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Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960S, Nigeria

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Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960S, Nigeria CHAPTER!"! Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria Chika Okeke-Agulu On the contrary, no experience that is interpreted or reflected on can be characterized as immediate, just as no critic or interpreter can be entirely believed if he or she claims to have achieved an Archimedean perspective that is subject neither to history nor to a social setting. EDWARD W. SAID (1993:32) The Osogbo group of artists, particularly those identified with the Mbari Mbayo Club and summer schools and art workshops between 1962 and 1966, has been compared with other contemporary workshop-trained artists else- where in Africa. Often their work has been treated as direct products of the colonial or romantic imaginations of European teachers. However, critics have questioned the cultural authenticity of such work—produced, as it was, under the influence of primitivist European teachers. These positions presuppose the gullibility, even naïveté, of the workshop-trained artists; the cunning, impe- rialist ideas of their European teachers; and a skewed, unequal power rela- tionship between the semiliterate African student and the European teacher.1 Put simply, they raise questions about the authenticity of the work produced by these artists and, related to this, the pedagogical and thus power relation- ship between the European workshop masters and their African students. I am equally interested in these issues, but not along the same lines as previ- ous commentators on the work Osogbo artists. Whereas most observers see another familiar story echoed in other workshops elsewhere on the continent, I argue that Osogbo was a trans-genre phenomenon in which the person and creative vision of Duro Ladipo loomed large in previously unacknowledged ways. Ladipo’s contribution to the making of Mbari Mbayo was not only fun- damental but also significantly placed it outside the horizon of one single dis- ciplinary domain. In other words, Osogbo’s uniqueness, it seems to me, lies in its production, through individual and collective work of those involved in it, Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2013. Indiana University Copyright 154 Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. a veritable Gesamtkunstwerk in the Wagnerian sense, which ultimately calls for a closer examination of how this might dislodge assumptions about the work produced by the artists, their relationship with their so-called teachers, and the nature and vectors of influences and ideas within the collective. In exploring these matters, I pay particular attention to the involvement of the artists in dance, theater, and music as members of Ladipo’s theater com- pany before the 1962–64 summer schools and art workshops that introduced them to painting and printmaking. Until the late 1960s, Georgina Beier and the artists participated in the design and production of Ladipo’s performances even as they created the collective murals and individual paintings and prints in which previous commentators have tended to locate the artists’ creative output. This historical fact is crucial to our understanding of the workshop and its artists, for it compels a rethinking of the ways the Mbari Mbayo proposed a radically different model of contemporary art practice that is rooted in Yoruba visual cultures yet reflexively modernist and postcolonial. I thus argue that Mbari Mbayo was an interdisciplinary club and workshop in which Ladipo was a central figure. Second, the Osogbo work refuses the (in) authenticity arguments canvassed by the group’s most ardent promoters and critics. Their simultaneous participation in the production of contemporary theater, dance, painting, and printmaking, and their inventive combination of Yoruba visual cultural practices with modern artistic and performance forms and techniques is thoroughly new. Yet I suggest that the artists’ identification with and recuperation of indigenous religious beliefs and notions of being, and their postcolonial cultural nationalism, are crucial to understanding their attraction to and involvement in the Mbari Mbayo Club and workshops. It also helps explain why artistic production at Mbari Mbayo was a transdisciplinary practice, “the oscillation between visual and performing arts being,” as dele jegede has noted, “[its] notable characteristic” (1983:60). Mbari Mbayo, Osogbo Jean Kennedy, an American art historian resident in Nigeria, published an account of an Mbari Mbayo festival she most likely witnessed in 1967 (Kennedy 1968). Her story is worth revisiting, for it captures some of the essential grounds for the argument I make in this chapter. The festival of arts—echoing the annual ritual of renewal