From the Indigenous to the Universal in the Study of Yoruba Aesthetics: Babatunde Lawal, Rowland Abiodun and Beyond

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Ancestral Transmissions from Living Masters

Collage of myself centre, framed by Hindu cosmographic symbols,central to my intercultural and multidisciplinary aesthetic explorations, flanked by Abiodun, left and Lawal right, against the background of contemporary African artist Obiora Udechukuwu's ''Our Journey,'' a work that, in adapting Igbo Uli symbolism of the spiral of life, dramatizes the transmutation of ancient systems in contemporary terms represented by Lawal and Abiodun's work on Yoruba aesthetics in the context of endogenous African thought, an orientation I am cultivating in studying the work of these masters.

Abstract

On studying the aesthetic explorations of Rowland Abiodun and Babatunde Lawal in the Yoruba context as points of entry into the intersection of the local and the universal in human experience.

Questions of Value

Of what significance is my study of Yoruba aesthetics, ideas of the nature of beauty and of art, developed by thinkers working in the context of Yoruba thought?

Who would care about my using the relationships between the ideas of two of these thinkers, Rowland Abiodun and Babatunde Lawal, in exploring these conceptions?

Would it not be more relevant, more interesting to people, to study contemporary African artists, possibly in relation to classical African aesthetics, instead of focusing on this aesthetics outside the contemporary context?

My Work in Contemporary African Art and in the Contemporary Significance of Classical African Art

These questions represent a creative challenge to further define the logic of my project.

I have studied contemporary African art in relation to classical African aesthetics, as demonstrated by my “Nsibidi/Ekpuk Philosophy and Mysticism : Research and Publication Project.”( Facebook; academia.edu PDF)

I am also conjoining classical and contemporary discourses of the Yoruba origin Ogboni esoteric order in relation to it's classical art as evident at my compilation “My Journey in Developing Universal Ogboni Philosophy and Spirituality, a New School of the Ogboni Esoteric Order.” ( Facebook ; academia. edu PDF )

Seeking Greater Depth in the Understanding of Classical African Aesthetics and its Universal Significance

I am keen on going deeper into African aesthetics, understood on it's own terms and in it's relationship to discourses beyond Africa.

My current approach is that of developing a deeper grounding in indigenous African aesthetics using the works of Abiodun and Lawal as my interpretive axis, and from that point, exploring the universal significance of the ideas they develop.

The Love of Thought and the Love of Art

I love art and philosophy.

I enjoy the dynamics of ideas, intangible formulations emerging from and used in making sense of our embodied existence, our lives as flesh and blood creatures.

My aesthetic experience is deeply shaped by nature, non-human and human, as well as by art, so I'm interested in thought that unites the two, like German philosopher Immanuel Kant's aesthetics is illuminating both for understanding human responses to nature and human relationship with human creativity.

Thus, I want to live in that world of ideas which is both temporal and timeless, abstract and concrete, historical and metaphysical, sociological and philosophical, illuminating the specific yet seeking the universal.

From the Art of a People to the Being of All Peoples

The fullest reading of such great art historians and philosophers of art as Ernst Gombrich, Kenneth Clark, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt and Okwui Enwezor and including such works as Olu Oguibe’s masterpiece, “El Anatsui: Beyond Being and Nothingness,” emerges not only in understanding Western, Asian,Persian, Arab or African art which they mediate, but in participating with great aesthetic and intellectual intelligences in engaging with primary forms of human culture, since the best art scholarship, like theirs, rises from the local to the universal, from it's temporal specificities to the dynamics of human being and becoming.

Kant is best appreciated, not only in terms of understanding a point of view from his milieu in German Idealism, but in participating with him in grappling with the human struggle with that which intrigues and yet goes beyond the human.

Along similar lines, people should be able to read Abiodun/Lawal/Adepoju to see the universe from a perspective that rises from a Yoruba matrix, ascending into the river of possibilities that is the journey to understand the how and why of existence.

Great thanks to the person whose challenges to me inspired these reflections.