Contrast this celebration of painting and image making with the austere disavowal of same that we find in an opposing thought system, one which has held a devastating sway over painting as a form and practice in the West for several hundred years. In the Hebrew scriptures, the creator issues a stern sanction against images and image making in the second commandment of Moses with the following words: “thou shalt not make unto thee any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath.” Like vengeance, such preoccupation is designated in no uncertain terms as the preserve of god that no human may breach without severe consequence. Earlier on in the scriptures mentioned, the children of Isra’el invoke the damning wrath of god when, forlorn and abandoned in the desert on their way out of Egypt, they beckon on Aaron the jeweler, brother of the prophet, to make them an image that they may worship. Contrary to the system outlined above whereby the painter goddess demands an offering of images, most important of which is her own, Aaron and his people, beholden as all mortals are to images and the calling of the image-maker, are made to suffer damnation for the failure of their ways.

Of course, for centuries this peculiar, proscriptive tenet had no place or meaning in the aesthetics and cosmologies of the majority of world cultures, its pernicious dogma of divine narcissism finding as its domain, only a small band of nomad cultures. However, once it took hold in the West and spread across its dominions, it would become the pivot around which the practice of painting and image making would revolve, setting up a narrow bandwidth of extremes within which Western society and artistic practice have oscillated for over a thousand years. In time the tenet has coalesced and ossified around one question, namely, the appropriateness of the desire to reproduce god’s creation. The manifestation of this desire, which Greek philosopher and anti-aesthete Plato named mimesis, has been at the center of the most important debates about painting for several centuries. And, although many might believe that this question was settled once and for all by modernism, and therefore no longer has relevance today, the evidence is, of course, to the contrary. At the core of debates over the picture plane, painterliness, the death and resurrection of minimalism and color-field, the death and return of painting itself, are those old and enduring questions: Is it the purpose or prerogative of painting to imitate nature? Is it within its bounds to seek to reproduce that which already exists? Is painting an original creation or a mere embellishment? Is it an indulgence embroiled and implicated in the pretentious machinations of the elite classes, or is it a potent social act? Today, the West and its global dominion may have escaped from the strictures of the biblical sanction against images, and instead immersed themselves in a deluge of images. And yet, the residues and after-taste of centuries of entrapment in the hold of that sanction remain, and its call on the limits and responsibilities of painting are to be found in the restrictive nature of debates and discourses around painting; the perpetual preoccupation with what is and what is not, what must and what must not.

In a brilliant introduction to his own paintings in 1929, the English author D. H. Lawrence attributed the preponderant mediocrity of English and American art over the preceding two centuries, to a fundamental social shortcoming, namely Puritanism and the dread of beauty and wholesomeness. This fear of the wholesome Lawrence described as a “mystic terror of consequences” which he traced to the end of the16th century when Europe underwent a “grand rupture in the human consciousness, the mental consciousness recoiling in violence away from the physical, instinctive-intuitive.” This terror would lead to a determined disavowal of all that is robust, rustic or sensuous, all that is natural, and would manifest itself in an intellectual severity in art, especially in painting, as well as a general, social malaise of mild philistinism and servitude to the intellect. Lawrence ultimately located the source of this malaise in the fear of the sexual. His Freudian diagnoses, of course, belongs in his day, but the deeper roots of this loathing which was manifestly religious in its formulation, projection, and technologies of perpetuation, is in that ancient, biblical damnation of image making. Not only did painters produce work that rather than have passion or soul, was so fastidiously possessed of mechanical wizardry, instead, viewers also came to painting inured by this malaise.

