1The variables of the topic are useful in formulating the general thesis of this paper. This is that when creative artists encounter new forms of transformation, they apply their art as a strategy of construction and deconstruction in mediating them. Through such a process of mediation, they forge new creative idioms. Creative artists not only transform but are themselves transformed by that which the creative act of mediation has brought into being. This, to a large extent, is true of professional artists (of art academy breeding) east of the Niger River. Beyond this, it is to be noted that this process of creative mediation of new transformations is not simply a movement from point A to point B. On the contrary, the creative encounters, as an art event, may occur at several points and perhaps simultaneously. However, the success of the created object that predicates the creative act derives from the constructive powers of the artist, his ability to select, ideate, distill, or even essentialize or elevate in Danto’s sense of The Transformation of the Commonplace,1 and to interpret in ways that are in accord with his creative identity and artistic temperament. In varied and sometimes strange ways, the artist maps out for us the creative contingencies and signposts (as plastic markers) on the artistic terrain. Again these encounters may assume the force of a revolutionary situation, as the artist-painter Obiora Udechukwu2 has pointed out, because of the artist’s quest to return to the essence, his desire for ample or fruitful domestication of his medium and for interrogating what he sees as colonial art patrimony. The artist sees nothing less than a revolutionary imperative on the creative artist to break away from colonial artistic assumptions, if not constructions, in the quest for individual identity or, in Obiechina‘s terms, “to restore a truncated consciousness.”3 As we shall see, art serves as a powerful tool because it thrives as a visual metaphor, an aesthetic object, at once mystical and material in its constructive and dissolving powers, and returns us to Cassirer’s notion of art as a symbol in its condensed and compact imagery.4 In modernist parlance, it is a return from type to prototype, like the transformations of grammar; it is a transition from the realism of Joshua Reynolds to the modernist concern with simultaneity and abstraction. What matters in art is not the temporal, but formal relations as reflections of the sublime and the unconscious.

2 Sources of change, whether internal or external, whether traditional or modern or through diverse forms of cultural patrimony, constitute various processes of transformation. It is possible that transformation itself may inspire or catalyze; it is possible that, in a reverse order, it can also be interrogated, perhaps assimilated only to be rejected or moderated or violated in response to current needs in the same way that a new language is allowed to “knock itself’ around in a new environment and soon becomes another human resource.5 Artists have learnt to explore new potentials and possibilities in art.

3The procedures of this paper can now be outlined against the above background. Two categories of practising artists are examined in terms of their creative background, training (formal and/or informal) and apprenticeship, their artistic/creative ideology (if any) and art works and how these are shaped by new creative centingencies and transformations. The two categories of artists provide a study in contrast as we shall see. They are (a) the popular artists whose practice location is Onitsha, the commercial centre of trade that interlinks various peoples and cultures of the West African sub-region and extends the global effects of modernism, as perceived through the movement of European trade goods into and out of Onitsha; and (b) the professional artist of art academy breeding. Their core centre of creative enterprise in terms of tutelage is the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka from which graduate artists have filtered into the polytechnics and Colleges of Education east of the Niger River and formed the core of the teaching staff. Some of them have taught for a couple of years and left to establish their own ateliers and other art nurseries.

4We now provide an analysis of art training and ideology, art works and how they empower and mediate themes and form as new transformations and configurations in space, e.g., a canvas, clay slab, moulded terracotta figure and others is necessary. By addressing these factors, we should be able to elicit those processes of transformation that shape and constitute the basis of artistic training and enterprise.

5Observations and interpretations emerging from the foregoing will be used as a basis for conclusions. The East of the Niger River is used as a setting for this study because of the need for a closer scrutiny of art as a phenomenon. Justifiably we need both micro and regional studies as a basis for making broad statements on contemporary art developments in Nigeria.

