Casting in contemporary Benin art.

   History began yesterday.
      --John Sanday, World Monuments Fund

   Unless history lives in our present, it has no future.
      --History Channel advertisement

   We begin at the end.
      --Archaeologist, History Channel, Narration

   "'One of those Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt's
   pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn't. One has
   historicity, a hell of a lot of it. And one has nothing. Can you
   feel it? ... You can't. You can't tell which is which ... You see
   my point. It's all a big racket; they're playing it on themselves.
   I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle ... and it's
   the same as if it hadn't, unless you know. It's in here." He
   tapped his head. "In the mind, not the gun."

      --Emmanuel Carrere, I Am Alive and You Are Dead:
      A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K Dick (2004)

Nothing is so stale as Benin art history. The Benin kingdom collapsed more than a hundred years ago, pummeled by a British Punitive Expedition. Like a terminal patient on life support, its cast art tradition was kept artificially alive by academic-to-academic resuscitation. Since nobody bothered about a prognosis for recovery, art historians soldiered on, happy with their comatose victim, that wonderful Latin phrase terminus ad quem--"final limiting point"--defining the moment of preemptive closure. In the meantime the patient got up and walked away. The Benin Edo world hadn't stopped and neither had the artisans of Benin City.

Benin's art reflects one of the great kingdoms of West Africa, a forest empire that spanned a millennium. Trade with Europe found a visual analog in cast brass objects--testimony to centuries of contact and Benin's expansionist impulses. The 1897 British invasion left the palace ransacked, its art confiscated, several chiefs hanged, and the king exiled. Loot from the palace arrived in London. The 3000 to 5000 objects dispersed into museums and private collections offset expedition costs, the largest caches going to the British Museum and German collections.

Chronologies convey the impression that, because the king was central to the scheme of things, everything of value had been carted off, Benin's technology eviscerated, its artistic inspiration anesthetized. Pre-twentieth century Benin art became iconic. Like Egyptian pyramids and Great Zimbabwe, Benin art represents Black Africa, the continent's highest but defunct cultural achievements. To get a handle on the imperial gaze and the social construction of knowledge in the age of empire, read Annie Coombes's "critical" discourse on Benin art in Reinventing Africa (1994), then fast forward to the present without much loss of meaning.

The technical virtuosity and aesthetic excellence of Benin art astonished, then puzzled European curators because its framing occurred within the "cultural degeneracy" theory of the time. Arguments over sources--European technical diffusion or indigenous African production--eventually gave way to the documentation of objects and development of a time line. Benin's art came to be recognized as an African accomplishment comparable to the best casting traditions of Europe, a metallurgical tour de force that rivaled Renaissance cast art and, in its employment of horror vacui, utilized embellishments worthy of the Baroque if not that tradition's exuberance. Degeneration theory didn't go away however. Post-1897 objects are thought to continue a trend from sixteenth century naturalism to a nineteenth century heaviness and a twentieth century commercial crudity. This testifies to nostalgia for the theory.

Art History and Science Testing

The catalog of witnesses and scholars seems as long as Benin's king lists: from Pitt-Rivers (1900) and Dalton (1898) to Felix von Luschan's compendium (1919) and William Fagg's intuitions (1963, 1970). Bernard Struck (1923) and Philip Dark (1962, 1975) refined chronologies by relating oral traditions and written records to iconography. Irwin Tunis (1981, 1982, 1983) matched technical methods to history. Spectrographic and metals analyses by Frank Willett and S. Fleming (1975), Otto Werner (1970), Werner and Willett (1975), Willet et al. (1994), and Paul Craddock and John Picton (1986) added scientific precision.

Willett, Werner, and Craddock show that brass has one particular metal composition if it dates before the Punitive Expedition and a different composition if of recent manufacture. Christian Goedicke, of the Rathgen Laboratory, Berlin, tested a sample of turn-of-the-century brasses for trace elements. The simple explanation is that modern production techniques of smelting ore and manufacturing copper, brass, and iron for commercial use remove impurities. Such refinements in smelting were not introduced until the twentieth century. Hector Neff of California State University, Long Beach, and Natalie Lawson, California State University, Fullerton, employ laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to sample objects of modern manufacture.