The consequence of this alternately subtle and vehement disavowal, and the deadening of aesthetic awareness that comes with it, is the dislodgment of the image-maker, the painter, from the secure pedestal accorded her in other cultures and earlier times. The myth of Asele typifies the opposite, for, within the cosmological and cultural structures that it represents, painting and the painter occupied a secure niche beyond threats of abrogation or disregard. From within this niche the painter fulfilled her responsibilities to the gods, and exercised her freedom in her responsibilities to patron and self. If painting as we know it should be in crisis today, it is in part because the painter—and the art of painting—have slipped from this cosmological niche. The perennial return to the question of painting’s uncertain future—a question that in societies like the one described here would be irrelevant and beyond contemplation—points to the tragic vulnerability of the painter in our time. Severed from claims to divine appointment, and indeed debarred almost entirely from the succor of popular election and celebration, the painter today must endure the loneliness of her calling.

True, the cult of the painter survives, but that cult is one built not so much on the merits and primacy of the art, or indeed on society’s high regard for either the practitioner or the form, as on the wily artifices of the modern celebrity market. Unlike in the Igbo myth, the modern painter is venerated not so much for her superlative skill or her ability to compete with the spirits or command the respect of her community, but for her astute ability to lever herself into and navigate the intricate paths of the visibility machine. Yet, rather than ameliorate her vulnerability, the inherent treacherousness of this preoccupation and terrain emphasizes it instead. Nary does it happen today that the painter is transfigured and transported into mythology for subsequent generations, except on the strength of their eccentricity or their voracity for the limelight.

This vulnerability may appear even more palpable for the contemporary painter working outside the buffered geography of her provenance. As the painter struggles to find her place in modern society, and to justify her calling, such struggle is often compounded by innumerable other realities which, in the case of those who work outside of their own cultures, may include the vagaries of itinerancy and a multiple consciousness of self. In many ways this is the reality that contemporary African painters bring to their practice. In the main the most visible among them work in expatriation where their location in the cosmopolitan milieu is as conspicuously precarious as it is deeply imbricated in an often tangled density of dispositions. As they shift from the certainties of origin and negotiate their place in a new epoch, the tradition of ambivalence toward the image and the image-maker here discussed, and its broad implications, become as much part of their heritage as those embodied in the Igbo myth. Yet, it is proper to observe that such artists bring to their practice and their construction of the self, a ready reference and background in the living, cultural memory of their cultures of origin.

By availing herself of the broad traditions and mythologies embedded in this cultural memory, the contemporary Africa painter is specially enamoured to contribute fresh ideas and positions to both the practice of image making, and to global discourses on the fate and burden of painting. For instance, in addition to outlining a more favorable disposition to the preoccupation with images, the legend of Asele and the beauty-seeking predilection of the painter goddess, Ala, reveal certain philosophical positions that could inform contemplation on the condition of painting, also. First, they point to a consciousness of, and longing for the beautiful, which validates beauty for its own sake without the strictures of meaning. In the essay referred to above, D. H. Lawrence observes that the bourgeois in Europe—and this may be said quite unequivocally of museum patrons in New York—come to painting in the quest for “cerebral excitation” rather than the plain, sensuous joy of an encounter with beauty. Such obsession with the cerebral is couched in the pretensions of a search for meaning, and recalls innumerable anecdotes on the frustration with modern painting. On the contrary, it is clear when Ala, the goddess, decorated the body of her messenger, the motive was to produce that which is sensuous and pleasurable. This act defines a chthonic liberty in the purposes of painting, for if the primary act of the first painter should be to produce beauty for its own sake, then, certainly, a terrain devoid of inhibitions is made available to the artist.

There are further instructions here for the contemporary painter. A great deal of the debates around painting has concerned itself with a preposterous dichotomy between painting and so-called decoration, that is, that which preoccupies itself with embellishment. In much criticism and especially art market gibberish, a painter is all too often dismissed as “decorative.” The irony and failure of such observation, which is reminiscent and indeed born of that old discomfiture with beauty, is in its failure to acknowledge that all painting, in the end, is driven by the will to embellish, or enhance, whether physically or conceptually, that which already exists. The patterned, non-figurative painting which at face value speaks to no hidden idea, is as much about embellishment or enhancement, as is the engaged painting on the vagaries of war. While the one elects to offer a moment or environment of beauty in the immediate, the other is concerned with the absence and desirability of beauty in the larger scheme of things.

