sarah adams - people have three eyes (ephemeral art and the archive in southeastern nigeria)

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People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive in Southeastern NigeriaAuthor(s): Sarah AdamsReviewed work(s):Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 48, Permanent/Impermanent (Autumn, 2005),pp. 11-32Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum ofArchaeology and EthnologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167674 .Accessed: 08/06/2012 06:43

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People have three eyes

Ephemeral art and the archive in Southeastern Nigeria

SARAH ADAMS

Mmad? nw?l? ?ny? n?ato. Of? bu ?ny? ? jl af? Mm?o, Ib?? folu ?fo bu ?ny? e j) af? mmad?.

People have three eyes. One is the eye with which the spirit is seen, the two remaining ones are used to see people and

the material world.1

Igbo Proverb

Eucheria Amoke glances over her shoulder and informs me that I should cease peppering her with

questions until she has finished painting her mural. It's a

logical request. The day unfolds, shadows reposition themselves, I dutifully remain silent, take too many pictures, and watch as her mural slowly takes shape. I am invited to return the next day with my questions, and do so, that day and several other days, notebook and

tape recorder always in hand. Four years later when I visit Amoke, the mural, and the entire building to which it was attached, are gone. In their place is a field of

cassava. I stand at the edge of the field in stunned silence, but Amoke, her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, all of whom witnessed her performance, are entirely unconcerned with the absence of mural and building.

My shock slowly dissolves into comforting thoughts of

my photos and notes. This story, of art apparently replaced by cassava, my

faith in a physical archive as a talisman against that

replacement, and the artist and her family's trust in an

intangible archive of history, neatly delineates the essence of an underlying theoretical tension that exists

in studies of ephemeral ?/? art in southeastern Nigeria and many studies of ephemeral African art. That essence resides in an untheorized confidence in physical archives, coupled with an equally untheorized mistrust for intangible archives of oral history and divinatory knowledge. The conflict between these two notions of how art memory is constructed is vividly demonstrated

by the existence of extensive physical archives of

historically ephemeral ?/? art in alternative media in various locations around the world. These archives,

which date from the early twentieth century to the

present, include photographs, video, works on paper, and written descriptions. Such physical archives, left

unproblematized, perpetually threaten to frustrate sustained, meaningful engagement with the ephemeral nature of the work and its supporting, intangible archive of history.

The expanded perceptual power that is accessed

through the resolution of the tension between these two modes of art memory is clearly described in an Igbo proverb that reminds us, "People have three eyes. One is the eye with which the spirit is seen, the remaining ones are used to see people, and the material world." By learning to "see with three eyes" and also to place trust in all three eyes, we can construct a history of

ephemeral arts like ?/? that implicity reveals the limitations of dependence on either form of art memory in isolation. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, a scholar of Jewish

history, has pointed out that by definition no archive is ever complete, "that is, no archive can yield sufficient material to understand the subjects or answer the questions that its own documents present. ... in order to be understood any archival document must be contextual ?zed by information outside and beyond the archive. . . ."2 In studies of ephemeral African art, however, the insistent presence of physical archives of

objects at once obscures the loss, silence, and absence they contain, and threatens to obscure the role of the exterior, intangible archive of knowledge as a corrective to this loss. The overwhelming focus on object-driven

I would like to thank the University of Iowa, the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute for supporting my research during the 2004-2005 academic year. I benefited immensely from discussion

with other scholars in the preparation of this article. I would like to thank members of the 2004-2005 Getty Scholar Seminar, especially

Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Joan Landes, Tom Levin, Peggy Phelan, Marcia Pointon, and Alex Potts. Others who asked important questions and offered critical insight include Zoe Strother, David Doris, Hollis

Clayson, and David Van Zanten. All errors are, of course, my own. I would like to thank Sylvester Ogbechie and Chukwuma Azuonye for their assistance with Igbo orthography.

1. John Umeh, A?er God Is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Healing, Divination & Sacred Science in Nigeria, vol. 2 (London: Karnak House, 1999), p. 72. Tone marks were not in the original text. 2. http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number3-4/yerushalmi.htm

12 RES 48 AUTUMN 2005

modes of art memory in the scholarship on ephemeral African art also throws into relief a troubling, asymmetrical theoretical relationship between the wider field of art history and the comparatively young field of

African art studies.

Side-stepping the ephemeral

I have been seeking to define the precise nature of this increasingly vital and troubled methodological relationship by focusing on a contradiction that has

Figure 1. Image of a young woman painted with ?/?. From Sylvia Leith-Ross, African Conversation Piece, London/New York: Hutchinson, 1944: facing p. 84.

existed for years in the background of my own research

methodologies. Since 1992, I have been conducting research on ephemeral women's body and mural

painting, called ?/?. ?li art was once very visible in southeastern Nigeria, and though it is still widely remembered, today it is generally practiced only by elderly artists who do not have apprentices working under them. The medium of black-line body painting is a greenish juice extracted from a variety of plants, depending on the season, and applied to the skin in

deft, elegant gestures (fig. 1). The juice turns black overnight in reaction to body heat, and then fades over the course of a week. Murals are painted on clay walls

during the dry season with a variety of earth pigments that are ground into powder, mixed into water, and

applied to the wall using hands, twigs, feathers, and, in the Anambra region, a metal implement with a dull, curved blade called a mm?nwuli, or ?/? knife (figs. 2, 3, 4, 5). In recent years some mural artists have also begun to use sponges and paintbrushes purchased in the

market, while others have expanded their palette to include bluing, a blue powder that can be mixed with a little water to make paint, or added to white laundry to

make it look whiter. Because artists do not add binder to the pigments, murals on clay walls generally fade after the first rainy season, and are then meant to be painted over with a new mural during the following dry season.3

Though a carefully protected wall can remain faded but visible for many years, such a state is unusual, and most

people associate these faded murals with a kind of

spiritual staleness.4 The ephemeral quality of ?/? art, then,

3. Experienced mural painters take the coming rains into account when they compose their work?the most detailed passages go at the

top of the wall, less detailed work at the base of the wall, the area that will be splashed by falling rain and thus fade the quickest.

4. In his 1984 B.A. thesis from the University of Nigeria Nsukka

campus, Okuosa Nwokoye suggested a link between the form of akika

patterns, the first stage of wall painting in the Anambra region, and the

patterns women in most rural areas make when they sweep the sandy ground of their compound at the beginning of the day (Nwokoye 1984:32). In addition to the connection Nwokoye suggests between the clearing gesture of sweeping the compound and the very similar

physical gesture of creating akika patterns (or prepping the wall in other regions), the act of painting the surface of the wall with akika patterns, like sweeping a compound, wipes away all that is stale and old. John Umeh tells us, "When you sleep in the night and wake up for a new dawn of the day everything has gone stale (Alahua tete ife ni i ne aboona ola). Every true Igbo person removes the staleness before living his/her new day. The ash in the cooking place becomes stale ash

{ntu ola) and must be collected and thrown away before meals are prepared again. The house is a stale house (uno ola) and must be freshened up with thorough sweeping with the broom (?z?za). . . . The outside compound approach roads have become Ezi ama ola (stale Ezi

Adams: People have three eyes 13

Figure 2. Mural by Helen Obiora, Orno, 1995. Photo: Sarah Adams, 1995.

.Mu

Figure 3. Mural by Onuigbo Aghadinuno, Orno, 1995. Photo: Sarah Adams, 1995.


Figure 4. Mural by Mgbadunnwa Okanumee, Nnobi, late 1980s. Photo: Sarah Adams, 1994.

Figure 5. Mural painted in the early 1990s by multiple members of the Upa Women Artists Collective in Nsugbe. Artists painted on the cement walls with earth pigments mixed with acrylic binder. The

building is a storage room and gallery located in the Ama Dialog, the cooperative compound in

Nsugbe. Photo: Sarah Adams, 1995.


exists in degrees?body painting is ephemeral in the extreme while mural painting can be slightly more stable.

