Let's Get Critical, Critical
Playing hide and seek with Yinka Shonibare
I’ve never quite understood the concept of reassembling historic rooms, putting a red velvet rope around it, and funneling tourists on a counter-intuitive path through a house, castle, or museum. But once Yinka Shonibare placed child figures ducking under desks or rocking on horses in the Brooklyn Museum’s “renowned” period rooms, peeking through an untouchable room’s window became a game.
Leaving his exhibit on the first floor of the Brooklyn Museum, I felt a bit cheated. I didn’t expect the majority of Shonibare’s survey to be film. But the map revealed there was more –the large-scale game of hide and seek brought me through other galleries to find those little figures in their clothes of “patterned Dutch wax fabric produced in Europe for a West African market” inside rooms that could easily have belonged to colonists. According to the exhibition’s website, another site-specific installation, Party Time—Re-Imagine America: A Centennial Commission by Yinka Shonibare MBE, will be on view at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, from July 1, 2009, to January 3, 2010, in the dining room of the museum’s 1885 Ballantine House. Would it be cheating to use 20th century transportation?
Tags: 
If you only saw the portion of the Yinka Shonibare MBE on the first floor of the Brooklyn Museum, you did not see all of the exhibition. There is another large section on the fourth floor in the Morris A. and Meyer Schapiro Wing that contains several important installation works, in addition to the pieces in the museum’s period rooms. Among the pieces on the fourth floor are The Swing (after Fragonard) and Gallantry and Criminal Conversations as well as two suites of large-scale photographs.
I think the relics that are period rooms, good or bad, tell us something about how we attempt to connect with and understand the past. Sometimes the bad ones tell us more.
I’m not sure how I feel about these rooms, but I think there’s more to them than a game of hide and seek.