The popular artist

6Anyone can be a popular artist provided his creative products have a popular appeal, that is, if his art interconnects the masses as a basis for its popular appeal. One does not, for example, look far to realize that in the African situation anyone who chooses can be a trader, a truck pusher, a barber, a furniture maker or even a welder. That this is possible does not imply an absence of modes of apprenticeship.

7The popular artist/painter, may practise from a background of apprenticeship to a master, after which he establishes his business studio. Or in some cases, the popular artist may be self-taught and may have acquired his popularity from the mass appeal of his art products resulting from many years of creative practice. Either way, a predisposition to art seems to form the basis for artistic apprenticeship and professional practice. Two factors also seem to aid his practice in their transforming effects. The first is that popular art east of the Niger River would seem to have developed and matured out of the pioneer phase of contemporary art east of the Niger River. In the 1930s and 1940s, Kenneth Murray had established a viable art-teaching schedule at Government College, Umuahia, from which the first pioneer artists, such as Ben Enwonwu, Nnachi, Ibeto and others had graduated. They and later generations after them filtered into the schools and missions. They taught art, illustrated school textbooks, including the Bible, and drew maps as visual aids to teaching. Many of them set up their studios in Onitsha and other urban centres and taught in schools for additional income. In the 1960s, as reported by Ulli Beier, they had constituted themselves as individuals into a flourishing art industry at Onitsha.6

8Another catalyst of transformation is ironically Onitsha itself, the centre of their art practice. Igbo urbanization has found its high point of development in the commercial town of Onitsha. The factors responsible for this include rural-urban migration, which sent thousands of Igbo people to Onitsha to seek out new jobs as traders, carpenters, motor mechanics and, in some cases, as factory hands.7

9Other factors include the presence of Christian missions in Onitsha, such as the Church Missionary Society (1857) and the Catholic mission (1888). According to Isichei (1976), the Igbo “looked to the missions as allies and defenders.” Christian prosetylization had brought about the acceptance of Christian values while colonial administration and British trading companies, such as the United Africa Company (1879), stimulated the growth of internal trade with the proclamation of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate in 1900.8 With a few well-paved streets riddled with pot holes, a mixture of shanties and modern structures, Onitsha bristles with life to such an extent that trade goods produced in Taiwan, the United States, France, Italy, Germany and other countries find their way legally and otherwise (afia iwu) into the Onitsha market by road, sea and air. Entrepreneurial activities, combined with other factors, have created an urban environment, which is visibly active, with a kaleidoscope of barbers’ signs, billboards, cement and concrete sculptures, welded metal gates, pseudo-portrait sculptures, folk paintings, and an assortment of other crafts. Other goods found in Onitsha include Dutch and Indian-factory fabrics, an assortment of pendants, earrings and necklaces, shoes of diverse origin and manufacture, etc. It is within such an active urban landscape that the popular artist works as he synthesizes different levels of urban experience.

10The popular artists’ works consist of thousands of prints from an original no one has ever seen. There seems to be little or no consistent creative ideology, except that the artists function as social chroniclers, witness the music of Chief Osita Osadebe. steeped as it is in philosophical sketches of human life, the wise cracks in the music of Peri Como, or the critical comments on urban life by the minstrel, Morocco Maduka. This activity has a parallel in the mass appeal of Onitsha Market literature, which has been studied by E. N. Obiechina. On the whole, the popular artist has little education but is highly committed to his art; he works full-time in order to maximize his gain in the same spirit of achievement that informs business enterprise in Onitsha.

The professional academic artist

11In contrast to the popular artist, most professional and practising artists of the academic strain do not work full time as artists, apparently because their works have a different orientation. What seems obvious is that artists of this category have received formal training in an art academy. Only in a few instances are they self-taught. By this process of artistic training, many have developed considerable interest in international art markets through their participation in art seminars and workshops and art biennials around the world. Many among them, such as Uche Okeke, this writer, Obiora Udechukwu and Tayo Adenaike, have featured in international art exhibitions in different parts of the world and have imbibed various aspects of trans-national art culture through several travels. With their high level of education, many artists have turned to poetry and won prestigious poetry awards in their creative quest for a visual- verbal metaphor. Through new contacts made from art residency programmes and workshops, and by individual research, many of the artists have cultivated the studio culture of art installations as a new spell on their art. An artist like El Anatsui, now fully Nsukka-based, has participated in several international performing art workshops.