In the past, ?/? body and mural painting would have been seen in a number of contexts?simpler versions for

everyday and more complex versions for weddings, funerals, title takings, and festivals honoring various deities. For a number of reasons, however, in many areas of southeastern Nigeria this art is no longer commonly practiced. Both body and mural painting are

closely associated with traditional Igbo religion, and therefore when people convert to Christianity, they tend to distance themselves from ?/?. There are also practical reasons for the decline in popularity?people have

moved into cement homes, and, as such, there are few

clay walls to paint. In many cases, existing clay structures are not maintained and cared for as they

would have been in the past, because occupants see these structures as temporary housing until they have saved enough money for a cement building.5 And, of course, today clothing covers what would have been the canvas for body painting. While physical examples of ?/? are no longer commonly seen in most regions of southeastern Nigeria, the memory of talented artists and their work is still fresh and vital. During my research, I

was regularly directed to elderly artists who had no

existing examples of their work and had not produced any work for a decade or more.

During the first thirteen years of my research, I have

developed and maintained relationships with ?/? artists in six different villages. I interview them about their

work and lives, commission and document new work

using video and photography, and in most cases, have worked as an apprentice alongside each artist. As scholar and apprentice, the archive I have compiled is

physical in two senses: the works I photograph, videotape, and collect constitute one aspect of this archive, while the physical memories of ?/? I acquired as an apprentice make me an embodied archive.

Until I began research on this project, ?/? artists and their works were regularly discussed in very general terms?as the work of "an ?/? artist." This was

fundamentally at odds with what these artists told me about their relationship to their work. "?/? di n'?k? n'?k?" was their refrain?literally, "?/? is from hand to

hand," and figuratively, every artist has her own style. Though many Africanist art historians' early discussions of individual artists are mediated by ethnicity or by the notion of

"regional stylistic differences," the artists I worked with always asserted a strong sense of artistic

identity that was personal, never defined against ethnicity, rarely against region. For example,

Mgbadunnwa Okanumee from Nnobi, an accomplished, elderly artist when she passed away in 1994, refused to

work with other artists because she felt no other artist's work was strong enough to stand next to her own.6

Agbaejije Anunobi, also from Nnobi, noted that she taught her daughter to do simple patterns like dots but that "she can't draw the way I draw."7 These artists and others discussed their work in terms that were

remarkably similar to those employed by academically trained studio artists in Nigeria, further destabilizing facile and reductive distinctions between the "traditional" and the

"modern/contemporary." In contrast to romantic notions about communalism and socialism in rural Africa, the artists I have worked with from 1992 to the present are fiercely competitive. Rank and relative talent are acknowledged.8

As I continued my research, I found that the physical archive of objects I created could be placed within the context of a much larger collecting project. This broader physical archive of ?/? art dates back to the early twentieth century, when British missionaries and other colonial agents in the Igbo-speaking region of southeastern Nigeria had remarkably similar reactions to encounters with ephemeral ?/? body and mural painting. Archives of drawings on paper, journals, objects, photographs, and letters in various locations tell a

complex, layered story of repeated attempts by colonial

agents to preserve in alternative media what was

invariably described as a "dying art." These early twentieth-century collectors' archives of ?/? art in alternative media were expanded further by Nigerian

ama) and must be swept" (Umeh 1999:153). It also seems likely then that as the sweeping of the compound removes staleness (ola) from the compound, so creating akika patterns and smoothing the surface of the

wall before painting removes staleness from the wall and therefore the house itself. Umeh also stresses that the body is stale until it has been

properly cleansed in the morning. As the body needs purification from

staleness, so the buildings (which suggest the human body and are often discussed in such terms) must be purified from the condition of ola or being stale through polishing, mending, and the application of akika and finally ??i.

5. I have commissioned work from artists on cement walls, and have seen examples of ull on cement in Nsugbe and Nnobi. These are,

however, exceptions?most people see cement walls as "modern" and therefore antithetical to "traditional" CiTi art.

6. Mgbadunnwa Okanumee, interview with the author, 1992. 7. Agbaejije Maryanne Anunobi, interview with the author, 1995. 8. For a more detailed discussion of each artist and her work, see

Sarah Adams, "Hand to Hand: ?I1 Body and Wall Painting and Artistic

Identity in Southeastern Nigeria," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2002.


and Euro-American artists and scholars (myself included) during the latter half of the twentieth century up to the

present. In short, though ?/? artists' works are historically ephemeral to varying degrees, collectors, travelers, and scholars (Nigerian and Euro-American) have simply avoided engaging the ephemeral nature of ?/? art by creating a physical archive of images and writing about the work against this archive. While the tangible archive of ?/? art has been useful in constructing a history of ?/? over time, and it allows the ephemeral work to function within the broader conventions and expectations of art

history, the use of such an approach in isolation places a

disfiguring pressure on physical archives as the site for reconstruction of art memory. Specifically, this physical archive of ?/?, if left unsupported by intangible archives of information, obscures to varying degrees the individual identities and agency of the ?/? artists themselves.

The Pitt Rivers collection, 1932-1950s: A silence that silences

The earliest and most extensive archive of ?/? work in alternative media is held at the Pitt Rivers Museum in

Oxford. Throughout the early twentieth century, British missionaries, colonial officers, and ship captains collected examples of ?/? on paper, many of which were

subsequently deposited at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The size of this collection, which ranges from 1932 to the 1950s and includes work from the Anambra region and

Arochukwu (areas quite distant from one another), is formidable. There are one hundred eleven drawings of ?/? on paper from six collectors, and one example of ?/?

designs embroidered on cloth.9 In the works from

Arochukwu, names of the artists were generally not

recorded, but some of the works from the Anambra area include full names or fragments of names. The information recorded by the colonial collector is often,

however, not complete enough on its own to link the work to specific place, family, and local history. As

such, this physical archive can be broadly framed as an expression of colonial control over individual

biography?the works function in a way that

simultaneously summons and silences one of their

referents, the artist.10

In Alan Sekula's discussion of the disciplinary use of

photography to document criminals or record

possessions, he asserts that such photographs operate as "a silence that silences." He suggests that the "mute

testimony" of these photographs makes all other forms of witness unnecessary?they are documents that by nature undermine the need for and credibility of

countering, protean oral texts that might be offered by the criminal represented.11 Sekula describes a conflict between "the presumed denotative univocality of the

legal image" and the multiplicity of the criminal voice.12

Similarly, the drawings in the Pitt Rivers collection, confronted without supporting histories of the artist, can be seen as silences that silence not the criminal voice, but the colonial subject. Each drawing is a mute record of ?/? art practice that at once points to and silences a

parallel archive of oral texts and divinatory knowledge, the intangible archives from which the identity of the artist unfolds.

Differences in the compositions of the works in the Pitt Rivers collection also suggest this struggle between

knowledge contained in the physical archive and caches of information that fall outside of such structures. The Pitt Rivers drawings from the Anambra region, and

works by many contemporary ?/? artists in this same area, tend to be open, and suggest compositional extensions well beyond what is physically represented? they suggest an intangible realm (figs. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

The fragmentary nature of the information collected with the Anambra drawings also points to the intangible archive: works include artists' first or last names

("Ekedinma"), references to names and specific locations such as Egbuso of Ukpo (fig. 6), or evocations of a place on the body on which such a pattern would be placed ("Woman's Back") (fig. 7).13 Because information

collected with the Anambra works is incomplete or

entirely absent, it would be hard to link these works to the artist and her family today. In spite of this, both the

9. The collection also includes ?///-related objects such as dried till pods and various types of mmanwuli (with single and multiple

blades). 10. Alan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter

1986):7.

11. Ibid., p. 6. 12. Ibid. 13. M. D. W. Jeffreys, an anthropologist, was in the Awka area,

where he collected ?ll on paper. Winifred B. Yeatman, a CMS

missionary, also collected drawings of Cill on paper in Awka in 1933. Because there are drawings that appear to be by the same artist in both the Yeatman and Jeffreys archives, it likely that they collaborated

during the collection process. For example, the Yeatman collection includes a work by "Nwayieke Awachie" while the Jeffreys collection

contains a similar work by "Nwaieke Awachie." Such a collaboration is also suggested by drawings with identical compositions that appear

to have been done by two different artists, with one in the Jeffreys collection, the other in the Yeatman collection.


Figure 6. Uli drawing on paper from the Anambra region, collected by M. D. W.

