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/\/n. mi Quarterly 
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V,.l ZNo 4 GLENDORA .
The setting is El Anatsui's Nsukka 
campus quarters. Running on the TV 
monitor were clips of oldtime Anatsui 
workshops in Europe, Brazil and Asia. 
Conversation, interrupted now and then 
with drinks, took a most informal and 
casual turn. October 1, 1998. 
.R: I just want us to 
throw the issues in the 
air. 
Oloidi: In the air ke, I 
thought you said you 
wanted to throw stones, 
(laughter) 
Anatsui:... We'll catch 
them don't worry. 
G.R: I want us to start by looking at this issue of 
feedback. By feedback I mean the response or reaction 
to the work of artists. Some people say that they 
actually endure them, or enjoy them, which ever way 
• how people respond. I'm referring to two categories: 
professional or critical reaction and there's the nonprofessional 
or pedestrian reaction. Can you share 
some of your experiences generally- have you been 
enjoying them or enduring them? 
Oloidi: How people receive... 
G.R: May be we should start with the professional 
reaction, reviewers locally... 
Oloidi: Okay, what I have seen or experienced so far 
with reviews, especially if you talk about reviews, then 
you'll talk about two categories that we all know 
around. And one which is commonest is newspaper 
reviews as against, proper or, in-depth academic 
reviews, which are rather very few and far between. 
G.R: In some places, the edges have gradually blurred. 
In some journals like the Times Literary Supplement 
which is supposed to be operating within a popular 
medium, and at the same time the quality is not 
compromised... 
Anatsui: Yea but we don't have much of that in the 
country. May be you can find that elsewhere although 
once in a while you find brilliant writing in the 
newspapers. What I can say about journalists' criticism 
is that most of it tends to be one-sided. 
Y'know they want to praise. May be they think as 
newspaper folks they have to sing praises, for an artist 
that can be very boring. 
GLENDQRA .v.« 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 4 
There's been only one occasion that one young, I've 
forgotten the name, attempted to really look closely 
when I had an exhibition. He looked closely at the 
show and he attempted to look at what was on show 
and what I had said so far and he made a statement 
which I thought was very critical y'know, the kind of 
thing that one would expect, y'know. He said that 
looking at the works, my rhetorics were more than the 
works. So when I read it, I said men, we're getting 
somewhere. 
But you don't have much of that happening you know, 
people who would want to now look closely. Look at 
the work critically. They don't do it. Most of them, most 
of the time, they want to only deal with your C.V. 
Beyond that they don't do anything to help their 
readers as such. There's no bridge they are building. 
Critics are supposed to build some bridge-they're 
supposed to build a bridge between the artist and the 
audience. 
G.R: Sometimes they are even supposed to talk back 
to the artist There's an interview where Soyinka was 
saying certain critics are really creatively endowed, 
they reinterpret the work. 
Anatsui: Yeah, when you read Roger Pryor, one of 
these British art critics, you read his critique and you 
have a feeling he is doing a new job out of the 
experience. He's not just regurgitating, vomiting; let 
me use that crude word, vomiting the material back to 
you. 
He's giving you an extension of the experience. 
G.R: Is itbecause, there's an handicap, and people 
tend to may be expect too much from the newspaper 
reviewer? 
Now if we really look at it, how much technical insight 
would someone who does not have any real training 
in art... Its not aiso helped by the fact that many 
newspapers assign the same person who's doing 
reviews for visual art to drama, music, to everything. 
Apart from that may be, y'know he/she even read the 
social sciences at school. 
But we also have cases where people, apart from the 
fact that they have a lot of insight, people also come 
from without who are real professional critics, and they 
make judicious use of the newspaper space. 
Oloidi: It is the duty of the critic to interpret! The artist 
has created his works, he doesn't really have to let us 
know what the work is all about. It is the duty of the critic 
to see, and see beyond what others see because the 
critic sees, but sees differently. There's a difference 
between looking and seeing. He sees more with his 
mind and not just with his eyes. 
So it is the duty of the critic to use his critique of art not 
as a decoration but as a symbol towards understanding.
