Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Microcron Begins
Owusu-Ankomah
21 x 28 cm, hardcover
308 pages
94 color illustrations from cycle of works of 2010 - 2014
Languages: German / English / French
Texts:
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Gerard Houghton
Hans-Werner Kalkmann
Moyo Okediji
Owusu-Ankomah
Rikki Wemega-Kwawu
Publisher: Kunstverein Bad Salzdetfurth e.V.
Edition 800
£25.00
The book Microcron Begins: Owusu-Ankomah that accompanies the multi-continent exhibition Microcron Begins of the work of the artist Owusu-Ankomah, is a great book.
It is great in the context of art history across continents and in relation to all fields of knowledge.
This greatness consists in its deft correlation of a great body of art by an artist and a profound and imaginatively rich philosophy by the same artist,a combination that is rare in publications in the history of the visual arts.
Perhaps the preeminent combination of visual artist,thinker and writer in the Western tradition is Vincent van Gogh. The scope represented by the peaks reached by his achievement in these areas of endeavor seems to be rare in Western art.
William Blake is magnificent in his poetry and art but I wonder if he reaches summits of consistency of achievement in these fields as Van Gogh did in both, keeping in mind that my acquaintance with Blake is very limited, while I am familiar with Van Gogh's writing and art.
Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are striking but I wonder if the notebooks and his art reach a related level of coherence of achievement,a coherence that would truly be a wonder because he is one of the greatest artists of all time, keeping in mind I have only a very basic acquaintance with his notebooks.
A discussion of relationships between art and thought by the same artist must include Asia, because Asian cultures seem to have developed a keen sensitivity approach to relationships between these areas of creativity for centuries and documented their ideas well before other civilizations attained that level of cognitive sophistication and documentation, but my exposure to relationships between philosophy and art by Asian artists is more limited than it is with that of the West.
The development of subtle and elaborate conjunctions between creativity, epistemology and metaphysics in Asian art is well known and a study of this field must include the specific ways particular artists have developed such ideas in relation to their art in the course of their careers across the diverse cultural worlds represented by Japan, India, China, to name three countries with very rich traditions of correlation between art and thought known to me among the wealth represented by Asian cultures in general.
Classical African art is very rich in relationships between art and philosophy, as is evident from publications in this field.
Post-classical African art is also very rich in these correlations, and the exploration of the convergence between art and philosophy in the work of these artists is steadily growing.
Owusu-Ankomah's work belongs in this strand.
The art of other continents, Australia, South America,Native-American art, for example, the last of which I am not sure whether or not to class as Western since it comes from North America although I wonder if it belongs to the same cultural stream as Western art , art of the Caribbean and African-American art which I am classifying as part of Western art and Diaspora African art, the latter being a categorisation which I am confused about, suggesting the limitations and perhaps archaic and outmoded value of categorizing art primarily by continent or by single or monolithic cultural streams, all demonstrate their own correlations between art and philosophy, as represented by the thought and practice of their respective artists as well as the views of non-artists on these artistic cultures.
Within the scope represented by the global history of art as I am exposed to it so far, the book Microcron Begins on Owusu-Ankomah's art is a landmark work on account of the scope of elements that constitute the book.
It integrates an individual spiritual and philosophical voyage in painting,expressed in a rich body pictures of the artist's work, complemented by philosophy, presented in terms of the elaborate, imaginatively rich and conceptually profound verbal expositions by the artist, and a magnificent body of essays by various writers engaging the artist's work and thought.
The artist's vision is also remarkable in integrating both the classical world views represented by ancient spiritual cosmologies, as demonstrated by ideas and practices from his native Ghana and contemporary advances in scientific cosmology and its philosophical implications.
The visual artist I know who is unsurpassed in her depiction of philosophical and spiritual quest in relation to her art is Susanne Wenger. I don't think the art of her school, however, since she directed a team of co-workers, is at the same level of realization as Owusu-Ankomah's paintings, although the architectural achievement of the school is particularly remarkable.
Artists engaging with broad and deep philosophical, particularly metaphysical issues in art from the 20th century to the present, such as the German artist Anselm Kieffer and the Indian artist Sohan Qadri, are well known but I think to find an achievement of spiritual and philosophical quest,depicting the individual on a journey in quest of ultimate meaning, that is correlative in scope of achievement with that of Owusu-Ankomah we might have to go to literature, from earliest times to the present.
The preeminent master of literature of spiritual and philosophical quest in Western literature might be the Italian Dante Alighieri.
Another great figure along similar lines, the scope of whose achievement is only beginning to come to light, is Aleister Crowley,known for his work in modern Western magic, but who is actually a multidisciplinary cultural icon.
Ibn Arabi is particularly remarkable in Islamic thought and literature for his ideational scope, imaginative range and verbal magic, to give an example from my very limited exposure to Arab and Persian literature.