Jeffreys. "Egbuso of Ukpo," which may be the artist's name and village, is written on the back of the drawing. Some pattern names were written directly on the drawing while others are numbered, which suggests that there was a "key" that is now missing. This is an excellent example of an open and non-centered composition. Pitt Rivers Museum,

University of Oxford.

compositions and the fragments of information allude to an intangible archive of supporting knowledge outside the visible realm. In contrast, in the works on paper from Arochukwu, where artists' names were not recorded and where overt attempts to control the colonial body at the time of collection have been documented, the

compositions shift from open to closed and bordered, a shift that mimics control over individual expression beyond the picture plane (figs. 8, 9). As this study makes clear, however, what is suggested or repressed beyond the visual realm?specifically, intangible archives of

supporting knowledge?can still be retrieved. This act of

recovery restores the sense of colonial subject as active, as narrator rather than one for whom others speak.

Works from Arochukwu

The earliest examples of ?/? on paper were collected in Arochukwu and donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1932 by Captain G. S. Hughman (figs. 8, 9). In

Hughman's collection, the names of the artists were not recorded?like many of the drawings from Arochukwu, the name of the collector eclipses the name of the artiste4 On a piece of paper attached to the back of one of these images, Hughman briefly explained his motivation for soliciting examples of ?/? from artists in the area:15

14. Mary Nooter Roberts has discussed the interplay between the names of artist and collector in relation to collections of Luba art: ". . . colonial collecting and subsequent exhibition, market valuation, and scholarship on Luba objects in the West have continued to transforrri their authorship. As objects have circulated from one context to another, and from one owner to the next, they have accumulated names and attributions in a kind of 'imbrication of identity/ all the

while moving further from their original producers." Mary Nooter

Roberts, "The Naming Game: Ideologies of Luba Artistic Identity," African Arts (Autumn 1998):60.

15. Though ?ll is pronounced "un" in Arochukwu, I will use "uTi"

throughout this article for internal consistency, except in direct

quotations and personal communications where I have maintained the

original pronunciation.


JWAAJUUUUU

Figure 7. L//? drawing on paper from the Anambra region, collected by W. B. Yeatman. Though the artist's name was not recorded, the

back reads, "G. Woman's Back. 1. Lines in Paint 2. Trap." Pitt Rivers

Museum, University of Oxford.

The enclosed uri designs are the work of Arochukwu natives. . . . The designs are painted free-hand with short tufted sticks on the bodies of women and girls and children and remain indelible for some months. It is usually done by

women who make a living by this work. 5/- or even 8/- is sometimes paid for an elaborate all-over design.

... All the

designs have certain significance and some are altogether bad. These are harmless but interesting but it is not often the designs are explained, and it is only quite recently that

these women have been willing to put their designs on

paper. The custom of painting the body is dying out but it seems a pity such beautiful designs should be lost.16

16. Hughman's comments are attached to the drawing 1932.46.3 in the Pitt Rivers collection. In terms of the duration of the work's

visibility, Hughman may have been confusing t///with nkasiani, another form of body adornment that is common in this area and remains visible longer than ?lh


Figure 8. Work collected in Arochukwu in 1932 by Captain G. S. Hughman. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Figure 9. Work collected in Arochukwu in 1932 by Captain G. S. Hughman. This is one of the works in which the artist pays greater attention to both the edges and the center of the paper. Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.


Hughman's comment that ?/? was a "dying art," and that artists were somewhat reluctant to create works in archival media, would be echoed by other collectors as the century unfolded.

In two of the Hughman drawings, the imagery is quite dense and there is an unusual attention to the edges and center of the paper (fig. 9). Though the other two drawings in this collection show similar interest in the center, they have more empty space and also give the sense that the drawing is merely a fragment of a larger composition that extends well beyond what is

represented. One drawing is structured by intricate

pockets of patterning that seem to bulge onto the visible

picture plane from the beyond the edges of the paper (fig. 8). Most artists I have worked with in a

contemporary context create compositions that, like the second work, are not inwardly focused?in fact, body painting often creates a sense of energy through the use of off-set patterns that play with the natural symmetry of the body (fig. 1). Contemporary compositions by accomplished artists such as Helen Obiora from Omo are not structured around a center, are powerfully attentive to negative space (?h?r?), and, like the second drawing in the Hughman collection, suggest extensions of energy well beyond the visible picture plane (fig. 2).

When contemporary ?/? artists Victoria Nwosu and Grace Nwosu, who are from Arochukwu, looked at

photocopies of Pitt Rivers drawings from their village, they often commented on the sense of space.17 Victoria

Nwosu noted, "Anyi_ ?naghi ?d? ?ri ny?g?d? n'?hu k? nk?siani w?r?p?t? n'?hu ^mgb?d?," which means, "We don't write too much ?r? so the nk?siani can come out on the body of the girl from the fattening room." Nk?siani is a mild, colorless skin irritant that body painting artists in Arochukwu often used to raise subtle

welts in complex, concentric patterns on a woman's

body. Grace Nwosu selected another drawing and commented, "nk? ? di nji ?kw?" or "this is too black"? the artist had not left enough negative space for nk?siani and as a result the work seemed too cluttered, too black, nji ?kw?. While two of the works in the Duckworth collection have open compositions and are attentive to

space in the ways these artists outline, the other two seem to respond to an entirely different aesthetic structure.

There are many possible explanations for the tensions between the two modes of composition in the Hughman collection?individual artistic preference, time, or

region. The attention to the edges and center, and the shift from open to closed compositions, may also be related to aesthetic changes that took place in reaction to another object archive then evolving in Arochukwu.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Scottish Presbyterian missionary Agnes Siddons Arnot was in the process of

establishing a cooperative in which students at the Mary Slessor Memorial Home for Girls translated ?/? drawings on paper into embroidery templates that were then

applied to tablecloths, napkins, coasters, pillows, and other linens (figs. 10, 11).18The compositional structures of many of the templates and embroideries from this

cooperative resonate with two of the drawings in the

Hughman collection. Works associated with the Arochukwu collective are often structured around a

center, and artists seem very aware of edges. The Mary Slessor Memorial Home for Girls, where

the embroidery cooperative was based, was a mission

marriage training center for young girls from all over West Africa. Girls who came to the school learned

"domestic sciences" and received a basic Western-style education. The mission focused on skills they felt were essential for young Christian wives to survive in the colonial economy and marry Nigerian Christian

evangelists?they learned to "keep house," garden, do

laundry, embroider, tailor, and so forth. Interestingly, though girls came to Slessor from all over Nigeria and

West Africa, Arnot limited participation in the ?/?

embroidery project to women from Arochukwu. ?li artists who generally still practiced traditional religion and thus did not attend the Slessor school made the

drawing on paper, while widows and young girls enrolled at the Slessor school who had converted to

Christianity created the embroidery. These embroidered works are now scattered around the world.19

Because it is unclear how the works moved from

drawing to embroidery template, we cannot be certain

exactly how and where the aesthetic shift from open to closed compositions took place. In 2000, Mleanya Iheonyebuokwu, a graduate of Slessor and a former

17. Interview with Grace Nwosu and Victoria Nwosu, March 2000.

18. For a more detailed discussion of this cooperative see Sarah

Adams, "Praise Her Beauty Well," in Call and Response: Journeys of African Art (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2000), pp. 9-45.

19. A few examples of this embroidery are in Arochukwu; others are at the Horn i mam Museum in London and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. One recently turned up in Florida, and yet another example

turned up in the back of the linen closet of one of Arnot's relatives in the United Kingdom. I would like to thank Susan Cooksey, Associate

Curator of African Art at the Harn Museum, for drawing my attention to the embroidery held in a private collection in Florida.


