Oracle Quest 2 : lllumination in Darkness : Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle II
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.
Acquiring Oracle II at great cost from a secretive art dealer in Berlin, the writer's captivation by its balance of mysterious power and explicit beauty leads him into the intricacies of the convergence of the arcane and the evident, the ineffable and the near to hand.
It had been a year since I discovered the construct Oracle I by the 20th/21st century artist Bruce Onobrakpeya in a cave at Anda, India, where it had been buried by the ancient sect who used it as an agent of cognitive expansion. The individual members of the master artist's Oracle series had been scattered in the centuries after his time in the fear that the knowledge and power they embodied were not safe in the hands of any one person. I had devoted myself, however, to the quest for these momentous artefacts in the conviction that all understanding that may be gained by humanity enriches our grasp of the possibilities of being. Expending huge sums of money and great patience, I had at last obtained the second find in my effort to acquire the entire series, preparatory to distilling the insights they encode.
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Oracle II
My latest acquisition, Oracle II, had come from a dealer in Berlin, who, realising its immense value and esoteric power as one of the lost keys of a timeless secret, had kept it hidden, accessible to only the most discerning collectors and most able buyers. Having reached this most solemnly delightful pinnacle of achievement in gaining ownership of this work, here I was, in my study at the Ogba Forest in Benin, a location the inspiring character of which is vital to the world of knowledge represented by the works of art I had dedicated my life to seeking, acquiring and studying. The strange and awesome atmosphere of the forest, its uncanny but profoundly uplifting sense of presence, attributed by those who live nearby to the goddess of the river that breaks ground in the vegetative space for the first time after a long underground journey, is an aspect of the magical and mysterious world that inspired the artist, an atmosphere uniquely conducive for the kind of sustained contemplation required to penetrate the marvellous artistic arcana by the ancient master.
Figure in darkness within circle
Oracle II constitutes a dialogue between the aesthetics of darkness and the symmetry of the circle, between eloquent concealment and evident order, between what is beyond complete cognitive circumscription and the symmetry of the evidently accessible, I concluded, marvelling at the compellingly uncanny form in darkness that broods over the structure, its visual force amplified by its positioning in a smaller ring within the larger circle that encapsulates the entire construct, the contours of the smaller disk, its spatial resonance, further highlighted by its location between a rectangle on either side, the emptiness of the framing rectangles projecting their role as purely delineators of spatial rhythms.
Figure in darkness within circle framed by flanking rectangles
My eyes are drawn by the organization of the work to the enigmatic form embraced by the circle at the top of the circumference of the larger circle. It inhabits a cocoon of darkness, a vertically flowing corridor composed by gracefully undulating ropes within which little light penetrates as glimmers of forms nestled within this space intensify the mystery of their character and roles. What is this uppermost form, occupying the space reserved for evocations of Esu, the Yoruba orisa or deity of paradox and transformation in opon ifa, the divination platform of the Yoruba origin Ifa system that is foundational for the Oracle series, yet does not resemble a conventional Esu image? Barely visible in the darkness of the space in which it is recessed, points of luminosity positioned vertically side by side within its body suggest eyes peering out of the crepuscular zone.
Central corridor with complementing vertically placed figures accentuated by various objects
Could it be an edan ogboni, a central symbolic and magical artefact of the Yoruba Ogboni esoteric order, as evoked by its similarity to edan sculpture in the suggestion of a large head dominating a highly compressed trunk, its mysterious presence within the alcove of darkness distilling the esoteric culture of Ogboni, the group's most important ritual sculptures being hidden from sight as befits their numinous authority , as described by Morton Williams in his 1960 "The Yoruba Ogboni Cult in Oyo", incubating their otherworldy essence through the generative potencies of darkness, as Susanne Wenger depicts of her adaptation of Yoruba shrine aesthetics in her 1983 book with Gert Chesi A Life With the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland?
Bottom figure of vertically placed figures in the central corridor
Resonating with the figure in shadow is another sculpture standing directly beneath it within the frame of the rope like substance that encapsulates the upper figurine. Through its sense of primal form, the lower statue intensifies the same quality in the upper figure, both projecting a sense of elemental power. Flanking the lower form are two edan, as two other edan are placed on either side of a row of three spark plugs in the lower middle of the assemblage, while below the spark plugs two elaborate and powerfully wrought figures are stationed, to either side of which are located another pair of figures, all these forms drawn from the aesthetic universe that defines classical African art and aesthetically proximate art forms such as those of classical Oceania.
Edan ogboni heads flanking the bottom figure in the central vertical sculptural alignment
Spark plugs flanked by edan ogboni heads
Sculptures underneath the spark plugs
One of the pair in the final, bottom set in the vertically organised sequence of sculptures
Multi-coloured, tightly woven threads, cowrie shells, a string like a necklace, complete the assemblage, multifarious possibilities chosen in terms of a seemingly asymmetric logic and enriching each other by contrast, complementary divergences amplified by their clustering within a carefully circumscribed space. Balancing luminosities of difference converge with spatial concentration in evoking a sense of grandeur, an opulence of actualisation suggestive of the opele, the divining strings of Ifa cast on the opon ifa to reveal oracular perception through their configurations, patterns understood as dramatizing the network of intersections in terms of which the dynamism of existence is constructed.
