Iconoclash Or Iconoconstrain Truth and Consequence in Contemporary Benin B®And Brass Castings
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Iconoclash or Iconoconstrain Truth and Consequence in Contemporary Benin B®and Brass Castings Joseph Nevadomsky YOU WANT THE TRUTH? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH. cally strategic, at the same time. The documented barricade —JACK NICHOLSON AS COL. JESSUP, IN A FEW GOOD MEN (1992) disarticulates the post-1897 production of cast objects from pre- 1897 castings, creating a dichotomy between categorizations— … UNTIL THE LIONS HAVE THEIR OWN HISTORIANS, THE Euro-American aesthetics and art trade vs. Benin civic efficacies HISTORY OF THE HUNT WILL ALWAYS GLORIFY THE HUNTER. and power memory objects—and in the end constitutes an intel- —CHINUA ACHEBE, THE ART OF FICTION (1994:3) lectual dissociation. The date disenfranchises twentieth century Benin castings at the same time that it adds substantial worth to pre-boundary objects. One has somehow to deconstruct the n his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Icono- border crossing between classical Benin art and contemporary clash Bruno Latour (2002) questions the (art) histori- Benin art as exemplified by the temporal cutoff. The difference cal narrative of modernity and turns it into a matter of in merit/value between an object made in the 1890s and, say, doubt. What happens, he asks, if iconoclasm is not a another made ca. 1900–1920 is in the perception of the com- definite dividing line between those who commit the modity as dictated by the date. Scavenging canonical castings hideous act of breaking images and those who don’t? result in few pickings these days, and a change in the academic What if we are all iconoclasts and what if we only differ by the weather makes a paradigm shift likely. Ironically, now that the motives and attitudes we have towards images?1 twenty-first century is here, art historians are researching twen- I 2 Fiddling with Latour’s questions allows for a blast of fresh tieth century Benin cast objects, true to their calling. air into the study of Benin art, especially for gauging the exten- As one examines twentieth century brass-casting, the absence sion of the boundaries of traditional brass-casting in the once- of documentation is striking. Not until the latter decades of that upon-a-time or forever-and-a-day Benin kingdom. Here I look century has attention turned to acknowledging the production at Latour’s questions as they relate to Benin’s brass-casting over of one hundred years, such as Philip Dark’s An Introduction to the past hundred years. I argue that both the Benin palace and Benin Art and Technology (1973), but even here the study of cast- Western art historical scholarship indulges in iconoclastic ges- ing techniques sought data not to examine twentieth century tures. Just as art historians think of 1897, the year British troops objects, but to understand the classical corpus, as in Dark’s ear- looted the Benin palace and deprived the kingdom of many of its lier Benin Art (1969). It raises, Sylvester Ogbechie says, “the issue artifacts, as a date which has changed artistic productions once of how to theorize Edo-Benin art in the era after the end of its and forever (the conceit of a pre-1897 art heritage and a post- ‘history’” (2007). 1897 kitsch consequence) the palace focuses on 1897 in order to The cultural contours of Benin City in landscape, ideology, brand Benin art as an eternal reference to the past/heritage and hierarchy, and social formations have also infected art histori- to justify demands of repatriation. cal interests in directing the studies of classical sculptural pro- The removal of palace objects after the punitive event made duction in the Ẹdo (Bini) Kingdom of Benin to acquisitions the date real and artificial, historically accurate and art histori- removed from the palace in 1897. An art historical myopia inci- 14 | african arts AUTUMN 2012 VOL. 45, NO. 3 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00008 by guest on 30 September 2021 14-27_CS5.5.indd 14 5/24/2012 3:55:20 PM 1 Brass castings in shop on Igun St., Benin City. A THE PLOT AND THE PLACE few shops, like this one, are retail only. Most do cast- The former Kingdom of Benin, with its capital in Benin City, ing on the premises as well as sales. PHOTO: JOSEPH NEVADOMSKY encapsulated now as Edo State, Nigeria, included an area that in its heyday extended over a large part of southwest Nigeria. It is known internationally for brass-cast art and ivory carving. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, this kingdom, as it expanded, produced commemorative art of such exceptional quality that it now enjoys a fame placing it at the apex of Black dentally accorded market value to objects, in Ogbechie’s telling African art, on a par with Renaissance cast art, Classical Indian brief, “whose veneration in Western historiography consigns all brasses, and Chinese bronzes. In 1897 the British invaded the subsequent products of Benin art to the realm of lesser objects” Kingdom of Benin. Britain sought to gain control over trade on (2007) (i.e., “fakes,” or “repros”). the Niger River and in the Bight of Benin. The “massacre” of a I show that these two different historical imaginations of Benin trade delegation to Benin precipitated the invasion, later justi- City are deeply entangled. By virtue of their mutual ensnarement fied by British morality. The British destroyed the palace, exiled they have also created a constrained environment, an iconocon- the king, hanged the chiefs guilty of the massacre, and confis- strain, in which initiatives of creative efforts on the side of brass- cated palace ivories and brass-cast objects that were shipped to casters appear to be stymied, but in fact are not. The innovations England and sold to offset expedition costs, ostensibly ravaging a of production butt up against the hegemonic frame that has its civilization’s memory markers and visual imagery. genesis in the coded 1897 date and in the corner of Airport and With the kingdom conquered and the king ousted, Benin art Adesogbe/Plymouth Roads, a.k.a. “The Palace.” A potential radi- production of merit was considered defunct by subsequent schol- cal art progressivism is subdued, maybe trumped, by the revan- arship. Or was it? A British fort built on the royal palace grounds chist conservatism of kingship manicured by art historians. The became the center of administrative authority. The British set up result is a conceptual stalemate that prevents both scholars and a prison and a hospital adjacent to the old palace, and near the actors from conceiving alternative ways to understand contem- sites of the notorious crucifixion trees that had brought moral porary Benin brass casting, but that is only one-half the story— outrage from England. A crucifixion tree became the ninth hole the short answer is not the whole answer. of a golf course at the newly established European Club (now VOL. 45, NO. 3 AUTUMN 2012 african arts | 15 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/AFAR_a_00008 by guest on 30 September 2021 14-27_CS5.5.indd 15 5/24/2012 3:55:22 PM (this page) 2 Igun St. artisan modeling a replica plaque based on a the Benin Club) a month after the conquest. In the same year, photograph in one of the major art history texts. however, a colonial report by Sir Ralph Moor, the Consul-Gen- PHOTO: JOSEPH NEVADOMSKY eral, states that brass-casting was alive and well, commercialism 3 Shop brass figures Igun St, one of many that is a com- had quickly replaced clientage, and colonial patrons took up the bination of contemporary and traditional motifs. slack left by an empty palace (HMSO 1899). I surmise that the PHOTO: JOSEPH NEVADOMSKY same kinds of objects were produced in this post-palace period (opposite) for a very simple reason: if the British had removed the brass 4 Braising and welding are techniques used to fill in, objects from the palace because they were seen by local casters repair, or weld components. Oloton Lane. to desire them, their future needs could be satisfied by casting PHOTO: JOSEPH NEVADOMSKY more of the same (Nevadomsky in press, 2012). Benin City was not shell-shocked by European conquest. The checks and balances built into Benin’s structural and cognitive ex-kingdom did not enter a catatonic or epileptic state. Contact fabric (e.g., the palace vs. town distinction), fostered compro- with Europe, which began in 1485, was followed by the exchange mise and internal political turmoil, warfare with other chief- of emissaries, trade, and diplomatic delegations from the Portu- doms, and alterations in hierarchical command, from Ẹwuare, guese, Spanish, Dutch, French, with the British incursions the Ọzọlua, and Ẹsigie, the “warrior” kings of the fifteenth–sixteenth most recent. Swainson, the British trader, received a wedding centuries, to the internecine conflicts in the seventeenth century, gift of an equestrian figure from Ọvonramwen in 1892. British to the Ọba/Iyase (Ogbaseki era) and NCNC/AG politics of the reporters such as Sir Richard Burton bounced in and out of the mid-twentieth century, and the Midwest State Movement con- palace from time to time. Nor was there a rupture in the ritual tested by the NCNC Otu-Ẹdo-Ọwegbe/ROF Ogbonism (Neva- and craft structures of society. Benin, ideologically ensconced domsky 2010, n.d.a). in the fabric of a highly integrated society and former empire, is The colonial government exiled Ọba Ọvonramwen after 1897, a total society and functions as a total metaphor. However trau- but reestablished kingship in 1914 as part of a policy of Indirect matic the British encounter appears, political conflict had racked Rule and in response to World War I global strategies.