Figure 10. Embroidered tablecloth from the Arochukwu embroidery cooperative. In the original publication, neither person was identified. From Donald M. McFarlan,

Calabar: The Church of Scotland Mission 1846-1946, London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1946, plate 8. Photo: Madame Lubinski, n.d.

member of the embroidery cooperative, remembered that the drawings on paper were made into embroidery templates in Arochukwu.20 However, Marie Achinivu, daughter of Rebecca Okwarra who worked closely with Arnot on the embroidery cooperative, said the drawings were sent to Scotland and made into templates there by a third party.21 Because the cooperative developed slowly over several decades, it is likely that both stories are true?some drawings were made into templates in Arochukwu; others were sent to Scotland.22 If some of the drawings were made into templates in Scotland, then early-twentieth-century British embroidery templates may have had an influence on how the

patterns were laid out.23 Both ?/? artists and members of the embroidery cooperative would have seen these returned templates, and they may have had an influence

on subsequent work. It is possible that in addition to

using and creating embroidery templates based on ?/?

patterns, girls at the mission used commercially produced British embroidery templates, and these too might have had an impact on compositional techniques.24

Arnot, the cooperative organizer who lived in Arochukwu on and off for thirty-seven years until she retired in 1948, is still vividly remembered there today. She was fascinated with ?/? and collected examples of it in various media. In a 1950 article in Nigerian Field

about the cooperative, she comments on the future of ?/? and on artists' initial reluctance to create works in alternative media:

It seemed a pity that these old designs should be lost, as

they seemed likely to be: girls now go to school and the body-painting is rarely seen. The old artists are dying out, the younger generation do not appear to have the skill, and the art seems to be disappearing. As we of the Mission in

Arochuku [sic] became better acquainted with the women, we began to collect designs. There were difficulties: they wanted to know what the white women wanted with these drawings: also they were afraid, for many of the designs

20. Mrs. Mleanya Iheonyebuokwu, interview with author, March

30, 2000. 21. Marie Achinivu, letter to the author, April 19, 2000. 22. When the project was revived during the Biafran War

(1967-1970) to raise money for the war effort, refugees did all of the work in Arochukwu.

23. I would like to thank Marcia Pointon for drawing my attention to this issue.

24. When I met with Arnot's relatives and sorted through their linen closet to see if they had any examples of work from the

cooperative, we found two works. One was clearly from the

cooperative and had ?li patterns. Another was on similar cloth, with an identical wide-stitched embroidered edge, but the pattern was

likely from a British embroidery template.


.. ^ y-"'"

Figure 11. Fragment of an embroidery template from a former Slessor student. Photo: Susan Cole, Alex Contreras, Yale

University Art Gallery.

had some old tribal significance. It was not till some years had passed and we all knew each other much better that

we got them to put the designs on paper.25

Arnot's assertion that ?/? was dying out and therefore

rarely seen, and her recollection of ?/? artists' reluctance to create work on paper, resonates with Hughman's comments eighteen years earlier.

Ironically, though the missionaries asked their students to embroider ?/? designs on cloth for sale

locally and overseas (the money went to the mission),

and Arnot speaks of ?/? in glowing terms in published articles about the project, women in Arochukwu who attended the Slessor school when they were girls and

participated in this project clearly remembered that they were strictly forbidden from painting ?/? on their bodies. ?li on cloth or on paper was acceptable?ephemeral ?/? on the body was strictly forbidden. In 2000, Mleanya Iheonyebuokwu remembered that if any student

appeared in church wearing ?/? they would be beaten

by Mrs. Mackennell, the evangelist at the school, also known as

"Daddy" by the girls at the mission because, in contrast to Arnot, she left the compound daily to travel and do evangelical work. The embroidery project in Arochukwu, then, had at its base a troubling tension

between the instinct to preserve ?/? in alternative media, and eliminate its cyclical appearances in ephemeral media. In contrast to the missionaries' aversion to ?/? in

ephemeral media, Arnot's and Hughman's comments about ?/? artists' initial reluctance to create work on

paper suggests a potentially meaningful mistrust of the new medium?perhaps artists were reluctant to create

works whose life cycle would be frozen in time. In this

project, the role of the physical archive as a silence that silences is clear. The drawings in isolation, and Arnot's

written records of the project, obscure the dissenting voices of former participants, and those memories are

clearly vital to the construction of a history of ?/? in Arochukwu.

Arnot and Hughman were far from alone in their fascination with ?/? art. Others who passed through

Arochukwu during this period, like Edward Harland Duckworth, a British colonial officer posted to Nigeria from 1930 to 1953, and Gladys Plummer, Deputy Director of Women's Education in Nigeria who visited Arochukwu in 1936, also took an interest in ?/? and collected examples on paper.26 The end result of all of this early-twentieth-century interest in ?/? from

Arochukwu is a rather extensive but geographically scattered collection of preserved examples of work from this area.27

25. A. S. Arnot, "Uri Body Painting and Aro Embroidery," Nigerian Field \5, no. 3 (1950):134.

26. The back of the Plummer drawing reads, "Nov. 27, 1936.

Mbogwo Erima Amanogwu Aro." This is likely the name of the artist

and her district in Arochukwu, which makes this the only work from Arochukwu that can be linked to a specific artist.

27. Other collections of ?li on paper include the K. C Murray archive, which was deposited at the National Museum in Lagos. In

1997, curators at the museum could not locate this collection?it is

either lost or was neglected and therefore destroyed. G. I. Jones also collected ?l) works on paper in Bende, and the Library at the University of Nigeria Nsukka campus holds ?l) drawings on paper from Arochukwu that were collected by Reverend Beattie.


The geographic range and bewildering number of

drawings in the Pitt Rivers collection as a whole obscure the sense of fragmentation and loss it contains. The

works are powerful, seductive, and full of promise?they beckon coyly, then refuse any easy engagement. In Kafka's meditations on excessive letter writing he

laments, "Writing letters is actually an intercourse with

ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost."28 Similarly, the Pitt Rivers drawings are letters that document interaction and negotiation between artist and collector's

ghosts, yet the ghost of the collector?supported by name and further documentation in physical archives? looms larger and endlessly threatens to eclipse, imperil,

and conceal the artist's ghost. The most thoroughly suppressed ghost in this equation, however, is neither that of artist or collector, but that of the artist whose

works were never collected and placed in a physical archive. By focusing on these admittedly extraordinary drawings we give them?and by extension the artists

represented in these collections?a certain status and

credibility, an entirely unexamined legitimacy that is unfounded in the absence of a broad art historical

survey. The drawings overshadow the histories of artists whose works were, for whatever reason, not collected. These drawings, then, operate as silences that silence the colonial subject, or more precisely the colonial artist, at multiple levels.29

The Nsukka artists, 1960-present

The parenthetical close of colonial archives of ?/? marks the moment of independence in Nigeria, and the

emergence of a new archival moment for ?/? artists' works. In contrast to the Pitt Rivers collectors, the new collectors are Nigerian, and they have a greater interest in the identity of the artist, but because the works are

often recorded indirectly in this archive, and interest in the artist is for the most part not supported over time

with oral history, within this physical archive the

individual ?/? artist becomes at once oddly singular and emblematic of all ?/? artists.

This archive opens in the early 1960s, when artists in

Zaria, inspired by emerging Ran-Africanist and

N?gritude philosophies, looked for ways to blend their

Western-style academic training with Nigerian art

history. In 1960, artist and art historian Uche Okeke, a leader of this movement, wrote a manifesto titled "Natural Synthesis":

. . . Nigeria needs a virile school of art with new

philosophy of the new age?our renaissance period. Whether our African writers call the new realization

N?gritude, or our politicians talk about the African

Personality, they both stand for the awareness and yearning for freedom of black people all over the world. Contemporary Nigerian artists could and should champion the cause of this movement. ... I do not agree with those

who advocate international art philosophy; I disagree with those who live in Africa and ape European artists. Future

generations of Africans will scorn their efforts. Our new

society calls for a synthesis of old and new, of functional art and art for its own sake.30

In his own drawings and paintings Okeke looked to ?/? art, including work by his mother, Monica Mgboye

Okeke, as a source of design inspiration (fig. 12). Through his teaching from 1970 to 1986 in the Department of Fine and Applied Art at the University of

Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) and during his tenure as acting head of that department, Okeke inspired legions of artists to experiment with ?/? patterns and aesthetics in their work. Okeke's students, such as Obiora Udechukwu, extended this interest in the exploration of ?/? in alternative, archival media. Okeke and Udechukwu, like many Nsukka artists, were and are

inspired by ?/? artists' unique way of seeing?they have a stunning ability to represent the world around them by depicting only the essential lines that make up any given object.31

The Nsukka artists' archive of ?/? is heavily mediated?it is constructed primarily through observation of ?/? artists' works and subsequent

28. Frans Kafka, Letters to Milena, trans. Philip Boehm (New York: Schocken, 1990), p. 223. John Zilcosky discusses this exchange in "Kafka's Remains" in Lost in the Archives, ed. R. Comay (n.p.:

Alphabet City Media, 2002), p. 633. 29. There is also the temptation to assert that artists whose works

have been collected are "Masters." In her research on studio

photographer Seydou Keita, Elizabeth Bigham correctly points out that such assertions of mastery are precipitous when they occur in the absence of a broad art historical survey. Elizabeth Bigham, "Issues of

Authorship in the Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keita," African Arts

(Spring 1999):65.