The opulence of the possible dramatised by the central assemblage
" A great poetic image is more than the sum of its parts" the 20th century critic Dorothy Sayers declares in her introduction to the 14th century Inferno of Dante Alighieri. I could work at interpreting what I know of the symbolic significance of some of the forms that compose this powerfully lyrical work, as they are understood in the cultures that gave birth to them, and try to do something similar even for those forms unfamiliar to me, but having done that for the constituents of Oracle I, the first in the series of creations to which this piece belongs, I will not do so again, since some of these selections are included in the other work and particularly since the power of this construct transcends the particulars of its agglomeration of symbols.
Woven threads
What dominates for me with this creation is an aesthetic of harmony embracing an aesthetic of rupture. The magnificent symmetry of the circle, accentuated by varied, elegantly crafted miniatures that shape its circumference, each telling an intriguing, enigmatic story, is broken by the irruption of the figure in darkness dominating the top centre of the structure. This disruptive figure is, however, integrated into the absolute harmony represented by the rhythm of the circle, complexifying and further empowering the underlying aesthetic of rhythmic, soundless music, a seemingly discordant note absorbed into the dominant synchronization, deepening its resonance.
Staff of woven beads
This aesthetic of dialogue between harmony and rupture may be further appreciated in relation to various contexts in which similar effects occur. On account of the scope of these similarities, a few examples would be useful in suggesting the core of these possibilities. The darkness ensconced figure overlooking Oracle II reminds me of the mysteriously meaningful dark spaces of sacred tropical forests, alive with a compelling density of presence that cannot be accounted for wholly in terms of the outcome of biological qualities, a secret identity evoking a yearning to penetrate its core but the means of penetration through understanding of these forces being most elusive, or inaccessible, describing my own experience.
Woven threads
The sublime perfection of the circle that holds together the entire ensemble of Oracle II recalls for me the conception attributed to the 5th century Christian thinker St. Augustine, that "God is like a circle, with its centre everywhere and its circumference nowhere", an understanding of ultimate reality that tries to make sense of the absolute value represented by transcendence and immanence in terms the human mind can grasp.
Cowries
Conjoining these two impressions, I arrive at the idea of a darkness of unknowing at the heart of being, to adapt the title of the famous 14th century Christian mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing. This points to those aspects of existence that cannot be adequately analysed or grasped by the ratiocinative mind, from love to the sacred, evoking, referencing the 20th century Christian theologian Karl Rahner, as quoted in Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowon's edited 1986 Karl Rahner in Dialogue, "not the unfortunate remainder of what is not yet known", but a core of possibility that embraces and transcends knowing as it is conventionally understood.
Necklace framing figurine at bottom of uppermost sculptural alignment
This paradoxical state is also embodied by the image of the Fulani cosmological personage Kaidara as described by the 20th century thinker Ahmadou Hampate Ba in Kaidara, a decrepit old man, dressed in lice infested rags, yet a beam of light from the burning core that is Gueno, the creator of the universe, an oxymoronic figure who embodies the intersection between the unknown scope of human knowledge and the range beyond which that knowledge cannot reach, similar to the comic figure of Olorun in some ese ifa, Ifa literature, yet, whose essence, in the words of Susanne Wenger in her review of Harold Coulander's Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes, is hidden behind veils of taboo, a sentient darkness from which emanates Olorun's character as "axiom paradoxon", "beginning and consequence".
Image Above:
A Procession of Storied Images.
Top right circumference : Last image in this detail :
The beak of a bird touches the centre of a ring of ripples on a pool over which it poised as a tree is starkly outlined in the background. Bird, water, concentric circles, here formed by ripples, and tree, are all universal symbols, with a broad range of symbolic values, some overlapping. "Having flown so long, I reached the ancient pool my beak touched its surface, sending ripples across the cosmos."
The previous line in quotes is a construction of a story from the image, interpreting it as a visual parable of a mystical quest in which the bird is the human being and the pool the source of existence, an idea drawing from the symbolism of water in Japanese gardening as described in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1971 essay on Japanese gardening, the mystical resonance of Japanese poet Matsuo Basho's famous poem on a frog jumping into water and the Islamic mystical poet Farid ud Din Attar's Parable of the Birds in which a group of birds go in search of an extraordinary bird, all these resonances mediated through the memory of English poet Gerald Manley Hopkins' celebration of the glory of the sight of birds in flight in his "As Kingfishers Catch Fire, dragonflies draw Flame" and " The Windhover", Basho and Hopkins being poéts who celebrated the unexpected emergence of the glory of existence in everyday happenings and scenes.
Second image :
Two birds perched on a tree. One eats of the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, the other, eating of neither, simply observes". Two aspects of the human self as depicted in the foundational classic of Indian philosophy and Hinduism, the Upanishads
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