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Yinka Shonibare`s The Swing In Relation To Theories Of Metaphor And Conceptual Blending

Short essay about the methods of Yinka Shonibare

Date : 08/10/2015

Author Information

Julia Jane

Uploaded by : Julia Jane
Uploaded on : 08/10/2015
Subject : Art

Shonibare`s `The Swing (after Fragonard)` 2001

Extract from an essay written January 2014

In 2001, British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare paraphrased the traditional Fragonard painting scene by replicating the picture as a three dimensional sculptural installation. It gained attention when it was subsequently nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004.

This is a mark of its ingenuity and its enigmatic quality. And this could be partly due to the materials used: one life-sized mannequin in vibrantly printed cotton costume, slippers, a swing seat with ropes. An oak tree bough is suspended from the ceiling and real twigs with artificial leaves and flowers support the sculpture on the floor.

An examination of the peripheral elements reveals interesting choices by Shonibare: a backdrop of a plain white gallery wall - the opposite of Fragonard`s rich background - a re-framing by Shonibare to place his sculpture firmly in his own minimalist period. Bringing the Fragonard into the present is re-enforced by the life-size dimensions of the piece that invite us to step inside and become part of the scene. Making it all the more meaningful. Engaging the viewer is also evident by the corner positioning that forces us to contemplate the piece from the front. Shonibare wants the viewer to share the same prying eyes as Fragonard`s young man in the foliage who Shonibare has chosen to omit in his own version.

However, Shonibare emulates the Fragonard when he suspends the figure in mid-flight, halted on an upwards swing, her toe pointing up with her slipper flying off and up to the skies. He also maintains the sensuality and playfulness of the Fragonard. However, with a version that takes a peculiarly dark turn - Shonibare`s girl on the swing has no head. She smiles no more. This compels the question of what happened to this tragic beauty - but a visual oxymoron emerges. Is this a serious strategy that conveys a serious message? We can assume only, because on the other hand, Shonibare answers a question about the missing head during an interview, where he claims, "It also began as a joke about the French Revolution." Again he confuses his audience. We know Shonibare is serious about a serious subject. But his nonchalant response leaves us with a mixed message. The notion of duality will be discussed when we consider `The Swing` in relation to the use of metaphor and conceptual blending later in the essay.

Metaphor in general terms, allows us to understand an abstract, unstructured subject by turning it into a concrete structured one. Affording us different ways of perceiving the world. Considering metaphor and art, George Lakoff & Mark Johnson in, `Metaphors we live by` write "Art is a matter of imaginative rationality and a means of creating new realities." This imaginative rationality is what artists do in order to connect the literal world with the visual world. In other words, information enters our minds, is processed with the help of metaphors, and exits as a metaphor itself. Hence new understandable meaning has replaced the previously incomprehensible one. As put by Lakoff, metaphor is "literal as input, metaphor as output".

There is considerable research on the area and the breadth of writings on metaphor is well beyond the scope of this particular study. Therefore this discussion on metaphor is determined by the size of this essay, so here we talk about an example of an ontological and a spatial oriental metaphor in Shonibare`s Swing.

An ontological metaphor is about the experience of thinking. Because the mind is an immeasurable and intangible experience, it needs to be structured into a physical entity. This metaphor helps us make sense of our world. Structured experience metaphors refer to actions, namely moving, pushing and pulling of objects. Spatial oriental metaphors organize a whole system of concepts with respect on one another. They are about orientation, for example, up and down, in and out, front and back, or deep and shallow. It could be said that we need a spatial oriental metaphor to ground our physical selves. This aids us to make sense of our non-physical world - the world that is inside our minds in other words. An example of an ontological metaphor in The Swing can be seen in Shonibare`s decision to produce a body without a head. In doing this, he is turning his model into a metaphorical container, a convenient vehicle to carry his message. We perceive the mind to be inside the head, therefore the head is a container so it follows that by removing this container, the headless girl must be an empty vessel.

According to oriental metaphor theory, `up` is a metaphor for positivity. All is good when we are up. Lakoff and Johnson claim that spatial orientations arise from the fact that we have bodies that function as they do in our physical environment. This is evidenced in the whole arrangement of `The Swing`, for example, the swing swings up, the slipper flies up, and the finger of the girl curls up. And a strong composition that forces the viewer to look up. So, if we take an account from Lakoff & Johnson, the swinging girl is the victor in the scene because she swings high up above all else.

