Sculptures and the Idea of Lifelessness

By

Obododimma Oha

There is something about sculptures: they tend to suggest the idea of lifelessness. If this is a confession of a phobia, well, let it be. For your information, I started having that impression right from childhood. Faces of masks that people wore in secular masquerading, which were popularly called “okporompi” in my part of Igboland, scared me for they resembled human faces; in other words, they were projects of mimicry, of resemblance and analogy in the visual mode. But apart from this, there was that morbid resemblance between the lifeless human face of the mask and the face of the person lying in state. I was frightened by lifelessness in them and this dread was extended to sculptures of human figures (you know death is frightening!). In fact, an uncle had a wooden form, called “nwagoro oyibo” and it always frightened me, in spite of the oyibo attached to it. To meet Nwagoro oyibo in my dream was terrible. I always made sure I woke up, but, of course, I held the person sleeping next to me tightly.

Don’t think that I was the first to draw attention between the iconic visual image and lifelessness. The thinker, Michel Foucault, was there before me. He was interested in photography and saw the still-life capturing of the image by the camera as similar to death. The image is a transformation and trans-fixity into deathly or deathsome lifelessness! At the time the person takes a pose for a photograph or is adjusted  by a photographer to have a particular pose, the transformation has taken over: the living is becoming the dead!

In Nigeria, this lifelessness is coming back to frighten me in Rochas Okorocha’s commissioning of sculptors to sculpt his friends in government. First, he commissioned the sculpting of Jacob Zuma, a later discredited president of South Africa. Why Jacob Zuma? Some people were wondering. What has he or his government done for Imo State? But as destiny would have it, Zuma was removed in South Africa and coincidentally, his statue was pushed down in Owerri, Imo State, as if being forced out of government was a kind of death signified by the fall of the statue. See Figure Three below. 

Figure One: Sculpture of Jacob Zuma. (Source: Facebook wall of Dada Babatunde Seun)

Zuma was disgraced out of office in South Africa, a symbolic fall for the sculpture too, I repeat!

 With the exit of Zuma, Okorocha was not yet done with sculptures, and particularly the sculptures of the controversial. The sculpting of Muhammadu Buhari and the  planned commissioning of the statue at a time Buhari’s government is accused by Nigeria’s South-East of being unkind to it and discriminatory, is only very provocative, even insulting. See Figure Two below.

Muhammadu Buhari's sculpture to be commissioned. (Source: Facebook wall of Franklin's Chinedu)

Let us hope the sculpture, which has also made my phobia for  the scuplted image become updated and epidemic, would not be violently pushed down and smashed when Rochas leaves office and when Buhari follows.

Humans register their inevitable mortality and lifelessness in sculptures. Or, to put it differently, sculptures are good narratives of our mortality. There is time for everything, says Qoheleth’s Rhythm. There is time to narrate mortality in sculptures and there is time to see the mortality of both the sculpture and the sculpted. There is a time for sculptures to stand erect and time for sculptures to take a plunge, a Zuma plunge.

Figure Three: The symbolic plunge of Zuma's sculpture. (Source: Facebook wall of Adebayo Olusola)

I like lifelessness of sculptures, although it frightens me that the boundary between the living and the dead, as narrated by them, is slim. Sculptures tell us about lifelessness, now and after. Sculptures indicate that death is our nearest neighbour, always.

Photographers: Historians or Creative Artists?

By

Obododimma Oha

Sometime ago, I updated my Facebook wall and indicated what was “on (my) mind” as whether Facebook was fast-turning into an electronic album where, if we buy a new Christmas costume, we want the whole world to see it and commend us. It was not only the costume that was the only focus of attention in that update (although it would seem so). The focus was also on the author of the image, the photographer. The need to focus on the image-maker came up a while ago as I was reading up Facebook updates and saw one that featured the representation of photographers as “historians.” Yes; we are familiar with that. We could think of photographers as telling stories in the visual mode. They are not just there to mimick the images seen by the mediator, the lens. Haven’t some of them left their mounted cameras before to adjust your neck, this position or that? That flying attire or this background? Surely, they are intervening in the way the lens would see what it sees and for the camera to record or tell part of the story.  That intervention is a choice, a  creative selection from options.

So, you cannot climb over the photographer to view the image. In fact, the photographer joins the camera in telling the story, but the photographer is also part of the story. The agents of the making of the story are also part of the story. Remove the photographer and the story changes!

Yes, the photographer matters in the way a photograph tells the story. Sometimes, some photographers enter the act of image-making fully, even creating an impression that they are the ones giving the image as it is. Do you blame them? That is maximum involvement. In fact, I like watching them act, whether they are armed with the ubiquitous Android phones or JVC or some of those cameras that make you wonder whether the shot is a real shot and a bullet would come flying  or a rockect is launched at the target. Stop terrorizing me, camera makers, and confusing shot with shot!

Well, let us return to a safer zone and talk about photographers as historians and creative artistry. I have said that the photographers are agents of story-telling that are interestingly part of the story. How can one be writing a novel and yet be a character in it? Amazing, but there are such stylistic twists. Technology is even further providing a very “problematic” twist through photoshopping software which extends the creativity brought in by the photo story-teller. The photoshop further brings in the flexibility of iconicity of the image, so that reality and truth are greatly undermined. What you see is just a matter of possibility, not certainty; the image is worth a thousand words but that is practically an image created by you. It reminds one about creation itself. We also try to recreate ourselves and our world. We are not satisfied with the way things are, or everything existing is just a raw material. We can adjust it, at least  a bit and have a different reality. So, photoshopping is a philosophy, a philosophy of the images. And creation is about images of images (not just a simple matter of turning a photograph into a hand-drawn representation, asking technology to move backwards a bit).

