The Need for Scholars of Art to Continually Grow in Writing About Art
Suggestions for Academic Curricula and General Development
Juxtaposed with Annotated Paintings of Kobina Nyarko and Photography of David Doubilet
Above and below, celestial revolutions and the hard earth at my feet, solar distances and my beating heart, fish at ocean bottom and life on earth surface, still potencies of watery depths and roiling powers of sky, unified to my bewildered but exalted gaze, brethren under the sea, reject me not for I come in peace, learning from you elder siblings in the watery space from which they who later became my kind climbed onto land for the first time in forgotten millennia.
Image: David Doubilet, Stingray in the Late Afternoon (1990), North Sound, Grand Cayman, West Indies from "Join David Doubilet in an Amazing Underwater World," Phaidon.
Summary
An explanation of the need for continuous development in the skill of writing about art,
juxtaposed with annotated examples of the underwater arts of Ghanaian painter Kobina
Nyarko and US photographer David Doubilet, suggesting the creation of novel ways of
viewing reality, central to art and to the efforts of the writer about art responding to such
unusually creative perceptions.
Contents
Image and Text: David Doubilet's Unity of Sea, Sky and Ocean Denizen
The Unity of Range of Knowledge and Expressive Skill
Image and Text: Kobina Nyarko's Fish Dynamics
Cultivating Intimacy with a Multidisciplinary Network of Great Writing
Image and Text: Cosmogonic Echoes of Kobina Nyarko's Fish Constellations
Studying Great Writing About Art
Image and Text: David Doubilet and the Glory of the Aquatic Cosmos
The Unity of Range of Knowledge and Expressive Skill
Reading writing about art by writers of various levels of competence makes it increasingly clear that this activity needs to be continuously nourished by study and practice, a never ending process integrating and going beyond grammatical accuracy to communicative power, ideational range and stylistic force. For that reason, I suggest that art schools include the study and practice of how to write and speak about art as compulsory courses across every year of training in art school, facilitating an educational process that should continue throughout life as a self-directed engagement.
Artists need to be able to communicate with others about their art in order to help bridge the space between their individualistic imaginative creations and their audiences, without diluting the mystery and evocative capacity, the never ending suggestive power of art that can never be confined to any views, no matter how informed, even the views of artists about their own work.
Those who study and write about art need to achieve the maximum communicative force they can muster, sharing their immersion in the symbolic universe conjured by art, a universe both shared with others, to a degree, and unique to each person, on account of their own cognitive individuality, their own way of responding to experience, the distinctive assemblage of images, ideas, emotions and responses that constitutes an individual, a uniqueness that art stimulates.
These goals cannot be achieved without a significant degree of reflexivity, of self knowledge, understanding how one responds to images and ideas, to messages apprehended by the senses, to the dynamism of one's mind in the effort to construct ideas, to one's own development in giving verbal shape to one's impulses, to one's slowly or speedily forming thoughts and feelings.
This reflective process cannot itself be maximised without a broad vocabulary, its items significantly understood. It also cannot be fully actualised without exposure to a breadth of examples of writers operating at the height of their craft, selecting and designing verbal patterns in ways that inspire one, luminous possibilities as stars in the sky of the mind, compelling one to join the company of those great masters.
Such exposure, of course, implies continuous breadth of reading, ideally across various fields of knowledge. This development enables one achieve the equivalent of a Catholic Encyclopaedia summation on the philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo, "He was eclectic as regards his sources but he was unique in the crucible treatment with which he amalgamated them into new schemata of striking freshness and power."
Kobina Nyarko's Fish Dynamics
Image: Kobina Nyarko, Spread, 2007
Some of Kobina Nyarko's most powerful art owes its uniqueness to its combination of visual dynamism and evocative force. Brilliant colours dramatize dazzling movement, schools of fish in motion round a luminous centre, in patterns suggesting the resonance of the minute and the vast, the cosmogonic and the immediate, cosmic emergence and expression.
