Akporode: A Journey with the Not Tall Man Seeking Wisdom : Cosmological and Historical Unfolding in the Art of Bruce Onobrakpeya: A Pictorial and Verbal Narrative: Part 1: Entering the Stream
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
A Journey with the Not Tall Man Seeking Wisdom
Cosmological and Historical Unfolding
in the
Art of Bruce Onobrakpeya
A Pictorial and Verbal Narrative
Part 1
Entering the Stream
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
A journey of knowledge with Bruce Onobrakpeya and his art
Our journey begins with meeting the Not Tall Man Seeking Wisdom, he like Orunmila , the Little Man from Igeti Hill Pursuing Understanding, and Kaidara, the bent and dirty old man who is yet a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe, the Not Tall Man holding the Staff of Exploration, with whom we shall journey from the Constitution of Totality to the Expansion of Being, Onward into the Unfolding into Infinity.
We meet him at Akporode, the Constitution of Totality
contemplating pillars of aspiration in the forest of being and becoming
reflecting on inscriptions probing the intersection of mind and cosmos, mysterious script echoing the impenetrable wonder inspiring it
the cosmos a temple of living pillars
the human person wanders through
as strange familiar eyes gaze upon him from the leaves above
The old man consults instruments of insight to guide our journey
"The forest is full of sights and sounds" he says " but people see little and hear little.
They see the surfaces of things and hear only the most immediate of sounds", he states.
"Do they ask questions about the ultimate destination of the ocean of people moving to and fro on a daily basis, working, eating, loving and exiting the earth at unanticipated times, such that in future, not a single person on Earth now will remain, the planet being peopled by others who came after them, and most answers to the question of 'where are we coming from?' and 'where are we going to ?' have no universal acceptance because are they not beyond even the most exalted human intelligence to discover through its own workings?" he continued.
"Understand you are on a journey you do not fully comprehend. Treat every experience as a particular dealing of the universe with your soul" he advised.
Urhobo, Izon, Edo, Akan, Yoruba, Fulani, Christian and other constellations exploding outwards, unifying and expanding again in a continuous cycle of expansion and unification in a mirror of cosmic convergence and dynamism.
I walk along the glittering corridors as the floor cries out " because I am silent, because I am pure!".
Video of visual and verbal walk through the Gallery of Revelation.
Interpretation
Akporode and the Gallery of Revelation
A response to the Akporode installation of Bruce Onobrakpeya as a cosmographic construct, a constellation of artistic forms evoking the constitution of the cosmos, opening out into other works by the same artist in a sequence suggesting cosmological and historical unfolding, the actualization of cosmic possibility and the unfurling of human experience, a progression a person may navigate through attentively walking through the gallery where Akporode is located while studying the art on its walls and on the floor.
The Akporode installation is centred in a grouping of pillars, described in the description of the work on the wall beside it, as inspired by the symbolism of pillars in Urhobo shrines as suggesting reaching out in aspiration to Oghene, the creator of the universe.
This symbolism motivates my interpretation of the complex dynamism of the installation, its integration of diverse forms, from densely and exquisitely inscribed pillars to Onobrakpeya's mysteriously elegant self created Ibiebe script to structures of various degrees of abstraction, as a cosmographic form evoking the complex unity of the cosmos, suggesting the dynamism of human efforts to interpret that totality.
These ideas may be derived from the experience of trees as the primal human encounter with vertical structures seemingly growing towards the sky, thereby suggesting reaching towards an ultimacy evoked by the beauty and expanse of the celestial envelope of the Earth.
Trees also suggest forests, and the forest in some African thought, as in Yoruba philosophy and that of the Beng of Cote d'Ivoire, evokes the intricate vitality of the universe.
These ideas underlie this visual and verbal composition as it quotes from a forest philosophy derived from Akan thought in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers, in referencing the sights and sounds of the forest, leading into the idea of life as a journey through the forest of existence, deeply resonant with African thought, and linked here with French poet Charles Baudelaire's image of pillars inhabited by eyes gazing down on the human being moving through a "forest of symbols" and the Western esoteric Golden Dawn injunction " to treat every experience as a particular dealing of God with your soul", with "soul" adapted here as "universe", creating consistency with this composition as suggesting spiritual and philosophical values while demonstrating latitude of interpretation of those values, even as the piece dramatizes a philosophical orientation.
