AN ARTISTIC
ROAD TO GOLOTTA
A medical
doctor by name Augustino Neto from Mozambique had a
flouring hospital. In it he helped the sick to regain
their health. But not really. Soon he felt in his blood
the call of revolution. He abandoned his medical
practice and took to the bush. He opted for the
people’s revolution, the triumph of freedom over
slavery. He composed a poem for the revolution: “I no
longer wait. It is I who am awaited. Hope is
ourselves.”
Augustino Neto
was not an artist but revolutionary. But somehow artists
seem to share with him the response to the inner call to
take the weapons of their art to the frontline. Theirs
is not a mission to spill human blood, but to conquer
the human mind through creative conversions. And yet
artists are not evangelists. But their artistic projects
often sound like private crusades which they plan to
take to the people so that scales may fall from their
eyes, so that they may begin to see themselves as they
really are – as a people full of fragile hopes, and
living among menacing eagles in the sky, predators
of their social wealth – prodigals who have
abandoned their homesteads, and the people, matadors
eluded by the snares of the forest buffalo.
C. Krydz
Ikwuemesi has also evolved his own project, a
Nigerian artistic project: “My vision (of a Nigeria,
mine) in perpetual gesturing at fulfilment, which
never comes true, owning to the exertion of a wicked
oligarchy…” The words used by the artist sound like
arrows carrying vengeful blood at their tip. This is,
however, metaphoric. It is their artistic potency that
waters his creative vision of Golgotha. He addresses or
rather confronts “ fire-eating, gladiatorial leaders”
in Golgotha “ bearing the cross of the decentralization
of violence, corruption and injustice …” Nigeria for
him bleeds from the pains of a leadership, which, to
borrow Achebe’s label is “deodorized dogshit.”
Picasso painted
“Guernica”, a canvass of haunting images that
underscores human cruelty as shown in the terror-bombing
of innocent people in the city of Guernica, the ancient
capital of the Basques in northern Spain. Francesca de
Goya painted “The Third of May” whose images are like a
revelation out of depth of psychology and of the human
mind’s ugly distortions with the chilling effect of a
brutal posture. Orosco and Sequiros used their public
murals to awaken public conscience and implant a
futuristic vision of society where once gloom
reigned. This was their artistic affirmation of the
people’s revolution. Demas Noko had to paint his “1959”
as a parody on colonialism and its ugly dance of
estranged marionettes.
The painting
project Golgotha sets its agenda against the
lurid landscape of our national life and uses paint
to create images that that have a point-blank range
of a covert pistol from The Devil’s Alternative
(Forsythe). Golgotha is the place of skulls. Nigeria
assuredly is also the place of skulls. She needs an
artistic cross or a redemptive one , for that matter,
so that “the orphan child may be led through the
forest paths of life.” Until then, it is the task of the
creative artist to expose a bleeding anus, the aching
pains of a tired foot, the withered skin of an old
shoe that needs the caressing blade of the cobbler’s
knife. She needs someone to stem the tides of an
insistent flood breaking the waistline of a fragile
clay hut or hold back the wayward hands of a thief
exploring the inner depth of someone’s side pockets.
Golgotha is the place of skulls. Nigeria is Golgotha.
She needs the dissolving powers of art to expose her
famished road(s) (Ben Okri), and plant an oasis in her
desert wastelands. Golgotha is the place of skulls. And
Nigeria is Golgotha. She needs the haunting images from
painting canvasses erected by an artistic Krydz to her
over flooded rivers so that from ancient ruins new forms
may rise. Golgotha is the place of skulls. Nigeria is
Golgotha. Only through art can an artist engage the
conquering shadows of the night -- the evil snares of
the political predator. This. the poet Tanure Ojaide,
has painted in vivid poetic colours:
A flag is
fertile ground to
plant a
common fate
Better still
when green and white
When we
wrote our adopted name
in one flag
We least
expected a charger
to grow into
a monster
with
voracious years
and occupy
the land mass
there’s
hardly space to breathe. (1990:69).
Elsewhere
Chinna Achebe has said that writers do not support
governments even while Nigeria awarded him a literary
prize of one million naira. They tell them what they are
doing wrongly. Similarly, the creative artist cannot
tell Nigeria how to solve her problems posed by a
depressed economy and ill winds of inflation. He merely
sensitizes the population to the receding lines of their
hopes and sad condition – their state of amnesia or the
cry of the tethered goat seized by the birth pains of
“goat labour.”
Something akin to creating a vision of Golgotha could be
found in this apocalyptic picture from Ben Okri’s
Fanished Road:
I wondered
through the violent terrain, listening to the laugher
of spirits. There was a crescent moon in the sky ,
darkness over the houses, broken bottles and splintered
wood on the road. I wandered barefoot. Fires sprouted
over rubbish heaps, men were dragged out of cars, thick
smokes billowed from houses. Stumbling along … I found
myself in a dark street. There was a solitary candle
burning on a stand near an abandoned house. I heard a
deep chanting that made the street tremble. Shadows
stormed past, giving off a stench of sweat and rage.