during which priests and priestesses of Osun, the tutelary deity of the Osun River and Osogbo town—was convened by artists associated with Mbari Mbayo Club, whose central space was located on the town’s main street. Spanning several days, the event was marked by outdoor performances by local and visiting dance troupes; an art exhibition including work by artists associated Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2013. Indiana University Copyright RETHINKING!MBARI!MBAYO 155 Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. with the Mbari art workshops as well as other forms of contemporary Nigerian “popular” art; the performance of one of Duro Ladipo’s major operas, Moremi; a drama, The Fall, produced by Theatre Express, a Lagos-based group; and sketches that included a rousing performance by the artist Twins Seven-Seven. In between were visits to important shrines in the town, displays in the market square of carved, painted and beaded figures from the Osun shrine, and a large procession to the palace of the Otaoja of Osogbo—with shrine sculptures on loan from the Timi of Ede—directed by Ladipo. In one photograph accompany- ing Kennedy’s story, Ladipo is seen helping a young participant heave a shrine sculpture onto his head for the procession; in another he leads a group from a neighboring town in a drumming session. These two images, I think, point to the centrality of Ladipo’s presence in Mbari Mbayo, and also to his role in developing a visual practice in which art and theater were organically and seam- lessly interwoven in ways that are unprecedented in the annals of modern and contemporary African art. Mbari Mbayo began in 1962 as an offshoot of the Mbari Writers and Artists Club established in Ibadan in summer 1961 by several Nigerian and African writers and artists with Ulli Beier, the German-born critic, writer, and teacher who in 1957 co-founded the literary magazine Black Orpheus. Conceived of as a laboratory of new ideas, practices, and activities spanning theater, fine arts, and literature by an emergent postcolonial generation, the inaugural programs at Ibadan included an art exhibition by Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, and the summer course for artists and art teachers conducted by two architects, the South African Julian Beinart and Pancho Guedes, a Portuguese based in Mozambique. The Osogbo Club specifically grew out of two converging cir- cumstances, Duro Ladipo’s need to establish an independent theatrical space for his increasingly successful plays and choral productions; and Beier’s deci- sion, at the completion of the 1961 inaugural Ibadan workshop, to initiate a similar program for young artists unencumbered by what he thought were strictures of formal art training.2 Commissioned by the Ataoja of Osogbo on May 17, 1962 (Duro-Ladipo and Kolawole 1997:104), with the premiere of the first of Ladipo’s trilogy, Oba Moro, the Mbari Mbayo gallery hosted an exhibi- tion of Susanne Wenger’s work followed in August by the first of the sum- mer art workshops conducted by Guyanese artist and scholar Denis Williams, weeks after he and Beinart ran the second workshop at Ibadan.3 The story of the emergence of the first Mbari Mbayo artists from the summer workshops is well chronicled in the literature: Jacob Afolabi and Rufus Ogundele emerged from Williams’s 1962 and 1963 workshops, respectively; Twins Seven-Seven, Muraina Oyelami, Adebisi Fabunmi, Jimoh Buraimoh, and Tijani Mayakiri were products of the 1964 workshop led by Georgina Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Press. All © 2013. Indiana University Copyright 156 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. Beier, who had relocated to Osogbo from Zaria in northern Nigeria sometime in 1963.4 The pedagogical conditions and axes of creative flow and exchange within the workshops have been a matter of longstanding controversy, with the apologists often claiming that no structured teaching took place; instead the young artists, motivated primarily by the force of their latent individual visions and creativity, matured rapidly with little guidance (Beier 1968:109). Critics have instead argued that the pedagogical environment in which the artists developed had all the marks of normative art instruction, with teach- ers and students performing their expected roles (jegede 1983; see also Naifeh 1981). Neither argument sufficiently explains or accounts for the impact of con- fluent vectors that have left their marks on the artistic productions of the Mbari Mbayo workshops. For it is clear that the political climate of newly independent Nigeria; the rapidly evolving artistic, intellectual, and social landscape; and the interflow of congruent and conflicting agendas of individuals associated with the workshops created an unprecedented context for developing new forms and ideas.
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