Technology and a Twentieth Century Chronology

For those who see a gray sky in the grim saga of the market in fakes and sweat over whether a casting is authentically real, authentically fake, or authentically reproduced, Benin's brass casters see a silver lining in the continuing interest in their craft. In Indonesia, silver medallions of Benin-like Buddhas are sold as pendants, Mardi Gras-like hip ornaments are made in Louisiana, and ivory salt-cellars are carved in Hong Kong (Figs. 2-3).

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John Picton (1997) observed that although there is more production in Benin City today than ever before, it is not documented. This is a stunning observation, because it is an indirect swipe at researchers who conducted ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological work in Benin City. The mind-sets of the 1950s and 60s failed to recognize the power of relentless creativity and entrepreneurial pragmatism that exists in Benin City (Fig. 4).

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Changes in brass casting technology and styles are the subject of this report. Von Sydow (1928, 1938) wrote brief reports on the subject. Balfour (1904) and Chief Akpata (1937) offer glimpses of shrine castings. Reports by William Fagg (1963), Philip Dark (1960, 1973), Timothy Garrard (1983), and Denis Williams (1974) are signal contributions to casting technology. Dark's An Introduction to Benin Technology (1973) is authoritative because it describes casting techniques, but his commentary has a lingering bias for earlier artworks. In a recent special issue of African Arts on the Benin Centenary, Charles Gore (1997) focused on one brass-casting family, linking lineages, historical associations, and casting ideology.

The story is also about the evolution of casting technologies and its interrelationship with an international commodity market. Looking back, the twentieth century offers little to the scholar interested in contemporary Benin art. Only castings of the precolonial era bear the imprimatur of authenticity and the legitimacy of academic documentation. There would appear to be no way around regimes of knowledge, hegemonic conceits that collectors, curators, and art historians reaffirm and shield. In the meantime, a century of artistic production has taken place, snubbed as tourist or kitsch art, touted as inept, gross, and crude. The judgment of a cutoff point sidelines artifacts that by other standards are not debased. Warped into an art historical imagination totalizing in its framing, there is no time- or style-line for twentieth century objects that would arrange that period of skilled and semiskilled production into a satisfactory survey, historical placement, and stylistic sequence. Sadly, one peers back into a hundred years of vacuum.

Is a twentieth century chronology now possible? The nearest to us in time, contemporary Benin art is farthest away in art historical documentation. There is no repository of twentieth century Benin art. Evidence is dispersed among individual tourists and collectors, as personal mementoes. For curators and their collector collaborators, condemnation of contemporary pieces is more rewarding than constructing a chronology. Ferreting out fakes rates as more compelling than exhibitions on contemporary Benin brasses. Scholarly interest in contemporary objects ranges from disinterest to disdain. The exhibition organized by Flora Kaplan for CENSCER, University of Benin, at the National Museum in Benin City in 1985, as part of her Fulbright duties, might have served as a template for exhibitions on contemporary Benin art had it been executed in the United States, for it was an intuitively tasteful blend of historic and outstanding contemporary pieces culled from the Benin Museum, private shrines, and casters.

I know of only a few exhibitions in Europe and the US that incorporate recent or near-recent castings. The exhibition organized by Stefan Eisenhofer and the catalog he edited, Kulte, Kunstler, Konige in Afrika: Tradition und Moderne in Sudnigeria (1997), is a rare attempt to incorporate modern but mostly not-well-executed castings from private collections. The permanent exhibition at Southern University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, organized by Vivian Kerr, Museum Director, offers examples of excellent castings, difficult to pin down, several of indeterminate styles, many twentieth century, some probably earlier, a few unique, the shrines from which they came sometimes known, the casters who made them unknown. There are no workshops in Benin City today that make anything like some of the objects on display, in casting quality, style, and motif. These objects are worth a PhD thesis or two.

Castings made after 1897 fit into a period of great changes in Benin history. The British shipped King Oba Ovonrramwen off to Calabar, where he died in exile; executed the chiefs they thought responsible for the surprise attack on the Philips party that precipitated the Punitive Expedition; built a fort on part of the burned palace ruins (now the National Museum, Benin City); opened up a golf course (now the Golf Club); set up a European Club (the present Benin Club); and laid out a grid for a Government Reservation Area (GRA) to house a government bureaucracy, colonial officers, and their families. The British restored the monarchy in 1914 under Lord Lugard's policy of Indirect Rule. Oba Eweka II rebuilt the palace on a diminished scale, using the ruins of the original palace as a guide. He reactivated court rituals and in 1927 established the Benin Divisional Council School of Art on a street fronting the rebuilt palace. Casters and carvers depended on commercial patronage.

