Oracle Quest 3
Encounter in the Marketplace
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle III
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
The time is a thousand years from now. The Oracle series of mixed media works by the 20th-21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, first presented in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows, and adapting the visual structure of the opon ifa, a central symbolic and functional form of the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge and divination, have long been missing, rumoured to have been scattered to unknown locations across the world in order to prevent the arcane knowledge they embody being available to any one person,so dangerous these perceptions are whispered to be.
Someone, however, determines to track them down and unearth the mysterious cognition they enable.. This series, combining art criticism, art theory and broader philosophical reflection within the compressed evocative and narrative power of the short story and rich in detailed visual and verbal engagements with each element in each of these works of art, represent this person's account of the quest.
Finding Oracle III in a market in Cairo, the writer is compelled to explore relationships between the artistic piece and the dynamism of the market, in the spirit of the classical African understanding of the world as a marketplace, adapting the title of Nkeonye Otakpor's 1996 essay on that conception in Igbo philosophy.
"Why is it beautiful?", "What makes it beautiful?", "What is the significance of this beauty?"
These are the core questions I ask myself when reflecting on forms I find beautiful. The compelling power of these enquiries, the exposure to the hidden places of the world, the insights into amazing dimensions of reality made possible by sensitivity to beauty, had inspired my quest for a series of artistic works, compelling in their recreation of aesthetic strategies already ancient in their time, and promising of entry into the unity of sense, thought and contemplation which I pursued as a template for opening the doors of the Ultimate.
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle III
Standing in a market in Cairo, holding Bruce Onobrakpeya's mixed media creation Oracle III in my hands, I reflected on these preoccupations. How fortunate the meanderings of fortune! I was taking a walk through the hubbub of activity that defined the zone of commerce, visually feasting on the vast assortment of goods on display, the energy of large numbers of people in action, when I spotted it. It was placed among prints of paintings of different kinds, but its authenticity drew my eye immediately. "Can this be an original Onobrakpeya?", the rhythm of my heart beat out this question as I approached the stall where it was displayed.
Cascade of the multifarious
Yes. Unmistakable. The solid grooves of the varied forms carved into the circular circumference. The colour cornucopia of the central assemblage flowing from the head overlooking the middle of the structure. The playful, tantalizingly suggestive scribbles that marked the empty surface behind the strings of multifarious objects. Delightful harmonies of contrastive colours. This was indeed Onobrakpeya's Oracle III, as evidenced from its picture in the 2015 book Onobrakpeya : The Masks of the Flaming Arrows, the first showing in pictures of what later became works missing to the world, their whereabouts unknown.
Procession of Sentinels, left side of circular circumference
The stall owner, seeing I was fascinated by the piece, encouraged me to buy it. We haggled. He had no idea of the true value of this superb creation, if not it would not be in his stall. Pretending not to be particularly motivated, I was able to get the work for what he believed was a fair price but which I knew was a ridiculously low cost, given its inestimable value. The assemblage safely in my hands, I asked where he got it from. It came to him among other works of art from a previously unknown person who brought them to his market stall for sale, he disclosed. How did this diamond come to be so concealed? An unseen hand using the nondescript as a means of hiding the magnificent?
Ring of Watchers, right side of circular circumference
The enormity of the achievement represented by my obtaining this artefact compelled me to take a seat in the market as the experience soaked in.
It was rumoured that the artist had invested his Oracle series with a potent portion of his own life force, a transformative energy channelled through the expression of his individuality in his organisation of disparate forms in constructing these artistic windows of possibility. Like the ritual master of the Yoruba Ogboni esoteric order, described, perhaps in Denis Williams' 1964 "The Iconology of the Yoruba 'Edan Ogboni' ", as channelling, through a nine day ritual, a disembodied sentient entity into an edan sculpture consecrated to a particular Ogboni initiate, this force thereafter acting as a means of protection and information gathering for the initiate as it came and went from its sculptural housing, the master of Agharha-Otor in what was then Nigeria's Delta State, Ogboni edan being incidentally a recurrent feature of his Oracle sequence, is perceived as achieving, through these creations, a literal expression of what the 17th century English writer John Milton depicted in his Areopagitica as the quality of a good book being "the precious life blood of a master spirit [ sealed ] and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."
First half of evocation of variety of being. Esu Laolu, at the crossroads of being and becoming, as an Ife head, looks down on the wealth of possibilities that constitute existence
Admiring the dance of colours from the spirals, cowries, gourds, spark plugs, edan ogboni, a Bambara chiwara sculpture, elegant in its dynamic poise akin to a crouching antelope, accentuated by a jagged spine in rhythm with alternating triangles of empty and solid space as the head flares upward like a point of flame, cylindrically woven beadwork, among other forms in the central assemblage, I can readily credit the care taken in creating, choosing and combining these disparate objects. This painstaking creativity is also evident in the forms inscribed on the circular circumference, each unique and detailed.