12There are other examples. Demas Nwoko is a designer, stage director, scenographer, sculptor, painter and building constructor. Obiora Udechukwu is a painter and poet. Olu Oguibe is a painter, art historian and critic. The same is true of this writer. Uche Okeke is a painter, designer and sculptor. Tayo Adenaike is a designer, painter and advertiser, being the art director of an advertising outfit at Enugu. The late UK based artist Uzo Egonu was a designer as well as a full-time painter with several international awards to his credit. Bona Ezeudu, an art teacher in a polytechnic who withdrew his services to set up his own atelier. He now functions as a painter and is a successful and well-patronized producer of entrance gates and railings, as well as interior furniture items wrought in metal. All these examples make a single point: Artists with good education are multi-faceted in their artistic and cultural outlook, at once local, regional, national and perhaps trans-national from their new encounters. There is also another form of artistic heritage and transformation which these artists seem to implant in their art practice. This is based on the notion that our usable past should be exploited as an artistic resource in the search for both individual and national identity. This was triggered by new creative conditions emerging in the period around the late fifties; their historical benchmark is political independence and, ultimately, the post-colonial condition. One of its expressions, perhaps the most basic, is the development after the civil war in 1970 of a new artistic idiom, uli, in the Art Department of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Its adaptive aesthetic potential lies in the kinetics of space-line configurations. As noted earlier by the writer with regard to this new idiom, adapted and nurtured in the Nsukka school, from which it has enveloped the various art expressions East of the Niger River:

In Uli, the line dances, spirals into a diverse, elongates, attenuates, thickens, swells and slides, thins and fades out from a slick point, leaving an empty space that sustains it with mute echoes by which silence is part of sound... Ultimately, it is in its calligraphic programmes, at once terse and epigrammatic, that Uli has become a creative tool and idiom for many contemporary artists (east of the Niger River) who have re-invented its language like the Uli adept from Achi.9

13For these various artists, therefore, there is the accepted need, if not challenge, to “explore through theory and practice our usable past as a means of engaging and interrogating modern realities in the pursuit of an African (Nigerian) art modernism.”10 For the pioneer artists in this group, the decades before and immediately after political independence provided the opportunity to question colonial art assumptions and constructions derived from the norms of the Western art academies and their training, and to assert their individual and collective identities within the emergent social matrix.

14The channel for the transmission of knowledge for artists of this pedigree in the east of The Niger River, which re-echoes the general mode of training for many contemporary Nigerian artists, is the art academy organized through structured art programmes with their cognate courses. These equipped the successful ones to be good designers and draughtsmen who could look the artistic eagle in the face. While this mode of training empowered them, it created a form of art practice that began with a new form of art breeding and transformation probably unsuited to the artistic demands of the immediate art terrain. Ironically, the received art training, while equipping them, also furnished the basis for the ample use of the interrogative, deconstructive, if not the visual and sometimes combative, powers of art as a creative tool in mediating new challenges in colonial and post-colonial periods. For the artists east of the Niger River, the uli idiom furnished the creative battery for explorations that transcended the normative. They opted for the unconventional use of materials in their conjunctive and dissonant relations for visual images of aesthetic power and visual effect. In grounding art through processes of artistic and stylistic domestication, the artists east of the Niger River quickly re-echo the words of the prominent playwright, Wole Soyinka, when he observed: “A creative concern which conceptualizes or extends actuality beyond the purely narrative, making it reveal realities beyond the immediately attainable, a concern which upsets orthodox acceptances in an effort to free the society of historical or other superstitions, these are qualities possessed by literature (art) of a social vision.”11 He goes further to elaborate: “For it gives clues to mental conditioning by previous history or colonial culture or conversely shows the will to break free of such in its projection of a future society.” It is suggested here that the creative vision most suited to a post-colonial condition and discourse is that which reveals individual sensibility that accomplishes the primary task of revealing colonial assumptions and history but deals with the colonial background of contemporary African reality. These would include current national issues and the human condition.