Ancestral altars also had to be refurbished. Shrines fallen into desuetude were primed with sequestered objects and reprimed with new castings. Art historians call these objects "replacement pieces." The casting technology and motifs of the 1920s to 1950s hardly differs from the late nineteenth century in motifs and style. A ponderous style and generous use of metal of the Late Period castings carried over into the next century, but there are exceptions.

Casters introduced new motifs. Folktales became a popular source for the brass casters because they carry moral weight (Fig. 5). The Greedy Hunter depicts a hunter with an elephant on his head who stops to kill an ant, his avarice the moral of the tale. The Oba in a Kola Nut Tree relates the story about an Oba and a powerful adversary. The king is saved through the intervention of an ally. This is a story about the limits of a king's power and the importance of alliances, complete with proverbs known by most local kids, or at least their parents (Fig. 6).

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A wonderful piece is a flat plaque with four trivet-like legs depicting a colonial officer with brogue shoes, addressing a chief, his attendant, and a small boy (Fig. 7). Overarching tree leaves take care of the horror vacui. The colonial officer facing the chief and his attendants, each depicted in diminishing height, expresses hierarchy and authority. The high relief of the attendant's serving tray is an exquisite example of dimensionality and craftsmanship. The official's brogue cordovans and the chief's beads are remarkably detailed. The plaque resembles a photograph, its border marked by a rope-of-the-world design (sign of longevity) that mimics the white border of photographic prints.

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In the 1930s, Oba Akenzua II ascended the throne and celebrated by sacrificing an elephant. A brass plaque commemorates this event. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip visited in 1956 and this, too, is documented in two different brass castings; one occupied a space behind the king's throne in the palace, the other is in the museum (Fig. 8). Akenzua II's reign of forty-four years saw the emergence of new social groups, with class interests opposed to the traditionalism of the palace. In the late 1940s, this erupted into street fighting in Benin City. Palace loyalists resurrected the osun nigiogio, or war staffs, using them as emblems of political rivalry. Hammered and cast with figures of vultures and chameleons, animals that represent death and poison respectively, the staffs marked the latent but smoldering warfare between Ogboni and Owegbe (Otu Edo), competing secret societies.

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The patrimonial versus gerontocratic cleavage between palace and town (Bradbury 1972) added to the endemic factionalism that had racked Benin in other guises for centuries. These days it is a subtle tension between brash, young, newly wealthy chiefs, some involved in 419 scams, lacking all but a semblance of traditional etiquette, and the cadre of older chiefs, now dying off, who honor the sacredness of the king. Put another way, the older generation see the annual Igue ceremonies as a vital part of annual renewal, with sacred overtones, while the younger generation see these rites as a festival, with free sodas and the kick of authority that comes from wearing chiefly robes.

After World War II Lebanese traders moved into southern Nigeria, including Benin City, carrying out their classic middleman import-export role. In the 1960s the Peace Corps came to town, the idealism of volunteers an infectious bonus for schools and Local Government Areas (LGAs). The Lebanese and the Peace Corps had an impact on Benin arts and crafts. Castings became realistic and robust, black and tiger ebony was popular for chess sets, and carved ivory found a market niche. The Lebanese and Nigeria's newly confident business class, many assuming CEO positions after independence in 1960, bought shiny castings to decorate their homes, while Peace Corps volunteers packed their embassy treasure chests with keepsakes for the folks back home. A lot was bric-a-brac, but the force of market demands modified traditional styles and added realism to brass and ebony work. The worst examples of wood carving bore laughably lopsided ears and crooked eyes, while brass castings showed the file and chisel marks of jobs inexpertly or quickly executed. That was to be expected, since carving, wax modeling, and post-casting filing were left to apprentices.

