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Worku Goshu in the1980s
COMMEMORATING THE DEAD IN PAINTING
When Worku returned in 1969 after completing his studies in Poland, the artistic situation in Addis Ababa had changed considerably. The religious, religious folk art, and folk arts that were booming in Addis following the battle of Adwa were no longer the representation of Contemporary Ethiopian art. The short-lived realistic or naturalistic kind of representation, which was set in motion spontaneously by the turn of the century, was no longer in the mainstream art movement. Kine Tibeb, the first school of art modeled after the Western art academies was replaced by the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts. Soon after its founding, the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts, where Worku was in the first group of graduates, was staffed primarily by modernist art instructors. In short, by the late 1960s, the mainstream of Western Modernist trends and ideas was taking root in the minds of the young generation of artists. The Addis Ababa public, and the élites for their part, blessed the arrival of the new art form and considered painting to be the domain and concern of the painter. Only a handful of formally trained artists chose to be noticed and make themselves willingly accountable to the establishment, the church and the old school, by creating conventional public art. Overpowered and discomfited by the modern, industrialized world, merciless cultural influences and domination, technological products and practicality, even the government preferred photography, cinema or TV production and other media to reach the public. Far from discouraging young artists, who wanted to live the life of a “modern artist,” it prized the generation of artists who adapted Western Modernist artistic trends. As a result, the followers and the practitioners of the modernist art style and the number of artists who believed that their art could make a difference in their lives and the community grow gradually. Strictly speaking, 20th century Ethiopian painting, like the country’s ancient painting, did not show any inclination toward describing Ethiopia and Ethiopian society in a naturalistic or realistic representation. It rather expressed and illustrated the mystic character, the faith and passion of the nation, and the society in spiritual and symbolic ways. The Ethiopian Modernist movement of the 1960s, which can be considered historically and chronologically as an act of liberation from pseudo naturalism and the narrative art of the 1940s and 1950s, in a way stimulated this age-old artistic sentiment and tradition of the country. However, following the 1974 revolution, when the new socialist-oriented government favored propaganda arts, contemporary Ethiopian painting purposely began to depict public art of a political nature in a realistic or naturalistic way. Henceforth, there was a decrease in the activities of the modernist artists and a change in style and approach throughout the 1980s. Worku was one of the few modernist artists who never wanted to change his artistic activities and approach despite the demand, the pressure, and the intimidation of the revolution. He was never confused and never questioned the validity of his training and his art--he believed that his way of doing art was effective, significant and communicated well enough to say what he wanted to say. He believed that at this juncture, what had to be attacked were the rotten system and the spiritual deprivation of the society and not the role of art and the aesthetic passion of individuals. For him, the society had been worn out of its spiritual force and integrity by excessive glorification of its newfound system of government. His concern was not aesthetic morality or style, but the degradation of morality--patriotic morality, morality of the army, the morality of the intellectuals, and morality of the public in general--which would eventually affect the ability of the public to understand or honor a work of art. Worku, more than any of his generation of artists, pioneered and renewed the spiritual significance of religious principles and subject matter for contemporary issues, just when it had seemed all but dead in the art of Ethiopian Modernists. Avoiding involvement in the climate of constant exaggeration and excess, he defiantly remained consistent and accountable to none other than himself and to his art. This was the kind of art he showed in 1971 at his first exhibition in Addis Ababa City Hall Gallery with his wife, Barbara. A decade before, the political cadres had labeled him and other modernists as “solitary artists”. Regarding the challenge in search of a personal style of Worku and several other artists who were inspired by the plastic solution of Christian Ethiopian painting, S. Chojnacki wrote in 1972: “Many modern artists have followed the Gondarene pattern, the movement of the angels’ eyes and the unchanging faces; as a result, the new works appear as mere copies of the ceiling. Worku’s angels also look in different directions, but unlike the Gondarene cherubim, each has a different and expressive face, caught in the process of thought, aggressive reflection and resignation. The angels of Worku do not spell out the attribute of God the Omnipresent; perhaps they convey to us the artist’s own concern about the world in which he lives.” It is true that in the 1970s, Worku, like many other modernist artists of his generation, was impressed and inspired by Christian Ethiopian painting and the structures, and plastic solution have a special place in his artistic eye and mind. But by the 1980s, Worku was out to extract the essence of Christian Ethiopian paintings--their spiritual and psychological meanings and contexts--rather than its aesthetic and its plastic solution. Ideas and iconography taken from Holy Scripture and models from Christian Ethiopian paintings were no longer being taken as an end and were no longer favored for their aesthetic and artistic sentiment alone. Instead, Worku repeatedly made use of their moral values as popular symbols to reinterpret, express, and reconsider imaginatively contemporary issues and situations. Following his recovery from an illness in 1979, and after completing one of his masterpieces, Symphony for Barbara, he created oeuvres, which reveal more than ever his religious nature. He painted themes from Holy Scripture: saints, disciples, apostles, the Crucifixion and the Trinity in several different versions. Even themes from his imagination took on religious and spiritual implications. The essential mood of his art, with its color and tonality broken, became melancholic. The forms become more fluid, colors dripping onto the canvas in one layer, to elicit a spontaneous and instant reaction. His colors become limited usually to blue, blue saturated in white, ever richer and broken into subtle