Notes
- Anke Haarmann, “The Power of Creativity: Rituals of Possession and the Art of Living, “ Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics, 3(April 1996): 82–95.
- C. O. Adepegba, “Ara: The Factor of Creativity in Yoruba Art,” The Nigerian Field 48(1983): 53–66. (Republished in this issue.)
- Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans.and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor. (London: Continuum, 1997), 21–57. Adorno explains how the new work of art in negation relates to its preceding traditions: “The new wants non-identity, yet intention reduces it to identity; modern art constantly works at the Münchhausean trick of carrying out the identification of the non identical,” (2).
- See Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 112. See also Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1925). Trans. with intro. by Christopher Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
- Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), is dedicated to the sole idea of retrieving the past through a focus on the object of art. In African art history, interest in the discipline from a dominating ontology-based anthropological focus is a factor to reckon with in its failure to harness the potentials of artworks for historical ends.
- A de le Oba Opo fèhin pon 'mo Ara tà oo riri L'Àdejumo nda A de le Oba Ope féehin pon 'mo.
- See John Michael Vlach, “Affecting Architecture of the Yoruba,” African Arts 10: (1975): 48–53, 99; and Cordelia O. Osasona, “The Ile Nla: A Colonial Town Hall in Ile-Ife, Nigeria,” African Arts 34, 1 (Spring 2001): 78–82, 96. See also Susan Denyer, African Traditional Architechture (London: Heinemann, 1978), 86–90.
- An Igbo proverb that relates to royal reverence reads; Asokalia eze anya, ekpulu nkata n'isi gwa ya okwu (an overly austere reverence for the king would create an unreasonable demand that a basket be worn over the head before one addresses him). A derivable import of the above proverb is that subjects usually do not directly address the king, but it also implies that unreasonable demands for deference weaken the king's authority. The poetic nature of the eulogy can be taken as a measure of reverence for the Alaafin and an idealized form of address. African art, it should be remembered, is essentially idealistic. It values “representational truth” as an approach to form and meaning, couched in canonical frames and sometimes in metaphors of representation. This is a probable explanation for how the “post that carry babies” supplanted the mural. I owe the expansion to this explanation to Dr. B. N. Unegbe, Department of Philosophy, University of Port Harcourt, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
- Haarmann, “The Power of Creativity,” 96.
- The male/female conventional marriage relationship has a strong bearing in many Biblical instances where Yahweh speaks to the Jewish people. Massimo Camisasca (in “The Prophet Hosea: The Humanity of Faith,” Traces, 8, 2 [2006]: 40–45), comments on the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, entitled Deus Caritas Est (25 December 2005) thus: “The Bible begins to present the drama of the love between God and the people of Israel with images of astonishing intensity. Then the Song of Songs is the book in which the “erotic” nature of the relationship between God and His creature finds its supreme expression,” a theme that the encyclical developed in detail in its first part in the unity between eros and agape Note also the negative consequence of this union between deities and mortals in the biblical narrative of the Nefilim.
- Haarmann, “The Power of Creativity,” 96.
- Henry Drewall, “African Art Studies Today,” in African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline (Washington, D. C.: National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990), 29–62.
- Manfredo Tafuri, “The Uncertainties of Formalism: Victor Skolskji and the Denuding of Art,” in On the Methodology of Architectural History, ed. D. Porphyrios, (London: Architectural Design, 1991), 73–77.
- Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” (1968) in Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–91.
- Postmodernist discourse is awash with problematics foisted on cultural studies by Western enlightenment theories, a subject taken up in Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics 6, (1997). Ram Adlar Mall (in “Some Reflections on Interculturality, Interreligiousity and Man's Place in Nature,” included in the anthology), points to the need for “a binding pluralism” and suggests, quoting Mircea Eliade, that Western philosophy cannot move within its own tradition without becoming provincial, i.e. without leading to some form of “culturalism; assigning an exclusive possession of truth to one particular culture. For philosophy proper, all cultures, philosophies and religions in the global context, mutatis mutandis, need to adjust—today more than ever. The network of relations in today's world has reached a degree of complexity, which threatens confusion (if it has not already precipitated it),” (4).
- Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972), 12.
- Christopher Nwodo, “In Heidegger Art Work is not Equipment,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13, 1 (1982): 69–78.
- Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sign of History,” in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 393–411.
- Philipe de Montebello, James N Wood, and Ian McKibbin White, “Foreword,” in The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1982), 8–9.
- Frank A. O. Ugiomoh, “Nigerian Art History and the Hegelian Unconscious: The Limits of Lineal Evidence in Historical Practice,” Third Text 19, 4 (July 2005): 329–338, relies on the Foucaultian notion of fractal history (in which disruption, resumption etc. epitomize the run of history) to reexamine the progression of form in African art history.
- Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 46.
- George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 123–130.
- Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), 10.
- Frank A.O. Ugiomoh, “Typology, Form and Function in Traditions of Ancient Benin Architecture,” Afe: Journal of Minority Studies, 2(1997): 105–115.
- William Fagg, Nigerian Images (Lagos and London: National Commission for Museums and Monuments, 1963), 25.
- Ibid.
- Marshall Ward Mount, African Art: The Years Since 1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
- Fagg, Nigerian Images. Von Luschen's record shows that between the sixteenth and seventeenth century bronze plaques already adorned the palace pillars in the Benin kingdom.
- John Picton, “Artists are as Artists Do,” Paper presented at the Pan African Circle of Artists forum, Enugu, Nigeria, 2002: 7.
- See Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, on the relative contexts and ends of artistic productions.
- Patrick. McNaughton, “Is There History in Horizontal Masks? A Preliminary Response to the Dilemma of Form,” African Arts 24, 2 (1991): 40–53, 88–90.