Suzanne Preston Blier Cognitive Nexus

Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju COWACArt The Cosmos of World Art and Correlative Cultural Forms Collaborative Knowledge Creation A Division of Compcros Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

Setting the Stage : The Academic Scholar as a Centre of Learning Within Centres of Learning Between Harvard and the Warburg Institute

The first time I encountered Suzanne Preston Blier was in exploring online the Olympus of learning represented by Harvard, so mythic has the place been in my eyes. Who are those people resident at the peak of that radiant mountain, a global destination that started with the library of one man, John Harvard, an iconic beginning that inspires me with the vision to lay such a foundation with my own library? After all, the Warburg Institute, which has been central to the transformation of art history and the understanding of the significance of various streams Western culture, began with the library of one person, Aby Warburg. The effects of this library on scholarship continue to resonate through the tremors created by the careers of the scholars associated either with the Institute or with the methods of art scholarship pioneered by its founder. Ernst Gombrich, once director of the Institute, and Erwin Panofsky, not a member of the institution but sharing the humanistic and idealistic vision represented by Warburg, are two of these great names in the study of art. Other scholars used its magnificent library ranging over arcane and most uncommon zones of Western culture in creating landscape changing research, as Frances Yates did with

Gionardo Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition on the formative conjunctions between Western esoteric thought and modern since, or encyclopaedic knowledgescapes shot through by a passionately reconfigurative intelligence, as Ernst Cassirer in various fields in philosophy, from epistemology to the scientific, exemplified by Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Encountering Creative Presences and the Empowerment of Recognition: Dante, Virgil and the European Classical Tradition

In the company of scholars and other creative people who redefine the possibilities of scholarship and creativity through the unique ways they embody these reconfigurative cultures, one may be slowly or even rapidly transformed. Did Dante, in his Inferno, walking among Homer and others representing the greatest masters of literature from Western antiquity, seeing from a distance "the lord of those who know", Aristotle, one of the world's ultimate polymaths, not declare in wonder "I walked among them, I, even I"? . Did Dante, on encountering the figure who moved past in silence as he cowered in a dense forest, having woken up inside there from his sleep, in the middle of his life, suggesting a mid life crisis where life's central certainties are tested and many overturned, not declare on learning who the figure was: "Are you Virgil?! Are you he? Are you that fount of splendour from whom flowed such a wide a stream of lordly speech? You are my master and my author! From you alone I learned the singing strain, the poetic spirit, the bello stillo, that does me honour now" Let my great love give me strength, the long hours and bent brow spent learning all your book can teach!"

The University of African Art Facebook to Facebook Talks as Virtual and Cognitive Convergences

It is in a similar spirit as Dante does with the great figures he encounters in his journey though the various regions of the cosmos in the Divine Comedy, of which the Inferno is the first part, that I approach the opportunity to take part in the University of African Art and particularly in its Facebook to Facebook talks. In this instance, we dont need to go to Preston Blier at Harvard, she comes to us in the University of African Art Face-to-Facebook Scholar Talk of Monday, 6 May 2013, a Multilogue, a Multiple Participant Conversation, as described by Moyo Okediji, University of African Art founder and director and initiator and moderator of the Face-to-Facebook talks : "The University of African Art is pleased to present the first in the series titled FACE-TOFACEBOOK Scholar Talks. Our guest is Suzanne Blier, distinguished Harvard professor, extraordinary researcher, world traveler, author of numerous books, winner of countless awards, exceptional teacher, courageous theorist, mentor, mother, philosopher, art historian, and great humanist.

Suzanne Preston Blier has been a leader in the study of African art for more than thirty years. Her interests include architecture, archaeology, iconography, historiography, and theories of African art." Or, am I not using the language of an old technology, not relevant here, a technology in which communication by sensory organs implies face to face meeting, a notion reaching even greater obsolescence with the presence of the global electronic network known as the Internet? So, better put, Blier does not come to us. She remains where she is and we all meet in a virtual dimension, a virtual space. I encountered in Nigeria the conception that the witchcraft of the West is employed in creating scientific wonders in which laws of nature are overcome. Interaction in the virtual space of the Internet is certainly an analogue to the fabled but more mythic than empirically reported witchcraft meetings in Nigeria and perhaps Africa, where these adepts of a mysterious power are described as congregating to do what is not accessible to other humans.

What will Blier Discuss? : Individual Scholarly and General Disciplinary Configurations and Development of the Study of Art History and Criticism on Africa

The wait for Blier's appearance is charged with anticipation. What will she talk about? Her fascination with the more conceptually challenging aspects of African art across disciplines, particularly the visual and performative arts? The relationship between concept and image in her book African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power? Her exploration of the relationship between world view and the management of relationships between space and form in her book The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression? The exploration of continuities between sociology, philosophy, art and architecture in another book Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West Africa? Her amazing and game changing achievement with the Baobab Project and Africa Map, later expanded into World Map? What might be her contributions on the place of the study of African art within the field of art history and criticism, having contributed to shaping this place in her decades of engagement with the discipline? What might be her views on mutuality and self sufficiency in terms of relationships between art history and criticism on Africa and art history and criticism on other parts of the

world, particularly within the dominant paradigm of knowledge developed within Western scholarship? What might she have to say about what it means to be a student or scholar of art history in general or of African art history in particular?

Scholarship as Construction of a Cognitive Image and the Interpretive/Hermeneutic Reconstruction of this Image

Let us try to construct her cognitive image, the shape of knowledge emerging from her scholarly work, beginning with a focus on her books as the most sustained, self contained representation of her engagement with her discipline as a scholar in African art.

Cultural and Social Transformation in Relation to Space

It is possible to understand the complete range of Suzanne Preston Blier's scholarly activity in terms of the intersections of human individuality, social context and material form in the matrix of space and time. World Map, a collaborative, open source mapping project emerging from her pioneering leadership in the mapping of Africa, Africa Map, can be described as a climatic point and axis of orientation of this passion in tracing and interpreting creativity as emerging in terms of a spatio-temporal matrix. World Map integrates the world in terms of a virtual field through which people can collaborate in shaping that virtual reality, and, in consequence, shape individual and social cognitive realities and physical contexts.

A mapping of Blier's scholarly trajectory and questions it provokes will follow. To be continued.