Benin City and Social Change

Benin City is a conglomeration of villages with a hub of government offices and a periphery of breweries and factories. Not a metropolis, it hosts modern institutions. When Oba Erediauwa ascended the throne in 1978, Benin City boasted a teaching hospital, a national university, and a GRA, more in tune with a middleclass lifestyle than traditional African city styles. Chock-a-block with schools, churches, and mansions, the extended GRA, in an odd kitschy way, emulates Miami Beach's extravagant, bizarre architecture. Houses floored with terrazzo and marble and compounds cluttered with biblical statuary are visual analogues to the mausoleums and monuments in Los Angeles's Forest Lawn cemetery. Benin City's GRA offers a strange postmodernist resolution of religious piety wedded to an African prestige-motivated consumerism, the Nigerian denouement of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).

Oba Erediauwa, born in 1923, is the first Benin king with a university degree (B.A. [Tripos] law, King's College, Cambridge) and extensive federal public administrative experience as a national permanent secretary and as a chancellor of the University of Ibadan. My assessment is that he parleyed change into a progressive conservatism, gradualism really, protecting the aura of kingship against a looming obsolescence, sternly preventing the palace and its belief system from disappearing by upholding ceremonies, court meetings, and making public pronouncements on civic issues. This is a daunting task. Kingship rituals vie in tenuous coexistence with modern government bureaucracies, modern commerce, and energetic evangelicalism. So far, the political and social goals of the palace hold off the tide of imminent and deleterious change.

Shrines blip off the screen, shot down by Christian evangelical fervor. Family shrines are denuded as children of princes, chiefs, priests, village headmen, and elders slough off ancient beliefs and sell or burn a heritage they abhor. Economic malaise and political malfeasance lead to pessimism. Education and cable television have their impact. Cell phones and phone cards are sold at intersections and bought by young men to entice girls' hearts. My research assistants are now on the Internet.

As Christian fundamentalism and consumerism subvert local cosmologies and converts castigate traditional practices as satanic or insult animist believers as rustics, few replace shrine objects. Local residents do not want "the work of the devil" as house decor, so Osun heads, altars to the hand, or ancestral staffs are not desired. Oba Erediauwa gives visiting bishops brass castings of gauche praying hands on a polished ebony base. Benin's elite favor castings of slim Fulani maidens carrying water pots--an aesthetic anomaly that contrasts to the half-apple-back-sided and busty local women they marry. There are popular tusk-like castings that combine traditional motifs one atop the other, and these are displayed in executive offices and home parlors.

Benin City's museum might have been a magnet attracting important pieces in local private hands. The National Museum and Monuments Commission has a policy to purchase contemporary art of ritual significance, one of several museum policy initiatives. Except for the elephant plaque that commemorates Oba Akenzua's coronation in 1933, however, nothing happened. The museum barely offers a haven for its own collection. Bleak and dusty cases with scribbled labels testify to objects on loan, but no one knows where. You are not sure that displayed objects are genuine. Security for the collection is in the hands of a curatorial staff holding religious evangelical antipathy for ancient objects. They also have the benevolent incompetence of minor government officials everywhere.

Location and Styles

Location, location, location! Igun Street is the heart of brass casting in Benin City (Fig. 1). The local government recently surfaced Igun Street with interlocking brick composite pavers that added a touch of class, and also contracted for an entrance arch designed by Sir Victor Uwaifo (Fig. 9), musician turned sculptor. Several dozen brass-casting families live here. Residence, brass casting, and an origin story bind them in history and occupation. Families embellish the origin myth to re-center it in their favor. Casting has exploded into a cornucopia of styles. Offshoot workshops operate workshops elsewhere in the city while holding political and kinship ties to the guild.

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Before 1897, Igun Street butted the southeastern corner of the palace. An exit from the palace led straight into the guild quarters. The Oba's patronage required Igun's casters to manufacture objects within the palace walls next door to ensure secrecy. Casters were rewarded with food, land, even wives (Ben-Amos 1971), plus the metal for casting. The king's patronage brought sustenance, support, and prestige.

The rebuilt palace is about 200 yards (183m) from Igun Street, separated by a ring road that houses a museum, once the British fort. The king buys his castings just like everyone else. Igun Street's castings reflect a variety of styles: elongated, stringy Giacommetti-like Hausa herdsmen; brass relief figures and wood inlays on red velvet backgrounds that resemble kitschy Tijuana tourist items; framed plaques; and an assortment of Western mythical and historical figures, including "Pappy" and "Mammy" Wata, a spin-off of the Roman god Neptune, with companion Venus rising from the water with fins but sans scalloped shell. Rows of leopards with bared teeth and hammered spots decorate shop verandahs. One caster had the bright idea to make an American bald eagle with arrows and olive branches--K-Mart prototypical.

