'What I Have Always Wanted To Tell The World'

Uganda Sun 04-12-2011

'What I Have Always Wanted To Tell The World'
By David Kaiza | Africancolours.com

One word nearly scuppered my interview with Odoch’ameny.

So what is the most immediate word I could think of to describe the provenance of his material? It was easily within reach and only in retrospect did it seem unsuitable and categorical. After all, Kenyan artist Kioko Mwitiki actively seeks abandoned metal at junk yards, which he refers to as “living gravesites”[1]. So how was I to know Odoch would find it politically incorrect?

Odoch’ameny in Nairobi, November 2009. Picture: Andrew Njoroge/AfricanColours.com

I asked: “You work a lot with scrap metals?”

Odoch’s face became serious as he responded: “You see that word scrap should not be applicable. I always collect any piece of metal I find around and bring them in. I also buy sheet metal from the hardware.”

That’s it, a panicky voice inside my head said, there goes the interview.

Odoch’s face soon lit up and he said: “I use found objects, as long as it’s applicable.”

Although his objection to “scrap” had momentarily put me off balance, I later realized that while Odoch can be single-minded in the pursuit of ideas, he was incapable of taking offence for long. But at this point, I was still concerned that if I was to allow a spotlight on my every lexical choice, I risked being blinded and the interview would grind to a halt.

“When you are talking of scrap, it means completely discarded,” he said. “Scrap metal means you are just picking, picking.”

I did not want to probe into this sensitivity over semantics. Artists who are fastidious with words also tend to be the most engaging; quickly, the bumpy introduction, a sort of territoriality, is overcome. Once the meticulousness is replaced with discussing the work proper, the dialogue can be very rewarding.

A little disclosure: Odoch, alongside one or two others, is responsible for my interest in art, for his were the first sculptures I saw thirty years ago – a male and a female figure – in my home town in northern Uganda.

Thick works of plaster, the two larger-than-life figures stood at the entrance of Aboke High School like forbidding deities with books of knowledge in their hands as if gauging who would and would not make it in life.

In the meantime I had lost any association of art with the region as war had completely ransacked it of creativity.

Odoch himself had left the country in the 1970s after the Idi Amin takeover and made Kenya his home. He owes much to Alan Donovan and Joe Murumbi for keeping his work alive through the decades. The quality of it attests to the seriousness with which African Heritage, ahead of its time, selected and promoted artists.

In the pantheon of East African art, Odoch stands with Elimu Njau, Elkana Ong’esa, Gregory Maloba, Francis Nnaggenda and a handful others as the grandees.

Yet, sadly, Odoch, arguably the highest achieving of Ugandan artists, is better known to patrons of his generation and now hardly talked about in his own country.

Three decades later and 1100 kilometres away in Nairobi, I finally met the man whose oeuvres had intimidated me as I visited my uncle during his studies.

The portfolio that Odoch carried for our interview (his art, like much of that from the region, is scattered all over the world) was far from the impression I formed in 1980.

Lyrical, shapely and gesturing, Odoch’s mastery of the human form is now legendary in the world of sculpture.

His is a time-consuming technique, fusing together individual pieces of sheet metal or whole objects. At this stage, they have already conjured up form. In many of Odoch’s pieces, disparate things – a piston as the head, bolts as phalanges, a typewriter as the torso – are like frozen metamorphosis.

One of Odoch'ameny's sulptures | Image courtesy of Allan Donovan

In more of his work, he does not stop there. Beyond fusion, he welds even more firmly, closely pressing the rod so that the links become less prominent and a confluence results. The final touch is a brilliant stroke – that mottled look – where Odoch points the rod randomly as he welds so that he ends up with a pointillist surface and the little bits of metal are subsumed.

The more you look at this sophisticated metal recyclia, the more the creative process is revealed. Some of Odoch’s works even appear unaesthetic, as if the long, drawn-out effort had so taken the man up that the sheer technical demand lapped over and overcame the vision.

It is during our interview that I got to understand that the discourse about art in the region is perhaps responsible for the meanness of our attention to our own art and the fractured heritage that complicates it:

“When you produce sculpture, you produce an area that is applicable to the audience,” he says. “You give them your sensualities that remind them of their own situation. It becomes a way of life, an element.” In some cases, it could be a reminder of what people – the internally displaced, refugees, economic migrants – have left behind.

Odoch creates art for the effect it will achieve, rather than for the beauty it will radiate. Beauty is of course a difficult word to apply to art. So much has already happened in the creative process that when the final work emerges, it is not necessary. Whatever aesthetic arises from it is incidental.

His most becoming works are feminine forms. Often elegant and gesturing, they are ideals of Woman. Elegant limbs run from the ankles, the legs tapering upwards faultlessly to become raunchy about the hips, contouring seductively about the abdomen, rounding off about the breasts to ingress sharply into long necks to the paradoxically small heads. These figures are, in his words “voluptuous – sexual attraction that enhances the landscape”.

