CTTE112433.

fm Page 329 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 4, July, 2005, 329338

Nigerian Art History and The Hegelian Unconscious

The Limits of Lineal Evidence in Historical Practice
Frank A O Ugiomoh

Notes

I am grateful to the University of Port Harcourt for the grant that funded this research and to Professor Chris S Nwodo for reading through the script in its preparatory stages.

1. Keith Moxeys Art Historys Hegelian Unconscious, in The Subjects of Art History, eds Mark A Cheetam, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp 25 51, inspired this paper. Moxey underscores the Hegelian origin of art historys methodology, which has become its unnoticed undercurrent. 2. Babatunde Lawal, The Present State of Art Historical Research in Nigeria, Journal of African History, 18,:2, 1977, pp 003016; C O Adepegba, The Question of Lineal Descent: Nok Terrakottas to Ife and the Present, African Notes, 9:2, 1983, pp 2332.

To plead the alibi that an archaeological search yet to be undertaken will eventually provide evidence for the certainty of African Art History is one that confronts African art studies as a cultural genre. It emanates from an application of Hegelian art historical methodology to Nigerian art history within the general frame of African art history. As a theory, its presuppositions are tied to an empirical foregrounding that validates history on the basis of a serial progression of phenomena or what has come to be known as the lineal evidence theory in the practice of art history. Its basic assumptions are that one is naturally followed by two then three and so forth. If, therefore, there is a broken link between one and three, which may be occasioned by the elision of two or what indeed may have featured as an aberrant artistic form in the supposed identity of two in a progression, a problem of an incomplete formal seriality is alluded to. On the premise of progression or evolution, an assumed coherence regarding stylistic succession in serial progress is judged important in the validation of an art history. The validation of a series, despite all other evidence, is also hinged on a presupposed subtext. This is why the recourse to lineal evidence as a theory is judged teleological, since its subtext assumes a status that defines the causal factor for coherency in a serial. Babatunde Lawal and C O Adepegba have expressed the opinion at various times that too many elisions hamper the construction of a definitely serial Nigerian art history. This, in their view, constitutes a problem towards the realisation of Nigerian art history.2 They arrived at this conclusion in response to Bernard Fagg, William Fagg, and Frank Willett, who at various times had proposed that it is possible to reconstruct the history of African art relying on the lineal evidence theory. Lineal evidence as a theoretical tool poses difficulties that require another option if we are not to postpone the actualisation of Nigerian art history. It is important, however, to reconsider the dependence on stylistic seriation that authorises lineal evidence for the validation of an art history.
Third 10.1080/09528820500124503 CTTE112433.sgm 0000-0000 Original Taylor 2005 0 4 19 Department FrankUgiomoh 00000July Text and & Article Francis (print)/0000-0000 Francis 2005 of Fine Group Ltd Art And Ltd DesignUniversity (online) of Port HarcourtPort HarcourtNigeriaAfricaugiomohfrank@yahoo.co.uk

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online 2005 Kala Press/Black Umbrella http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820500124503

CTTE112433.fm Page 330 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

330

In this regard, E H Gombrichs advice is pertinent, for as he observed, the history of style lends itself better to attempts at hypothetical reconstructions.3 Gombrichs alternative proposition explores the values that inhere in the phenomenon of artistic mastery. This, according to him, provides a better definition of artistic progression. Michel Foucault provides the appropriate framework to examine the limitations of the lineal evidence theory:
And the great problem presented by such historical analysis is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what structure is implied by the transmissions, resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division of limits, it is no longer one of lasting foundations but one of transformations that serve as new foundations.4

Elswhere Foucault also submits:

3. E H Gombrich, Hegel and Art History, in On the Methodology of Architectural History, ed D Porphyrios, Architectural Design Profile, London, 1981. 4. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Routledge, London, 1991, p 5. 5. Clare O Farrell, Foucault: Historian or Philosopher, Macmillan, London, 1989, p 58. 6. Peter Garlake. The African Past, in Africa: The Art of a Continent, ed Tom Phillips, Prestel Verlay, Munich, New York, 1995, pp 309. 7. Bernard Fagg, Nok Terrakottas, Ethnographic for the National Museum, Lagos, 1977. Frank Willett African Art, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995, and Ife in the History of West African Sculptures, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967. William Fagg, Nigerian Images, Lund Humphries Publishers, Lagos and London, 1963, p 25, proposes a hypothetical lineal evidence theory of Nigerian art history which presupposes a gap of a thousand years that accounts for in the succession of its artistic forms.

