Iconoclash or Iconoconstrain: Truth and Consequence in Contemporary Benin B®and Brass Castings

Abstract

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash Bruno Latour (2002) questions the (art) historical narrative of modernity and turns it into a matter of doubt. What happens, he asks, if iconoclasm is not a definite dividing line between those who commit the hideous act of breaking images and those who don’t? What if we are all iconoclasts and what if we only differ by the motives and attitudes we have towards images?1 Fiddling with Latour’s questions allows for a blast of fresh air into the study of Benin art, especially for gauging the extension of the boundaries of traditional brass-casting in the onceupon-a-time or forever-and-a-day Benin kingdom. Here I look at Latour’s questions as they relate to Benin’s brass-casting over the past hundred years. I argue that both the Benin palace and Western art historical scholarship indulges in iconoclastic gestures. Just as art historians think of 1897, the year British troops looted the Benin palace and deprived the kingdom of many of its artifacts, as a date which has changed artistic productions once and forever (the conceit of a pre-1897 art heritage and a post1897 kitsch consequence) the palace focuses on 1897 in order to brand Benin art as an eternal reference to the past/heritage and to justify demands of repatriation. The removal of palace objects after the punitive event made the date real and artificial, historically accurate and art historically strategic, at the same time. The documented barricade disarticulates the post-1897 production of cast objects from pre1897 castings, creating a dichotomy between categorizations— Euro-American aesthetics and art trade vs. Benin civic efficacies and power memory objects—and in the end constitutes an intellectual dissociation. The date disenfranchises twentieth century Benin castings at the same time that it adds substantial worth to pre-boundary objects. One has somehow to deconstruct the border crossing between classical Benin art and contemporary Benin art as exemplified by the temporal cutoff. The difference in merit/value between an object made in the 1890s and, say, another made ca. 1900–1920 is in the perception of the commodity as dictated by the date. Scavenging canonical castings result in few pickings these days, and a change in the academic weather makes a paradigm shift likely. Ironically, now that the twenty-first century is here, art historians are researching twentieth century Benin cast objects, true to their calling.2 As one examines twentieth century brass-casting, the absence of documentation is striking. Not until the latter decades of that century has attention turned to acknowledging the production of one hundred years, such as Philip Dark’s An Introduction to Benin Art and Technology (1973), but even here the study of casting techniques sought data not to examine twentieth century objects, but to understand the classical corpus, as in Dark’s earlier Benin Art (1969). It raises, Sylvester Ogbechie says, “the issue of how to theorize Edo-Benin art in the era after the end of its ‘history’” (2007). The cultural contours of Benin City in landscape, ideology, hierarchy, and social formations have also infected art historical interests in directing the studies of classical sculptural production in the Ẹdo (Bini) Kingdom of Benin to acquisitions removed from the palace in 1897. An art historical myopia inci-