Drums vibrated in the air. A cat cried out as if it
had been thrown on to a fire. Then a gigantic
masquerade burst out of the road, with plumes of smoke
billowing from its head. The masquerade was terrifying
and fiery, its funeral roar filled the street with an
ancient silence. I watched it in horror. (11)
This transient
play of Armagedom is like a painter’s surreal vision of
Nigeria. This horrendous picture which conveys the
artistic burdens of Golgotha needs the redemptive power
of art to engage and mediate it in the same a way that
the elected may wear proudly their epaulettes of grace
and the medal of eternal presence in contrast to the
twisted fate of the children of perdition, the
reprobates. Such a halo “belongs not only to those who
have publicly taught sacred science, by word or by pen,
but also to those who have taught in private fashion (by
the artist and his art) when occasion presented itself.
They that instruct many to justice shall shine like
stars for all eternity” (Lagrange O.P . 1952: 248).
Until then, the artist-painter must confront with the
quivering tip of his pen, pencil and brush, the evil
snares of a forest buffalo, the menacing and ugly
feet of the slimy octopus, the threatening scars of
the forest cactus, the silent but grim face of the
benighted dancer, the talons of the fiery eagle, the
erosions of the whirlwinds and the elusive shadows of
the of the night masquerade.
And we ask, why
does the artist marshal his art to confront the
unclipped wings of injustice, the acidic sweat of
dancers who have “defiled the occult regions of the
market” (Achebe). There are, of course, soothing and
cleaning sources for the validity of art in filling
a vacuum so that, instead of art imitating life, life
begins to imitate art as it dispenses the wisdom of self
liberation at the doorsteps of everyday living. Here
are instances from a slim volume by Jacque Barzum on
“The Use and Abuse of Art (1974):
1)
By undermining the ancient presumption that
state and society are justified, art impairs their
effectiveness and thus proves its own case (73).
2)
“… the present conditions of civilized life and
the character of men in the mass are not good enough
of for art to tolerate. Its effulgence pours death
-rays on a substandard society” (73).
3)
“... the life of art – redeems man from the a
deep anxiety for another, like a near-escape from
death, like a long anaesthesia for surgery: it is
a massive blow from which one recovers slowly and
which leaves one changed in ways that only gradually
come to light (74).
4)
“… art gives the beholder a sense of active
well-being and the impression of possessing new
knowledge…Its source, the work of art, has universal
validity and sway “ (75).
5)
“… the life of art - redeems man from these
very conditions and limitations and bestows on him the
blessed estate the earth denies (75)
6)
“After undergoing a masterpiece, we believe
that we know more about ourselves and others, about
this world and the next” (75).
7)
“Every artist … professes to create a world
more real and solid than daily existence …, ( a
world) eternal and indestructible …” (75)
8)
“And since the great works express so
transcendent a reality on the mind by ordinary
material means – words, sounds, colours and lines – art
seems to give proof of a fundamental connection between
man’s life and the infinite” (75)
9)
“Art projects Eliot’s confessional passage of how
“ reality seen through art is equivalent to that which
religion formerly brought within the reach of man.
Both redeem man from selfishness and commonplace”
(76)
10)
“Art has the same essential features, implied in
the cliché … that each work is a universe that only
answers to its own laws, supports itself, internally
coheres, has a new standard of truth” (77).
I have
deliberately quoted copiously from the referenced text
so that we may discern the artistic project of
Golgotha. Through the use of lines, textures,
colours , shapes etc., visual images begin to emerge
from the artist’s atelier as a haunting ground from
which to measure the world – a world unsure of
itself, a world groping from the illusion of man’s
littleness, the frailty of his flesh and body – a world
which inflates itself with vain and vacuous displays.
Ikwuemesi’s art
intervenes, interrogates and mediates and so prevents
the world from falling asleep. With a combination of
haunting images bathed in chromatic strength and the
visual freshness of linear syncopation, lines contour
shapes as shapes define and release the poetic
openness of visual space, soon saturated with
textures that seem to cuddle and reshape images in
their endless configurations like Okigbo’s stars that
come and go “in a coming and going that goes on
for ever.” These are evocative, artistic signposts that
lead us along the artistic road to Golgotha. Their
thematics are clear. They encapsulate and circumscribe
the sordid landscape of Nigeria as Golgotha, namely:
“The other side of paradise”, “A Parliament of
Vultures”, “ A Cry of Anguish”, “ Children of
Violence”, “Learned Ignorance”. Others are “In the
Heart of Golgotha, “Vultures Pick Their Bones”, “And the
Story Continues”, “Dividends of an Uncanny Democracy”,
“Cross over, little brother, cross over”, etc.
Metaphorically, Golgotha is Ikwuemesi’s insistent cry
that what a child sees standing, his father has already
seen sitting. And that he has crossed seven rivers and
returned, carrying burdens of our times – burdens which
an artist, endowed with prophetic vision, translates
into visual images as the corrosive but sobering effects
of art on a benighted world. This is Golgotha, an
artist’s creative vision.
Prof. Chike
C. Aniakor,
Nsukka, 2005
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