ART, ARTISTS, AND THE DEFINITION OF NATIONAL CULTURES AND IDENTITIES
Art often appears as an off-hand engagement by an artist. At the same time, it bears a significant relationship and status to culture and national identity. In other words, Art is more than what it looks like- a piece to be enjoyed or despised depending on what it presents to an audience. Deep within what Art is and can be, it defines nations and cultures and also accords an entity a measure of its identity.
The above art values become evident when one goes beyond what an artwork visually presents. As some encounters show, the mere appearance of objects, doodles, and colour combinations are deeply rooted in an artist’s character, personality, and history. Often the artist may not be aware that what they create is rooted in their subconscious self. Other artists consider their work as products of mere inspiration. But the truth remains that the work of art may present or address the artist’s personality or something about their culture and society. Hence the critic engages the artwork in interpretations.
Works of art succumb to varying interpretive possibilities because people are different from one another. The age-long saying has it that “different strokes for different folks.” For the complex nature of art beyond its appearance, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce (1838–1914) developed three codes natural to the nature of art as ‘cultural symbols’ consisting of iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs.
As a member of society, the artist has the unique gift of converting sentiments and insights from their experience into two broad artistic signs or symbols — metaphors or allegories. Be it allegory or metaphor, works of art carry abstract or complex messages. The word Art used here refers to Fine Art. But, traced to its Latin origin Ars, which means skill equates to the general concept of culture. Counterpoised to culture is nature. Art as culture implies the deployment of skill to provide what nature could not offer humans who are always searching for survival needs and necessities. Art as culture becomes an aid to the fullness of life.
It is crucial to note that our actions and activities are not frivolous. They target goals. Since every action has some reasons, art history always endeavours to understand such reasons and attach them to an artwork. Hence whatever gets made in a cultural space defines it. Artists with their creative works are the core of various definitions of culture.
Below, I engage the artworks by some Nigerian artists assuming Pierce’s narrative order.
When Aina Onabolu (1882–1962) painted “Dr. Oguntona Sapara” (figure 1.) in 1920, he presented an iconic portrait of the subject in extensively regal agbada made from damask. Such was an outing dress style of the elite male emancipado in Lagos, who occupied the areas known as Popo Àgùdà and Popo Amaro. They dominated social and business life there.
Onabolu in Dr. Sapara represented a “dress code revolt” by the emancipados. Before 1892, they dressed like the colonial masters of Lagos with Victorian-style attires, as seen in Herbert Macaulay’s statue in Sabo, Yaba, Lagos.
Some narratives tell how, by 1892, the colonial representative, Governor Carter, began disenfranchising the natives from core business holdings in Lagos. Carter’s treachery brought about identity reclaiming and turned the emancipado, mainly of the Yoruba elite class, to return to the highly regal agbada dress.
For Pierce, such a painting responds to iconic and indexical status. As an indexical sign, the cultural reclaim in clothing and fashion arose from oppression that reinforced cultural memory from Governor Carter’s apartheid policy. It is like seeing smoke without seeing its fire. As an iconic sign, one appreciates only a beautifully made life-like or iconic picture of Dr. Sapara.
A Mobile Telephone Network (MTN) TV advert privileges an indexical sign. The advert showed on billboards and on recharge cards. The President, Olusegun Obasanjo, ushered the mobile telephone into Nigeria, vowing to tackle corruption as a plan for the new democratic government he headed.
In August 2001, MTN debuted in Nigeria with South African scripted and produced TV adverts. Following a year, an indigenous one, “Now I can link with my beloved ones and friends,” replaced it.
In the text, a liable Dad set out to present a scripted talk to an audience but forgot the text at home. A proxy subject — his little daughter at home- used a mobile phone powered by MTN and read the text to her father. The father, acting as if reading from a script before him to the audience, had a mysterious audio connection to the daughter.
A prevailing ideology governing Nigeria unconsciously suggested the TV plot to the author. The audience, who appreciated the advert, considering the accolades the advert earned, were also products of the same ideological state. Endemic corruption — double-dealing or dishonesty is smartness frames the mantra. The advert revealed the extent to which the Nigerian citizen had detoured from the deep and pristine African culture of moral rectitude and forbearance. Children listen and learn from their parents, not the other way around. A child dares not to eulogize a parent in what the TV advert purveyed. A subsection of the advert dares to assert, “Take a Bow, Daddy, Achieve What You Want to Achieve.” The above deception also colours the song “I don get alert, God Win.” One is bound to ask the labour that earned the alert, except God facilitated it. The mindset “yahoo yahoo” eulogizes the brain at work,” in dishonesty is smartness — the above contexts are indexed on corruption as a national malaise.
Solomon Ona Irein Wangboje’s (1930–1998) “Man, Mask and Myth” 1 (1964). The lino-print consists of the portraits of three men, but other components of the title “mask and myth” are not physically identifiable. The three figures represent “man,” “mask” and “myth” as symbols.
Reasoning on the symbolic nature of the print, another point assumes that the artist addressed himself in the composition. Wangboje started his career teaching in a tertiary institution the year he composed the artwork. In the piece, the central figure in the sequence is the mask. It carries the most active profile yet is not represented by a masked figure. Curiously the year Wangboje retired, he responded to an inquiry about his contributions as a teacher, thus, “now that we are no longer anonymous, let us see what we have done.” That Freudian slip of the anonymous stands him as the mask.
Wangboje was a subject whose vocation entails teaching Nigerian citizens on behalf of the government, hence mask. As a mask, the teacher acts on the government’s behalf and represents it.
His voice is the government’s that rightly educates the citizen. Hence, “Man, Mask and Myth” presents dual frames. Wangboje addresses himself while sketching the government’s civic obligation to the citizens through agencies. The myth arises from interpretations imposed on the actions the mask conveys.
“Pope John Paul II” (fig.5) (1983) metal plastocast, by Bruce Onobrakpeya (b. 1933), also is symbolic. The Pope’s image and the resemblance are perfectly accurate. With style in Onobrakpeya, the pontiff is a persona of the Roman Catholic faith. His figures dominate the human clusters, while two unfolded scrolls represent the Christendom narratives. The symbolic index in this print presents the pontiff in a larger-than-life or social status as he leads more than a billion Christian flock. Equally, Erhabor Emokpae’s “Queen Amina of Zaria” (fig. 6) and “Mai Idris Aloma of Bornu” (fig. 7) present figurative subjects.
Queen Amina and Mai Idris Aloma document the cultural and social realities of the feminine and male subjects in northern Nigeria before Islamisation.
However, some artworks deny natural recalls. Such artworks are generally labelled abstract but fit into symbolic metaphors. “Ulism I” (fig.8) by Vincent Chuks Amaefuna is a mixed-media painting. The composition is a mosaic of aquatic objects, beads, and other mixtures amassed in cylindrical, curvilinear, semi-circular, and circular forms with intersecting horizontal and vertical layouts. The colour scheme is a balance between earth colours and shades of blue.
The examples above present instances of definable objects or subject matters, as artworks, that adopted the Piercian semiotic model. Art is a visual text or a signifier of a context — the signified to be interpreted. Significantly, Art pushes forward prevalent cultural attitudes and dispositions of a polity.
By so doing, artworks remain within society as enduring narratives and references in culture, community, or nation.
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