Photographers tell their stories visually, but that is not the end of the story. When the framed photograph gets home, the wife or whoever cares would pick it up, ask it to be part of the visual story on the walls. She has the story all worked out in her head. She knows the positions for the photo (you could say the plot of her story) and the company some would have to keep. Some photographs could be placed nearer others to maintain a rigid visual syntax. Some images may even be iterated, thanks to more photographs coming in from weddings and other social occasions in a country like Nigeria. Don’t ask me how the numerous commercial photographers know their targets! Anyway, do not attempt to tamper with the way she has planned and executed her visual story. You could be taking a great and grave risk. She has told her story and she is also part of the story; on a page that is the parlour.

She is a visual historian (the same way you have the oral historian in the raconteur), but she is also a creative artist. She has creative plans, the photographer too. In fact, she is only following in the footsteps of the photographer in the image-making project. But this essay is not about her; she is only a proxy and related things somehow matter to us. The photographer, the major figure she represents, is the focus. I want to join my Facebook friend in recognising this figure as a historian, but provide an extension: that visual historian is also a creative artist!

Recognising the Simple Jesus in a Modern Attire

By

Obododimma Oha

 Figure One: A popular artist's impression of Jesus Christ. Source: biographyonline.net

It is obvious that some leaders of Christian churches have started confusing the form with the substance, a represenation with the real thing. Images of personalities like Jesus that we see are just artists’ impressions; they are twice removed from reality, just as some accounts that we have in the Holy Bible were first oral traditional narratives told by people (from mouth to mouth), each teller adding salt and pepper here and there to make the telling sweeter. Have we just forgotten that images of Jesus Christ we see are the impressions by artists who felt that the white face they represented looked like it? What if Jesus had been black or blackened (from all his wanderings and travels)? Would his universal adoration have been the same? Well, let us leave that to theologians to chew and quarrel and fight. But what is central to this article is the depiction of the dressing of Jesus, just as he chose to come in human form, eating like humans do, drinking, going to toilet, urinating, sleeping, waking, etc. Being in human form was why he even died on the cross. And the one we hardly think about: he had a skin like us and so his number one covering was human skin!

Figure Two: Another popular image of Jesus Christ. Source: amazon.com

In the time of Jesus Christ, of course there was no photography (not to talk of photoshoppping software). There were only sculptors and some leaders like Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, Nigeria, who would want to commission the sculpting of important personages, as he did once upon a time for Jacob Zuma of South Africa. If Jesus lived in the time of Okorocha, perhaps a sculpture of him would have been erected to grace the Imo State capital and tell the heroic story of his miracles of several exotic cars and numerous investments. A sculpture was a chief means of telling the story of an important person like Jesus Christ, a real historical figure, even though there were scriveners and griots who used language aesthetically to narrate him and his deeds.

What develops out of this? In our  new hero-worship, we forget the humanity of Jesus and that he liked it. Also, his dressing was not permanent. Jesus wore what each artist gave him, but in reality his dressing was in conformity with his time. He wore the Semitic long gown, yes. Sandals, of course. Maybe he would have worn Cortina shoes if he had been a child going to school in my time; caned by his teachers if he was naughty sometimes.

Yes; he would not always wear that recognisable Semitic long gown and sometimes appear bare-footed. His hair style, too. Maybe as my school mate he would wear “brush head” but if a modern child he may choose to wear one of these shaggy hairstyles and have his ears wired, listening to his favourite rabbi or popular musician playing religious hip-hop. He could even see the General Overseer of the temple once in a while.

But, if he chooses to shift from a semiotic stereotype of him, maybe wearing these, or tattered jeans pants, T-shirt, and baseball cap, I am sorry for him when he wants to enter the temple, not to talk of going near the altar when the archbishop or General Overseer is celebrating, maybe taking the microphone and announcing himself as “Jesus Christ!” Won’t the ushers quickly grab him and he could be seen as a terrorist waiting to strike? Do you blame them? Think of the Sri Lanka church bombing!

Figure Three: A Very Modern Jesus. Source: funnyjunk.com

Do you see why and how visual representations of Jesus Christ have to be permanent or stereotyped, even if they are artists’ impressions, far from reality? Was it not how the mermaid (momiwata) in Nigerian worship turned out to be a pretty Indian woman in Nigeria in those days and as a religious fraudster received all the encomium and sacrifices? That of Jesus is particularly disturbing becuse the top echelon of Christianity already intoxicated by power and Roman procedures of worship brought into Christianity would not recognise him as their leader if he chooses to come simple, modified in any way by our age, and not ready to respect constituted authority again! It is even the leadership of the church that would crucify him themselves, not the Roman soldiers.

Human beings have courageously used human language in signifying God and his actions. We have to think of God through what we can understand. In a similar way, they have to represent Jesus in the ways that suit them, but forget that he is free to put on something different but fashionable, i.e. in conformity with the present time.

Figure Four: A Black Jesus Christ.Source: ghostprintgallery.com

Figure Five: Jesus Christ the Spiderman. a modern Jesus. Source: pinterest.com