Mathematical language since the time of Galileo and Newton has not functioned as an explanation of nature but as a description of its process. I dont see why non-formalised disciplines such as history should not undertake the primary tasks of descriptions as well.5

Foucault suggests alternative theoretical considerations on the nature of historical practice. Foucaults position accommodates the possibility that even where historical sequence is lineal, artistic forms produced in it will eventually be characterised as diverse types. Artistic forms produced in history become intelligible if the effort of the historian is directed to the definition of the language of those forms as visual metaphors. Identification of the nature of the artistic sign in time is one of the duties of the art historian. Our point of departure is to ask how Hegelian lineal evidence features in Nigerian art history. Can the theory be adjusted to allow for the reality of the non-lineal? Peter Garlake acknowledges the rich visual culture of Africa but holds the opinion that its history cannot yet be properly defined. In the course of his evaluation, he recognised the debt that African art history owes to archaeology, an obligation that reflects the absence of documents to construct an African art history. He also called attention to the gaps in the presupposed series of artistic forms in African art which have impeded a proper articulation of art history.6 William Fagg, Bernard Fagg, and Frank Willett, relying on archaeological evidence available mainly in Nigeria, have proposed the possibility of an African art history on formal and stylistic grounds.7 The Nok terracottas seem to provide the point of departure for their reconstructionist bid which Fagg, Fagg, and Willett proposed. Adepegba, however, contests the reality of such a reconstruction in The Question of Lineal Descent: From Nok Terracottas to the Present. Adepegbas contribution to the understanding of Nigerias premodern artistic traditions came after Lawals similar focus. Adepegbas study, on the Nigerian art traditions of the royal convention, aiming to re-evaluate the proposals of Fagg, Fagg, and Willett, hinged on the lineal evidence theory. He began by articulating the formal and stylistic contents of Nigerian art history as

CTTE112433.fm Page 331 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

331

established for the arts of royal genre in the Nok tradition. To a great extent he successfully defined the language of forms that resides in these works. He detailed the styles and in some instances reconstituted the conceptual frames in which they had hitherto been appreciated. Despite these ingredients of art history, he concluded that it would be difficult to lay claim to any historical reconstruction of a Nigerian art history. For Adepegba, the possibility of that history must lie in filling the chronological gaps, which will aid the study of a complete stylistic progression in the region. Sixteen years before Adepegba, Lawal had evaluated the problems and possibilities that inhere in art historical research practice in Nigeria. Lawal focused on issues that bordered on provenance, chronology and iconographic associations, as well as some indeterminacies, within the same traditions of restricted conventions or arts of royal genre as opposed to arts of popular conventions. The arts of popular conventions in Lawals study were referred to only as complementary and support frames in his overall analysis.8 Despite evidence of stylistic progression, as he confirmed it, and the establishment of certain chronology, he concluded before Adepegba that a great deal remains to be done before a definitive art history of Nigeria can be written.9 Adepegba and Lawal question the construction of Nigerian art history as proposed by Fagg, Fagg, and Willet, not on methodological grounds but on the value of their empirical evidence. The following observations that underlie their argument reveal this in Adepegbas counter-proposition:
Of the various Nigerian art traditions Ife art has been observed to have the closest similarities with Nok art. Indeed Bernard Fagg is concerned with the relationship of Nok art to West African sculptures in general, and so gleans his evidences from various arts of Africa. But most of his evidences are drawn from Ife art. William Fagg is however more definite. He specially asserts that Ife art is the closest to Nok art. But Frank Willett simply endorses and reinforces William Faggs view.10
8. Adepegba, op cit. 9. Lawal, op cit. Arts of royal genre is the same as arts of restricted convention used in opposition to the arts of popular convention a distinction that defines artistic progression is called to mind. Progress in artistic styles was fostered mainly by royal and church patronage. In Adepegba, Ara as a factor of creativity, in Yoruba Art: The Nigeria Field, 1983, p 48, pp 5366, where the phenomenon of co-opting artistic creativity by royalty is documented. 10. Ibid, p 27. 11. Ibid.