Benin's brass casters have shifted to new markets, adjusting to globalization. Catering to Christian clients, businesses, and attracting overseas customers, artisans fulfill orders for gate ornaments, testamentary statues, hotel foyer adornments, car replacement parts, custom-made hallway niche busts, and birthday or anniversary gifts. It is not unusual to see life-size leopards at hotel portals, or cast effigies as memorial markers. The casters of Igun Street introduce design and production variations that suit the times. The procedures are as ancient in their complexity as they are reinvented in technological and artistic ingenuity.

Typical of contemporary styles are queen mother heads, as appealing for their regal hairstyles as they are for a naturalism that transcends the traditional convention of stylized form. They resemble the engaging, well-coiffed, and full-cheeked young women who perform as dance troupe members. Contemporary styles are reminiscent of the fifteenth and sixteenth century queen mother castings, but with the natural aesthetic of a contemporary Benin beauty queen (Fig. 10). Figures of a kneeling pregnant woman holding kola nuts in one hand and a cockerel in the other became popular, copied and recopied from the point of initial inspiration. Crocodiles were marketable for a while. However, leopard castings still predominate in all sizes and prices (Fig. 11).

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Castings of square-necked giraffes have made their debut, and there are seated lions--a stuffed, moth-eaten lion finds a place during the annual Igue festival on the Ozolua shrine at the front of the palace and serves as a model for brass lions (Fig. 12). Since the Oba now has two ostriches (a gift from a northern emir) running round the palace grounds, one expects these odd birds to find their way into the repertoire of cast art.

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Cast statuary is more realistic than the stylized objects of the past and, in the case of remembrance statuary, modeled from photographs (Fig. 13). A recently cast bust for a state governor honors his fiftieth birthday. It reminds one of those commemorative busts associated with Caesar's and Augustus's Rome, or of a statue made for a niche in a European manor house. Castings with a pedestal of ebony or mahogany add grandeur to the commission.

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Job orders are for popular fleur de lis brass finials that top iron fences and gates. Casters on Igun Street make these objects through an assembly-line version of lost-wax casting (see below) that simply reuses the same inner mold until the job is complete (Figs. 14-15). They also make engine parts for automobiles; the broken part, such as a flywheel or cog, serves as the imprinted pattern for casting the solid core.

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Commissioned commercial castings include an eben (state ceremonial sword) decorated with the Nigerian coat of arms for the High Court (N40,000), a mace for the House of Assembly (N70,000), a hammered brass crown meant for a would-be delta king (N20,000) who must have gone broke because he never picked it up, a bas-relief plaque of Christ's resurrection destined for St Theresa's Catholic Church (N50,000), a 9' (2.74m) Islamic brass calligram ordered by a local mosque (N90,000), and two almost life-sized leopards commissioned for the entrance of a newly opened hotel (N250,000 for the pair). The military has contracts for battalion emblems and flag finials. A large bust of Awolowo completed a few years ago resides at the former University of Ife, now Awolowo University (Fig. 16).

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Production Technology

The lost-wax process (cire perdue) remains the tried and true method. In a nutshell: beeswax is modeled over a clay core, covered by an outer layer of clay, banded and dried, with muddy clay washes that fill cracks and cover the bands. The wax is melted and replaced by molten metal. Once cooled, the outer clay is chipped away and the carbonized core reamed out, with the casting filed and chased. The last bellows-driven furnace, powered by car-tire inner tubes attached to poles pumped by human sweat, was abandoned about 1998. Air-conditioner motors supply compressed air to melt metal. One family, the Omodamwen group (who live not on Igun Street but on Oloton Lane), has a modern gas foundry that handles up to 100 pounds (45k) of metal in large crucibles. The major problem that casters on Igun Street face is lack of a modern foundry. The typical crucible holds 8-12 pounds (3.6-5.4k) of molten metal. Modern castings require a lot more metal. Changes had to be made either in the molds or in casting procedures.

