Uzo Egonu: A Discourse of Reversals

Olu Oguibe UZO EGONU A DISCOURSE OF REVERSALS "Journal of Contemporary African Art • Spring/Summer 1955 Uzo Egonu, Addiction Two 19 70 ( Se r i g r a p h ) zo Egonu is one of Britain's foremost artists. His location in modernism would be that hitherto largely unacknowledged space in the center where artists of non-European descent established their presence and practice by forging a conspicuous intersection between the Occident and its Others, and by creating a discourse of Journal of Contemporary African Art" Spring/Summer 1995 N K A H 3 identities initiating a new phase of modernist culture, what we today know as postmodernism. Within that space, modernism finally acknowledged its true nature as an amalgam of discourses, forms, idiosyncrasies, and layered histories, and not the pedigree of western invention and the European genius which its narrators constructed . In 1995 Egonu will have lived and worked in England for half a century. Born in Onitsha, Nigeria in 1931, he was sent to Europe at the end of the war in 1945 to study art at the age of 13. After private school in Norfolk, he moved to London in 1949 where he enrolled at the Camberwell College of Art and Crafts under the Royal Academician Stanley Spencer. At Camberwell, Egonu studied painting and typography. After art school he travelled in Europe, visiting museums and galleries in Italy, Finland, Switzerland, and France. There he studied major collections of classical African sculpture, and viewed first hand the work of the European masters. O f special interest to him were the post-impressionists and the early modernists, especially the way in which their formal devices differed from those of the Flemish school which Camberwell promoted under Spencer. In the mid 1950s, Egonu lived briefly in France where he painted watercolors for survival. Very little of his work from this period has been traced. Eventually he returned to England and set up studio, relying mostly on the patronage of a Gambian bookmaker in London. He began his practice in London at that historical moment when Europe began to contend with the collapse of the colonial project. The fall of empire signalled a discourse of reversals. Not only did the direction of migration between the centre and the outposts change, bringing hundreds of thousands of natives into the metropolis, this in itself encoded a turn in the balance of power between empire and subjects. The latter became objects of vilification, Europe's malcontents. In England, colonials who had answered the Empire's call to help in the War and in post-war reconstruction, suddenly became unwelcome outsiders. In France, especially with the advent of the anti-colonial war in Algeria, Africans became targets of French nationalist violence. Europe invented an immigrant problem and mapped a new space on which to displace its social anxieties at home and political frustration abroad. Postcoloniality was confronted with varying strategies of exclusionism by the art establishment. Non-occidental artists were barred from mainstream spaces and structures; galleries, exhibitions, opens, fares, as well as influential sections of the art press. In 1952, Jacob Epstein had advised the young Egonu to anticipate this. Under the circumstances, not only did he have to invent devices of self-presentation and projection, he and artists like himself found they also had the enormous historic responsibility of formulating a new cultural discourse . They were to redefine modernism, inscribe postcoloniality on metropolitan culture, and lay the foundations for postmodernist thought and practice. Between the late 1950s and early 1960s, Egonu steadily delinked from the conservative legacies of his training at Camberwell. For a while his approach was peculiarly fauvist, combining polychromatism with a progressive disregard for anatomical accuracy. His themes were drawn from his childhood in Africa, as we find in such early paintings as "Boy with Budgerigar" and "Boy eating Sweetcorn" from 1963, both referring to his family. He was beginning to define an essentially postcolonial consciousness, a rhetoric of distinct identities signified through a narrative of self-representation, through biography. At the same time he was mapping a location within late modernism by signing this narrative through modernist formal devices. Even the persistence of figuration in his work firmly situated...