Adepegba situates the reality of history to be explored in Nigerian art. The hub of this history is Nok culture; but the chronology of African art shows that many of its traditions predate the Nok culture. Nok in African art history appears to occupy a medial position to which other historical occurrences, including the Nigerian, must relate. Where an art historian determines the beginning of narrative interpretation becomes the choice of licence. Adepegbas has a further argument to ground a holistic conception of historically constructed meaning:
Similarities have been pointed out in the motifs, formal treatment of some features, sizes of the objects, as well as the body ornaments on some of the images. I have however found some of these allusions rather vague, and in cases where they are particular their evidences are single, isolated cases, as with Benin. Nonetheless, their evidences have guided me in my observation of the two arts, and I have found some indications that some similar cultural ideas and practices possibly underline the production of the two arts.11 (emphasis added)

In another instance he states:

CTTE112433.fm Page 332 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

332

Moreover as long as the Nigerian art traditions are studied in groups without any attention to any possible stylistic variations within the groups, no matter how subtle, possible inter cultural influence between the various Nigerian art traditions will be difficult to ascertain or dismiss.12

Lawal and Adepegba, however, fall into fallacy when categorically presupposing that Nigerian art history may have to wait upon evidence drawn from stylistic relationships. From Lawal:
By and large the story of a stylistic relationship between Nok and Ife assumes that there was transference of artistic form or ideas from one another. At present there is no concrete evidence for this theory.13

Adepegba arrived at the same conclusion when he stated that until archaeology proves otherwise the Nok terracotas dated between 500 BC and 200 AD are the oldest sculptures in Nigeria.14
What and how much more are to be discovered from Nok, Ife or any other part of Nigeria cannot be surmised. At this point in time, however, it is neither possible to establish or rule out the attractive idea of lineal descent from Nok. The evidence simply does not exists.15

Lawals validation of iconographic consonance and diatopical appropriation of symbolic concepts across geographical boundaries goes thus:
In any given case, given the frequent representations of the ram motif in the arts of the Yoruba and Benin and its depiction on the Gara pendant, it seems that at some time in the past this animal was a sacred symbol of a great cult or perhaps a monarch. To the extent that the animal could be worn by priests as a badge of office, the cult might have had a political function in addition to its religious ones.16

12. Ibid, p 21. 13. Ibid, p 17. 14. Adepegba, op cit, p 23. 15. Ibid, p 31. 16. Lawal, op cit, p 17. 17. See Lawal on the following affirmative conclusions: Nok and latter-day cultures around the Nok area, p 12; Nok and Ife, p 13; Ife, Benin and Owo relationship (p 14), Nupe Benin Ife have relationships, op cit, p 15. 18. Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, Routledge London, 1997, p 133.

Lawal and Adepegba agree to some conventions that indicate a shared history, but they find the unconnected nature of the progression of form in the history of Nigerian art difficult to explain using the lineal evidence theory as a tool. Thus, while Lawal concurs with Willetts affirmation regarding the reality of such history, Adepegba hinges his conclusion on the essentialising nature of anthronopologically biased studies that constitute the bulk of literature on African art in older studies, to canvass for the postponement of Nigerian art history. Their conclusions derived from works whose absolute chronology can be determined within identifiable time-frames. The tropes Lawal and Adepagbas discourse convey are metonymic, and laden with irony, because they failed to see the otherness imputed in the arguments of Fagg, Fagg, and Willett, which did not conceal their ideological foregrounding. It is indeed a native assumption whereby:
The legacy of the modern or anthropological episteme in the invention of the academic discipline of reconstructionist history is accompanied by the native assumption of transparency in language and the belief that narrative can objectively correspond with what actually happened in the past. Taken together, these beliefs produced the predominant nineteenth- and twentieth-century conception of history as an empiricist epistemology.18

