Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Yinka Shonibare
British; 21st-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
19%
The American Library Collection (Activists). 2017. Hardback books, Dutch wax printed cotton, textiles, gold foiled names, bookcase
The artist wrapped a bunch of books in an Indonesian-Dutch-African (i.e. global) textile and printed the names of famous American immigrants onto their spines. These books are displayed as a sculpture on a big bookshelf. That a British artist would see fit to make a work that, per a description on his website, "is inspired by the ongoing debates about immigration and diversity in the United States" speaks to how maddened by Trump was the world's whole liberal elite just after 2016, and to how unidirectional they'd become in their thought. That I saw the piece in an encyclopedic museum in 2024 speaks to how maddened they remained for years, and to how little they continued to care about judging art in terms of artistic value. The artwork's critical element is milquetoast and obvious and symbolically facile — what more is there to get than that the fabric stands for diversity and internationalism? —yet this squishy politics is all that the piece has going for it. The late 2010s were a time when, to be vaunted, art needed only to position itself against a thing which educated people believed was bad. That is all this artwork does. (The textiles are pretty, sure, but they'd be prettier either worn or sculpturally deployed, rather than appropriated.) (2024)