ELAnatsui, Visual Arts and Intersection with Knowledge

Abstract

“Natural synthesis” compartmentalized the black art world. This essay unravels how with folkloric gleeEL Anatsui, in a “selective critiquing and re-evaluation of self” dared to “wriggle out” of that quagmire. Thusly, reactivating the dynamic terrain that lives and is animated from within the soul of artists, he forged a new path of creativity. With reappraisals of the intellectual dynamics that forged the artistic substance of the post 1960s; empirical analysis and the engagement of storytelling mechanisms, this essay unreels that artistry. Anatsui, in spite of his accademisisation and art practice, threads a detour to cloth making craft traditions, particularly the Kente weave and its autography; for inspiration. Hence, the “vital and enabling” intellectual paradigm “resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions” makes possible an intersection with arcane knowledge, while the “uniting representation” of the synthesis in the appropriation of Memory and Interview grounds the contexts within which each artwork is experienced. EL’s “non-fixed forms” make visible the temerity of new shapes and forms forged directly from the wellsprings and fecundity of African roots as exemplars of the art of the new dawn (Ben Shahn, 1965:53).A deconstruction of EL’s artworks reveals the groundings of his discourses on assemblages of “Forgotten Biography” and the engagement of “mythopoeia imagination” (Marina Paolo Banchetti-Robino, 2011) in the recalibration of personal expression in language and imageries that inflect spiritual ties to ancestry and the reality of memory. This is sufficient basis for the historical narration of the intersection of visual arts and knowledge.