CTTE112433.fm Page 333 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

333

Munslows observation shows that Lawal and Adepegba assume the objectivity of the very foregrounding itself from which the propositions of Bernard Fagg, William Fagg, and Frank Willet emerge. Thus, if the historical facts are available, their evidence demonstrates, and at the same time accedes to the irreality of that history, their submission must be a way of denying history in which the artwork in itself is history. That negational submission is the basis for the irony, and indeed the high point of a satirical endeavour. The mode of argument whereby Lawal and Adepegba affirm the irreality of history is equally reductive and mechanistic. Why, after identifying the formal language that belongs to the artistic traditions they evaluate, should extra-deterministic laws be sought to validate history? Their position at once serves both liberal and conservative ideologies. It is judged liberal because of looking ahead to some fine-tuning, and hence why both agree with the archaeology-dependent hypothesis. But suspending Nigerian art history on the authority of that premise serves blatantly a conservative ideology. A coherent serial progression in absolute chronology has been established for the majority of the works on which they draw. This denial of history, as Lawal and Adepegba make known, has nothing to do with the evidence available to them. Their position rather speaks of something else. Historical evidence can be denied even to the artworks historical value by relying on episteme of a Western figurative canon. That episteme is Hegelian and goes beyond the teleological pursuit of historical meaning to the metahistorical. H H Whites evaluation of Hegels historiograph confirms this observation:
Hegel emplotted on two levels Tragic on the microcosmic, comic on the macrocosmic both of which are justified by appeal to a mode of argument that is organicist, with the result that one can derive either radical or conservative ideological implications from reading his work.19

19. Hayden H White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973, p 30.

Lawal and Adepegbas Hegelian construct of historical reality is validated on two grounds. The first is the appeal to evidence whose validity is in contest on the very grounds of evidence, and the second is drawn from their texts own historiographic colouration of the argument that negates Nigerian art history. The grounds on which the archaeology-dependent theory has thrived so far are a product of a logocentric rationalisation that features around Hegels art history. These grounds are twofold, the first being his absolutisation of Western epistemology and the naturalization of the authorial voice, and the second his overriding influence on art historical methodology. It now features subliminally and yet as the overriding method that has shaped art history. The nature of the Hegelian unconscious in Nigerian art history relates principally to the search for stylistic units of progression, as evidence on which its art history may be constructed. This focus calls into question various efforts so far made at defining the language of form in Nigerian art history. What is needed within modernisms logic and its constructed archaeology-dependent alibi are some urgent clarifications of historical emplotments, historical foci and conceptual frames, the limits of a lineal-seriation of style and teleologically driven history, and the relationship between the artwork, historicity and interpretation. Hegel did show how art could be used as a cultural sign to construct

CTTE112433.fm Page 334 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

334

history. He achieved this in a sketch where the works of art of many epochs were taken through a teleological journey in an imaginary museum.20

THE LIMITS OF LINEAL EVIDENCE IN HISTORICAL CONSTRUCTION

If it has been possible to define stylistic and iconographic relationships on the scales that Adepegba and Lawal have demonstrated, what then puts African art history in abeyance? Is it because linkages have not been established in an epistemic frame that valorises the serial progression of artistic style and a teleological unravelling of meaning? Is it not possible for history to transcend lacunae and construct a contingent reality? Agreement to a deferment of history is surrendered to an extra-historical alternative, which simply implies a halt to historical enterprise. We ought instead to be asking from history itself what the Hegelian conception imposes by its dialectical construction of meaning for art history. If we suspend these evaluations and return to the thingin-itself, the question for history is the following: what is responsible for the similarities in the context of use, the shared conventions, even as the evidence makes available? What do these similarities point to in terms of moving beyond a primary level of phenomenological systems of thought? The need to re-evaluate the limitation imposed by lineal evidence demands that we look again at the institutional origins of the limits Lawal and Adepegba impose on the reality of Nigerian art history. Gombrichs advice on the appropriation of determinate stylistic canons for hypothetical reconstruction hinges on what he identified as Hegelian art historys metaphysical optimism. Its assumptions march to the idea of a progress towards the future perfection of artworks. But tied to this progression is what Gombrich identifies as an over-easy applicability of the Hegelian dialectic.22 The Hegelian dialectical consciousness is a consequence of feedbacks from the consequence of past actions.23 The ground for a teleological reconstructionism proposed by Fagg, Fagg, and Willett, as well as Lawal and Adepegbas indeterminacy, has so far been the evidence derived from stylistic studies. Stylistic studies differ from historical values that reside in an artwork. Stylistic studies are related to formalist art history, which is reputed for its negation of an artworks habitual association, since what form exhibits is its interest. It is by way of the aesthetic value of a work of art that the worth of artistic mastery comes to be appreciated. This is what aids the location of an artwork in its proper place in time. Ben Genochio validates the basis of Gombrichs worry while evaluating the implications of the discourse of difference; he quotes Mari Carmen Ramirez thus:
Such practices rely on a teleological view of art based on a sequence of formal change that privileges the concept of aesthetic innovation developed by the early 20th century avant-gardes. They also subscribe to an absolute notion of aesthetic quality that transcends cultural boundaries. In this way they select, exclude and evaluate works to their own preordained and preconceived standards.24

