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'The Confession', 2007
Yinka Shonibare, MBE, revealed his Parisian garden to the Parisians yesterday. The 'Garden of Love' is his lush labyrinthine maze built inside the Musee du Quai Branly, the new Parisian museum that seems to be at home with all things garden. Its Seine-facing wall is a living, breathing carapace of plants, while its architect Jean Nouvel chose to print the north-facing windows with one almighty foliage transparency.
A year in the planning, the 'Jardin D'Amour' takes that internal / external garden connection and runs wild with it - Shonibare's meandering walkways cover much of the ground floor. The maze is low-lit and peaceful and lets you wander through its green arches a while until you glimpse through the flora three hidden copses, each of which is the stage for its own set of gallivanting lovers. The life-size couples are perfectly mimicking the poses of the figures in Jean Honoré Fragonard's 'The Pursuit', 'The Love Letter' and 'The Lover Crowned' - the originals of which are now with the Frick Collection in New York.
They are dressed in aristocratic 18th-century costumes made from trademark Shonibare 'African' fabric - fabric which was actually inspired by Indonesian design, mass-produced by the Dutch and eventually flogged to the West African colonies. The mannequins' shoes are rich in detail and the layering and composition of the strangely modernist cloths is complex and appealing. Shonibare gets it all from Brixton market then works closely with Sheffield designer and seamstress Mary Charlton to bring it to theatrical life.
'The Crowning,' 2007
Continuing with the Fragonard theme from his first major work 'The Swing' - acquired by the Tate Modern in 2001 - Shonibare's figures are a riotous inversion of the 18th-century painter's originals. Despite the protestations that he's not a polemical artist - "Poetry is really central to my work"- Shonibare's tableaux always raise necessarily uncomfortable questions. Surely such opulent joie de vivre could only be maintained with the revenues generated in far-away lands, with merchant ships and, ultimately, with slavery.
Headless as they are, the figures also allude to the nobility's last gasp of extravagance before the Revolution came nipping at its heels. There's soon to be no more luxuriating in your garden, which itself is a symbol of your wealth, screams the sub-text. A sense of absurdity and foreboding comes especially from the female figure of the 'The Lover Crowned' tableau as she crowns the space above her lover's headless torso: an empty space, thin air.
'The Pursuit', 2007
"My work is a way of sounding an alarm on something that runs the risk of actually happening", said Shonibare. Insisting that the aim of the work is not to preach he nevertheless went on to deliver a topical warning; "Indigent social classes and their ever-swelling ranks are becoming more and more discontented: terrorism threatens the balance of power and is encouraged by people who are reduced to a feeling of impotence."
The museum prides itself on its devotion to the contemporary; but the bulk of it houses ethnographic art that was largely plundered from all over the world (bar Europe) in the 17th and 18th centuries. So one imagines they were more than a little pleased to have Shonibare accept the commission after opening last year to much accusatory grumbling about the reinforcing of colonialist stereotypes. A veritable masterstroke, from a public-relations point of view.
Shonibare seems to be pretty much down with the museum's ethics, though, and took on the commission because, for him it neatly inverts the fascination of looking at other cultures. "In an African's eyes, Europe's culture in the 18th century is my fetish while theirs is the African mask. For a modern African artist, all of this seemed so exotic, I wanted to understand its meaning. I asked myself how could these people have all these beautiful fabrics? And then I understood there was a link here with the history of colonisation and all its excesses."
"I like the confusion that arises from an African artist not doing Neo-Primitivism, as might be expected of him," he continued, over lunch - the lunch that briefly became a strained debate between a journalist and the museum's director regarding his somewhat woolly answer to why an institution dedicated to non-European art would have an all-white staff.
Shonibare stepped in to diffuse the situation and thanked the museum for their total commitment: "I like the confusion my work generates overall. I also don't mind being a filthy rich ethnic."
Cue ripple of polite nervous laughter.
Laura K Jones
Yinka Shonibare MBE
Jardin D'Amour
Until 8 July
Musee du Quai Branly
www.quaibranly.fr
All images courtesy Stephen Friedman, Yinka Shonibare's London gallery, and Musee du Quai Branly
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for the Saatchi Gallery's online magazine.
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