Olu Oguibe : The Triple Vision

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems "Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"

Three Major Distinctive and Interrelated Streams: Creative, Critical, Political

Olu Oguibe's career can be divided into three major streams. The first is his creative work. The second is his critical work. The third is his political activity. These distinctions are crude but helpful. They are crude because all three strands are interrelated. Creativity informs his critical activity, while the critical may also demonstrates a political engagement. The creative, in its own domain, could also express a political engagement. An ideal summation of the three interrelated strands would be a word or an expression that demonstrates their mutuality, but I dont have such a word in mind right now and so will use a visual symbol, the visual symbol Kuntunkantan of the Akan/Gayaman Adinkra, in which four circles are bisected by a fifth circle, as the four circles converge to create a quadrilateral at their centre, a centre shared with the fith circles bisecting them all, suggesting the convergence of different forms to create a unified form, while the converging forms retain their distinctiveness, in terms of form, mode of expression and disciplinary context, as the case may be.

Kuntunkantan

With reference to the creative dimension of Oguibe's work, I refer to his transformation of reality in terms of imaginative form in poetry and the visual arts. In terms of his critical work, I describe his work as an art critic and art historian and his autobiographical writing, his interviews and other verbal expressions. His explicit political activity I understand as his work as Secretary-General of the University of Nigeria Students Union, University of Nsukka 1983-1985 during his BA and perhaps after that.

Creative : Poetry

According to his website his poetry collections are A Gathering Fear: Poems (Boomerang Press, Bayreuth, 1992;Kraft Books, Ibadan, 1992), Songs for Catalina (Limited edition, Savannah Press, London, 1994) and A Song from Exile (Boomerang Press, Bayreuth, 1990).

Creative : Visual Art

His website particularly the PDF summary shows some of his work in the visual arts. This work is summed up, up to a point, in this review of his work as a member of the Nsukka art school that emerged under the inspiration of Uche Okeke and Obiora Udechukwu. This school is impressively described by one of its members, Sylvester Ogbechie in "A Gathering of the Clan" . Other works of Oguibe's are visible on various sites. These include The installations Ethnographia 2.0 and Game, the painting Lovers, the impromptu installation and performance Bridge, the site-specific installation Brewster House, 2002,Ashes, all at his interview with Saul Ostrow , the Wall sculpture at http://www.realartways.org/archive/visualArts/olu-oguibe-201103.html and http://www.parkwaterarts.org/archives/130, his ipad doodles , the painting Untitled VI,

the installation

Keep it Real : Memorial to a Youth ,

the painting Cocoyams , his painting Martyr the ipad paintings.

Critical : Art and Other Communicative Forms in their Psychological and Social Nexus

His critical work includes a number of books and essays. This critical work can be understood in terms of four major divisions. The first division is represented by a focus on the study of art, particularly, the visual arts, in terms of their formal character and the creative processes of the artists in bringing them to birth within the context of the nexus of influences, social and individual, that enable the distinctive transformative effort of the artist. The second division is a focus on social conditions as shaping the nature, the form and evocative or significatory power of art and communicative forms and the lives of artists and participants in communicative communities. I expect that in some of his writings, he combines these two closely related preoccupations in the study of art. The third thread consists in the development of theoretical constructs that engage with these issues in the study of art in order to provide a body of general ideas interpreting and correlating these explorations. Critical : Autobiographical Writings and Interviews

The fourth unit is his autobiographical writing and interviews. These provide insight into his self perception in the context of how he presents himself in public. Examples of these autobiographical writing are his essay on citizenship and ethnic tensions in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil War "Lessons from the Killing Fields" (Transition, No. 77 (1998) and his essay on the Nigeria poet and scholar Esiaba Irobi "Esiaba Irobi: The Tragedy of Exile", (Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Issue #7, Aug 2010). These autobiographical essays and other writings of his suggest that he lives a conflicted citizenship in relation to his native country Nigeria, a conflict emerging from traumas relating to the Nigerian Civil War and questions about the role of his native Igbo ethnic group, which was at the centre of Biafra, the state that fought against Nigeria in the war, in Nigerian history.

This conflict is summed up at one end by Esiaba Irobi, speaking from his position as a Nigerian scholar in the US, describing himself as a Biafran who "has lived all his life in exile in Nigeria, the United Kingdom and the USA"( Nnorom Azuonye, "My e-Conversation With Esiaba Irobi", Sentinel Poetry), by Obododimma Oha, from his position as a scholar at Nigeria's University of Ibadan ("A Risen Sun That Shines Forever", X-Pens, Thursday, December 1, 2011) describing Nigeria, where he lives, as still at war with Biafra, with which he identifies and Chinua Achebe's parting essay lamenting what he understands as the correlation between Igbo marginalisation and the inadequacies of Nigeria.

"El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness" as Thematic and Methodological Pivot

An essay that could be used as A pivot in terms of which to examine Oguibe's work is his great essay "El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness"(African Arts, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter, 1998). The essay demonstrates the linguistic sensitivity of a poet, the conceptual sophistication of a philosophic mind, a probing sensitivity to artistic processes in the encounter between the body, concrete material and the self, the environmental context as a matrix for creativity and the integration of these axial points within the transformative matrix of artistic creativity concretised in the formal product in its achieving distinct form. From the range of engagements represented by this essay, we could move to his essay "Forsaken Geographies : Cyberspace and the New World Other" (http://www.camwood.org) in its questioning of the vision of globalisation represented by a vision of global communication and information sharing in terms of inequalities in access to the opportunities afforded by the Internet. Considerations of the emergence of communicative and expressive forms within the ambit of individual creativity and the social enablements and transmissions of this creativity takes us into his work on African art and the struggle between this art and questions of the local and the universal, the African and the Western, global peripheries and global centres. These issues are given body in his book on Ezo Egonu,. Uzo Egonu, an African Artist in the West ( Sylvester Ogbechie review) a pioneering text in the still nascent field of full length, detailed studies of African visual and performance artists, followed years later by Sylvester Ogbechie's book on Ben Enwonwu,Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Amazon; G.T. Salami review ) by works on the performance artist Fela Anikulapo Ransome-Kuti, and perhaps other book s I dont know about, and complemented by the more robust scope of publication on African writers, of which Ezenwa Ohaeto's Chinua Achebe biography is a pioneering biography of an African writer, efforts truncated by his being unable to complete his Wole Soyinka biography on account of his sad transition. The Journey from Here Where does the artist and scholar go from here? A continuing emphasis on critical writing? An emphasis on discussions of art in terms of its aesthetic power and creative contexts, , which focus, as in the Anatsui essay and "The Burden of Painting" (camwood.org) and "On Art and Magic"

(camwood.org) is the most exciting writing of his I have read, an emphasis on art in the context of the struggle between competing power claims, on which he is also eloquent and very informative, a correlation of poetry, painting and installation art and criticism, the personal and the public? A renewed engagement with active political activity, perhaps using these media?