15Two factors derive from these. The first is that the time period around Nigeria’s political independence provided a historical and social matrix with which to address the issues of national identity, through re-excavations of our usable past, its creative potentials, and possibilities for their transposition to the present, for strident creative statements and for a new process of artistic interrogation of art knowledge received through formal training predicated on colonial assumptions and the policy of “possession of territory”. According to Gerald Moore, with the attainment of political independence, it became urgent to discuss the nature of art and creativity within the context of non-colonial praxis. And what was the new praxis? To put it another way, what stimulated this search for a new praxis through a process of interrogation of received artistic knowledge resulting from formal training on the British model? The liberating condition of political independence would seem to have set the stage for the creative interrogation of the colonial art patrimony: from creative ideology to the formulation of new techniques, the experimental use of media in new directions, and the assertion of new forms of imagery resulting from the inter-face of art, creativity and issues of individual and national identity. Obiechina12 sees it in a direction of the artistic goal of restoring “a truncated national consciousness” or, in Achebe’s words,13 “to put back the tail of the severed trunk of our tale,” or, in the wise counsel of Kofi Anyidoho, to “lead the orphan child through the forest paths of life”. This of course led to the domestication of tool and media/ imagery in ways that responded more truly to the demands of nationalism.

16As noted elsewhere by Kofi Anyidoho: “What the artists of the first generation brought to nation building was the waging of the battle for the human soul, its freedom and liberation from the despoliations of colonial hegemony by opting for the creative path of artistic decolonization through which to inscribe individual and collective/national identity in an art programme that was deeply wedded to nationalism. They re-examined their learned art canons, creative tools and formulated new artistic agenda in the sourcing of their themes and in their art production methods. These led the artists to new and radical postures nurtured within the compass of artistic experimentation and technical procedures. For the first generation of artists, it could be said that they began to accept the need to subject their art to internal cultural determinations sustained by primary audience, even if foreign missions were the more active patrons, a national consciousness, a modernist sensibility and the retrieval of history and their cultural inheritance while not eschewing the transforming effects of global modernism.”14 These new creative directions derived their force from national values and a creative consciousness; these are the moulders of ideas which art addresses and celebrates.

17While the first generation of artists, like others of the same lineage in two other parts of Nigeria, sought to restore individual and collective identity, those of the second generation and others coming after them became restless critics of the nation-state, because of the ensuing social, economic and political ills, whose creative themes they distilled from our collective angst.15