G.R: I just want to add one thing to show the extent to 
which I agree with what you are saying. We actually 
went to one exhibition in Lagos recently and when we 
arrived there, the people running the place, not the 
proprietress but some of the staff, came and said, 
'what are you planning to do?' 
Of course we were going to appreciate this exhibition 
and discuss it on television and she said, 'what exactly 
are you going to say?' She was pleading, she said it 
might even be safer for them not to allow us... just to 
support what you are saying that some people actually 
think that the critic is coming to hack the artist down, 
and so on. 
If the level of social awareness about the role of the 
critic is so low, who do we blame? Do we blame the 
critic? 
O l o i d i : I'm personally disappointed with many reviews. 
Even depressed at times. For example in one of 
my review clips an exhibition of Yussuf Grillo is entitled 
'Yussuf Grillo, an exhibition of painting'. That is 
meaningless. The public will see that title, that highly 
artificial, very nude title has allowed the exhibition to 
shed off its purpose. 
People will see that title. Who cares about the exhibition 
of Onobrakpeya's prints on display? 
G.R: At the same time, may be I should be on the side 
of the newspapers. I think we actually have to delineate 
between a report and a review, because they are 
not essentially the same. 
Oloidi: Reporting. What is the purpose of art reporting? 
Is it to help a newspaper, or the artist or to help 
art...? 
G.R: But a report is not supposed to interpret. 
Oloidi: No, no, no. Anyway we are not talking about 
the art critic now, we're talking about the art reporter. 
G.R: Well, it may be confusing, y'know, because on 
the same newspaper page where there's a review, 
there's a sort of critical engagement with a work, you 
also have some other report there. 
Oloidi: When you talk about criticism, you devalue 
art reportage. What they do is not art reporting. They 
don't see themselves as art reporters. They see themselves 
as critics because they make judgement. 
If you think they are art reporters then you'll be 
surprised when they are making conclusions.... That 
the exhibition is this.... They do make judgements and 
critics make judgements. 
The art reporters are not supposed to make judgements, 
they are supposed to presentthingsasthey are, 
without attempting to offer interpretation. 
G.R: Yeah, certainly. 
Oloidi: ... and no newspaper will tell you that it's just 
satisfied with this. Why do they make, or break, artists? 
'An artist is born', that's a critic's expression. 
You see, biographers, praise singers, these are not 
reporting. To report is to say that an exhibition opened 
at, till, this,... that's all. 
But if that is the purpose, then anybody can do that.... 
G.R: It has its own art too. Reporting has its own art. 
I'm just saying that it has its own pre-occupation without 
necessarily crossing lines. The atmosphere of the place 
can be captured in a report, who was there and all that. 
And actually reporting what was said, the intentionary 
statements of the exhibition, without necessarily having 
a critical or analytical engagement, y'know, with 
the mind of the work. 
I'm saying it doesn't mean that reporting is necessarily 
a kind of lower art. 
Anyhow, you are actually confirming that art criticism 
in Nigeria has either failed or is failing. 
Oloidi: But we want it to be up to standard. Okay, 
look at the review pages; they say 'Art Review ' With 
art reviews you are to review, you're doing reviews. 
You are able to synchronise. 
G.R: Some call theirs 'Friday Review', 'The Arts' or 
something like that. 
For journalism in a very broad sense, people are 
trained to be journalists. Ultimately it is not possible to 
subordinate journalism to scholarship, to criticism. 
Anatsui: I do not see a good criticism which wouldn't 
at the same time report. A good criticism has to report 
because you have to present the thing somehow before 
you now go into criticising it or analysing it. 
G.R: For instance, it is possible for me to write a review 
and just say that well, El Anatsui's exhibition which 
opened on so so y'know is a major departure from the 
exhibition which he had... 
Anatsui: In what way? 
G.R: I have given... y'know, its just a shred of 
information, whereas a report would sound differently. 
What we are trying to do is just to assess. How far we 
have gone. 
Anatsui: A very, very, short distance— 
G.R: Very, very short distance? 