Chi wara of the Bambara, totem of creative activity at the nexus of sky and earth, as stretching from the beginning of human time
The artist does mention, in his introduction to the pictures of his artistic sequence, that "the name 'oracle' connotes aesthetic charm, magic or manna that the combination of objects radiates". Intriguing, but what precisely does that mean? What exactly does he signify, in this context, by "magic" and by reference to the Biblical concept of "manna" or divine sustenance?
Second stage of projection of existence as seemingly random variety within concealed unity
To what degree should these ideas be understood in literal or metaphorical terms? Is he suggesting that aesthetic charm is synonymous with magic, with something beyond the confines of nature as conventionally understood, as Ulli Beier in his 1975 Return of the Gods : The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger, may be seen as doing in referencing the thought of Wenger in its inspiration by Yoruba animism, describing aesthetic force in trees, for example, as an expression of consciousness and agency in these inanimate forms? Is Onobrakpeya alluding to a similar conception, a capacity understood in animistic cultures as pervasive across nature, as John Anenechukwu Umeh also depicts of Igbo thought in his 1997 After God is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria? This body of ideas references a quality which may be described as mobilised by shrine art of Southern Nigeria in invoking non-material agency through aesthetic forms, as Margaret Thompson Drewal's 1983 "An Ifa Diviner's Shrine in Ijebuland" depicts of the ritual strategies of a Yoruba Ifa adept and Norma Haas Rosen does in her 1989 "Chalk Iconography in Olokun Worship", approaches resonant across the world as represented by Voodoo veves and Hindu yantras.
Culminating evocation of existence as a creative jumble, a complex network of symbolic intereferentiality, within which the human being seeks meaning
The procession of human and abstract forms, humanity and its creations, that shape the circumference of Oracle III resonate with the human beings and the goods they sell and purchase in the market where I have been arrested by this superb construct. This artistic constellation is evocative of the constellation of possibilities constituted by transactions in the theatre of life, an exchange of resources dramatizing the distinctive creativity each person brings to the business of living, an understanding of human life adapting conceptions from various African philosophies which see "the world as a marketplace", quoting the title of Nkeonye Otakpor's 1996 essay on that conception in classical Igbo philosophy.
Richly engraved humanoid, stylised and abstract figures watch over the unfolding tabeleau at the intersection of the art of life and the creativity of the artist
Like the market may be seen as microcosmic of human experience, Oracle III may connote human activity as an assemblage of possibilities, represented by the multifarious collection of objects that make up the strings in the centre of the form, within the ambit of the eternal suggested by the circle within which these disparate forms are organised. The spirals of transformation, spark plugs of creative drive, edan ogboni signifying the terrestrial foundations enabling life on earth, the dynamic stance of chiwara suggesting human creativity at the nexus of the elemental empowerments of sky and earth, the cowries of life as a transactional process, the leopards of beauty and power, the woven threads and beads signifying existence as a tapestry within which humans weave their own lives, all these subsumed, on the empty surface on which they rest, by the squibbles of inchoate speech groping after understanding, the hesitancy of a child's growing understanding of verbalization or the helplessness of even a master poet like the 13th-14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the face of the ineffable, in his Paradiso reduced to babbling "mama, papa" in accounting for his vision of the ultimate.
From emptiness, both primordial and immediate, rise inchoate gropings after existential and semiotic expressions at the borderline of what is not and what is, what may be expressed and what may not
Oracle III may thus assist us in appreciating what Onobrakpeya describes as the oracular nature of the series to which this work belongs as pointing to "the fact that the objects themselves are ingrained with wisdom and knowledge that our rich culture attaches to them". The "rich culture" in this instance is the understanding of opon ifa iconography as demonstrating a dialectic between emptiness and fullness, between the relatively empty centre on which odu ifa oracular patterns constellate in divination and the populated circumference, between the temporality suggested by the human and abstract forms that people the opon's circumference, and, adapting Ifalola Sanchez's 2007 " Discourse on Meaning and Symbology in the Ifa Divination System", the circle of infinity that the circumference constitutes.
Rich engravings bring the circumference of the cosmic theatre alive, evoking unseen but vital forces that shape being and becoming
Feeling uplifted as I always do after experiencing a particularly satisfying conjunction of ideas, I rose from the bench and looked around me at the market crowd, purposeful in its diversity, each person pursuing their own goals within the network constituted by the matrix of their life, the totality of these overlapping networks shaping the complexity that is the human experience.
The human being reshapes the world, making the universe something it would not have been without homo sapiens, as suggested by these powerfully ingenious engravings near the bottom of Oracle III, evoking the master's painstaking, richly imaginative crafting of every detail, the artist justifying his existence by transforming the visible and invisible worlds into visible art, an interpretation of Onobrakpeya's artistic quest that adapts the Encyclopedia Britannica 1971 essay on the crowning vision of the 19th-20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
Have I, by these insights, come closer to the rumoured secret, perhaps a gnosis believed to be enabled by Onobrakpeya's Oracles? One day, perhaps, glancing at the colour dynamism, the sculptural and object permutations of Oracle III, the doors of my mind could expand to experience, rather than simply think, the broad ranging constellations actualised by the artist, the circle of infinity grinding together the spirals of being and becoming in the fire of the mind.
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