The gallery demonstrates the artist's unfolding of what may be understood as a cosmological, aesthetic and historical vision conjoining Urhobo, Edo, Yoruba and other African spiritual aesthetics with Christian aesthetics, all inimitably visualized by the artist in terms of his own construction of an ecumenical universe in which the emergence of African approaches to spiritual reality develops in relation to rethinking the Christian message in terms both African and even transcendent of humanity.
The motion through life, subsumed through a walk down the gallery where Akporode is located, is further vivified by the gallery floor being described as crying out, using lines drawn from the Golden Dawn adaptation of an ancient Egyptian text.
The Old Man
Onobrakpeya 's image functions splendidly as a means of focusing the idea of guidance and companionship in a quest for the meaning of existence.
The fortuitously captured image of the artist holding an exquisitely wrought staff in his house in Mushin, Lagos, and the fortuitous pictures of him in front of the Akporode shrine installation in its location in one of Onobrakpeya's galleries at the Onobrak Arts Centre in his home community of Agbarha-Otor, blend almost seamlessly to suggest the idea of motion through possibilities of meaning, possibilities discovered through cognitive explorations that are both physical and mental, as a person moves across spaces alive with the boundless power of densely concentrated aesthetic force, such as the Akporode installation and the gallery into which it may be seen as leading, a cosmographic form opening out into an expansion of cosmographic possibilities, images of various realms of being depicted in Onobrakpeya's art, from the human world to that of underwater denizens, evocations existing with classical African and Christian images, as the histories of explorations of the unity of cosmos between matter and spirit in classical African and Christian terms is uniquely suggested in what I name Onobrakpeya's Gallery of Revelation.
Onobrakpeya's image is used to concretize the universal motif of the wide old man, explicitly correlated here with ironically described figures from various African cultures.
One of these is "The Little Man from Igeti Hill" in Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology who is yet understood as having a "head full of wisdom", transposed here into "The Little Man Pursuing Understanding", emphasizing the central motif of quest constructed in this composition.
The ironic conjunction between littleness of form and vastness of understanding enabled by the head crowing that form are the ideas adapted here from Orunmila's characterization, though the old man image does not occur in his depiction, which is meant to lend associative value to the picture of the man in the picture above, who is elderly and slightly built yet physically dynamic for his age.
The old man depiction in relation to qualities not conventionally associated with the decline of human powers represented by age emerges most forcefully in the depiction of Kaidara, a figure from Fulani cosmology also referenced above.
Onobrakpeya is neither bent nor dirty like Kaidara, whose extent of physical inadequacy and problematic hygiene is meant to contrast with his essential nature as " a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno", the creator of the universe, a nature concealed by his unattractive exterior which is meant to test seekers for wisdom as to their ability to see beyond the immediate into the essential, as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba.
Onobrakpeya, however, shares with Kaidara the characteristics of age and the embodiment of contraries, between elderly age, along with slightness of form and inward power, represented in Kaidara by wisdom and the capacity to grant wealth and in Onobrakpeya in a dedication to wisdom pursued through art and thought and its use in economic empowerment and the employment of that in visions larger than one's own enrichment, as represented, for example, by his annual Harmattan workshops running for decades as a means of developing artists.
Why is a human being depicted in relation to deity figures, Orunmila, the Orisha deity of wisdom and Kaidara, God of gold and knowledge in Fulani cosmology?
Deity figures may be understood in terms of intensifications of human possibilities, as Akinwumi Ogundiran's description of the conjunction between history and cosmology in The Yoruba: A New History, may be described.
In making conjunctions between a human being and deity figures one could be seeking to highlight particular qualities of the human being and use them as a template for exploring ideas related to the person but going beyond that person, as Onobrakpeya's figure is employed in this composition as reflecting the archetypal image of the old man as a guide in matters of wisdom, this metaphorical conflation assisted by pictures taken by luck chance and brought together one or two years after they were taken as their narrative potential began to be better appreciated.
Great thanks to Bruce Onobrakpeya for permitting that photography and for his support of the biographical project that inspired this piece.
All pictures are by me. Taken between 2022 and 2024.
Sources
Bruce Onobrakpeya image and video archive of works by myself.
The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order.Ed.Israel Regardie. 2002.
Ahmadou Hampate Ba, Kaidara, A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali. Trans. Daniel Whitman.
"Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: Fagunwa, Tutuola and Soyinka", The African Experience in Literature and Ideology by Abiola Irele, 1981.2003.
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers, 1979.
African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change. Ed. Celia Nyamweru and Michael Sheridan, 2008.
Akinwumi Ogundiran, The Yoruba: A New History, 2020.
Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondences" in Flowers of Evil
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
A Journey with the Not Tall Man Seeking Wisdom
Cosmological and Historical Unfolding
in the
Art of Bruce Onobrakpeya
A Pictorial and Verbal Narrative
Part 1
Entering the Stream
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
''Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge
Abstract
A journey of knowledge with Bruce Onobrakpeya and his art
Our journey begins with meeting the Not Tall Man Seeking Wisdom, he like Orunmila , the Little Man from Igeti Hill Pursuing Understanding, and Kaidara, the bent and dirty old man who is yet a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno, creator of the universe, the Not Tall Man holding the Staff of Exploration, with whom we shall journey from the Constitution of Totality to the Expansion of Being, Onward into the Unfolding into Infinity.
We meet him at Akporode, the Constitution of Totality
contemplating pillars of aspiration in the forest of being and becoming
reflecting on inscriptions probing the intersection of mind and cosmos, mysterious script echoing the impenetrable wonder inspiring it
the cosmos a temple of living pillars
the human person wanders through
as strange familiar eyes gaze upon him from the leaves above
The old man consults instruments of insight to guide our journey
"The forest is full of sights and sounds" he says " but people see little and hear little.
They see the surfaces of things and hear only the most immediate of sounds", he states.
"Do they ask questions about the ultimate destination of the ocean of people moving to and fro on a daily basis, working, eating, loving and exiting the earth at unanticipated times, such that in future, not a single person on Earth now will remain, the planet being peopled by others who came after them, and most answers to the question of 'where are we coming from?' and 'where are we going to ?' have no universal acceptance because are they not beyond even the most exalted human intelligence to discover through its own workings?" he continued
"Understand you are on a journey you do not fully comprehend. Treat every experience as a particular dealing of the universe with your soul" he advised.
Urhobo, Izon, Edo, Akan, Yoruba, Fulani, Christian and other constellations exploding outwards, unifying and expanding again in a continuous cycle of expansion and unification in a mirror of cosmic convergence and dynamism.
I walk along the glittering corridors as the floor cries out " because I am silent, because I am pure!".
Video of visual and verbal walk through the Gallery of Revelation.
Interpretation
Akporode and the Gallery of Revelation
A response to the Akporode installation of Bruce Onobrakpeya as a cosmographic construct, a constellation of artistic forms evoking the constitution of the cosmos, opening out into other works by the same artist in a sequence suggesting cosmological and historical unfolding, the actualization of cosmic possibility and the unfurling of human experience, a progression a person may navigate through attentively walking through the gallery where Akporode is located while studying the art on its walls and on the floor.
The Akporode installation is centred in a grouping of pillars, described in the description of the work on the wall beside it, as inspired by the symbolism of pillars in Urhobo shrines as suggesting reaching out in aspiration to Oghene, the creator of the universe.
This symbolism motivates my interpretation of the complex dynamism of the installation, its integration of diverse forms, from densely and exquisitely inscribed pillars to Onobrakpeya's mysteriously elegant self created Ibiebe script to structures of various degrees of abstraction, as a cosmographic form evoking the complex unity of the cosmos, suggesting the dynamism of human efforts to interpret that totality.
These ideas may be derived from the experience of trees as the primal human encounter with vertical structures seemingly growing towards the sky, thereby suggesting reaching towards an ultimacy evoked by the beauty and expanse of the celestial envelope of the Earth.
Trees also suggest forests, and the forest in some African thought, as in Yoruba philosophy and that of the Beng of Cote d'Ivoire, evokes the intricate vitality of the universe.
These ideas underlie this visual and verbal composition as it quotes from a forest philosophy derived from Akan thought in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers, in referencing the sights and sounds of the forest, leading into the idea of life as a journey through the forest of existence, deeply resonant with African thought, and linked here with French poet Charles Baudelaire's image of pillars inhabited by eyes gazing down on the human being moving through a "forest of symbols" and the Western esoteric Golden Dawn injunction " to treat every experience as a particular dealing of God with your soul", with "soul" adapted here as "universe", creating consistency with this composition as suggesting spiritual and philosophical values while demonstrating latitude of interpretation of those values, even as the piece dramatizes a philosophical orientation.
The gallery demonstrates the artist's unfolding of what may be understood as a cosmological, aesthetic and historical vision conjoining Urhobo, Edo, Yoruba and other African spiritual aesthetics with Christian aesthetics, all inimitably visualized by the artist in terms of his own construction of an ecumenical universe in which the emergence of African approaches to spiritual reality develops in relation to rethinking the Christian message in terms both African and even transcendent of humanity.
