Between the Organic and the Mechanic by Joseph Gergel 

 

(Essay published in Uche Uzorka: The Organic (exhibition catalogue), published by Goethe-Institut Nigeria, October 2012.)

 

 

“No Parking”. “No Exit”. “Post No Bills”. Entering into an Uche Uzorka artwork is similar to the experience of entering a restricted public space. Throughout Uzorka’s prolific body of work that includes painting, collage, cutting and pasting, charcoal, and ink drawing, the viewer is at once confronted with a dense mass of visual clutter while at the same time directed by the textual fragments that animate boldly from the canvas. Appropriating the signs and symbols of Nigerian street culture, Uzorka encapsulates the psychological energy that defines the city of Lagos. In a city that is synonymous with generalised chaos, the streets of Lagos echo with a myriad of sounds and movement: car horns blowing, Okadas swirving, merchants selling goods, and police sirens blaring. Commercial billboards announce their products, advertisements and public notices adorn empty walls, hand written directives announce the limitations between public and private space. Yet, amidst this visual and phenomenological chaos, the city of Lagos functions nonetheless. The urban population adapts to their environment and the energy of the city is counteracted with the organic processes of human habitation.

 

Yet, if the word “organic” generally suggests something that is wholesome, participatory, or innate to the natural processes of life, there is a paradox between the types of signs that Uzorka appropriates in his work, which immediately references the ways that government controls the public environment. He describes his interest in the concept of the “organic” as starting while working as an artist in Abuja, where he was able to experience the construction of a city built from scratch. As the city of Abuja was constructed as Nigeria’s new administrative and government capital in the early 1990s, the infrastructure of the city was created anew, and Uzorka was able to watch the evolution of a city and the impact that human habitation has on the urban environment. While the newly constructed city was essentially a clean slate for an anonymous populace, as soon as construction was completed the city became a cluster of signs, where it is immediately apparent the “stains” left behind. Laundry appeared on clotheslines that is left to dry, shopkeepers advertised their services, torn posters left paper fragments that meshed into a cohesive whole.

 

While Uzorka began his experimentations with the “organic” processes of urban street life in Abuja, it was when he began his artist residency at the African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos that he met the energy that would become the iconic references in his work. If Abuja came across as ordered and structured, Lagos could be considered its polar opposite. Lagos is the most populous city in Nigeria, the second fastest growing city in Africa and the seventh fastest growing city in the world. Just as millions of Nigerians migrated to the urban center of Lagos in search of job opportunities from other, more rural environments, and were forced to adapt to the fast pace of life very quickly, Uzorka’s arrival in Lagos came across as a similar shock. Uzorka responded to such shock by manifesting the same vibrant energy in his own work. Uzorka’s dense mixed media collages reference the organic as a strong creative force while also suggesting the paradox between order and disorder, between the government and the masses, and between the controllers and the controlled.

 

Uzorka’s conceptual embrace to art production came about during his education at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an arts program that is based on the primacy to ideas before form. Yet, as much as his work can be rooted in a conceptual framework, it is as much an exercise in the formal study of colour, lines, patterns, and the fundamentals of art theory. Uzorka’s art education began even before his studies at the University of NIgeria, Nsukka, when he spent time shadowing the art program at the University of Benin, an art program that focuses on the fundamentals of colour, painting, and sculpture. The tension between these two methods of art production are reflected in his practice, where they simultaneously straddle both genres. While Uzorka’s approach in his early career focused on the basics of art making and only later developed into a more conceptual field, there is a clear continuum in his progression. As Uzorka rejects a unified perspective that could be said to have culminated in Renaissance oil painting, his work lacks the unity that would tie such a formal approach to a social cohesion in the bourgeois sense of linear and narrative association. Uzorka’s dense and cluttered formal approach becomes a comment on society by rejecting such a sense of cohesion, a practice that is more aligned with graffiti or mark-making. Yet, while the work begins to take on the characteristics of graffiti, it is not the conscious tactic of adolescent rebellion. The markings that he references are more about a collective cultural consciousness, markings that bear no intentions to the level of art, especially high art.

 

Uzorka’s appropriation of found objects, including flyers, recharge cards, juice packs, toothpaste, condoms, and pharmaceutical drugs, suggest an idea of emptiness and patterns of mass consumption. He focuses on notions of value and economies, and how the devaluation of products and currencies come to reflect a devaluation of the self. Uzorka focuses on the connections between the individual and the collective, of the private and the public, and between the consumer and product. Uzorka states: “My intrigue is moving between the one and the many”, in the in-between space we create for ourselves as individuals and the moving back and forth between public space and communal activities. If his body of work clearly situates itself in the “organic”, it can be described equally as interested in the “mechanic”, how human life becomes compartmentalized, fragmented, and robotic. If such a conceptual pattern roots itself in his personal experience in Lagos and in Nigeria specifically, it is equally universal. Uzorka focuses on the small point of view, on the individual body flowing through the city, and in the process his work becomes a message on collective existence in global urban society today. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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