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The comfort of knowing which side of the fence you are is being constantly thrown.
(Shonibare 1992)
.... his work tricks the mind, by first making it comfortable with its own contradiction, innocence, and ignorance, and then by quickly deflating those sentiments.
(Enwezor 1999:8)
Shonibare's work registers the invalidity of borders....He subverts notions of traditionality through parody...
(Oguibe in Enwezor 1999:11)
Over the past ten years Yinka Shonibare, an artist of Nigerian origin working in Britain, has achieved a very considerable measure of international success.1 I am interested in examining some aspects of his work and in showing how that work can be seen to address the taken-for-granted status of ethnic categorization in the literature on African art. My title is an obvious play on "Dressing Down," the name of Shonibare's 1999 retrospective exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (see Ikon Gallery 1999). I first met the artist at a talk he gave at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, early in 1992.2 Later that same year we saw his installation at the Serpentine Gallery (see Shonibare 1992; Court 1993); but the story as presented here begins in Chicago in February 2000.
Kathleen Bickford Berzock had invited me to the Art Institute of Chicago to participate in "In Context, In Depth: A Symposium about Yoruba Art and the William B. Fagg Photographic Archive." She organized this event to celebrate the Institute's acquisition of two sculptures by Areogun of Osi-Ilorin (see Picton 1984a, b) and a set of William Fagg's field photographs. I arrived in Chicago with a day or so to spare, and after visiting the Yoruba display, a first-rate installation of sculpture and masquerade, with Fagg's photography, I was taken to see the set of photographs by Yinka Shonibare entitled Diary of a Victorian Dandy. They were not on show in the Yoruba or Africa galleries but in rooms devoted to contemporary art; not "contemporary African art" (with all due respect, only the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., has been that daring) but "contemporary" as understood in an international sense. That usage in reality means Europe and America, though Latin America just about makes it in these days, and there is the occasional visitor from Japan,...