G.R: Do you sometimes feel like picking up your pen 
to jot something down. In a way that is similar to some 
extent to what Bruce Onobrakpeya has done a lot, by 
actually having to write on your own work. Do you get 
that urge sometimes? 
Anatsui: No, no. Well, it does come, once in a very, 
very long while, very long while. 
My approach is that if the urge is not strong enough 
then don't do it. 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol 2/No 4 GLENDORA.
Ola Oloidi, Anatsui's flat, Nsukka 
Even in the studio, you have an idea and its floating in 
your mind, if you don't think you can anchor it very, 
very effectively, forgetit. Or even ifyou start anchoring 
it and then you find that it's not it, you leave it. 
G.R: A number of visual artists from Nsukka I observe 
practise as poets and creative writers. 
Do you think that creative writing gives the artist an 
edge? 
Anatsui: I don'tthink creative writing should. There's 
no difference between them because they're all sourced 
from the, as I mentioned earlier, the right lobe of the 
mind. Not the left lobe. 
Anything creative comes from the right lobe And 
whether poet, or whatever, you should be able to cross 
over. Whether you are in... some people go to art 
schools, may be they did painting and they say 'oh I 
didn't do sculpture so I can't...' you should be able to 
cross over easily because, they are... all of them being 
creative endeavours, reside on the right side of the 
mind. 
And to do poetry, fiction, you should be able to, once 
it is creative, as against critical. 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
GLENDORA ...i.w Vol. 2/No. 4 
Y'know, the critical is different from the creative. The 
critical is from the left lobe. So he's (Oloidi) a left lobe 
(laughter), and I'm right lobed. 
So they are to sit down as critics and say okay, 'we can 
see this, that, that. That, can translate into this'. 
And when, as the artist, you read it you say'oh! Okay, 
they're making sense. So they are able to use the left 
iobe to read meaning into right lobe product. 
It shouldn't be difficult at all. In fact, most times when 
I do some work, y'know, if the work is successful and 
you wantto title it, you find that you find yourself writing 
poetry. There have been times when I had that feeling. 
Most of the titles that I did... the exhibition 'pieces of 
wood', the titles were very, very... some of them were 
poems, may be four, five lines and so on. 
G.R: And your intention was to really get a caption? 
Anatsui: Yes. Yes. But because they're all in the 
same... 
G.R: But it seems that you had to move from the right 
lobe to the left lobe... 
Anatsui: No, no. I was still in the right. 
G.R: Still in the right. 
Anatsui: Yeah... 
G.R: But the very act of getting a caption for a work that 
is completed... 
Anatsui: It's also a right lobe function. So I was still in 
the same... 
G.R: The creative is the right? But it seemed that to get 
a caption you had to cross to the left. 
Anatsui: I wasn't crossing to the left. Titling a work is 
a creative endeavour as well. 
G.R: Well, there's a school of thought that's also 
arguing that criticism is possibly as creative as... 
Anatsui: Eh, eh you are combining the left and right, 
like the critic I mentioned whose work you read and 
you feel like he's created a new work out of yours 
Perhaps such things happen. And there are artists, too, 
who can operate left and right. They find it easy to shift 
there, shift back, and so on and so forth. 
G.R: If we had a situation in which practising artists 
were also discussants, y'know, in public once in a 
while, it might actually enliven and may be stimulate 
those whose real pre-occupation is criticism. 
Anatsui: Yes, yes. Especially if they are able to, the 
right lobe is really broad. I understand it's the most 
difficult, but if they're able to reach the audience from 
that lobe, you know, then probably a lot of problems 
would have been over. 
G.R: I remember, from my personal experience of 
editing the arts pages of a newspaper, that we had 
space for visual arts, literature, performing, and other
areas of the arts. But literature just almost always took 
more than 70 per cent of our space because we found 
that those who were creative writers were also creatively 
responding, and that tended to increase the 
quality and the kind of responses you got from that 
critic who literally sent you back to your own work. That 
happened more in the area of literature than in the 
visual arts where you found that people were jealously 
kept within the right lobe as you said. 
Anatsui: I think literature people might have read 
criticism of people in literature who operate on the 
right lobe very intensely. I think they find it easier to shift 
between the two because words are very much a 
vehicle of the left lobe. And since that's what they use 
as their medium, they find it easy to cross over. 
