Who: El Anatsui, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Jason Farago, Massimiliano Gioni, Julian Lucas
What: Book launch
Where: New Museum Theater, 235 Bowery
When: Thursday, September 22, $10, 6:30
Why: “The fact that El Anatsui normally expects curators and collectors of his metal sculpture to decide how to install them, but also because they are hand-wrought, flexible things, with numerous parts that can behave in infinite ways when moved, how they are installed determines their composition, affect, and phenomenological presence. Having conceived the work, and invested so much labor along with his many studio assistants to realize it in initial sculptural form, ceding its inaugural and future manifestations to whoever has custody of the work, is an extraordinary power to invest in others, without any instruction or even suggestion of his own authorial intentionality.” So write Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu in their new book, El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture (Damiani, $70), about Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, who uses discarded items (primarily bottlecaps) in creating large-scale pieces that comment on the relationship between humans and the environment. The works are malleable, able to be displayed in various configurations that El Anatsui leaves up to whoever is showing the piece.
On September 22 at 6:30, the seventy-eight-year-old El Anatsui (“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui”), who works in Ghana and Nigeria, will be at the New Museum for the official US launch of the book, highlighted by a panel discussion with Princeton-based artist, critic, and art historian Okeke-Agulu, art critic Jason Farago, and Brooklyn-based critic and essayist Julian Lucas, moderated by New Museum director Massimiliano Gioni. Okeke-Agulu wrote the book, which features such chapters as “El Anatsui and Modern African Art,” “The Aesthetic and Rhetoric of Fragmentation,” and “The Epic and Triumphant Scale,” with beloved Nigerian curator and critic Enwezor, who passed away in 2019 at the age of fifty-five and whose spirit will be felt throughout the evening.