Shrine Master and Shrine
Victor Ekpuk at the Convergence of Global Shrine Aesthetics
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
"Collaborative Knowledge Creation" A Division of Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Wonderful...
the contemplator and the contemplated
the creator and the created
the shrine master and the shrine
Victor Ekpuk and his ideographic mysteries....
The Shrine and the Transcendental but Apprehensible
Across time and space, people have created or recognised forms which they relate with possibilities of being beyond themselves.
Such forms are known, explicitly, or implicitly, as shrines.
Such a shrine might be an image, a necklace, a free standing structure, a book, an idea, a human being or even a group of people.
At the core of what I would describe as shrine aesthetics is the understanding of the form as something worthy of veneration because it embodies possibilities of being beyond what is readily accessible to human beings.
Victor Ekpuk's Shrine Aesthetic
The visual and performance artist Victor Ekpuk does not describe his work as shrines, but, in my view, the core of his aesthetic vision is a dramatisation of what I would describe as shrine aesthetics.
What is Shrine Aesthetics?
Shrine aesthetics consists in the creation of forms, visual, kinetic or more, that evoke a sense of mystery, of possibilities suggesting values that goe beyond conventional understanding but which have significance for humanity.
This is at best a rough distillation of my encounters with what I understand as shrines.
These encounters range from constructions explicitly understood as shrines, such as the classical religion shrines of Nigeria's Benin-City, which initiated me into the concept of shrine aesthetics through exposing me to patterns in shrine construction there, patterns resonant, it seems, in Southern Nigeria, to my experience of forms not conventionally understood as shrines, such as my experience of the trance inducing power of seemingly secular writing in reading for the first time the German philosopher Immanuel Kant on the Sublime in his Critique of Judgement, to my current veneration of the human being as an embodiment of the most sublime possibilities of being.
A definition of shrine aesthetics could change or be modified depending on the form being addressed.
At the core of the concept, however, is the recognition of a form luminous with depths of possibility that demonstrates or suggests something of the utmost value, which is yet beyond ready apprehension.
Its distance from immediacy of full appreciation implies it would require dedicated attention, even over a lifetime, to enable it yield its deepest possibilities.
In that sense, a moment of time, a word, a footprint or a drop of water could be understood as a shrine, as poets and other thinkers across space and time have demonstrated.
Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's famous "frog jumping into water...a deep resonance" poem, suggesting naturalistic , contemplative and cosmic associations, South African poet Dennis Brutus' sight of the stars in their transcendent beauty above the prison transport he was in at that moment, in his poem "Cold", my everlasting memory of Virginia Ola's exclamatory response to that numinous moment in the poem as she taught us in our first year poetry class at the University of Benin, Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's image of egrets flying into the sun at break of day, mass servers to the communion wafer the sun had become, as he watched from his prison cell, my experience of spontaneous integration of cosmological concepts, accompanied by intense bliss, on glancing in passing at a Siva yantra, a geometric embodiment of the Hindu deity Siva, the sense of an Ekpuk painting as a living deity as my mind was led to see the back, and therefore, perhaps, the complete hidden being of the supposedly two dimensional painting as I contemplated it in the moments of slowly rising from sleep...all these are shrine moments, recognitions of the fantastic possibilities of phenomena that may look ordinary at other moments, and, in some of these examples, the creation of forms that evoke such illuminations of the vast wellsprings of time and form, these evocations themselves becoming shrines to those who are able to relate with them as sparks of creative possibility.
The Dynamic and the Realized in Ekpuk's Art
The sense of eloquent mystery, of actualisation of profound possibility through unanticipated encounter between consciousness and phenomena, and of the creation of forms to evoke these encounters, and perhaps stimulate such experiences in others, is an apt description of the core of the Ekpuk aesthetic and of his style of presenting this aesthetic to the public.
This emphasis on both the dynamism represented by the process of actualisation of the numinous form and the form itself as an wakener of numinous possibilities, is a marked feature of Ekpuk's presentation of his work on the online social media site Facebook, perhaps the most complete presentation of his creations, even more inclusive than his website in its scope and its charting of his artistic development from earlier years to the present.
Ekpuk takes pains to present images of himself at work, enabling us see the work in progress as it unfolds at the intersection of consciousness, form, materials and method.
We are thus enabled to witness the uncanny shaping of hieroglyphic forms emerging from his personal aesthetic, as his foundational inspiration in the semi-esoteric nsibidi script of Nigeria's Ekpe esoteric order undergoes transmutation within his inscriptional intelligence, becoming a forest of possibilities unrealised anywhere, at anytime, except through the creative intelligence of Victor Ekpuk.
We are escorted into the shrine master's creative activity as the shrine unfolds, but are likely to be as bamboozled than before we saw the wizard creating his wizard works.