During our attempt to unravel the complexities that are loaded into `The Swing`, perhaps theories of metaphor and conceptual blending may shed some light on strategies used in the creation of this work. Our imagination is stretched and we are left with blurred ideas and fantasies. We relish the chance at taking a stab at completing the picture and turning it into a whole story based on our own input and imagination. The viewer is put to work and required to complete the scene. And in line with Lakoff and Johnson`s theories on metaphor, thus creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities.

Conceptual structure is not merely a matter of the intellect-it involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: colour, shape, texture, sound, etc. Artworks provide new ways of structuring our experience in terms of these natural dimensions. The artist who incites attention provokes experience, imagination and sensual reactions to works of art. Viewing `The Swing` as a whole invokes the senses. We almost hear and smell the scene.

Ultimately, the metaphors attached to the headless figure dressed in colonial fabrics lead to a conceptual result that is a blended result of our vision of the artwork. It is baffling but soothing, a blurred strategy and successful play on our minds on behalf of Shonibare. Tricking the mind is what the writer and art critic, Okwui Enwezor observes in Shonibare`s work. He states it is something that `tricks the mind`, by first making is comfortable with its own contradiction, innocence, ignorance and then by quickly deflating those sentiments.

Finally, Daniel Serig states that "Metaphors can prompt unexpected and poetic insights." Art and the making of art, certainly for my practice, are part of the process. Metaphor forces the artist, who learns to expect the unexpected, to build the unplanned into the planned, so that a rich mix it part of their creative output. Additionally, conceptual blending can yield `unexpected and poetic insights`. This is where metaphor meets conceptual blending. Insightful art is a positive byproduct that challenges and teaches that artist and viewer. As stated earlier with regards to metaphor, the breadth of writings on conceptual blending is beyond the scope of this essay, hence this relatively brief descri ption on key points relevant to the work discussed.

The roots of today`s ideas on conceptual blending can be traced to `The Act of Creation` a 1964 book by Arthur Koestler. In it, Koestler develops a general theory of human creativity, describing and comparing many different examples of invention and discovery. Koestler concludes that they all share a common pattern, that he calls `bisociation`. This is a blending of elements drawn from two previously unrelated matrices of thought into a new matrix of meaning. The process is by comparison, abstraction and categorisation, analogies and metaphors. He regards many different mental phenomena as special cases of bisociation. We can see a sample of bisociation, when new experiences come alive through first entering a form of conceptual blending.

A feature of conceptual blending is that it helps us to challenge our own assumptions about the world and in this case about a work of art. And, as claimed by Mark Turner in his book, `The Literary Mind` , conceptual blending is used in our basic construal of all our realities. This `basic construal` of all our realities is in other words how we make sense of our world. We blend concepts as a way to understanding our world. So when viewing an artwork with an attempt to understand it, we cobble and mix up our ideas, formulate some understanding, a reaction normally follows, and then an opinion arrived at. Therefore, conceptual blending in relation to art reveals that art is a self-reflective activity.

The artistic object compel reflections on the very process that created it-that is, on the mind of the artist, and thus of the society from which the artist emerged. Turner argues that "art is derived from the innate human capacity for self-observation". He states that art has a crucial role as a collective vehicle for self-reflection and as a shared source of cultural identity. Art is a teacher engendering knowledge comes out of the reflective practitioner.

We shall speculate about the duality that produces the blend in Shonibare and his work. A good example is in the African prints that Shonibare uses in a blend. These fabrics originated from Indonesia and were subsequently manufactured in Britain for export to West Africa. Today they have become an adopted symbol of African nationalism. They are now employed as one of Shonibare`s strategies of provocation. For example, the figure on the swing still wears and authentic eighteenth-century dress but the opulent, ornate silks have been replaced with bright African print cotton fabrics. This creates a hybrid of meanings and cross-references. Shonibare grew up in the UK and Nigeria, and describes himself as `a postcolonial hybrid` and the fabrics he uses are a symbol of this multi-cultural identity. He is a master of metaphor and uses blending techniques in the creation of his work, albeit knowingly or not, to brilliant effect. It could be argued that Shonibare himself is a living blend.

In order to enable Shonibare to portray his interest in themes that are in a post-colonial context has devised numerous strategies. He is aware that that African printed fabrics have a complex history and re-stages them in his work to suit his agenda. As he says he enjoys incongruity-when things are not supposed to work together." So,`The Swing` certainly suggests this to be the case, with its bi-meanings and magnificent and curious narratives that lure the viewer. Then they are taken aback by the dark themes that the works address. Shonibare thrives on contradictions. As do we, the viewer.