The Igbo divine painter chooses body decoration as the first act of painting, with the aim to elicit same pleasurable response as did the Hebrew god who, at the end of each day of his week of creation, looked back at his handiwork, and “saw that it was good.” In the much-restrained language of the King James translation of the Hebrew scriptures, at the end of the week, the creator god “saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good.” (Emphasis originally in the King James Version.) Both divinities, including the latter who would in the book of Exodus issue the sanction discussed above, banishing humans from the preoccupation of image making, recognized the generation of pleasure as a valid purpose for art. For centuries early societies indulged in the manufacture of robust and concupiscent images of obvious sensuous or decorative aim. So that the superior derogation of the decorative which has plagued the painter’s conscience in the past few decades defines an era of prevalent inhibition not distinct from the one that D. H. Lawrence described in his essay. This deserves to be interrogated and discarded.

The contemporary African painter who pays close attention to the traditions discussed here, is liberated from the inhibitions of hierarchizing dichotomies, equally bearing in mind that Asele, the legendary painter at the center of our references, was herself not only a muralist but a body-painter, also, and it was on account of both preoccupations that she was retained by the gods. Even so, such a painter is almost certainly conscious of the inherent multi-valence in the nature of the image, almost always aware of the image’s capacity to speak simultaneously to both the sacred and the seemingly profane, to appear decorative without losing its vehicular agency. She is aware that in this multi-valence resides the redoubtable power of painting.

And though this awareness is not peculiar, it is nevertheless lodged in the recesses of the painter’s mind, providing avenues of freedom and enabling a surefooted disposition to the condition of painting. We find this disposition most clearly in the work of African painters like Ghada Amer, Mary Evans, Julie Mehretu and Donald Odita; all of who methodically employ technologies of the sensuous in their construction of otherwise highly charged social and historical messages. Whether it be Amer’s occasionally disturbing reflections on social and historical inhibitions, and their effects on a woman’s attitude toward the self, or Mehretu’s contemplation of the social implications of itinerancy and urban rootlessness, these are most exquisitely wrought in a masterly command of medium and technique reminiscent of Asele. Evans reminds us of the goddess Ala, able to draw the viewer close, even endear them to equally difficult moments and issues through her undeniably seductive patterns and decorative motifs. Odita engages us with his studies of color and color-field painting, yet his interest in “color” is both visual and conceptual, both formal and metaphorical. His paintings resonate with disarming plays on optical pleasure, yet speak to serious, philosophical questions around color and human relations. These artists are not inhibited by uninformed disavowals of the decorative, but recognize instead, as did the divine painter of Igbo lore, the power of beauty in painting.

The myth of Asele has yet another relevance for the contemporary African painter whose theatre of practice is the West. As noted earlier, it speaks to the desirability of transit and transcendence across borders and realms of origin. It is a potent and inspiring metaphor for the aspiring painter who is able through mastery of her art to levitate herself unto new planes and theatres of practice. Through mastery of her art Asele transported herself to the theatre of the spirits. Her ability to engage such unfamiliar territory—which is in many respects reminiscent of what I have described elsewhere as “the terrain of difficulty”—and command it with enough redoubt to earn the commission of the gods, speaks to artists who come to the heart of the global from “elsewhere.” It has a particular resonance for artists like Amer, Evans, Mehretu and Odita all of whom were born in Africa but have made their living and located their practice in this terrain of difficulty. Asele’s contests with the spirits on their own turf is a very apt metaphor for the condition of artists who must contend with the redoubled challenges of practice and contestation in a truly most challenging environment. That these artists have brought their skills to bear on our understanding of the location of painting at the turn of the century, in turn speaks to the longevity and enduring relevance of painting as a form and practice.