“Landscape” is another word that you feel he has chosen carefully, as if women are entwined with nature.

These figures are elongated in parts and compacted in others – like the head. But it is the interpretation of their proportions that make them approach Truth – a word he might like and one which seems to describe best his quest.

Odoch, who, as a student at Makerere University School of Fine Art attended anatomy as well as life classes, which he has taught as far away as California, has absorbed the human form and his realisation of the body is exhilarating.

The buttocks with their proportionality and the dimples just above them, the hollows of the lower back and their relation to the hips are so exact as to feel more than lifelike. There is an air of balance which suggests fertility.

He can talk endlessly about womanhood, seeming to have observed not just form but character as well, declaring in amusing appraisal that “[women] make the world when the environment is conducive to them; they destroy the world when the environment is not conducive to them.”

He is an anthropometricist for whom everything man creates emanates from his own body, man being “a jealous champion of what he has and the world he creates is the outward representation and totality of his personality.”

“I discovered that all engines are derived from human parts,” he says. The engine, with its heart and valves, is as “gracefully organized as the human body”, “balanced against gravitational pull”. The crankshaft is a kind of spinal column.

The human head is represented by the piston because it moves the rest of the body when it has inhaled oxygen; its disproportionately small size is to get the central axis.

“I calculate the human body against natural forces,” he says and launches into a repertoire that speaks of man as inhabiting not the industrialized world of his source material, but one of spirits that compel him to navigate in a world of expectation, wants and negotiations.

“When I can’t tackle a subject, I go to rest and I hear voices; I feel powers and when I do it finally, I look and I ask myself ‘is this really me?’”

Odoch’ameny and David Kaiza at AfricanColours offices in Nairobi. Photo: Andrew Njoroge

The creation of art as representation of the seen and the unseen universe harks back to pre-colonial Africa, an approach that suffered dirty derogation with the coming of colonialism and particularly the Christian missionary:

Problematic, yet hugely collected by the very West that dismissed its source, such an approach is not on the curriculum of art schools in Africa. Hence it is brave for an artist working on the continent today to begin to articulate this. Even more bracing is his grasping it comprehensively.

Odoch’s quest – a search for existential truths, as he explains it - is to arrive at a nexus where he represents man in a manner that captures outwardly the “totality of his personality.” A personality of flesh, blood and the invisible.

He says, “I look at a lady standing and I start to get haunted.”

“Even as we talk right now, there are spirits hovering around. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it but you can hear. There is the world of invisible spirits and you come up with some representation of it.”

Then as if it has just hit him, he jerks off the chair and hits his forehead, walking about the room. “It is what I have always wanted to tell the world. Man is a walking spirit.

It takes some effort to read this from his work, yet it abounds with hints. His pieces in plaster are differently realised from those in clay, terracotta, wood and soapstone. But they all have the continuity of cubist, angular shapes. They all have – whether in material or space – geometric, circular, rectangular, conical, pyramidal shapes; cylindrical, spherical, going round.

“These are the forms discovered by […] Africans before they were colonized,” he says. “[…] Africans were ahead in Modern Art. The colonialists only subdued us with guns. I go to the origin of humankind where you look at so-called primitive art and see these ideas. Ideas like ‘primitive art’ are concepts thrown to disgrace the African.

I thought fleetingly of “classical African art” to describe his work, before recalling the historical problem associated with “classical”, and with the scrape over “scrap” fresh in my mind, held it back.

I was in the presence of a man who embodied the manner in which ancient Africans approached art; the elemental, meditative purview rifling into the unseen yet felt, to produce forms. Art as metaphysics. This was serious stuff, a creationist art (in the biblical sense) in which everything is heavily weighted, nothing casual.

“Creationist”, “meditative purview”, “metaphysics” – these are laborious meta-concepts; with Odoch, they start to drip in because it is the zone from which his ideas are forged.

His art, I could see, came from very far, not just in time, but properly far in a logical, philosophical sense.

Phenomenological and pre-categorical, it is conceived at the stage where totalities have not yet started to congeal and to deform our vision. It is pure conception, which makes his work an ill-fit with the contemporary art that is now everywhere and perhaps explains why Odoch is not talked about too much:

While talking to him from within a language that comforts because it is bereft of colonialist, historical baggage, the question remains: what value is there in re-stating these time-worn considerations? On the flip-side, is there a moral-ethical value Odoch is presenting (elevating Man to the rank of spirit) and that rather than time-worn, his work is timeless?

He has a lofty conceptualization of creativity, describing creative people as the next-best thing to God and ending with a heavy pronouncement to explain why he exerts himself so hard.

“Society is seen by what it has made - the roads, the attire, the houses and towns. Man is a tool-making being. When you make half-baked things, it means the thinking is not developed. You read a man’s mind by what he has made."

This article was first published on this website on the 4th of June 2010

Posted By: Andrew Njoroge

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