“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui” (Brooklyn Museum): A tipping point, or the start of one, arrived in 1998, when Mr. Anatsui invented a new art form. One day, by his own account, on a routine scavenging hunt through Nsukka, he picked up a trash bag filled with twist-off liquor bottle tops of a kind manufactured by Nigerian distilleries. Although it took him a while to realize it, he had found his ideal material: locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded.
Liquor had come to Africa with colonialism. Production of rum propelled the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Later Africa had made a double-edged European import its own. And the history of all that was printed, in shorthand, in the brand names on the bottle tops: Bakassi, Chelsea, Dark Sailor, Ebeano.
In addition, crucially, the metal was visually magnetic. The colors — reds, yellows, silvers, golds — were bold and bright. And it was easy to manipulate, to “fold, crumple, crush,” to quote the title of a documentary film on Mr. Anatsui made in 2011 by Ms. Vogel, a curator and former professor of African art and architecture at Columbia University.
Finally the bottle caps answered Mr. Anatsui’s growing interest in expanding the scale of his art. Pressed flat, twisted, or cut into circles, then punctured, the caps could be wired together into panels or blocks, which were joined to form pliant, fabriclike sheets, each sheet a whole made of fragments, and, potentially at least, endlessly expandable. “When I started working with the bottle caps,” he said recently during a trip the United States, “I thought I’d make one or two things with them, but the possibilities began to seem endless.”The labor involved was arduous but communal, a kind of three-step performance. Studio workers in Nsukka made the initial blocks. Mr. Anatsui determined the configuration of the blocks into a larger works. Whoever installed the finished piece could hang and drape it as they pleased. No way was the only way, no way was permanent.
And when a piece, no matter how large, came down, it could be folded up to fit in the equivalent of a suitcase or trunk. More here.