18There are other levels of creative ideology, which inform their art practices. The variants of such an ideology are explicit enough. A young member of this group of practising artists, the ceramist Ozioma Onuzulike, pushes his art within the normative frontiers of ceramics to a more integrative and liberating idiom. His art is forged on the anvil of creative ideology because, in his words, “Our present is pitch-dark/our future is unfcnown/Even acclaimed seers accept defeat/ We have burnt the foliage of God’s umbrella/And we sojourn blindly/ Holding withered branches to protect ourselves/ From the cruel laughter of the desert sun.”16 The artist-painter-critic Olu Oguibe takes the ideological posture that the artist is that voice, which the leaders have chased into the desert and decimated, his broken or mangled limbs buried deep in the desert sands. The voice went into their brains and began to holler unceasingly. Demas Nwoko believes quite strongly that modern art ought to be forged within the melting pot of the diverse cultures of Nigeria, as expressed in urban life. A single ethnic culture is not adequate, he reasons, if art should respond to the demands of nationalism. For Uche Okeke, creativity is a return to the source without eschewing modernizing effects. He stands for the creative ideology of the creative domestication of levels of artistic encounter and transformations. He chose the uli idiom. The artist El Anatsui forges his creative voice on an ideology that African writing traditions offer enough basis for re-writing the letters of Africa’s history in different leather parchments.17 He also sees the effects of global transformations as strengthening rather than distracting. Finally, the patronizing audience of the artists are art collectors and their salesmen, European visitors and local clientele, usually of the middle class, and the rest are art dilletente. Their art is confined to displays in public museums and art galleries, in keeping with Western strategies for art promotion, which are institution-based and economic interest-driven. These strategies define the quality of accompanying art scholarship, as “shown in the strategic ways works of art are packaged and interpreted”, including their direct impact on curatorial responsibility. Their patronage is refined in taste but narrow in clientele, whereas that of the popular artist is mass-based and encompasses the broadest spectrum of society in its mass/popular appeal.

Of the popular artist and his themes

19The success of the Yoruba Alarinjo Theatre18 is that what was an exclusive theatre was re-appropriated and taken to the masses, hence its popular appeal. It serves as a device for coping with the stressful conditions of the urban environment, its uncertainty and contradictions, especially its ethos of anonymous responsibility. The popular artist therefore displays his art to the people who are delighted by his explorations of urban life.

20The themes of the popular artist centre on all aspects of urban life, from the religious, social and political to the ideological and philosophical. While the range of his themes still awaits future research, we can at least summarize some of his thematic concerns. The first is both social and/or moral in the same way that social issues are underlain by moral strains or, to put it the other way round, moral issues are rooted in their social dimensions in society. The popular artist in Onitsha seems to operate within a social code. Through his art he mediates the uneasy tension between good and evil. In a painting such as “Death does not Take Bribe”, we are reminded of the ravages of corruption in the society. In the parlance of the Onitsha social code, a man who becomes very wealthy through ‘import and export trade’ (a business disguise label) is said to have killed a corpse (igbu ozu). The metaphor “killing a corpse” underscores the fact that success in business or trade in Onitsha invariably does not exclude aggressive business tactics and the spilling of human blood one way or the other, although pursuit of this line of evidence is tenuous, nevertheless, through the creative lens of the popular artist we learn that there is a moral judgement that awaits those who use bribery as a stepping-stone to material success. In a similar vein, the painting “Battle of Life and Death” may underscore the human paradox and the close tension between good and evil in an environment shorn of any institutional sanctions.

21There is also a political aspect to the popular artist’s subject matter. A painting such as “The Oppressor” is a metaphor for political despoliations, whether from past military leaders or from business tycoons whose agenda make life very difficult for the ordinary people, who have been described by Franz Fanon as ‘ the wretched of the earth”. The oppressor therefore may be a political predator, or the aggressive trader at the Onitsha market who specializes n illegal business deals and sponsors gun running and illegal drug trade. “The Oppressor” is a fit metaphor for the absence of a moral centre in our society whose macro model is the Onitsha urban center, with its core in the Onitsha market

22In another social theme, “Which Way Nigeria? -Where are we heading to with these conditions?”, which was probably inspired by the music of Sonny Okosun with the title “Which Way Nigeria?”, a popular artist, simply called CAS examines the biting effects of inflation on the people. In this work (plate 1), the costs of all material goods and services such as education, building materials transportation, cooking items, vehicles and others have suffered from sky-high inflation. This is shown in the way these goods are suspended from a towering pole Below are the people, the toilers of the orient, struggling for access to goods and luxury items that are beyond their reach. Some are shown using ladders to facilitate access to them, but to no avail; others make use of poles in an attempt to pull some of the items down. Others stare at them helplessly. To the left of the picture is a boy using a catapult: In his efforts to shoot one or two items down, he is aided by a girl who supplies pebbles or stones. In any case, what probably is of interest to the popular artist is the marked contrast between the rich and the poor in society. The popular artist draws our attention to the prevailing injustice.