Igun Street's casters rented Omodamwen's large crucibles and gas furnace and hoped to buy a modern furnace/foundry of their own so everyone on the street could make large sculptures at a central location. This plan fell apart for a variety of reasons. Lacking the equipment to handle large crucibles for melting metal and the tools necessary to cart large encrusted clay and wax cores without damage, they section their wax/core models into head, arms, back, and front, then independently cast each section, after which they are welded together and filed (Figs. 17-18).

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Differences between earlier castings and those of the twentieth century include thickness, filing, grinding, chasing, and now, welding. Some recent casting jobs come close to mass production, a cottage industry that family and guild members support with their labor. The filers/chasers are family or contract labor, and grinding is done with an electric disc sander, an absolute must for the enterprising caster because it cuts down on time and effort and increases production. Filing is the job of small boys using a range of hand files.

After casting, a decision is made to patina the casting. Igun Street caters to Nigerians, who prefer shiny brass, the bright surface traditionally associated with war and power, but now merely an aesthetic preference. Oloton Lane casters, by contrast, send a lot of castings to Lagos and other major cities, the objects displayed in international hotel shops that cater to foreign businessmen who like the dulled finish and dupe themselves into thinking that an artificially patinated object has age.

It is an aesthetic preference. Shiny surfaces are brash for European tastes, and the darkening created by the patinating process covers over minor flaws and surface chasing. (Renaissance bronze sculptures had dark patinas, a look so desirable that museum keepers for centuries darkened bronze statues with charcoal or lampblack, covering over underlying pigment and gilt.) Casters concoct patinas out of a mixture of battery acid, potash, and lime that shifts the color from medium tan to a gray-black or gray-green. They sometimes use imported commercial chemical powders (see Trivedi 1998; Young 1998), but usually Benin casters let middlemen do the antiquing.

Although compounds on Igun Street are large and laterite clay for casting can be dug from the backyard, these days laterite is trucked in from Ikpoba Slope on either side of Ikpoba River at the eastern edge of the city. Charcoal is brought in bags from villages and resold at a stall midway down the street. A woman sells charcoal and also buys brass and copper for casting. Wood is trucked in to heat the molds, to remove the wax for reuse, and to prevent the molten metal exploding during pouring. The variety of metals is important to note because metals analysis provides a possible method for dating. During the Biafran War in the late 1960s, cartridge metal casings were melted down; nowadays everything from boat propellers to brass nipples go into the crucible.

Unique and highly individualized pieces based on a finely modeled clay core with slips of powdery sieved clay (that allowed for a thinner casting) has given way to assembly-line production. In the Omodamwen family, family members and workers are allocated different tasks, from core-makers to grinders and welders. The rush to efficiency also seeps into technological innovations. A mold consisting of two halves of baked clay vaguely modeled to resemble a bust is brushed with engine oil to prevent the clay from sticking to the mold. Then one half is filled with clay (laterile, sand, and water mixed to achieve consistency and a nongummy cohesion) and covered with the other half. Because of the oil interface, the newly formed core is easily removed, then sun dried, ready for use by any of the modelers. Dozens can be produced in an hour or two (Fig. 19).

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One innovation is the production of brass tableaux. This began about a decade ago with the Omodamwen family creating an 18" (46cm) brass canoe, complete with separate figures of Oba Ovonramwen and the British soldiers who ferried him into exile. This led to more exciting designs of slaves based on poster adverts for the film Amistad (1997), with slave merchants beating chained slaves, mounted on an ebony or teak base (Fig. 20). The individual figures are approximately 8" (20cm) in height with the addition of a cast 4" (10cm) threaded base that neatly fits drilled holes in the wooden base and is secured by a brass nut. Individual castings are burnished to a satin finish with sandpaper and engine oil. Other tableaux are of the Oba and his chiefs, palace ceremonies, and historical episodes (Figs. 21-22). The tableaux are similar to pewter soldiers beloved by military aficionados who create miniature battlefield reenactments. (The Benin tableaux are reminiscent of a bronze of bound slaves on display in the exhibit "Captive Passage" that showed at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture in 2003.) Benin examples are currently exhibited at metals-casting fairs in the US through industrial and crafts trade networks.