These methods of duality or blending strategies, as we mentioned previously, tricks the mind, for example the headless figure could at a first appear to be a direct reference to the French Revolution and the use of the guillotine. However, Shonibare claims that this is just an allusion to the event. We are fed contradictions in the fact that these works are presented at first as humorous but they are carriers of a sinister message.

And this is Shonibare`s underlying motivation, to mix the message and confront upheld beliefs or assumptions. He has devised a way to encourage us to stand up and pay attention by twisting the picture into a puzzle, oxymoron and contradiction. For example, taking the headless figure engaged in a playful activity, set in a setting fully of gaiety. After all, unlike the Fragonard, if there are no facial expressions, then we must bring our own to the scene. We need to imagine the face. We need to also imagine the expression by piecing aspects of the work together to add the remaining ourselves.

Additionally, she becomes a faceless entity, not a person. His blending works by pleasing and shocking us at the same time. She is an ugly beauty. We are attracted to her but something terrible has happened or is about to happen. We are unsettled and questioning. We question why Shonibare has be-headed his model, making her faceless and nameless. Is it a reference to her `blood money`? Or is it to make her as anonymous and faceless as the colonized people of French rule? Let`s assume that this is the case and then it successfully conveys Shonibare`s concerns with divide between the rulers and ruled over, the later being made into the faceless `other`. This is in part, Shonibare`s use of alterism but it is in the blend that the message hits us.

The viewers blend their own reactions whilst Shonibare allows conceptual blending to take place. The gaps in the narrative are filled. We wrap up by story. It is useful to this study to ask what method Shonibare has employed - has he used a Surrealist method from the early 20th century, with the intention to unbalance the viewer with the unexpected? Or is it a conceptualist strategy of disguise and allusion?

However, for best effect a mix of both are necessary, arguing that as much as we attempt to fix one method to one artist, it important to remember that a blurring of the edges of different ones combine into a fusion that creates something new. As Koestler claims, "it is the sustained juxtaposition and incomplete fusion that is key to blending" when he explains this phenomenon, he describes it as catharsis.

Blending theories have a place in all of our worlds and an aesthetic experience is thus not limited to the art world . Understanding conceptual blending informs artistic practice. My research area is examining the effects of written and visual messages on the scores of posters pasted up around the London underground system. Additionally, the focus is on the power of the written image, combined with the visuals.

In conclusion, studying Yinka Shonibare`s Swing has opened the way for new and illuminating insights into his art, the artist himself and also into my practice and myself as an artist. The study has revealed that Shonibare educates, and this study has reinforced the fact that it is the necessary job of the research artist to continually question and challenge whatever surrounds their practice. By considering Shonibare`s Swing in relation to theories of metaphor and conceptual blending has introduced a new set of tools that enable alternative ways of reading artworks and creative practice overall. This engenders a broader vision of art as a whole. Also how art is received and perceived in unpredictable ways by different audiences has proved a key development.

In my understanding of Shonibare`s Swing, I have found that he has devised a way to encourage the viewer stand up and pay attention. My further perusal of how these theories of metaphor and conceptual blending may inform us about visual images has altered my approach to my creative methods. Hence, an awareness of metaphor and conceptual blending in my strategies and creation are at the fore now, when I blend my stories about London commuters.

Another consequence of this study is that Metaphor will allow a freer approach and subsequently deeper, more meaningful construction of my visual imagery. In particular, a fresh awareness of an alterist approach is becoming more in force. Alterism is a creative approach that will marry well with theories of metaphor and conceptual blending. Shonibare is an Alterist and this further allows conceptual blending to take place - the viewer fills the gaps in the visual narrative. And he has devised a way to encourage the viewer stand up and pay attention, he states:

`Curiosity and wonderment are part of being an artist`

This engenders a broader vision of art as a whole. In the way forward for future studio practice, this study has cast an influence on the themes and issues around my research project, namely: social comment, story and literature, social ritual, journeys within a crowd, and identity and disguise.

To sum up, art does not show how life is, but how we want to show it to be. Ultimately, keeping metaphor and conceptual blending in mind during our research, creative practice and construction, the ideas and resulting artwork will be the result of a freer, more confident and positive experience, as Shonibare himself states:

"To be an artist, you have to be a good liar. If you`re not, you can`t be a good artist. Basically, you have to know how to fabricate, how to weave tales, how to tell lies, because you`re taking your audience to a non-existent space and telling them that it does exist. But you have to be utopian in your approach."

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