23In “Crime in the Animal World” (plate 2) the popular artist explores the world of the criminal or Mafioso, who may serve as a visual model for understanding the high incidence of crime in Nigeria. In the different frames, we are shown the various activities of criminals: their life of luxury and carnal pleasure, their highway operations, the extravagant life style of their leader, who is called “the main boss in the toilet” (plate 3). He is probably eating from a lobe of banana in his right hand and drinking beer from a bottle in his left hand. We are shown their encounter with a man on a motor cycle and with others. Then their luck runs out. They are arrested by mobile policemen dressed as soldiers. What is interesting here is that all the characters in this work, from the criminals themselves to their various victims, are depicted as gorillas. The work has sardonic wit in its language of disguise and yet reveals enough, as the inserted texts in English and Hausa make clear and visible. Other titles include “Secret Cult is Death,” “The^Great Hunter vs Dangerous Animal,” “War Against Corruption,” and many others.

Technique and imagery

24In terms of pictorial imagery and technique, the popular artist cherishes simple and direct visual story lines. He eschews abstraction in his works. He is predisposed neither to structural complexity nor even to pictorial sparseness or any of the creative’ artifices associated with art of the academy. His images are shown as units or sub-units clearly defined by the use of firm boundaries for narrative clarity. He opts also for relative pictorial mimesis for added visual appeal. Settings in his paintings provide an idyllic backdrop for human activities. While he is indebted to art that filtered in through imported trade goods, he is simultaneously an adept, that is, a master copyist and eclecticist of his sources, one who has cultivated an eye for social realism, although the resulting images in his works seem to thrive in an inventiveness characteristic of a folkloric imagination. His art succeeds because of its topicality, its sense of humour, its narrative candour tinted with elements of fantasy. He succeeds because he is a popular entertainer in the tradition of the authors of Onitsha market literature and the alluring music of the master highlife musician Osita Osadebe and others. What are his pictorial strategies? In his works he opts for the use of multiple narrative frames like the subplots of a dramatic theme. While each unit is to some extent self contained, it is simultaneously linked to the next. In some of the paintings, the units are clearly numbered in order to maintain narrative flow and interest. In a work entitled “Secret Cult is Death” (plate 4), the story is broken into twelve units. We are offered glimpses into the dangers posed by secret cults in Nigeria, particularly in tertiary institutions. The various units are tightly held in place by means of a realistically painted, massive chain that forms a taut boundary on three sides, down to the base of the narrative frame. In the middle is Christ Jesus breaking the chain to assert his divine mastery over evil (plate 5). Passages from the Bible surround him in directional flashes, reminding the onlooker of the salvation that comes from Christ Jesus as well as of punishment. Beneath is a picture of President Olusegun Obasanjo launching the anti-cult campaign. Other pictorial devices include the lavish use of Bible quotations, sometimes misquoted or mispelt, inserted appropriately to drive home the morals of the event.

25In some of the works, as in the above, the calendar for the year is printed at the base of the painting so that the artistic and the utilitarian can combine to enhance or aid the visual appeal of the work. The elaborate use of Bible quotations derives from the pervasiveness of Christian music in Igboland and in other parts of Nigeria. The popular artist deploys its benefits to enhance the quality of his works. One need not forget that part of a work’s narrative convincingness derives from the fact that real life characters are painted or copied faithfully for ample recognition, and this aids clarity and understanding of a painting. Elements of humour are infused into a work as in the painting “Gossip, Asiri, Gulma, Amebo.” Here, two women, who are engaged in gossip, are depicted with exaggerated ears and mouths to underscore the theme of gossip; the title, rendered in Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba and other Nigerian languages, broadens audience appeal.

