El Anatsui has never been tortured by the tyranny of a canvas and its definition of a grid. His bottle cap tapestries, or “metal sheets,” are normally constructed by the logic of a grid, but this grid is not weighted by the psychic and historical baggage of European modern art and architecture. His work is a new grid/medium because of Anatsui's careful calibration of how it operates as a mechanical, conceptual, and social device. Anatsui understands his art to be at once mimetic, philosophical, and communicative, an aspect of African art that has been undertheorized. Where Western art has typically required artists to choose a mimetic function, African artists refused the choice, and that refusal is part of the luminosity of Anatsui's work.
This review is a long time coming for African Arts, as Susan Vogel's El Anatsui: Art and Life was published seven years ago. I am not...