His paintings are conjunctive with globally diverse images of unity in diversity, of expression and unification in terms of circles of cosmic manifestation and convergence, such as the Hindu yantra and the Buddhist mandala, as well as accounts in scientific cosmology of cosmic emergence from a primal explosion and telescopic pictures of celestial bodies organized round a solar or galactic centre.
The pervasive blue of this particular painting is comforting in its calm luminosity, elevating in its evocation
of power through expansive motion bursting from a pulsating centre, its integration with slivers of white
amplifying the sense of intense activity, evoking brilliant flame, possibly suggesting the intense heat of the explosion that birthed cosmos, or cognitive power at its most profound in cosmic creativity as all mental and physical possibilities or their foundations burst from a creative core. All these evocative possibilities are all the more striking in being enabled by a painting of myriad tiny fish.
Cultivating Intimacy with a Multidisciplinary Network of Great Writing
"The practitioners of Ijala, the supreme lyrical form of Yoruba poetic art, celebrate, not only the deity, Ogun, the hunter, but animal and plant life, seek to capture the essence and relationships of growing things and the insights of man into the secrets of the universe."
That compilation of two sentences from from Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World (1990, 28) is something I will never forget, always in the background of my mind, coming to the fore from time to time as I repeat it to myself, having first encountered them when I read that book in 1985. A very brief summation, but one in which Soyinka has encapsulated an entire cosmology, referencing relationships between a deity and all biological life forms, represented by animals and plants, the entire ensemble dramatising the continuous efforts of humanity to understand the essential identities of these growing elements in relation to the totality they constitiute, in the context of exploring the mysteries of the cosmos in which humanity finds itself , a glorious body of ideas projected through a particular poetic form, Ijala, Yoruba poetry of hunters.
"The Vandal armies were besieging Hippo when Augustine died there in AD 430. His influence has spanned and may one day reconcile the divisions of Western Christendom. Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, the makers of the English Prayer Book, Pascal, Sales, Bossuet, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, all these, have, in their different ways, drawn inspiration from one in whom they have been compelled to acknowledge 'the heart of the matter.' 'Verus philosophus est amator Dei,' 'The true philosopher is the lover of God.' In those words from the De Civitate [City of God], Augustine has left us at once the truest portrait of himself and the fullest justification of his life's work.''
I love those lines for their rhythm, their lyrical weaving of ideas, akin to a piece of music gathering various acoustic threads to a crescendo, like waves riding from the heart of the sea to crash tremendously on the sea shore, spraying onlookers with droplets and the taste of sea water as they recede their colossal powers to the ocean depths from which they rise, as those on the shore gaze on in wonder.
Those lines operate at various levels of communication. Along with their lyrical cadences, the writer is also projecting something that only those versed in the history he is referencing can adequately understand. He justifies his statement that the influence of Augustine, a 5th century North African Christian theologian and philosopher, pervades the various denominations of the Western Christian church-European Christianity and its affiliates- by listing, in chronological order, a selection of theologians and philosophers from the earliest periods of the Western Church after Augustine's time to the present when the essay was written, across different countries and denominations, from the 12th century figures Anselm of Canterbury, in England, to Bernard of Clairvaux in France, to the Protestant schism represented in modern times by Niebuhr and Tillich in the twentieth century US.
Like the Soyinka sentence, an entire universe of ideas is encapsulated in those lines from John Burnaby's 1971 Encyclopaedia Britannica article on Augustine of Hippo, lines representing the tip of an iceberg jutting above the surface of an ocean, evoking the vast learning of the writer, a fraction of which is hereby opened to the tantalised gaze of the reader.
Cosmogonic Echoes of Kobina Nyarko's Fish Constellations
"The ultimate Śakti, by her own will assumed the form of the universe, first as a pulsating essence…situated on a dense, flowering mass of lotus…" Drom The Yoginī Hṛdāya (Heart of the Yoginī) quoted at Mike Magee's Shiva Shakti Mandalam on Hindu Tantrism.