Of the academic artist/ media and their themes

26The themes of the academic artist are derived both from the past (history and cultural inheritance) and the present (current issues of the nation-state). A few examples will suffice. What is noticeable is that artists of the first and, perhaps, second generation tended to look to the past, that is, the authority of the past, as an artistic source, reformulated it in ways that are appropriate to the current national conditions, in the collective quest for identity.19 The artists of the second, and particularly the third and later generations tended to be radical in the selection of their themes.20 They simply confronted the social condition with a sense of urgency and did not overlook the debilitating condition of the nation-state, its imposed amnesia, or John Ekwerre’s “We on Us.”

Production technique

27In terms of media and technique, it would appear that artists of the first and second generation tended to restrict their media to imported types, such as pen and ink, oil, acrylic, crayon or even charcoal and pastel. One can not of course deny that they charted new, creative directions; witness the inventiveness of their imagery and their manipulation of media. For example, Nwoko’s technical achievement with his neo-Nokian experiments in terracotta was an attempt to fashion new forms from the old and to establish a technical continuity from the past to the present without denying the modernist sensibility that would differentiate his works from those of Nok. Uche Okeke, for example, shows a skilful manipulation of pen and ink in “A Fabled Brute” (1959).21 In the quivering impasto of his “Aba Riots” he did not can we overlook the poetic linearism of this writer’s drawings and paintings (plate 6). The linear flashes of Obiora Udechukwu’s drawings underscore the mellifluous quality of Uli in the hands of a modern artist. Fluidity, rich chromatism and spontaneous work rhythm are obvious in Tayo’s works in water colour. And one cannot overlook Okpu Eze’s surrealistic imagery.22

28Artists of the third and later jgenerations tended to break away from traditional western media to incorporate new materials sourced from the immediate environment. Those in ceramics, of which there were few, have begun to push the frontiers of creative ceramics. Instead of ceramic wares thrown on the wheel, they now combine the technical and autographic. An artist such as Ozioma combines what, from the viewpoint of classical ceramics, would have been branded a disjunctive use of media. In his works, he has no inhibition about drafting dry leaves into the service of ceramic art (plate 7). In one of his works, he combines termite-devoured wood with condoms and metal. His other media for ceramic art include metal sheets, terracotta, metal, copper wire, aluminium and rope, among other articles. Obiora Anidi began with cement and wood sculpture, and suddenly veered off to use metal wires and marble or a combination of metal wires, cement and marble. Other artists of this ilk follow the path of creative freedom in the choice of media and their manipulation. Artists of the first generation, for example, could not have hazarded working with these media probably because of the primary task of addressing artistic issues of national identity, following the attainment of political independence, and the need to seek out new forms of imagery within non-colonial praxis as a matter of creative contingency.

29In terms of media manipulation or technique it can be suggested that the artists of the first and second generation blazed a new trail in the implanting of the Uli idiom in the artistic terrain east of the Niger River. However, artists’ responses to this idiom have been mixed in terms of individual approaches. The Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui, who has lived in Nigeria, and particularly at Nsukka, in the past twenty years, has deeply imbibed the lessons of Uli. But he has never been constrained to work only within this idiom, although it could be suggested that Uli must have empowered his daring experiments in the manipulation of wood of different colours and multiple textures/motifs in the deep symbolisms that embody the artist’s creative vision, as seen in plate 8. Like other art practitioners, he is not content with one source of inspiration or stimulus for his art practices. He draws freely from Igbo Uli tradition, adinkra designs, the Nok model, nsibidi and a host of other writing traditions. He subjects these to his own brand of sculptural phrasing at new levels of creative encounter and for new imagistic transformations.

