Oracle Quest 5
Paradoxical Aesthetics
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle X
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.
Oracle X, discovered by the writer in an asylum in Buenos Aires, where its previous owner had been confined because the spell of the work had rendered her incapable of any other activity as she gazed continuously at the artistic piece gripped in her hand, inspires reflection on the tension between the human quest for ultimate, summative meaning and the possibly paralyzing paradoxes involved in this search.
The power emerging from oppositional elements, the beauty arising from the conjunction of contraries, the visual ontology at the intersection of the seemingly irrational assemblage of a person considered mad because of their life shaping immersion in extremes of the illogical and the esoteric logic of the classical African magician conjoining various diversities to create an uncanny construction.
Aristotle eventually conceded the ultimate impossibility of conceptually unifying all of being, I recall from an Encyclopaedia Britannica essay on the 4th century Greek master, a challenge perhaps pointed to by Bruce Onobrakpeya's creative jumble occupying the central space in his engagement with the evocative force of the circle, his Oracles series. Since the cacophony that is existence is ultimately ununifiable, this style of thinking might hold, why not replace the quest for unity with the acknowledgement of the dominance of chaos, and celebrate disorder instead?
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle X, foregrounding seemingly chaotic order within exquisite structural and colour symmetries
My tracks and that of my ancestors before me stretching across the globe and back to the first people on the primordial mother continent, who initiated imaginative thought through their creation of exquisite shapes in densely dark caves and the crafting of tales that underlie all other stories we tell across all geographies millennia later, who first quantified time, making notations of lunar phases on a length of bone, tracks marked on the surface of the circle where we are trapped, as evoked by Oracle X, my latest find among Onobrakpeya's Oracle sequence, tracks crisscrossing the space of existence in the doomed quest to arrive at the root of it all, torn between David Benatar's conclusion in his 2008 Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence and the questionable comfort of the contradiction riven variety of ultimate answers, of a summative justification beyond our grasp, even as the farmer of time picks us off one by one, cleansing the earth periodically of all who walk it at any particular point in time.
All are active in perennially racing from one dreadfully serious thing to another even as the ultimate extinction looms in spite of its being pushed aside to allow for the frenetic busyness of the moment. All these frenziedly scurrying ants will be wiped out, their whereabouts unknown beyond the desiccation of earth.
Journeys across time and space figured by twisted streaks within the circle of being and becoming
Perhaps the resolution of our quest is to be found, not in thought or even intuition or revelation as some claim, but in something akin to the dimension bending scale represented by the pervasive presence of light, as suggested by the uniform luminosity of Oracle V in the orange washing across its surface as shown by its picture in the 2015 Onobrakpeya: Masks of the Flaming Arrows.
As the chaos of contraries represented by its central conglomeration is foregrounded, intruding itself into all efforts to arrive at ultimacy of meaning as suggested by the embracing completeness of its concentric circles, the race of light across the universe could be our chariot to the ultimate destination, taking our minds to where we could not go otherwise.
But even light is finite, however colossal its speed is to the minisculity of our passage through the medium and the littleness of our occupation of space.
Do we not gaze into time as we look into the night sky, the light from the stars only just reaching us having travelled for millennia?
In spite of the reflections of Einstein and others about transformations taking place when light speed is achieved, light might not be the answer.
Would faster than light motion, on the contrary, tear the universe or reveal dimensions beyond the trap we are locked into as creatures bound by the parameters defined by a scale of measurement in which light is a point of reference?
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle V
My quest to either assemble or engage with where I cannot obtain, the Oracle series of artistic creations by the enigmatic 20th century master, has again yielded unanticipated fruit in the acquisition of one these works, Oracle X, in most fortuitous circumstances, but this acceleration of fortune, rather than uplifting my spirits, has led me into despair, paradoxically, perhaps from the growing fulfilment of what I used to understood as my goal.
Am I not going round in circles, searching for some cryptic meaning in what are obviously beautiful constructions, but can they be more?
The interpretations I triumphantly develop about these works- are they more than circular actions in which the ruminations of the chewing animal are simply transformed into something no different in essence from what has been ingested?
Am I making any progress in breaking free of the circle constituted by the cage of human understanding, the walls that encapsulate logic of all kinds, no matter how ambitious?
In my current combination of despair and compulsion, the desperate hunger inspired by these creations persisting in inflaming me, am I slipping into a fate similar to that of the person who once owned Oracle X, having been consigned to an asylum in Buenos Aires from which I acquired it after her demise, the previous owner having been placed there after she proved unable to do without the work, gripping it day after day as she stared at it, doing nothing else and needing to be fed intravenously in order to keep her alive? Had she, like the figures in the Kabbalistic story, entered into the garden but could no longer come out?
Particularly mesmerising this construct really is, its rhythm of dominant white and blue harmonies in counterpoise with the dazzling variety of the colour contrasts foregrounded in its centre enchanting, the radiant white of the circling constellations embracing the enigmatic centre, the deep blue pool of circular space scoured by irregular troughs of jagged black as frenetic scribblings in spidery white lines claim the luminous turbulence, its superb clash of colours suffused by the richness of deep blue highlighted by the ordered cacophony of multifarious sculptural forms and other objects, each of them striking on its own terms, each distinct from the others and repeated in only about four or more cases out of that multitudinous assemblage.
The three major compositional units of Oracle X
One could spend a lifetime feasting on this visual music, fixated by the intersection of ordered and chaotic beauty, the steady luminosity of its radiant white and blue border in contrast with its turbulent blue, black and white centre thrown into relief by the grandeur of the assorted cluster whose logic defies the sequential procession that rims the circumference. Linear vs non-linear order, aesthetics of difference vs aesthetics of regularity.
Perhaps the earlier owner had been gripped, in this convergence of contrastives, by the perplexity that threatens me even now, trapped in the lake of brilliant blue the surface of which is roiled by irregular gashes of deep black and disturbed scribblings in white.
Could these paradoxical luminosities have actualised for her in a manner more forceful than any concepts the contradictions of any effort to pin down central questions that drive our existence, all answers to the deepest queries at last understood as at best provisional , the futility in trying to make sense of ultimate meaning by the human mind irresistibly compelled to fathom the rationale of being but the mind being so constructed that all efforts in this direction might be little better than lines of water skidding down a window, the interior beyond the window unpenetrated, yet the sheer grandeur of the cosmic drama, the glory of its absolute symmetry remaining inescapably compelling, a wonder focused in the mystery of the force of life animating body and mind, within the sublime construction of the human form and the grandeur of the human being's shaping of existence from the crudity of the earliest days to the ascending magnificences of the unfolding centuries.
Perhaps these paradoxes, suggested by the glorious contrasts of Oracle X, arrested her, locking her within the tension between the marvellous and the perplexing, the potent and the destabilising, paralyzed at the intersection of the immersion in the glory of being and the impossible quest to grasp the totality.
Will that be my fate if I persist in this quest?
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