Creative reformation of African art traditions: the iconography of Abayomi Barber Art School

African Arts, Summer, 2009 by Freeborn O. Odiboh

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Since the colonial period, many African artists have been caught in a dilemma (Adepegba 1996) which, up to the 1960s, was phrased as a two-world disposition between tradition and modernity, and reflected in literary works. (1) During this period, the fervor of African nationalism reached a crescendo of expectations and desires for the creation of the new Africa (Vogel 1994). African leaders who had begun to take political control of their nations from colonial administrators vigorously campaigned for anti-Western attitudes among their peoples and raised hopes for nation building through new collective forms of identity that transcended the boundaries of ethnicity; national identity rather than tribal loyalties (Campbell 1997:36-46). Artists followed suit, seeing as their artistic mandate the assertion of African identity and nationhood, as exemplified in Nigeria by the students of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology, Zaria, with their concept and philosophy of natural synthesis, an admixture of tradition and modernism.

Most African artists trained in the style of the Western academy prior to independence considered the media and forms of traditional art as "moribund, perhaps even 'primitive' and void of possibilities for development" (Vogel 1994:179). Nevertheless, they were concerned to express an African identity. They chose to assert themselves artistically by hybridizing their African backgrounds and their Western artistic experiences, often inserting traditional idioms within a contemporary (Western or global) artistic language. This eventually became a feature of most postcolonial art from Africa.

Initially, Western critics were averse to the creative tendency of hybridizing traditional and modern, regarding it as a corruption of the primitive, naive, or authentic Africa. Authors such as Ulli Beier (1960) tended to separate the artist from the reality of his contemporary environment, and to view his formal artistic production as something of a "phenomenon" or "unique occurrence." In contrast, African authors and artists of the same period such as Leopold Senghor (1967) and Yusuf Grillo (Mount 1973) justified the expression of cultural hybridization or recreation in the works of modern African artists in the late colonial and early post-independence period. More recently, Andre Magnin and Jaques Souhillou (Kasfir 1999:134) have suggested that the artistic hybridization of ideas and African tradition and modernity used to be a characteristic of Western academically trained African artists. But that delineation of creativity between the formally trained and the workshop trained artists has disappeared in the postcolonial period.

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In Africa, modern artists may be university trained or workshop trained, as well as self-taught or trained through the apprenticeship method in a local tradition. Before the 1980s, a large number of workshop artists were not formally educated prior to their workshop training and as a consequence were not regarded as "modern" because modernity was linked to the new modern education. However, since the 1980s and 1990s, workshop artists have played critical roles in contemporary African art (Kasfir 1999:134), which places them within the rubric of "modern."

However, artistic developments in the postcolonial period in Africa have proved the futility of artistic categorization by form, content or subject matter. This is because, if the character and forms of the productions of workshop centers such as Osogbo (1963-1966), Frank McEwen's stone carvers in Zimbabwe (1958-1973), or the artists of Ruth Schaffner's Gallery Watatu in Nairobi (1990s) were usually naive, with the artists having little if any Western education (Kasfir 1999), the Abayomi Barber School artists, equally poorly educated, produce super-realistic works described as no different from those of the formally trained (Adepegba 1996). At the same time, some members of those early European-founded workshops, like Osogbo's Jimoh Buraimoh, have since acquired university credentials. Thus an artist's education can no longer shape the form and content of his work, and what different groups of modern African artists hold in common is the idea of reconnecting with the precolonial past, an attitude that pervades all classifications of African artists including those working outside the continent, as part of the perceived Africanization of their art.

It features in the music, theater, film, literature, and visual arts of Africa. Usually, it takes the form of manipulation of materials, subjects, contents, and contexts that are creatively hybridized, reformed, or recreated to make statements about the artist's identity. In art, this attitude is quite visible in West and Central Africa, notably in Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, and the Congo (Kasfir 1999:16-17) where contemporary art creation occurs within a milieu of existing practices, resulting in hybrid images and reflexive content. The situation differs in those areas of Africa not well known for precolonial art, such as Zimbabwe, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. In these areas, which are seldom represented in museum collections of traditional sculptures--such as East Africa and southern Africa, where the precolonial art medium was not recognized as art until recently--the artists often create new forms rather than having recourse to existing ones.