20. Beat Wyss, Hegels Art History and the Critique of Modernity, trans Carol D Saltzwadel, Cambridge University Press, 1999. 21. Keith Moxey The History of Art after the Death of the Subject, In-Visible Culture An Electronic Journal of Visual Studies 1, 1999. Available at: http:// www.Rochester.Edu/ invisible culture (accessed 30 May 2000). 22. E A Gombrich, op cit, Hegel and Art History, pp 6 and 7. 23. Ibid. 24. Ben Genochio, The Discourse of Difference: Writing Latin American Art, Third Text, 43, 1998, p 70.

CTTE112433.fm Page 335 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

335

25. Frank A O Ugiomoh, The Philosophy of African Art History: A Hegelian Interpretation, PhD Dissertation (unpublished), University of Port Harcourt, 2003, p 130. 26. OFarrel, op cit, in Robert G Calkins, Monuments of Medieval Art, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1979, pp 12832, provides the medieval other in the works from the Nicolas of Verdun atelier to exemplify the antithesis. The Shrine of the three Magi, 1181 1230, shares similar formal stylistic features with the Roman classical style and by its date also anticipates the Renaissance period. These relief sculptures, unidentified with the typical formal language either of the Romanesque or Gothic, hardly appear in texts on the medieval period. 27. Quoted in Moxey, Art Historys Hegelian Unconscious, 1998, p 25. 28. Gorge Kubler, The Shape of Time, New York, 1962.

The conception of the new, the avant-garde, as a sign of a cuttingedge in artistic creativity, as Gombrich further notes, is not totally a creation of Hegel. But it developed from his philosophy of history. Gombrichs worry is about the inversion of Hegels metaphysical optimism to a metaphysical opportunism as he cites from Karl Popper. The negative effect of metaphysical opportunism in the consideration of a Nigerian art history is the result of that search for stylistic linkages with the tradition of Nok taken as a paradigm. Its other default is the search for congruent forms that define an assumed subtext in which theses forms are their visible evidence. Foucault evaluates the problems of history generated by the Hegelian construct as they relate to the nature of the dialectic and its teleological focus. Central to Foucaults standpoint is the fractal nature and order of historical events.25 The Hegelian dialectic in its constructed nature should, ideally, open up to continuous revaluations. But the way Hegel employed it generates a closed circle. In Foucaults view, a situation of sameness at the beginning and end of the circle confronts a lone other as an antithesis in its triadic structure. The dialectic achieves meaning by relying on this lone other as its apparent antithetical middle term to privilege what it logically considers the same to itself at the end. The dialectic therefore, as OFarell submits, interpreting Foucault, encircles the opposed other to a vanishing point of non-being. The dialectic is a virtuous circle, which validates itself by negating a constructed other. Validation of this kind is a continuous process of self-recuperation in denial of the others existence.26 Foucaults criticism of the teleological bias alerts us to the nature of Hegels history as one of exclusions. The excluded supports his agenda of pitting the notional against the essence as the dialectic circle confirms. The notional here becomes the determinant historical factor, while the essence as dominant factor of a period is relegated to the background. A system is in place by which negation is exploited to validate a constructed reality. This is the problem of the unconscious in Hegelian art history. A constructed reality gains value by way of a methodology which discards continuities in favour of new artistic styles it assumes to be frames of reference or the avant-gardes of a given period. Newer manifestations of what Hans Robert Jane calls a metaphysics of supratemporal beauty within an ongoing time-scale become the determinant notional factor since they constitute the emergent identities in a progression.27 Some manifestations of artistic styles can therefore be brought to abrupt notional closure while indeed they are still extant. Kubler, in his discussion of the progression of a serial, or serial of serials, established three possibilities regarding the life span of artistic forms.28 A series may remain open, as a visual form relevant since its manifestation; a second series may become arrested in the case of an artistic form that is experiencing a temporary closure as a mode of formal actualisation; in the third series, some forms of artistic practice may have become extinct and represent closed serials. In Foucaults sense, the dynamics of closed or open or arrested sequences of forms relate to a problematic condition initially responsible for the emergence of a form. That formerly problematic condition can extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given. It may well be a problem that had ceased to command attention, whereby the need to