"What does it mean?" becomes an irrelevant question.
"What does it mean to me?" takes centre stage, since no dictionary or map exists of the universe that is distinctive to this artist, continually sprouting new forms.
Within this constellation of strangeness, however, certain forms are discernible as either classical nsibidi forms or recurrent original creations of Ekpuk's or both, but the total ensemble almost always demonstrates the enigmatic force of the belly of a witch as that term is understood in its older sense of both dread and fascination in contemplating a figure dealing intimately with mysterious life shaping powers.
Auto-Graphics : Action, Contemplation, Realization
In the Auto-Graphics sequence of images on his personal Facebook account and his Art of Victor Ekpuk account, this rendition of process and created work reaches it height in two images, one of contemplation of the work in progress- shown above- and another an image of the completed work-shown below.
In his pictured contemplation of the work in progress, the shrine master is seated in front of the shrine in its process of creation.
His back is turned to us as he faces his creation.
The entire tableau is imaged in stark black and white.
His stillness and the sombre colour of the human and structural environment cast a contemplative atmosphere over the scene.
The contrast of the shape of the work at this point with the completed work in the next image suggests that the shrine creator is contemplating his creation in progress, perhaps reflecting on the next move in the unfolding of this spider's web of inscriptional mystery, a mystery that sings its beautiful music inside him and of which he attempts to help us glean perhaps an echo or sliver of it, or something more robust of that inner melody suggested by the rhythms of his lines.
What is Ekpuk meditating on?
The core of power within himself from which emerges visual forms encoding mysterious symbolic values, a spider's web encompassing various zones of being?
A core of creative possibility evoked by the circle on the wall directly in front of his gaze, the circle radiating nodes around its circumference, as creative flow continuously erupts from Ekpuk himself?
Do the intersections of creative power and expressive skill that define him as an artist emerge in the line running vertically from the radiating circle up the centre of the painting, marked by horizontal lines that bisect the vertical line, making it look like a ladder?
A ladder of inspiration from creative core to manifestation?
It could mean anything to the viewer but its sheer mysterious beauty might be inescapable for all viewers.
Who should have the last word here?
An enraptured one, coming upon these images, compelled, utters thus :
"Shrine.......
from ancient to modern shrines
from concrete shrines to visual shrines
from embodied numinosities to visualised coruscations of power
from prehistoric cave ritual forms to Indian yantra
from Ekpe nisibdi to modern Tantric art
from the Benin Olokun graphic art of
Norma Haas Rosen
to the modern Tantra of Sohan Qadri
from the Abakua inspired art of Belkis Alyon
to the Urhobo shrine aesthetics of Bruce Onabrakpeya
from the Orisa inspired art of Susanne Wenger and her Osun forest collective
to the uli/nsibidi inspired worlds of Joseph Eze and Victor Ekpuk
and the awesome tattoo shrine who is Moniasse Sessou...
enshriners in installation, canvas, the human body..."
thereby evoking a global map of shrines in various contexts, from two dimensional images represented by classical Indian yantra art to three dimensional shrine installations, as in the modern shrines of Bruce Onabrakpeya, to the human body, exemplified by the living tattoo shrine that is Moniasse Sessou, a cross-cultural and multi-ontological map inspired by the work of Visor Ekpuk.
Contemplating the completed work, the ecstatic fervour of the enraptured one spills forth even further:
"The completed work looks like the lingam or phallus of the Hindu deity Siva
defined here
by centres of power like those understood as shaping the human body in yoga
the base a circular network of points orbiting a centre
leading upward to a sequence of horizontal lines balancing masculine and feminine polarities
constituting cosmic totality
the unity of Siva and Sakti
as this unity in polarity is topped by the triangle of balance,
its base the unity of the primordial duality
its apex the issuing forth of this unity in duality in terms of a third element
the cosmos
the outcome of their union.
Around the central pillar
composed of a base of a circle of nine radiations
a circle like the presence of Sakti coiled snake like at the base of the human spine
the human person being both Siva and Sakti
from where she rises upward to unite with Siva at the top of the head,
thereby enabling the awareness of the unity of microcosmic and cosmic being
can be seen various enigmatic inscriptions
beckoning with a compelling immediacy but their meaning out of reach
escaping logical interpretation
as if they may be deciphered only by some intuitive illumination....
truly we enter here into the realm of mystery...
where logic stops and something else takes over...a new kind of light...
we are welcomed into the shrine...
may we be reborn though the realignment of our inner universes
through the inward caressing of our being by these outer forms...."
Silence.
Source of images: Facebook account of Victor Ekpuk.
Both images copyright of Victor Ekpuk.
Also posted at
The Cosmos of World Art and Correlative Cultural Forms
Studying the Art of Victor Ekpuk Facebook group
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