Image: Painting by Kobina Nyarko
Studying Great Writing About Art
A writer about art is also empowered by reading great writing about art, creativity suggesting the possibilities of this realm of human endeavour, indicating what one could also accomplish. A favourite example of mine of such writing is Olu Oguibe's "El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness" ( African Arts. Vol. 31. No. 1. 1998. 48-55+96). An unforgettably majestic essay. Great in ideas, free of jargon and expressively powerful. Smooth juxtaposition of ideational engagement through the material shaping of art, as this creativity is grounded in history.
Another wonderful piece is Rowland Abiodun's "Verbal and Visual Metaphors: Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Orí" ( Word and Image. Vol. 3.No.3.1987.252-270). A magnificently bold exploration of relationships between verbal and visual languages through mythic narrative, sculpture and their correlative explication. Smooth prose in simple, correct English that is yet refined to an ultimate point as the writer's translations of Yoruba poetry glow with unforgettable evocations of wonder at cosmic ideations and their resonance in human reflection and expression, dramatised in endlessly creative images.
I understand the essay as a work in progress. The relationship between the verbal, the visual and other expressive forms in Yoruba aesthetics is taken further in Abiodun's 2014 book Yoruba Art and Language, where this paper is slightly but significantly reworked as the first chapter. The later effort, however, is also one that I think might need further elaboration and more explicit links between the two major sections of the essay, on the verbal and the visual, for the full explication of Abiodun's project to be achieved. This may be so given the imaginative scope realized, and subtle interrelationships developed between the range of ideas he works with and their boldly ingenious images.
A further development of this project is demonstrated by Nkiru Nzegwu's " When the Paradigm Shifts, Africa Appears: Reconceptualising Yoruba Art in Space and Time" (Journal of Art Historiography. Number 18. June 2018) her landmark work on Yoruba aesthetics, reviewing Abiodun's book, clarifying and building on his foundations, demonstrating Nzegwu's magisterial grasp of the complexities of philosophical styles of thinking and expression.
Her essay complements Abiodun's more simple yet luminous writing. Both of them project a passion that is both scholarly and sacerdotal, analytical, imaginatively rich and priestly, devotees of a body of knowledge critically engaged with even as it helps define the rationale of their existence, even though this personalistic depth of value is not explicitly stated but resonates deeply in their work.
Babatunde Lawal's "À Yà Gbó, À Yà Tó: New Perspectives on Edan Ògbóni" ( African Arts. Vol. 28. No. 1. 1995. 36-49+98-100) is wonderful in foregrounding the manner in which the metal sculpture of this Yoruba esoteric school evokes ideas at the intersection of the arcane and the everyday, unifying notions of spirit with conceptions of human biology, of invisible, potent and awesome realities with the unity of society in the convergence of women and men, a convergence enabling the continuity of the human species within and beyond terrestrial life.
Lawal's oscillation between ideas and artistic form is sublime, grounded in a rich historical framework, creating an essay that stands as a monument to the vision of a community, an essay which, even in spite of any distortions that may be suffered by that community, makes clear its more elevating values.
David Doubilet and the Glory of the Aquatic Cosmos
Underwater beauty, bright with the armpit-dazzle of a lioness, gold crop, watermaid of the salt emptiness,
wearing deep lights about her, she answers, the waves escort her, my lioness, crowned with sea light,
luminous with mirrors around me, downward, the waves distill us, ''come into my cavern...my mouth calls from a cavern.'' - Lines adapted from ''Watermaid'' the third part of Christopher Okigbo's poetic cycle of
aquatic and water spirit mysticism, a journey with and to "the water spirit that nurtures all creation, "
Labyrinths. Heinemann, London. 1977. xi, 11 and 59.
Image : David Doubilet, Lion's Mane Jellyfish Drifting in the Shallow Bays of Bonne Bay Fjord Located in
Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland, Canada in "These Gorgeous Underwater Photos Show Us What Life Is Like Under the Sea" by Kate Bubacz, BuzzFeedNews, Nov.6.2021.
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