That's why you can have more of people who respond. 
If you source your response from' artists, in words, 
you'll find it difficult to because most of them are locked 
in that... y'know, they find it difficult to shift into the left. 
G.R: So the question now is this, to whom, or where 
does the practising African artist turn? If the newspaper 
reviewer is not delivering, the professional critics 
within the universities are not performing, where does 
the practising African artist turn? 
Anatsui: And the teachers too are not performing... 
(laughter). 
G.R... So where does he/she turn? And where does 
he/she actually get stimulation? 
Oloidi: I wouldn't say that they are not performing. 
Things are really improving, there's no doubt about 
that. Things are improving. But the thing is slow. 
So, about the artist, you say where does an artist turn? 
To his/her creativity. 
You see an artist is supposed to have... any artist 
without any sustaining ideology cannot be called an 
artist. Because it is your ideology, which becomes 
highly instrumental and no critic, no matter how 
negative can be discouraging. 
Some artists create, not for money, they continue to 
work without thinking of the attending gratification. 
They are creating because of that rush in creativity. 
They are full of experimentations. 
But they are only a few. Some artists create because 
they want to sell. And such people, anything goes. If 
they say this is the style in Lagos, yes that is it.... 
G.R: But again you're already shutting out the younger 
ones. Those who have not actually reached that 
ferment. Those who are still highly impressionable, 
and they still have to depend on... 
Oloidi:... if they want to be artists nothing will 
discourage them. That's why artists will always fail, 
and artists will always pass.. 
You discover that there are many art teachers now and 
few artists. Many art teachers. Many art administrators. 
It depends on your interest! 
If there's that rush of creativity, nothing! Okay, like 
Yusuff Grillo, Grillo said when they took to art they 
never knew the future. He said they just took to art 
because they loved art 
Look at installation which came up in our discussion the 
other time If you want to be academic you can say that 
what you call installation has been with us. If you go to 
the villages you see all those shrines, they didn't see it 
as installation. But that has been their own system of art 
arrangement. 
G.R: I want to take up this issue on behalf of some 
artists who still insist that the authentic feedback should 
come from African reviewers and critics. 
And they give the following reasons. I'm going to give 
four of them. 
The first is that Africans should determine their own 
canons, in art as well as in literature; that we should not 
allow others to do it for us. We ought to determine who 
are the frontliners, who are in the middle and so on. 
The second is thatthere is the danger for contemporary 
African art to be classed as an appendage of museum 
ethnography. 
The third is that even when contemporary African art is 
well acknowledged, it is put in the same bracket as 
auxiliary art forms like bread labels, sign writing and 
those which Ulli Beier classed as Middle Arts. 
And the fourth. The soul of a work, they reason, cannot 
be accurately interpreted by critics who are outsiders 
to the mental and cultural worlds the artist has drawn 
from. How do you react? 
Anatsui: Lets have the first reason again... 
G.R: That Africans should determine their own canons 
in art as well as in literature. 
Anatsui: Well, I think that stands to reason. You can't 
have canons determined for you by anybody. 
And how do you determine canons? What are the 
things that bother you? What are the things in your 
environment, for instance, which bother you, impinged 
on you or which make you uncomfortable or even 
make you very happy. What are the things around? 
They say art is something which is not in a vacuum. You 
don't grow in a vacuum. Its grows on an environment, 
therefore they certainly would reflect. No matter what 
you do, it will reflect. Since it draws its strength from the 
environment, that environment would certainly be 
reflected in it. 
That's why when, for instance, I meet some young 
artists who finish their art training and they come and 
say, 'we've heard about this installation thing. What is 
your view on it? Is it African?' I tell them it is as African 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 4 GLENDORA.
as anything you can think about. Even more African 
than European. And I cite so many examples after 
which they'll say okay, okay it's true. 
But the problem again is the extent to which Europ has 
destroyed our sensibilities. We have all around us 
things that are in current fashion but look down on 
them. 