30An artist such as Obiora Anidi produces works which are characterized by their organic and stylised quality. His sculpture figures have attenuated forms, with areas around the belly scooped out; into these the artist inserts coiled metal wires. These propel the figures with an internal architectonics that tends to energize them. He has also “created works which have formal consistency in the interplay of sculptural mass and space in their dynamic relations. According to the artist. Live wire has yet added flesh to its form.”23 The structural relation between form and metal wire, and sometimes cement, marks out his works in their restless energy and kinetic power. The ceramic artist Umunna, in his application of brilliant oxides, infuses his ceramic works with the richness of polychrome. His ceramic works are delightful in the richness of surface colours distributed within a grid pattern. Okey Ikenegbu uses machine parts, which he reassembles like a mini installation; in his other works, he welds linear metal wires into relief sculptures that vibrate, with the kinetics of both line and negative space revealing the natural background of the gallery display walls. There are many examples from other artists, such as Boniface Okafor; Uchendu, with his brutal aesthetic imagery of found objects and discarded glazed ceramic pieces; Bona Ezeudu, with the chromatic effects of his impasto technique; Ali, with the insistent rhythms of his coiled pottery idiom; and the sculptor Ndidi Dike, whose relief sculptures are bold in her use of lines and carved symbols. These she sometimes brings to dramatic effect by the use of polychrome in a creative lineage that goes back to El Anatsui. She achieves this without losing her individuality.

31Another artist-painter, Nsikak Essien, continues to experiment with mixed media. His works are bold in the assertiveness of media and blunt in execution. For example, against a backdrop of pasted newspaper clippings laid out in uneven rhythms of anguish and pain, as in his ‘Armageddon’, disembodied figures emerge and confront the observer as if from the murky void of death. Such a painting is a plastic comment on the sadness of the human condition in Nigeria, if not the tragic apotheosis of her death.24 He has just begun to experiment with Nigerian fabrics in his mixed media paintings. Chris Afuba’s sculptural forms enjoy plastic control that defines and enriches their self antonym. Among his works “The Only Son” is a high point in sculptural phrasing: the subtle interlocking of forms, the details of face types and the richness of surfaces elevate his sculpture to a high level of aesthetic experience. This is why he says, “I shall continue probing to substantiate my dreams and concretize my feelings.25 Ifediora Dike, a textile designer and fibre artist, produces unique and visually compelling tapestry works. His experiment with fibre is a new development in fibre art that ultimately has aesthetic power and intensity and an amazing tonal/form-defining suggestiveness.26

Conclusion

32Two case studies have been used in the discussion of contemporary art east of the Niger River: the popular artists and professional academic artists. This categorization is based on their training and the ensuing transformation resulting from this. This paper has to examined how these artists have moved in two different directions in forging their creative idioms. The first sources his art ideas from the various transformations wrought on popular art practices by urban trade and experiences, urbanization and the effects of trans-national cultures imported as trade goods. Ensuing images map out for us the convergence of diverse sources as raw materials for popular art, which is a pictorial distillation of urban life, its strains, and stresses, its contradictions and mysteries. The professional academic artists, on the other hand, have received sound art training well-suited to their professional practices; they have cultivated a disposition to trans-national cultures and patrimonies, as evident in art exhibitions, art workshops and art discourse on a global scale. Art residencies, travels, fruitful research alliances, with source materials and other influences, have broadened their creative vision. But more fundamental is the fact that their received artistic training and practice, while equipping them, also formed the basis for serious creative interrogation under new transformations, for example, colonial, post colonial and national. Their creative tools, placed at the service of these new demands, have broadened their artistic terrain as a terrain of self examination, self reappraisal, of new ideological formulations and as a matrix for producing works marked by experimental energy, plastic audacity and the certainty that comes from aesthetic assurance when art assumes the rightness of place. While both categories of artists are of different pedigrees, they tend to converge at that point where, like the Alarinjo Theatre, art is implanted in the theatre of life for the masses (the point of view of the popular artist) and as a private vision that soon becomes a public vision (the point of view of the academic artist). Put together, their works serve as aesthetic vectors for the retrieval of our collective memory so that the visible is made legible.