30. Uche Okeke, "Natural Synthesis," reprinted in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, ed. C. Deliss (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p. 208.

31. For further information on the Nsukka artists see: Simon

Ottenberg, New Traditions from Nigeria: Seven Artists of the Nsukka

Group (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Chika Okeke, "The Quest for a Nigerian Art: Or a Story of Art from Zaria to Nsukka" in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to

Marketplace, ed. O. Enwezor and O. Oguibe (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), pp. 144-165.


Figure 12. Uche Okeke, Mma Nwa Uli, 1972. Collection of Joanne B. Eicher. Photograph: Franko B. Khoury.

translation into alternative media without the ?/? artist's assistance or involvement. One of the requirements for a bachelor's degree from UNN's Department of Fine and

Applied Art is a final research paper, and many artists and art historians who graduated from the department during Okeke's (and later, Obiora Udechukwu's) tenure fulfilled this requirement through research on ?/?. Copies of some of these theses, many of which include "lexicons" of ?/? motifs and discussions of individual artists, are still held by the Department of Fine and Applied Art.32 These constitute a local archival reference for university artists, and in fact many of the patterns found in Nsukka artists'

works can also be found in these theses. Because the archive of references to specific artists is

studied and then appropriated by the Nsukka artists, the ?/? archive created through references in the Nsukka artists' works can be seen as analogous to the Galtonian

composite photograph, which Sekula identifies as a

"collapsed version of the archive."33 Sekula's description

of Galton's photographic process provides an apt metaphor:

Galton fabricated his composites by a process of successive registration and exposure of portraits in front of a camera

holding a single plate. Each successive image was given a

fractional exposure based on the inverse of the total number of images in the sample. That is, if a composite

were to be made from a dozen originals, each would

receive one-twelfth of the required total exposure. Thus,

individual distinctive features, features that were unshared

and idiosyncratic, faded away into the night of underexposure. What remained was the blurred, nervous configuration of

those features that were held in common throughout the

sample.34 [author's emphasis]

In the Nsukka project, the ?/? archive is embodied not through apprenticeship with specific ?/? artists but

through indirect study. In the Nsukka artists' work, the

singular identities of each ?/? artist studied, the physical archive of each artist's work, collapses into the hand of the university-trained artist. The names and identities of individual artists are recorded in relation to the Nsukka

project, yet each artist's distinctive style is more visible in the Pitt Rivers collection.

The nature of the fame a few ?/? artists have achieved as a result of Nsukka artists' interest in their work is also

very specific?it is always in danger of becoming a part of the collapsed archive, one in which individuality simply fades away. For example, one of the best-known ?/? artists, Mgbadunnwa Okanumee, from Nnobi, received international attention and has essentially been canonized through association with the Nsukka artists

(fig. 4). In her work on clay walls towards the end of her career, Okanumee had a style that was unmistakable. In these works, thin, elegant black lines grow out from the

edges of wide, vertical pillars of black, and then cover the red background with a network of organic shapes.

Okanumee's linear black shapes have no hard angles or

edges?the branches curve and melt into one another, giving the hard surface of the wall a surprisingly supple, fluid feeling. The black webbing frames a parade of

yellow patterns that pull the viewer through the

composition, drawing them in for closer inspection. It is as if Okanumee poured the yellow motifs into the

containing black shapes. Okanumee's color placement? black next to red, yellow over black?creates maximum color contrast and powerful visual presence.

When she passed away in 1994, Okanumee's

reputation as an artist extended well beyond the borders 32. The Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of

African Art has photocopies of many of these theses. For a compilation of these lexicons see Elizabeth Willis, "A Lexicon of Igbo ?li Motifs," Nsukka Journal of the Humanities, vol. 1, 1987, pp. 91-102.

33. Sekula, see note 10, p. 54. 34. Ibid., p. 47.


of Nigeria. University-trained artists and art historians from Nigeria and abroad (myself included) studied and documented her work, and in 1990 the Goethe Institute in Bayreuth included large photos of her murals in an

exhibition focused primarily on the Nsukka artists.35 These same photos were included in a 1992 show at UNN that was curated by artist Ada Udechukwu, whose work is also inspired by ?/?.36 Udechukwu's exhibition focused on work by female, ?/?-influenced Nsukka artists. Finally, images of Okanumee's murals and discussions of her work have also been included in

publications on ?/? art and the Nsukka artists.37 For those who have seen and studied Okanumee's

murals, her influence on the work of many Nsukka artists is clear. There is a complex, symbiotic relationship between Okanumee's international reputation, the

physical archive of her work, and the Nsukka artists' interest in ?/?. Publications and exhibitions of

Okanumee's work constitute a physical archive, one that in spite of its specificity has been oddly deployed in relation to the Nsukka artists' project as a shorthand, iconic symbol for all ?/? art and artists through the ages.

Her canonization and documentation within an art historical discourse that is rooted in the assumption of a

physical archive of objects, and her association with the Nsukka artists, have allowed for sedimentation of new

layers of meanings onto her work. Over the years, both

processes have made her work simultaneously more

singular and more generalized. Okanumee, like many artists whose work was documented in response to the Nsukka movement, has been celebrated as an

individual, yet her work is also used as a mere footnote to the Nsukka artists' project.38

The Upa Women Artists Collective, 1992-present

The Nsukka movement inspired another

contemporary effort to create archival examples of ?/? art. In 1991, German artist Doris Weiler and Nigerian ethnomusicologist Dr. Meki Nzewi established ?m?

Dialog, a compound just outside Onitsha in the village of Nsugbe. ?m? means compound in Igbo, and Dialog refers to the conversation they hope to create between "modern art and the traditional arts and between Europe and Africa."39 Though the project eventually grew into multiple areas, Weiler and Nzewi's initial goal was to establish a collective of ?/? artists who would transfer

body and mural painting onto paper and canvas.40 These works would then be exhibited and sold in galleries and museums in Nigeria and Germany. Like Arnot sixty years earlier, and the Nsukka artists twenty years earlier,

Weiler and Nzewi were concerned that ?/? was "dying

out" and felt it could be reinvented through a change in media and thus remain relevant and economically viable in a contemporary setting. Weiler and Nzewi also

hoped to correct an imbalance in the literature on ?/??

specifically, female ?/? artists are merely mentioned in

passing in studies focused on the mostly male Nsukka artists' project.

In this physical archive of ?li, the names and identities of each artist are thoroughly documented over

an extended period of time. Weiler and Nzewi acted as cultural brokers between artist and patron and built a

complex narrative of artistic identity around the work that anticipates the perceived expectations of their new audience.41 Their acts of insider and outsider cultural

brokerage are similar to those described by Christopher Steiner in which urban traders of African sculpture manipulate objects through alteration, presentation, and description in order to meet audience demands.42 In addition to modifying ?/? artists' media and mode of

35. Uli: Traditional Wall Painting and Modem Art from Nigeria, exh. catalogue (Lagos and Bayreuth: Goethe Institute and Cultural Centre, 1990). This exhibition catalogue focuses on ?li art and the Nsukka artists who use ?li patterns and "?li aesthetics" in their work.

The catalogue includes an essay about Okanumee's murals on her

compound walls in Nnobi. 36. Ada Udechukwu, "?li: Different Hands, Different Times,"

Nsukka, 1992. This exhibition was held at the Continuing Education Center on UNN's campus.

37. Publications on Okanumee, and references to the artist

include: Elizabeth A. Willis, "?li Painting and the Igbo World View," African Arts 23, no. 1 (1989):62-67, 104; Olu Oguibe "Notes on Murals from Three Private Compounds in Nnobi" in Uli: Traditional Wall Painting and Modern Art from Nigeria, exh. cat. (Lagos and Bayreuth: Goethe Institute and Cultural Centre, 1990); Okeke, see note 30, p. 47; Ottenberg, see note 31, p. 208.

