too bad my father didn't live to see me get the MBE. He would have loved that – though it's ironic that I got it by being subversive, by being the opposite of what he wanted me to be. But [before he died] I was invited to Windsor Castle for a party, and he was so excited. I heard him on the phone saying: 'Yeah, I encouraged him to go to Goldsmiths.'"
After school in Lagos, there followed a stint at a British boarding school ("a Nigerian middle-class thing; I hated it – it was cold, and all the food was boiled, no spices") after which he enrolled at the Wimbledon School of Art. Two weeks later, however, he fell ill; a virus in his spine left him completely paralysed. "It took me three years to recover. I had to learn to walk again. At first, my mum looked after me. Then I moved to a rehab centre. It was extremely isolating. But as soon as I was back at art school [he went to Byam Shaw and then, for his MA, Goldsmiths, where his contemporaries included the Wilson twins and Matthew Collings] I started winning awards. That encouraged me. I thought: OK, I have a disability, but people can judge me by my work. It's about what I can do. In that sense, art has been like a life support system for me." Today, he walks with a stick, and his body is slightly curved. But he suffers no pain. "I make sure I keep mobile, I don't let myself get too stiff. You're only noticing because you're meeting me for the first time."
After Goldsmith's, with its notoriously critical tutors – "it's that military thing; they destroy you completely and then they rebuild you" – Shonibare found himself frozen for about two years, "unable to produce anything". In 1997, however, his work was included in Charles Saatchi's infamous Sensation show at the Royal Academy. After this, there was no stopping him. "I've been lucky. Audience response has always been good, and every time I've done a show, it has led to invitations to do three more." What role, if any, does he think his colour has played in his career? "I'd be lying if I said I had suffered discrimination, though I'm not naive enough to think it doesn't exist. But in any case, I love a challenge, so if you don't think much of me, I will do things to make you consider me more highly." What about positive discrimination? "People do that only once. They invite you, and if you produce crap they won't invite you again, full stop." On a blackboard, his schedule for the next 12 months is already chalked up. It includes shows in Monaco and Israel, in Spain and in Australia. He could not, he says, be busier if he tried.
I wonder if he finds conversations about multiculturalism tiresome, for all that his work invites them. I wouldn't blame him if he did. Shonibare shrugs. "Culture has a role to play. In a diverse society people have to find a way of being together, and that can only come from understanding other cultures. Otherwise, you're just fighting for space. But I'm from London, now. I've been here for 30 years. In Lagos, I would feel like a foreigner. The city has had such an impact on my work. If I'd lived somewhere else, I'm certain that my career would have evolved very differently. And I love it. I love what you could call 'vindaloo Britishness'. It's a mixed-up thing. You hear it in British music, and you taste it in British food. This purity notion is nonsense, and I cherish that." His trademark Dutch wax is, he says, a metaphor for interdependence and thus, perhaps, a metaphor for city life as well. We all pinch from one another. We take what we like, and in doing so, we are, whether we like it or not, joined together in one great and vibrant web.
Figure 1Figure 2
Figure 3
Work Cited: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nelson%27s_Ship_in_a_Bottle_by_Yinka_Shonibare.jpg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/16/yinka-shonibare-fourth-plinth-trafalgar
figure 1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nelson%27s_Ship_in_a_Bottle_by_Yinka_Shonibare.jpg
figure 2: http://adventures-of-the-blackgang.tumblr.com/post/1045056488/yinka-shonibare-victory-bottle
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