CTTE112433.fm Page 336 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

336

29. Jan Vansina, Art History in Africa, Longmans, London, 1984, pp 957. 30. Adepegba op cit, Lawal, op cit. 31. OFarrel, op cit.

trace back a line comes to an abrupt end, which results in other transformations that serve as new foundations and identities. Adepegbas stylistic typology of Nok art is grouped into two dominant and two subdominant categories of form. Is it not possible that such identification by Adepegba in the question of lineal descent may argue for the gradual development of regional styles that have mutated into some other existing styles today in which the particular problematic condition that commanded attention for such forms no longer exists? Lawal upholds the same view, although he belabours it with the lineal search for evidence. Lawals study of Benin art confirms the difficulty of establishing a perfect chronology by relying on style. He even hints at this in an attempt to establish extant relationships with some artistic practices around the Nok region. Vansina has remarked on this problem.29 The issue at stake is that an open class of form can remain open for as long as its relevance persists or can mutate, giving birth to forms (artistic styles) that complicate an assumed serial progression. Hence the reason why it becomes problematic, relying on stylistic grounds to validate a historical progression. Recourse to the arts of the royal convention carries with it (especially for the examples Lawal and Adepegba rely on) an implicit habitual association that may aid in defining Nigerian art history. Foucault attends to the reality of historical progression but cautions against the assumption that historical events are lineal and identifiable on the basis of form alone in a progression. Artistic forms may mutate and result in formal classes complicated by cultural limits and other factors. The art historians task requires a description first of what is there to behold. Historical progression of artistic forms may then be established through habitual associations not always of aesthetic origin but which nevertheless gave identity to the forms that evolved to serve their need. Lawal supports this notion when he acknowledges Willetts efforts to rely on function to explain Ife naturalism.30 To affirm the suspension of Nigerian art history is therefore to subscribe to a position outside the limits of art historys notional grounds of reference the artwork. In Foucaults compost pit philosophy, the concept of the limit marks only the beginning of another history that implicates the said and the unsaid. The compost pit instructs us that life is rekindled as plants grow from it. Lawal and Adepegba succumb to limits by proclaiming a moment for Nigerian art history. Limits ought to engender a consciousness that challenges erstwhile normative boundaries which are set within an episteme. For Foucault, thought should not be directed towards establishing a kind of central certitude but towards the limits, the exterior emptiness, the negation of what it confirms.31 Lawal and Adepegba did not confront the limits of the possible in this sense. Their thorough work at the stylistic and iconographic levels is only primary to the objective of art history. Identity yields to a demand to understand an artwork or to appropriate it metaphorically. A metaphoric appropriation of meaning has not always been in consonance with the search for stylistic seriation or a determination of casual effects. It is the identity of the artwork properly defined that excites the urge to historicity. This is the art historical urgency of Foucaults call for a historical agenda that concerns itself

CTTE112433.fm Page 337 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

337

with the simple tasks of description. An established identity, as it is described, reveals the nature of the artwork. Where there is a series of likeness of forms that bear the same identity, a serial naturally emerges. Where such like-forms are in multiple groups, the historian is confronted with the reality of many serials. Within a historical time-frame, therefore, multiplicities of serials can arise from the reopening of closed or arrested sequences to the extended life of an open serial. An open serial may accommodate further mutations.32 The focal point from which Lawal and Adepegba have so far led is indeed the search for the transformations that would serve as new foundations on which to attain the certainty of a Nigerian art history. To think otherwise is to deny the artwork and its history, and by implication to exclude its significance from history.