38. For a lengthier discussion of Mgbadunnwa Okanumee's work and its relationship to the Nsukka school, see Sarah Adams, "Can't Cover the Moon with Your Hand: Artistic Identity and Stuff" in

Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art, ed. C.

M. Kreamer, M. N. Roberts, E. Harney (with other contributors) (National Museum of African Art in association with a still to be

determined commercial publisher, 2006). 39. Doris Weiler, interview with author in Nsugbe, 1995. 40. Weiler and Nzewi also organized programs for scholars,

tourists, and students from abroad. These programs consisted of

drumming workshops, mural painting with artists in the collective, and

various trips to shrines and markets in Nsugbe, Omo, and nearby Onitsha.

41. For further discussion of the term "cultural broker" see Sidney Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), p. 64.

42. Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1994).


display, Weller and Nzewi chose to verbally frame the artists and their work as Igbo, a decision that anticipates

Western patron's notions of authenticity in relation to African art as outlined by Kasfir.43 However, in spite of

Western patrons' preference for "anonymous" African art, Weiler and Nzewi also chose to visually and

verbally present each artist in the cooperative not just as named individuals but as "masters" of ?/? painting. Their assertion may very well be true, but is nonetheless

problematic as it occurs in the absence of a broad

survey of ?/? from this region. In this case, then, the archive places pressure on the individual artist, and like the Pitt Rivers collection, forces us to consider meanings established through seemingly simple acts of inclusion and omission.

The Upa Women Artists Collective was founded after Weiler and Nzewi's 1992 pilot study on ?/? in Nsugbe

and Omo (a village about 45 km from Nsugbe). After this initial study Weiler wrote a report for the German

Foreign Office and received a Culture Sustaining grant for a larger, long-term project. Such grants were not necessarily for research, but were earmarked for projects that would sustain local culture in "third world countries." The projects did not have to be economically motivated but, Weiler noted, their project was:

S.A.: The Upa Women Artists Collective?tell me what your goals were when you founded that collective.

D.W.: O.K. ... of course it has an economical background. We started the collective at the end of the pilot project. . . . We didn't want to go away and leave the women alone

with what we had done. We thought about how we could fit them into a form where they could start to earn their life

[living]. . . . [author's emphasis]44

Though the project has an economic motivation, Weiler and Nzewi have done research on ?/? in this area

and have conducted extensive interviews with each of the artists in the collective, which they use in

publications about the project. As such, the Upa collective is positioned in an ambiguous, at times

problematic, space between an economic development project and academic research.

In 1992, after the pilot study, Weiler and Nzewi invited artists in Nsugbe, Omo, and Anam to take part in

"try outs" for the collective. Though no artists showed up from Anam, from the twelve artists who came for the try outs Weiler and Nzewi selected eight for the collective. The artists from Omo are Igbonaka Anichebe, Onuigbo Nwadinobu, Abuluchukwu Aghadinuno, and Helen

Obiora, while those from Nsugbe are Oliaku Nzewkwu, Mbaise Ateli, Okwuchukwu Obiudu, and Nwodu

Okoye.45 In January 1993, after signing a contract in which they agreed to sell their works exclusively through the collective, the artists took part in what

Weiler and Nzewi called a period of "reorientation."

During this period, Weiler taught members to add

acrylic binder to their earth pigments and paint on

canvas, and to approximate body painting on white

paper using bamboo blades dipped in ink (figs. 13, 14).46 Finally, Weiler and Nzewi asked each artist to come up with a symbol which they would use to sign their work?a nod to the artists' new global audience,

which would not be able to recognize distinctive styles and expects works by "masters" to be signed (figs. 13, 14). This final step separates the Upa collective from the 1930s and 1940s embroidery cooperative in

Arochukwu. Though Weiler and Nzewi's framework for the collective positions the project's innovations against the notion of an Igbo worldview, they have nonetheless insisted on marketing the canvases as the work of

named individuals.47 The second aspect of their framework is very much in line with contemporary

43. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, "African Art and Authenticity: A Text With a Shadow," in Enwezor and Oguibe, see note 31, pp. 88-113. As

Steiner and Kasfir have noted, these constructions circulate around

privileging antiquity, placing greater value on objects made for use rather than trade, and insisting on ethnic continuity (i.e., the object

must be made by and for someone of the same cultural group). Given these perceived biases on the part of the Western patron, it would be

easy for the new audience to dismiss the Upa artists' work as

"inauthentic" on a number of counts. The artists add acrylic binder to

their pigments and paint on canvas, which takes the work out of an

imagined historical ethnic continuum. The changes in media also push individual artistic agency to the foreground. Finally, with the absence

of strong local clientele, most of the work is created for non-lgbo patrons. For a potential Western patron, these factors could all render

the work "inauthentic." Nzewi's description of the artists and their

work anticipates these prejudices and attempts to counteract them. 44. Doris Weller, interview with author in Nsugbe, 1995.

45. During the selection process, Nzewi and Weller evaluated each artist's work. Nzewi felt it was also important to consider each

artist's family background. For example, one woman who submitted work for evaluation had a son who was a drug dealer. Though her work was strong, she was not asked to join the project for fear that her son would try to destroy the project, take the money she earned, or extort money from the cooperative. Weller commented that at the time

she questioned Nzewi's insistence upon selecting artists from "good" families, but over the years it has become clear to her that this was a

good decision (Doris Weller, email to author, June 15, 2001). 46. Meki Nzewi and Doris Weller, unpublished exhibition

catalogue, 1995. 47. Ibid.


concepts of artistic identity established through studies of ?/? artists in other areas.48

Analysis of works on clay walls by a few artists in the collective, and comparison with works on canvas, gives us a sense of aesthetic shifts that take place due to the

change in medium. Helen Obiora's work on clay walls is more spare than that of other artists from Omo. Her

patterns tend to be thin, slightly attenuated, and her lines vary slightly in thickness as they span out over the

wall, an effect that heightens both visual interest and overall sense of motion (fig. 2). Obiora's work demonstrates an impeccable sense of space through its

overwhelmingly soothing, ethereal, floating quality. In a mural from 1995, her elegant command of this medium becomes clear as she wraps her composition around the corners of the building while maintaining an internal sense of rhythm and fluidity. An Igbo proverb asserts that the beauty of body painting is revealed through the

motion of the wearer?the beauty of Obiora's murals is revealed through the motion of the viewer.

In contrast, in a work by Igbonaka Anichebe from this same year, patterns are bolder and there is less of a sense of dialogue between the various sides of the

building (fig. 3). In this mural Anichebe used a technique that I have only seen in Omo?the wall is covered with a grey soil that has been mixed in water, and while the wall is still wet the artist goes back and

quickly works patterns into it with her hands. Doris Weller described the process perfectly when she said it

is like brushing velvet the wrong way?the "brushed" area has a slightly darker hue that deepens as it dries. The sweeping background patterns develop from flowing movements of the whole body?Anichebe often adds flashes of yellow as a finishing touch. Works on canvas

capture the sense of movement in Obiora's and Anichebe's murals with varying degrees of success (figs. 13, 14). Some of the works on canvas from this

cooperative have a sense of internal symmetry that recalls work from the Arochukwu cooperative (fig. 14), yet when the works are hung in groups in a gallery space (or placed next to work by another artist in a

mural), the sense of symmetry is broken, and motion and interaction between each artist's piece are somewhat restored (fig. 5).

Weller sold collective artists' works primarily in

Nigeria and Germany, using art world connections she established through marketing her own work. Initially,

Weller and Nzewi had hoped to find an active market for the work in Nigeria?perhaps even secure contracts

Figure 13. Painting on paper by Onuigbo Aghadinuno, ca. 2003. The artist's signature is in the lower left corner?the circle within a larger circle. Photo: Sarah Adams, 2003.

for the women to paint on cement buildings?but the

Nigerian market proved to be slow. Weller noted that a few wealthy Nigerians have purchased canvases, but

most works have been sold in Germany.49 Pricing the canvases was also difficult. Weller thought the large canvases would sell for around $800 to $900 per canvas, the same price as similar work in Europe. In

response to sluggish sales, however, gallery owners

eventually convinced Weller to cut those prices in half, and as a result, more canvases were sold.50 Artist and art historian Olu Oguibe has commented on the ironic and

revealing discrepancy between Western collectors' voracious appetites for "popular" African art (such as

work by Nigerian sign painter Middle Art), and how little those collectors are willing to pay for it. Low

prices, he says, reflect a Western relegation of such work to "the category of mere objects of pleasure and

48. Sarah Adams, see note 8. 49. Doris Weller, email to author, June 15, 2001. 50. Ibid.


Figure 14. Painting on paper by Oliaku Nzekwu, ca. 2003. Nzekwu's signature, the "OK," is on the upper left side of the canvas. Photo: Sarah Adams, 2003.

fascination, like pornography. They are positioned on those peripheries of creative genius where the aesthetic

experience fails to cohere with great material value."51

Oguibe's comments resonate with Weller's experiences in trying to market Upa artists' work overseas.

