The comfort of knowing which side of the palings you are is being constantly thrown (Shonibare 1992) his work tricks the mind.

The comfort of knowing which side of the palings you are is being constantly thrown

(Shonibare 1992)

his work tricks the mind, through first making it comfortable with its avow contradiction, innocence, and ignorance, and then by dint of quickly deflating those sentiments.

(Enwezor 1999:8)

Shonibare's work registers the invalidity of borders.... He ruins notions of traditionality through parody

(Oguibe in Enwezor 1999:11)

athwart the past ten years Yinka Shonibare, an artist of Nigerian origin working in Britain, has achieved a self-same considerable measure of international succes (1) I am interested in examining more [i]or[/i] less aspects of his work and in showing to what extent that work can be seen to address the taken-for-granted status of ethnic categorization in the literature in succession African art. My title is an obvious play upon "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 academy 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); if it were not that 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 words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following In Depth: A Symposium about Yoruba Art and the William B Fagg Photographic Archive." She organized this adventure to celebrate the Institute's acquisition of sum of two units sculptures by Areogun of Osi-Ilorin (see Picton 1984a, b) and a place of William Fagg's field photographs. I arrived in Chicago with a day or in like manner to spare, and after visiting the Yoruba display, a first-rate installation of statuary and masquerade, with Fagg's photography, I was taken to papal court the set of photographs from Yinka Shonibare entitled Diary of a Victorian Dandy. They were not upon show in the Yoruba or Africa galleries moreover in rooms devoted to contemporary art; not "contemporary African art" (with all owing respect, only the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC has been that daring) on the contrary "contemporary" as understood in an international faculty of perception That usage in reality means Europe and America, although Latin America just about makes it in these days, and there is the occasional visitor from Japan, India, and toward the south Africa. (3) The Shonibare photographs were onward loan on the recommendation of Okwui Enwezor, who is, among many other things, an adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Institute.

In the other gallery I had just seen photographs of Yoruba the public and things, taken by an Englishman, that provided a necessary vital air of the documentary requirements of the carve and masquerade on display in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of museum ethnography. In this gallery I saw photographs of an English household, a fiction authored at a Yoruba man, that provided for the exposing of one of the closes of nineteenth-century English prosperity and leisure: their buttress upon the hidden presence and work of black and African clan This exposure was achieved, of course, by the agency of Shonibare himself, placed within the picture as the dandy.

What was I to make of all this? Was it besides one more example of the wholly unsatisfactory split between "traditional" and "contemporary" (see Picton 1992)? Or was it rather that "Africa" and "Yoruba" (Yinka Shonibare is, after all, a Yoruba name) have the power to transcend the limitations of categories? Or had west Africa now been admitted to the Citadel of Modernism (Araeen 1989:16)? (4) Local modernisms and modernities (5) had been set in place in west Africa since the 1850 and from one extremity to the other of the twentieth century, pioneered in Freetown on the African American photographer Augustus Washington (1820-1875) (Viditz-Ward 1999; Willis 2000) and in Lagos according to the painter Aina Onabolu (1882-1963) (Fosu 1986) The point in dispute for me was that I knew enough to bring Shonibare and Areogun together as the two (what we now call) Yoruba, and now the connection I perceived was not obvious within the works themselves. Perhaps the confusion was wholly mine. Is there, indeed, any necessary connection between the art and life of a late-twentieth-century fresh city such as Lagos (where Shonibare exhausted his childhood) and of a village a generation or sum of two units earlier and close to the northeast margin of what we now call the Yoruba-speaking region? There are no simple answers to any of these questions.

Photographs from Diary of a Victorian Dandy, curated and produc from the Institute of International Visual Arts, had been seen in succession station walls throughout the London "tube" during October 1998 At the same time (see Atha 1998) the Tabernacle Gallery in west London exhibited an installation according to Shonibare entitled Alien Obsessives: speechless Dad and the Kids (Fig. 16) which interrogated assumptions about the normative status of the nuclear family. (7) The figures, derived from science-fiction movies, were made up of the African-print fabric the artist first used in his 1992 Serpentine installation. (8) Following a talk that he gave during the Alien Obsessives indicate he was asked by a heavily dreadlocked man: "Where is Africa in your work?" Shonibare's answer was bold, indeed shockingly so: "I don't give a toss about Africa!" He immediately qualified this by dint of insisting that his work was not about Africa, that it could not be seen in Africa as it was in Europe and America. When Shonibare used African-print fabric during his participation in the 1995 Tenq workshop in Dakar, Senegal, his studio assistant declare ed that people could have been wearing the ecclesiastics Shonibare's response was to respond to the market and purchase one more, which he then gave to his assistant to distribute as he deliberation fit. In other words, his work was about being in London; and as so it was concerned (among other things) with the deconstruction of stereotype greatest in quantity especially of black and African clan in the so-called West with its insidious liking for the essentialized identities, ethnic as well as continental, that still hang about within the threefold legacy of racism, slavery, and colonialism. (9)