Matter and Spectacle
“The traditional motivation of the craft movement has been to oppose the spectacle through the rhythms of craft work and the quiet virtues of the well-made thing. From this perspective, craft has been seen as exemplifying the everyday, the field of activity that lies beneath the reach of spectacular culture and therefore constitutes a realm of authentic experience.”
Always an astute commentator on the conditions of contemporary society, curator and craft historian Glenn Adamson’s insights about objects and their implications provoke larger critical considerations of makers and their motivations. Writing in the introduction for the catalog of the landmark 2007 exhibition Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Adamson dove deep into the question of the relationship between the everyday and its rarefied opposite.
His interrogation of the premise of the exhibition assessed the commissioned works on display as embodying an unexpected turn in contemporary craft and its meanings in the context of history of the concept of spectacles and the spectacular. Eight international artists from the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Japan and Nigeria “placed craft at the heart of their practice, transforming ordinary materials — paper, thread, dust and nails — into extraordinary artworks.” (2)
Described as a series of “unusual and beautifully crafted installations” which employed “traditional techniques in unexpected ways,” the exhibition included “a scattering of life-like weeds and plants ‘growing’ around the gallery, all skilfully hand-carved from wood; an apparently paint-splattered table which has been inlaid with mother-of-pearl; a seven-metre-high crimson cascade made using traditional Chinese paper-cutting methods.” (3)
Adamson acknowledges the social and ideological implications of the spectacle — and by extension the spectacular — with the expected references to the work of French theorist Guy Debord. Debord was a member of the Situationist movement who critiqued what he saw as late capitalism’s increasing deployment of the spectacle as a mechanism of mass seduction. Adamson also refers to French scholar Michel de Certeau’s writings about the everyday, and the reassurances of the familiar and the quotidian, to explore what exactly was being desired and achieved by moving away from the ordinariness of craft.
For Adamson, employing the idea of the spectacular in craft, or the making of spectacular objects, is a strategic device to critique the conditions of society. The makers, as Adamson explains, “know that craft is mainly a matter of persuasiveness, a technique for grabbing attention and holding it … Like any form of rhetoric, it can serve equally to open up thought or close it down.” (4)
Adamson’s thinking about the aesthetic and ideological import of the spectacular as a calculated element in contemporary cultures of making relies on the transformation (perhaps transcendence) of the ordinary. For something to be spectacular it must exhibit qualities that make the work exceptional and which place it on a different plane than the majority of things. The crafted object must exhibit sensational qualities, be arresting, unquestionably accomplished, authoritative and rare.
And while Debord’s argument about the increasing prevalence of the spectacle in capitalist life raises questions about the ideological meanings of spectacles in our digital age, it is arguable that contemporary artists and craftspeople infuse what Adamson celebrates as the realness of the ordinary with extraordinary powers.
El Anatsui, Behind the Red Moon, Act I: The Red Moon, 2023. Metal bottle caps and mixed metal. Photo: Pack-Shot, COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK.
II
El Anatsui is a Ghanaian maker whose career has been defined by wall-mounted works made by flattening and stitching together discarded coloured foil wrappings from liquor bottles. His large-scale works often resemble the traditional Akan and Ashante textiles known as kente cloth. Shimmering, colourful and transfixing, Anatsui’s remarkable sculptures raise questions about technique and taxonomy: whether they should be considered artworks borne of the principles of craft, or craftworks that supersede even the most elevated ideas about the category with its historical and inherited ideas of making. But such debate feels small and narrow-minded.
Hand-built, labour-intensive (the artist has a huge atelier in Accra), malleable and hypnotic through their sheer visual power, the installations are spectacular and globally renowned. He has exhibited in such major institutions as the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the National Gallery of Victoria, in Australia, the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, in Japan, and at the Royal Ontario Museum in Canada between 2010 and 2011, with the installation — El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa — having been organized by New York’s Museum for African Art (MfAA, now the Africa Center).
In October 2023, Anatsui unveiled a site-specific installation in the cavernous, five-storey tall Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern museum in London, UK, which in many ways represented both a continuation of his material practices and the cultural and social histories of the African continent and which took both new and astonishing directions.
Unprecedented in terms of scale and material complexity, the Hyundai commission titled Behind the Red Moon was comprised of three hanging sculptures. The first piece, Act I: The Red Moon, was suspended from the ceiling near the west, ramped entrance of the hall. The enormous two-sided convex sheet was constructed from linked bottle caps and metal fragments sewn with copper thread. The gently rounded side facing the entrance, with its many shades of red, outlined a giant orb. Its curved interior, with its myriad shades of yellow, was made up of subtle, interlocking and overlapping patterns.
In the centre of the vast hall hung Act II: The World, a mobile of numerous separate abstracted elements in golds and soft pinks arranged in close proximity that as much suggested human figures as some spectral celestial body. The third work in the installation – Act III: The Red Wall – was an impossibly tall predominantly black and darkly hued curtain that hung straight down from close to the ceiling, with three powerfully rendered horizontal folds. The opposite side of The Red Wall displayed a different compositional strategy in red and yellow with what appeared to be blank, or lighter coloured patches. As Anatsui explains, the wall was a retelling or interpretation of the ancient story from Notsie (present-day Togo) about a tyrannical king who built a tall wall made of earth to entrap his people.
A work of staggering moral and poetic power, and a work of dazzling creativity and virtuosity, El Anatsui’s Behind The Red Moon makes irreverent conversations about the implications of making in the service of humanity and the power — the humbling power — of art and craft as mechanisms for authentic and transformative reflection.
El Anatsui, Behind the Red Moon, Act III: The Red Wall, 2023. Metal bottle caps and mixed metal. Photo: 365 Focus Photography, COURTESY OF SHUTTERSTOCK.
[1]. Glenn Adamson, “The Spectacle of the Everyday,” in Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft, edited by Laurie Britton Newell, (London, UK: V&A and Crafts Council Publications, 2007), 15,
https://sherisimons.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/outoftheordinary.pdf.
[2]. Jaimie Fobert Architects, “Out of the Ordinary: the Project,” https://jamiefobertarchitects.com/work/out-of-the-ordinary/.
[3]. Victoria and Albert Museum, “‘Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft,’ a V&A and Crafts Council exhibition: 13 November 2007-17 February 2008,” press release, https://www.vam.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/254468/40346_press_release-1.pdf.
[4]. Adamson, 26.
This article is available in print in the Fall/Winter 2024-2025 issue of Studio Magazine.