CONCLUSION
The zeal to convey historical knowledge as it relates to Nigerian art history has often been dampened by explanations that put its reality in abeyance. The archaeology-dependent alibi, the grounds for such a postponement, has not hindered the lineal evidence theory of art history. The lineal evidence theory draws on the value of artistic form or a formalist conception of meaning to construct a history of art.A Gombrich has noted, style alone cannot yield an understanding of art history. But Bernard Fagg, William Fagg, and Frank Willett, relying instead on the vicissitudes of style, proposed the possibility of a formal reconstructionism on teleological grounds. The mode in which they have conveyed the notion of progress in African art was grounded on the Wests figurative episteme, which Lawal and Adepegba assumed innocent, doubting in spite of a realisation of the inherent reconstructionist proposition. But there is an even greater snare which Lawal and Adepegba glossed over in the evidence they confronted and which informed their conclusions. Attempts to respond to the reconstructionist proposition for a Nigerian art history, its origin in the Hegelian logic and the conclusions Lawal and Adepegba arrived at have a history. Fritzman, in his comments on modernitys attempt to escape Hegel, observes that to confront Hegel by relying on logic is impracticable.33 This is because such attempts usually lead to the same conclusion that Hegel structured. Thus for Firtzman, to confront Hegel with some measure of success is to approach his logic rhetorically through a determination of the content and structure of his logic. Lawal and Adepegba addressed the contradictions in the lineal evidence theory, but because they set out to confront the inherently Hegelian prepositional logic, they failed to harness the value of their argument for the validation of a Nigerian art history. Indeed their position validates an assent to a lineal reconstructionist bid originally tendered by Bernard and William Fagg. The problems that lineal evidence theory harbours in its assumed coherent progression of artistic form have been deconstructed by Foucault. Foucaults poststructuralist understanding of historical knowledge holds strongly to the idea that historical narrative as a product of experienced life accommodates breaks, mutations, and fractures as well as continuities. Thus instead of looking for a constructed progression,

32. Foucault, op cit. 33. J M Fritzman, Escaping Hegel, International Philosophy Quarterly, 33:1, 1993, pp 5868.

CTTE112433.fm Page 338 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:38 AM

338

34. Martin Bunzul, Real History, Routledge, London, 1997, pp 279, is a reflection on Arthur Dantos notion of truth or understanding in the way the present relates to the future.

Lawal and Adepegba should be establishing the habitual associations of form whose stylistic definitions they affirmed as defined by their predecessors. Failure of action indicates where history that goes beyond Hegel should begin. This is because, in the spirit of Foucault, the birth of an artistic form prompted by a particular problematic condition may not give rise to a formal sequence that coheres with its antecedents. All the same, the needs that gave rise to antecedent forms may persist within society. A search for a consonance of linked solutions peculiar to Hegelian inspired art history, appropriated in the way Adepegba and Lawal follow, was bound to arrive at the conclusions they did. A hypothetical reconstruction is affirmed and at once denied within the same logical premise. Western art history is itself beset by problems of incomplete serials. The escape has always been a recourse to exclusion of identities that cannot be accounted for in a serial. Hegelian art history proceeds by the exclusion clause whereby the new becomes the notional, and what is unknown is set aside. Two probabilities arise from an attempted complete definition of form and its location in history. The first is that what may be premised as an unbroken chain of stylistic associations could turn out to be a series of serials in the understanding of a historical process. The second is that historical reconstructions are contingent. The enterprise of history is a continuous process of updating knowledge. Martin Bunzuls postmodernist view of history is that events in the present can sometimes reshape the meaning even of unconnected past events.34 Understanding through experience is a continuous phenomenological process. Revaluations and constant updating are what history is all about. Thus, to defer to a notion of the yet-to-be-possible Nigerian art history, as Lawal and Adepegba have done, simply conforms to the predominant ahistorical tradition which the West has always conferred on African art history.