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Some artisans focus on making wax models only and farm out casting. Lucky Oboh (see Gore 1997), creates dramatic baroque wax core figures, but others cast for him. Peter Omodamwen, who has a workshop off Textile Mill Road, knows how to sand-cast, an especially effective method he used for a German client whose Bavarian castle needed nine furnace grates with the family's coat of arms to replace the medieval originals (Figs. 23-24). Peter is also known for casting very good Ife heads that he sells in Lagos.

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Unlike wood carvers, casters do not often make sketches before modeling, nor are they draftsmen. A decade ago casters relied on the picture texts of Pitt-Rivers (1900), Fagg (1963), and Dark (1973). This has given way to commissions based on family photographs supplied by the rich and famous. Patrons seek immortality in brass or bronze for their parents and relatives--a new form of ancestor worship--others to commemorate a wealthy donor. Casters make commemorative or memorial busts and figures specially ordered and designed by clients. Casters worth their salt keep a photo album of civic and religious commissions they show prospective clients. GS cell phones link casters to clients worldwide, and international orders are expedited through Panalpina, a shipping agency in Warri, or air-freighted from the Murtala Mohammed airport in Lagos. Export licenses are easy to obtain because the Nigerian government lists commercial art as an export category and regional government offices expedite the process.

Few brass casters have formal training. Osaze Omodamwen worked in a foundry in Ibadan run by Europeans. He cast machine parts and later translated that experience into brass casting. Only the Omodamwen family operates a modern foundry. They have a large, compatible family enterprise, so their collective setup works very well.

There are two academically trained brass casters in Benin City. Ben Osawe, an artist of international renown, is a former student of Camberwale Art Institute in England. His work ranges from busts to monumental castings commissioned by civic, church, or corporate clients. The pieces are "Roman-jointed," a European method of casting in sections that are then "coupled" by welding. Osawe is a multimedia artist, as familiar with concrete statuary as he is with brass castings. Elizabeth Olowu, trained at the University of Benin's Faculty of Arts, molds but is not allowed to cast her designs because women are circumscribed from casting in this patrilineal society. She has since turned her attention to large civic cement statuary.

Endpoints

In 1973, Dark complained that brass-casters had the necessary technical skills but their "creative world is confused by the march of events." Seeking inspiration from a "residue of traditional themes ... sifted and altered through the years of change," Dark contends that the caster is conservative, and that "the years since 1897 have not been conducive" to artistic expression (Dark 1973:23), the casters satisfying a naive competence with stultifying regularity. Dark's profound knowledge of Benin art is unparalleled. This is evident in his research on Benin crafts. His catalog (1962, see also 1975) of files on Benin ear, nose, and mouth styles and other motifs borders on obsessive perfection. The fact of the matter is that, while there are badly modeled and cast objects that don't merit a second glance, Dark and others of his generation deferred to the terminus ad quem. Dark and his colleagues ignored what I think are exciting contemporary castings. However, these castings require a mental shift in their viewers. Castings these days are explosive in style, dynamic in ingenuity, and attuned to international marketing.

Benin's casters face a Catch-22. The more they emulate traditional pieces, the more they are accused of fraud. The more they explore outside the box, the greater the accusations of ineptitude for not matching the paradigm. Casters are not cowed by judgments of the Western art academy. The brass casters of Igun Street are astute, adept quick studies and show a remarkable receptiveness to new technologies and ideas. They read every issue of African Arts I send them and whenever I visit debate relevant articles and chastise me for errors of fact and analysis. Their vigorous arguments collapse the distinction between an academic field researcher and his local cultural guides (my in-laws in this case).

By contrast, scholarship is caught in a lockjaw allegiance to the past, the rigor mortis of an iconography that fails to position modern creations as a continuing narrative of Benin's art history. As in tourism, where history is romanticized through the production and consumption of nostalgia, art custodians and their sidekick collectors consume a heritage of pre-1897 material culture. Instead of leading the way and providing a platform for exploring the directions in which Benin's casters are moving and proposing that researchers assess the issues Paula Ben-Amos explores in her 1971 PhD thesis on wood carving in Benin City, academic and curatorial authorities have placed themselves into a straitjacket of the masterpiece syndrome, where allegiance follows the familiar greenback trail and the narcissism of personal possession and institutional acquisition. The present is condemned by the past, and modern castings are seen as residual surrogates of history instead of as vibrant windows on that past that build upon the pre-1897 art traditions to credit the contemporary achievements of Benin's casters and artists.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

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