Around Nsukka y'know, I do go to the villages, most 
times over the weekend, to just roam around and see 
very exciting things that we do in Africa. 
In Africa we live with art. We do art without calling it 
art. What somebody referred to as 'Art Without 
Artists'. You can have a lot of sculptures all over the 
place without sculpture. It's a matter of well, somebody 
decides that we'll call it sculpture and people say okay 
we give it a name. But we don't give names to such 
things. And that doesn't mean that we don't have them. 
We have them. 
So, installation art is African. In the market, everyday 
the Ugba seller cooking his 'Ugba' has a technique of 
wrapping and the form it takes are forms of sculpture, 
and you can call them installation. 
Recently I found while reading, the only aspect of art 
which has been bandied about in the West which I 
had not tried to find an example for in Africa, but 
recently found an example of. I was reading through 
some book, I think The Guardian of the Word by 
Camara Laye. There's this, y'know Sungolo Njata... 
G.R: Sundiata... 
Anatsui: There's this episode in which he did something 
which, y'know, if you look at it, it's just what they 
call 'Conceptual Art' in the West. 
The art whereby you don't use... you want to express 
that you want to wage war on somebody and you don't 
make a human being carrying a gun. Butyou use some 
other signifiers which if anybody sits down and looks 
at it closely he can get the message. 
There was a time he (Sundiata) had this encounter with 
a king who wanted him to succeed him. The king didn't 
have a son and Sundiata had lived with him as a, I 
think he sought refuge, and the king so liked him for his 
prowess and everything. And since the king didn't 
have a son he wanted Sundiata to succeed him but this 
guy had problems in his home. 
His people searched for him and found him in the 
king's domain and they wanted him to come back and 
help them fight some enemy. And since blood is thicker 
than water he decided to go back. 
So he went and told the king that he would want to take 
leave. And the king said 'Ah ah but I want you to 
succeed me, I don't have a son' and the chap said 
'well I have a call from home'. 
mother died just a night before he was due to leave, 
he went to the king again to beg for a piece of land 
bury her corpse. 
And the king said 'well, you don't want to succeed m 
you don't want to inherit this place, anything you ha 
carry. Carry your mother's dead body'. 
So the chap said supposing I buy the land and pay f 
it, and the king said: 'well, maybe'. 
So the chap went away awhile. When he returned F 
came with a basket of feathers of guinea fowl, broke 
pieces of pots and some other ruffles and said 'oka 
this is your payment'. 
And the king said 'How? I can't have this rubbish... yo 
call this payment?' Meanwhile, the boy left. 
But there was somebody whom we can call a critic 01 
the spot. I think he was from Saudi Arabia because th< 
Arabs were already in contact with that area, so he 
understood and came and explained to the king wha 
the guy meant. 
He said: 'if you don't give me this land, I'll wage war 
on you, and not only wage war, I'll destroy your 
kingdom. It would become a place that guinea fowls 
come to take their dusty bath'. 
Y'know he had dust, guinea fowl feathers, broken pots 
and so on. 
That's a very good example of Conceptual Art when 
you look at what they call Conceptual Art in the West 
Y'know this took place in the Thirteenth century. 
There's no difference between it and what Sundiata 
did a long time ago. When I meet this new phenomenon 
abroad, I don't just come back and say okay I've 
seen' installation art let me do it. I first search my 
environment. If I find it I say okay then. If I'm doing it 
I'm not doing something European. 
Anything that I do now I can cite examples of it in parts 
of Africa. Not necessarily of my people, but people of 
African descent. So that's what I do. 
What I want to say again is that artists need to open 
up. We have attempted to open up to go back and find 
out that what is happening in the West is not a new 
phenomenon, or a new idea. 
The West are also going back to their past to pick from 
whatever they had done so many years ago. And in 
some cases you find what they're doing is much more 
relevant to the African situation than it is to theirs 
These ideas about conceptual art, installation art and 
all that, I think we have more material and more 
inspiration and more ideas that can enable us to do it 
better. 
So our canons are things that we have to shape and if 
you go back you'll find many, many things. Very many 
models. GR Meanwhile he was living therewith his mother and the 
GLENDORA ..v 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 4