I am not informed of examples of personal accounts of spiritual quest in Jewish literature, although the stories and philosophy of Nahman of Bratslav, which I am conversant with, are interpreted along such lines.
I am acquainted with the wonderful work of Jorge Luis Borges, from South America, but he does not present his work in terms of a personal journey even though it certainly is.
From my reading of Asian literature of spiritual and philosophical quest, I understand Jetsun Milarepa as amazing for the emotional depth, conceptual density, imagistic range and musical fluidity of his poetry.
The accounts of personal spiritual and philosophical journey known to me in African literature are represented by Amadou Hampate Ba'spresentation of the Fulani cosmological epic Kaidara, Christopher Okigbo's Labyrinths,Wole Soyinka's The Man Died, complemented by his A Shuttle in the Crypt and The Credo of Being and Nothingness and Bessie Head's A Question of Power.
I see Owusu-Ankomah's body of work as akin to the roles of the central characters and the universes they traverse in these literary and autobiographical works.
Of course, all creative work, particularly in the arts, embodies the preoccupations and possibly the cognitive journey of the creator, but it is relevant to bracket the field of comparison to explicit foregrounding of personal individuality in order to make the scope of comparison manageable in this context.
Across these figures in the visual and verbal arts,central qualities of their creativity are imaginative range and dexterity, evocative power and conceptual force.
From my exposure so far, I understand Dante as preeminent in his multidisciplinary correlation, welding magnificent poetic music and imagery to explorations in metaphysics, religion, literature, art, political and social philosophy and the scientific cosmology of his time in medieval Europe.
Owusu-Ankomah's writing is complementary to his painting, much more so than that of Van Gogh, whose letters represent a body of work that can stand on their own in terms of volume, ideational scope and beauty and power of expression.
Owusu Ankomah's writing, however, suggests a comparable range of reference to that of van Gogh's much more voluminous writing and a more sophisticated and complex philosophy, particularly since van Gogh's writing is deeply engaged with his personal struggles in working out his vision within the vicissitudes of his life, that personal texture being vital to the human richness of his work, while Ankomah's writing is completely philosophical and extra-personal.
In terms of evocative range, however, I would see Owusu-Ankomah's visual art as comparable in scope to Dante's greater variety of imaginative evocations.
The complete range of achievement and possibilities of development represented by Owusu-Ankomah'swork, however, might be unique in the history of both visual and verbal art across cultures.
This uniqueness consists of his development of a complete visual sequence and complementary verbal expression that may be adapted to a spiritual and philosophical practice involving physical motion, artistic contemplation and intellectual reflection that others may adopt.
His paintings may be divided into three major categories of philosophical and spiritual exploration, each of them requiring significant depth of study in terms of their internal referentiality and associations with other bodies of knowledge.
The first category may be seen as his art of contemplative orientation, in which attitudes suggesting commencement of philosophical and spiritual quest are depicted in terms of physical postures and colour values represented by lone figures and the evocative power of the colours and symbols that shape the spaces they inhabit.
The second classification may be understood as his major body of work, in terms of number and evocative range, of the actual process of cognitive exploration, consisting of human forms in various positions against a background of Ghanaian Adinkra and other symbols and his own central self developed symbol, the Microcron.
The third set may be seen as his art of somatic orientation, in which the focus is on the positioning of the human body in relation to points in space with a minimality of other forms within that space, spaces evocative of the coordinates within which embodied being is realized.
I see in this sequence of paintings a discipline that incorporates physical exercise, visual contemplation of art and reflective exploration of philosophical and spiritual questions raised by the artist.
This discipline is enriched by its associations with correlative disciplines such as Yoga, Asian martial arts and Asian movement disciplines such as Qiqong in their conjunction of physical exercise, contemplation and philosophical reflection.
The discipline represented by Owusu-Ankomah's work is also better appreciated in relation to the full range of philosophical and spiritual exploration across the world, including the philosophical implications of scientific cosmology, which the artist explicitly references.
The book Microcron Begins:Owusu Ankomah, in its large scope of verbal exploration and presentation of the artist's ideas and work, within a thick hardbound volume enriched by numerous color photographs depicting the sequence of his major body of work, and powerful essays by the artist and scholars of his work, provides a most rich introduction to a massive body of work that would take several volumes to present and explicate its significance.
The book presents the magnificent range of the artist's paintings and ideas, pointing a finger towards further exploration that can help actualize a fuller understanding of the unique scope of his achievement as both an evocation of a personal quest with profound ramifications for humanity in the search for ultimate meaning, but as also representing a discipline that others may adapt for their own use in this quest as embodied beings, an embodiment in the midst of metaphysical coordinates that is the core of Owusu-Ankomah's response to the challenge of the question of ultimate meaning
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