Though sales were slow and prices had to be reduced, the added income still had quite an impact of the artists' lives. Initially, the artist received 30 percent of

the profit from a sale and the cooperative 70 percent, but later, in response to the artists' demands, these

percentages were reversed to create a more competitive structure, one that offered relative financial rewards for individual artistic success. The second structure reinforces Weller and Nzewi's emphasis on presenting the artists as individuals, and resonates with concepts of artistic identity established through studies of

contemporary ?/? artists in other areas. After getting married in 1999, Weller and Nzewi left

Nigeria and put O'dyke Nzewi, one of Meki Nzewi's 51. Olu Oguibe, "Art Identity, Boundaries" in Enwezorand

Oguibe, see note 31, p. 24.


sons, in charge of the project.52 Though O'dyke Nzewi continues to promote the artists and their work in spite of the challenges posed by Nigeria's economy and

infrastructure, he recently moved to South Africa.53 This could signal the end of the active phase of the

cooperative, or perhaps a shift to promoting the work in South Africa. In 2003, many of the artists who were involved were disgusted and frustrated with the project. In Omo, Helen Obiora, Igbonaka Anichebe, and

Onuigbo Aghadinuno described the effect of the project in very concrete, troubling terms.54 When the collective

was doing well, they said, they had more money, ate

better, and hired laborers to do their farm work. They noted that in the heyday of the project their husbands often complimented them on how beautiful their bodies were, how soft their skin was. Since Weller and Nzewi

left Nigeria, they said, this is no longer the case. In

short, the brief influx of money provided a contrast that

today makes them feel their suffering more acutely.

Accessing the invisible and intangible

Mm?o n? mmad? na-az? ?fia, m?n? ?f?k? ?maroo

Spirits and humans are in constant

communication/exchange, but the uninitiated does not know.55

Through at times disturbing intervention by Nigerians and Euro-Americans over the past century, an extensive and varied archive of objects related to ?/? now exists.

Many scholars, myself included, have written about and

attempted to understand ?/? art and artists over time

against this physical archive, relying primarily on art historical methodologies predicated on the assumption of this type of archive. While it has been useful for scholars to write about ?/? against this impressive and

growing object archive?we have learned a great deal about ?/? using object-driven methods?I am increasingly intrigued by and drawn to the holes in this cloth, the silences and absences that remain unacknowledged

when we use such methods. ?li compositions themselves are overwhelmingly concerned with space

and absence, with suggested extensions of the

composition outside the visible picture plane. The historical medium of ?/? is also designed to remove itself from the physical realm over varying periods of time. Both medium and composition of ?/? art urge us to

accept that vital information can be or can become

intangible. Engagement with such absences, in what is

suggested outside the visible realm, mirrors the

suggestive compositions, and interest in physical absence, among contemporary ?/? artists.

The vital interdependence of tangible and intangible archives of knowledge, of space and presence, can be

productively explored by rooting it in Igbo religious cosmology, in which the world is divided into ?l?/?n?

Mmad? (the human world) and ?l?/?n? Mm?Q (the spirit world). Through divination and reincarnation there is a great deal of conversation and traffic between these two worlds. Human vision is also divided into two

categories?between ?ny?/nd?/?f? na-afu uzo (the one/people/things that see), and ?ny?/nd?/?f? a naghi ?fu uz? (the one/people/things that do not see).56 Professor John Umeh, a dibi? (diviner, or literally master of or expert in knowledge or wisdom) and professor of estate management at the University of Nigeria Enugu campus, explains:

In other words, for the purposes of seeing beyond the

ordinary, it is immaterial whether or not one has good visual acuity as measured by scientific methods by expert eye doctors. . . . ?jiro ?ny? ?ji af? Mmad? af? Mm?o, i.e., the eye used in seeing human beings is not the eye used in

seeing the Spirit. Variants of this mystical witticism include one recorded by Enekwe: "Two eyes do not see a Spirit"

(?ny? n?abo ?ha-af? Mm?o). Vision may be physical vision or spiritual vision. ... In Afa language Ose n?abo is the two eyes with which one sees the mortal world, while Ose ?r? is the eye with which one sees the Spirit and the world

in addition.57

If we apply this model of vision to the history of ?/? art, it becomes clear that to varying degrees studies of

ephemeral ?/? emphasize physical vision, the eyes used to see the material world, over the eye used to see the

spirit. This model of seeing also clearly illuminates the

parallel, intangible archive. In short, in studies of

ephemeral art we often look with two eyes, though people have three, and all three are needed to perceive the whole picture. 52. Weller left Nigeria for health reasons and Nzewi left to take up

a teaching position at the University of Pretoria. 53. O'dyke Nzewi, email to author, January 2005. 54. Helen Obiora, Igbonaka Anichebe, and Onuigbo Aghadinuno,

interview with author in Omo, July 2003. 55. John Umeh, After God Is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination &

Sacred Science in Nigeria, vol. 1 (London: Karnak House, 1997), p. 2.

56. John Umeh, After God Is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Healing, Divination & Sacred Science in Nigeria, vol. 2 (London: Karnak House, 1999), p. 71.

57. Ibid., pp. 71-72.


Additionally, in Igbo religious thought death is not the complete annihilation of self. Rather, if one lives an honest and moral life and dies a good death (a natural death, not a suicide), and one receives appropriate funeral rites, one is ensured passage to ?l? or ?n?

M^m??, the Spirit World.58 Those in the spirit world can be reached from the human world through divination, until they are eventually reborn into the human world. Even after an ancestor is reincarnated, though, sacrifices can still be offered to their spirit at local shrines, and their opinions can be sought out through divination. In

fact, divination would still be necessary after

reincarnation, as reincarnation does not include passing along previous knowledge at a conscious level. Umeh

notes, "Agw? wol? iwol? o wol? mkp?l?? ?ny? ya tinye?when the snake flays its skin, it sheds off in the

process the seeds/existing cognitive aspects of its eyes as well .... when someone reincarnates, he or she loses

cognition of previously known places, persons, things and issues, even though these are clearly stored in the subconscious mind."59 Overall, then, there is a

profound, layered sense of a deceased ancestor's?more

specifically, artist's?presence in multiple sites long after the physical body is gone.60

We must return to each archival moment with these ideas in mind. In the Pitt Rivers collection, in most cases

?/? was collected without the name of the artist, or with

fragments of information?a first or last name, a village, the name of a collector, the name of a pattern, or the eerie invocation of a body part on which the pattern

would have been placed. In this case, there is such an

emphasis on the physical object that the artist drops almost entirely away and there is little sense of her

relationship to a broader art historical moment. In this

archive, there is a palpable tension between the impulse to record and the impulse to disguise?the shreds of information and, more powerfully, the references to

fragments of a body, force us to confront the work as cut

off from a body, from the human. Artists whose work was studied and collected in response to and support of the Nsukka project were often named, but through association with the Nsukka artists many become at once strangely singular and emblematic of all ?/? artists

through time. This archive collapses into the hand of the

university-trained artist. In my own research and in the

Nsugbe project, there is also greater emphasis on the individual artist, and this interest is sustained over a

larger group of artists for longer periods of time. In the

Nsugbe project, the name of the artist is invoked in relation to the name of collective and broader notions of

Igbo ethnicity, though over time the relationship between artist, collective, and ethnicity has adjusted to place greater emphasis on the individual. In my own

research, the relationship between artistic identity and

ethnicity is problematized in favor of individual artistic

identity. In both the Nsugbe project and my own research, documentation is sustained over time through

oral history, photography, and in the Nsugbe case, a shift in the artists' medium. As such it becomes possible to trace change and artistic development.