The motion through life, subsumed through a walk down the gallery where Akporode is located, is further vivified by the gallery floor being described as crying out, using lines drawn from the Golden Dawn adaptation of an ancient Egyptian text.
The Old Man
Onobrakpeya 's image functions splendidly as a means of focusing the idea of guidance and companionship in a quest for the meaning of existence.
The fortuitously captured image of the artist holding an exquisitely wrought staff in his house in Mushin, Lagos, and the fortuitous pictures of him in front of the Akporode shrine installation in its location in one of Onobrakpeya's galleries at the Onobrak Arts Centre in his home community of Agbarha-Otor, blend almost seamlessly to suggest the idea of motion through possibilities of meaning, possibilities discovered through cognitive explorations that are both physical and mental, as a person moves across spaces alive with the boundless power of densely concentrated aesthetic force, such as the Akporode installation and the gallery into which it may be seen as leading, a cosmographic form opening out into an expansion of cosmographic possibilities, images of various realms of being depicted in Onobrakpeya's art, from the human world to that of underwater denizens, evocations existing with classical African and Christian images, as the histories of explorations of the unity of cosmos between matter and spirit in classical African and Christian terms is uniquely suggested in what I name Onobrakpeya's Gallery of Revelation.
Onobrakpeya's image is used to concretize the universal motif of the wise old man, explicitly correlated here with ironically described figures from various African cultures.
One of these is "The Little Man from Igeti Hill" in Yoruba origin Orisha cosmology who is yet understood as having a "head full of wisdom", transposed here into "The Little Man Pursuing Understanding", emphasizing the central motif of quest constructed in this composition.
The ironic conjunction between littleness of form and vastness of understanding enabled by the head crowing that form are the ideas adapted here from Orunmila's characterization, though the old man image does not occur in his depiction, which is meant to lend associative value to the picture of the man in the picture above, who is elderly and slightly built yet physically dynamic for his age.
The old man depiction in relation to qualities not conventionally associated with the decline of human powers represented by age emerges most forcefully in the depiction of Kaidara, a figure from Fulani cosmology also referenced above.
Onobrakpeya is neither bent nor dirty like Kaidara, whose extent of physical inadequacy and problematic hygiene is meant to contrast with his essential nature as " a beam of light from the hearth of Gueno", the creator of the universe, a nature concealed by his unattractive exterior which is meant to test seekers for wisdom as to their ability to see beyond the immediate into the essential, as described by Ahmadou Hampate Ba.
Onobrakpeya, however, shares with Kaidara the characteristics of age and the embodiment of contraries, between elderly age, along with slightness of form and inward power, represented in Kaidara by wisdom and the capacity to grant wealth and in Onobrakpeya in a dedication to wisdom pursued through art and thought and its use in economic empowerment and the employment of that in visions larger than one's own enrichment, as represented, for example, by his annual Harmattan workshops running for decades as a means of developing artists.
Why is a human being depicted in relation to deity figures, Orunmila, the Orisha deity of wisdom and Kaidara, God of gold and knowledge in Fulani cosmology?
Deity figures may be understood in terms of intensifications of human possibilities, as Akinwumi Ogundiran's description of the conjunction between history and cosmology in The Yoruba: A New History, may be described.
In making conjunctions between a human being and deity figures one could be seeking to highlight particular qualities of the human being and use them as a template for exploring ideas related to the person but going beyond that person, as Onobrakpeya's figure is employed in this composition as reflecting the archetypal image of the old man as a guide in matters of wisdom, this metaphorical conflation assisted by pictures taken by luck chance and brought together one or two years after they were taken as their narrative potential began to be better appreciated.
Great thanks to Bruce Onobrakpeya for permitting that photography and for his support of the biographical project that inspired this piece.
All pictures are by me. Taken between 2022 and 2024.
Sources
Bruce Onobrakpeya image and video archive of works by myself.
The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order.Ed.Israel Regardie. 2002.
Ahmadou Hampate Ba, Kaidara, A Fulani Cosmological Epic from Mali. Trans. Daniel Whitman.
"Tradition and the Yoruba Writer: Fagunwa, Tutuola and Soyinka", The African Experience in Literature and Ideology by Abiola Irele, 1981.2003.
Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers, 1979.
African Sacred Groves: Ecological Dynamics and Social Change. Ed. Celia Nyamweru and Michael Sheridan, 2008.
Akinwumi Ogundiran, The Yoruba: A New History, 2020.
Charles Baudelaire's "Correspondences" in Flowers of Evil