In all cases, however, there are varying degrees of vivocentric emphasis on the physical archive, on what can be collected from living artists, and by extension, emphasis on the eyes that see the material world rather than those that might peer into the spiritual realm.

Especially in the case of the Pitt Rivers collection, accessing this parallel intangible archive would restore essential information about the work. That realm can be accessed through two directions?by collecting oral histories of artists who have passed away and have no

existing examples of work, and through contact with such artists by working with a dibi?. The latter method, however, would surely be held in a great deal of distrust and even disdain among many scholars?in African art studies we tend to frame this archive of divinatory knowledge as "belief," and instead place unexamined faith in what is visible and physical. In Archive Fever, Derrida's insistence upon the archive as an interior defined by its exterior is emblematic of this mistrust. "The archive," he proposes, "if this word or this figure can be stabilized so as to take on a signification, will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory."61 Derrida

58. Reincarnation is not, however, guaranteed. In contrast to this

cycle of life, if in the past one lived a life that was somehow morally incorrect, one risked being denied proper burial rites and being thrown into Ajo Ohia, the "bad bush." This was a spiritual banishment from the cycle of life, a way to prevent a person from ever being reincarnated. While this third space is important in theorizing the life

cycle of ?li, I unfortunately cannot fully develop this aspect of the

argument within the space limits of this article. 59. John Umeh, see note 56, p. 72. 60. The promise of reincarnation is endlessly recalled in daily life

because Igbo names often refer to the idea?the names Nna-nna

{father's father) or Nne-Nna {father's mother) mean that the child so named is the reincarnation of his or her father's father or mother.

61. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 11.


contends that the very order and visible discipline of the internal store of knowledge implies a parallel realm of

potential knowledge that is disorganized, uncontrolled,

beyond its bounds and therefore needs to justify itself, not the reverse. Access to and trust in the knowledge contained in this undisciplined, external, disembodied archive would, however, fundamentally reconfigure the

relationship between artist and work, placing greater emphasis on artist (and her community) rather than work as the site of art memory. Such shifts offer the tantalizing promise of reconstructing a history of ?/? art, and other

ephemeral art, that is thoroughly unhinged from physical objects. These histories would also finally shut down decades of insistent shouts that ?/? is "dead" or

"dying" because it is not physically visible.

In Archive Fever Derrida's meditation on Yerushalmi's

"Monologue with Freud" makes it clear that re

theorizing divinatory archives as knowledge, not belief,

requires profound epistemological adjustment. Derrida is staggered by a moment in Yerushalmi's text in which

he, struggling to arrange Freud's archive in a way that

firmly establishes his intellectual intentions, finally turns to and addresses Freud's ghost.62 That is, Yerushalmi, a

scholar, addresses Freud, a ghost, directly. Yerushalmi's

scriptive act sends Derrida into an intellectual tailspin. At the moment of direct address, he realizes, the Freud whose life and words exist in the physical archive is "no

longer treated as a witness in the third person (terstis); he finds himself ca//eof to witness as a second person. A

gesture incompatible in principle with the norms of classical scientific discourse, in particular with those of

history or of philology, which had presided over the same book up to this point."63 Yerushalmi lifts his eyes from the physical archive in front of him and looks instead at the ghost who has been standing next to him the entire time. In that moment Derrida sees, "the

coming of a scholar of the future, a scholar who, in the future and so as to conceive of the future, would dare to

speak to the phantom. A scholar who would dare to admit that he knows how to speak to the phantom, even

claiming that this not only contradicts or limits his

scholarship but will in truth have conditioned it. . . . "64

Yet Derrida recognizes that Yerushalmi's brave act is borne of and endlessly located in frustration?the very title, "Monologue with Freud," anticipates an

unresponsive addressee. In contrast, the dibi?'s identical direct address to the ?/? artist is not borne of frustration

but of certainty, and it fully expects a reply. Such an address promises to bear fruit, to elicit a response from she who is addressed. That powerful divinatory act in its entirety, not scriptive but performed in time,

fundamentally repositions the archive from mere

repository of traces of the past into an unfolding archive of the future.65

To create a balance between knowledge contained in

physical and intangible archives, we must adopt a more

equitable blend of methods, one that more accurately reflects the diversity of this region. To adopt wholesale a

model rooted in an Igbo religious philosophy and

cosmology?that is, to rely entirely on oral history and

divinatory knowledge?would also be a mistake, as this

ignores the fact that religious practice, and culture in

general in southeastern Nigeria, and in fact across the

continent, exists in profoundly intercultural diversity. Religious practice in southeastern Nigeria moves between Islam, traditional Igbo religion, traditional

religious practices of other ethnic groups in this

region, and numerous denominations of Christianity. Additionally, as the university-trained Nsukka artists and their project of natural synthesis make clear, academic art training (studio and art history) may have originated in the West, but it is now very much a part of Nigerian intellectual culture. To completely discard art historical

methodologies predicated on the assumption of a

physical archive would, then, constitute a facile denial of this diversity. However, there is need for greater diversity and balance in our approach to the study of

ephemeral art?more attention to placing equitable trust

65. In contrast to this insertion of time, dependence upon physical archives of Uli in isolation encourages us to talk about the work in a

way that freezes it in time. I have found that as artists paint, and

immediately after the work is completed, the artists themselves, their

patrons, and the audience apply a complex repertoire of aesthetic evaluations and formal appraisals to the work. I have also seen this

vocabulary applied to drawings on paper. After the work disappears, however, such detailed terms are no longer used. When artists' work

is recalled after its demise, more attention is given to the artists, themselves?how financially successful they were, how prominent their family was, the ease with which they created their work, their

many children and grandchildren, and other roles they played in the

village?while the formal aspects of the work are described in only vague terms. This is a reality that many Africanist art historians have

confronted when collecting oral histories about artists. Descriptions of the work are so vague that it would be impossible to do an analysis of

stylistic changes over time. When the works are preserved, however, we become mired in such issues, and never get past the object and to the intangible archive. These facts are almost completely obscured in

studies of African art by the pressures of the object and archive that emanate from the wider field of art history.

62. Ibid., pp. 33-81. 63. Ibid., p. 41. 64. Ibid., p. 39.


in and creating a balance between Ose n?abo, the two

eyes with which one sees the material world, and Ose ora, the eye with which one sees the Spirit and the

world in addition.66

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Arnot, A. S.

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Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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66. John Umeh, see note 56, pp. 71-72.

Article Contentsp. [11]p. 12p. 13p. 14p. 15p. 16p. 17p. 18p. 19p. 20p. 21p. 22p. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32

Issue Table of ContentsRES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 48, Permanent/Impermanent (Autumn, 2005), pp. 1-206Front MatterEditorial [pp. 5-10]People Have Three Eyes: Ephemeral Art and the Archive in Southeastern Nigeria [pp. 11-32]Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in Tenth- to Sixteenth-Century West Africa [pp. 33-44]Censorship and Iconoclasm: Unsettling Monuments [pp. 45-60]Recycling Icons and Bodies in Chinese Anti-Buddhist Persecutions [pp. 61-68]Modifications of Ancient Maya Sculpture [pp. 69-82]Roman Oscilla: An Assessment [pp. 83-105]Turning Tale into Vision: Time and the Image in the "Divina Commedia" [pp. 106-122]Building outside Time in Alberti's "De re aedificatoria" [pp. 123-134]Restoration as Re-Creation at the Sainte-Chapelle [pp. 135-154]Documents and DiscussionsThe Constitution of Pleasure: Franois-Joseph Belanger and the Chteau de Bagatelle [pp. 155-162]Composing Vinteuil: Proust's Unheard Music [pp. 163-165]Diskotel 1967: Israel and the Western Wall in the Aftermath of the Six Day War [pp. 166-178]The "Kulturbolschewiken" I: Fluxus, the Abolition of Art, the Soviet Union, and "Pure Amusement" [pp. 179-192]Aby Warburg in America Again: With an Edition of His Unpublished Correspondence with Edwin R. A. Seligman (1927-1928) [pp. 193-206]

Back Matter

sarah adams - people have three eyes (ephemeral art and the archive in southeastern nigeria)

Documents

eyes ephemeral art

jstor archive

art memory

intangible archive of

trusted digital archive

studies of ephemeral

absence of mural

peabody museum ofarchaeology