nuances. The blue and the blue luminous color were applied not for illusionist ends but for plastic and spiritual ones. Light radiated from within the canvas rather than from without, flooding the canvas. He created fuzzy symbols in flowing dark and gloomy colors. Eyes became faces, and faces become eyes that mutated and multiplied over and over again on the canvas. Helpless and confused eyes and faces were posed and superimposed one over another– to the point that the details of eyes and noses and lips were subordinated to the interest of the whole. The faces and the eyes of the angels that Chojnacki mentioned, those “expressive faces, caught in the process of thought, aggressive reflection and resignation” became different. Those huge, enchanting eyes painted in great detail in relation to the iris and the pupil, and those faces drawn and painted in perfect ovals or circles express and take on a different flexibility, a different meaning and direction. He did around a hundred paintings of this kind and always in a rush, both at his studios in the School of Fine Arts and his residence. He never failed to exhibit his works yearly, sometime twice yearly at home and abroad. And unlike other artists of his generation who were hard to pin down chronologically as well as stylistically, the fundamental and stylistic principles of his art were already in place. In 1984, when the city council of Addis Ababa sponsored his one-man-show at the City Hall Gallery, “to celebrate his 25 years of Artistic Works” it was not so much his style that radiated his creativity and ingenuity but the content embodied and spirituality revealed in his works. Apart from their obvious religious connotations, the iconographies were all his own invention and his personal religious imagery. In fact, he made no effort to be true to Christian iconography. In Trinity, 1983, for example, taking into consideration the teachings of the church--three in name, in person, Akal, in deed and one in essence, in divinity, in existence, in will--he created his own icon. It is unlike any of the Trinity icons painted for hundreds of years in our churches and monasteries. The same goes for Adam and Eve, 1981; Disciples, 1984; and Resurrection, 1981. As he was a searching and thinking artist, he found his own imagery and received the answer to his doubts, inspired by Holy Scripture. In Trinity, the significance of the image is unity, harmony, and wholeness; in Adam and Eve, we see an ironic metaphor of all of us as the head and the tail of the serpent. In Disciples, the contrast between reality and dream is carried entirely by the paint qualities on the images, all appearing ghostly and more mystical and in biblical proportion against the faintly luminous blue of the background, giving the whole composition a sense of eternity. Resurrection, one of his masterpieces and inventions, (he later titled it Credo in unum Deum), is actually a Crucifixion, but he titles it otherwise as he does other paintings. The image of Christ is absent, symbolized only by the bleeding cross, and it is ascending upwards as flocks of worshipers look at it, Aksum stelaes representing the worshipers. What he sought in this work was a spirit of tolerance and compassion and hope. Choir II and Silence II with its somber and celestial impression can be interpreted only as prayer--prayer and mourning for the dead. For “The living pray for the dead and the dead for the living…because their souls are alive.” In Sun, Earth & Moon we notice the sad and infuriated impression of celestial bodies, where earth is also considered as incomprehensible as the sun and the moon – it is as if all conspires against the society. In Black soil, the sun is darkened, as it was darkened at the time of the Crucifixion. This is a manifestation of utmost grief and frustration in his part. Obsession, 1984 is all done in a very somber dark blue and sky blue colors or earth colors, with distorted, mutilated and mutating melting images, with eyes, nose and mouth effortlessly created with simple brush strokes, flocking and flanking the solar symbol. Tortured visages, frightened images, stare at us. The big orange and yellow glowing in the center and the blue background reinforce the restless explosion of shapes and colors. The represented creatures rather than the nonfigurative shapes and colors convey more of the hopeless feeling created by this painting. They all have that religious elegance, but there is no indication that these creatures were painted to arouse our sympathy or to remind us of the heavenly. These are the dead, the victims transformed and recreated by his brush. The mutating and seemingly melting faces and eyes on the canvas, faces of the victims of famine, war, politics, social injustice, suffering and the irrationality of life are meant to agonize and torture us--the living. Obsession is like a picture from hell. For the ancient Ethiopian artist, art served as a beneficial expression of the tension in his world and was a “prayer in color” and praise for the Lord, and evidently, his intent and purpose was different from the modern artist. Worku’s art, though an expression of the tension of his time, cannot be a prayer in color, as we would like to think of it. Rather, it is intended as objet d’art in a purely aesthetic sense, but more to the point of a vision of suffering, grief, and salvation and it acts as a theme of martyrdom and crucifixion of his generation. It is an admonishment to the society of it wrongs and a warning against the perils of deception and temptation and act as symbols of mourning. It stands as a commemoration and requiem for the thousands of innocents who died. Even those subjects not overtly religious, like Famine, Famine II, 1985; Konso, 1989; Rise up, 1989; and <.Aware of AIDS, 1989 carry a forceful presence that compels their acceptance as sacred and spiritual images. The solar pictography used by the ancients appears consistently in his work in the form of the sun or the moon. A sparsely distributed light radiates from the background as if it had been temporarily eclipsed. They take their places in the center of the canvas or work symmetrically with rest of the composition and stand as a vital poetry of his work, where their color and symbolic representation mysteriously assume an inner significance. They might even be compared to the figure of holiness. But his works are still so complex they resist any one interpretation like divinely inspired apocalyptic and prophetic messages. Alberto Tessoro, who noticed Worku’s fervent use of Christian themes, wrote in 1984: “Your religious element is quite strong, even if it is not so obvious…but then nothing is obvious in you; everything is hidden, to be searched for, to be discovered… your Crucifixion in which Christ is on the cross but all the eyes in the picture, all the people around him are crucified as well. There is a heart-catching commonality, a strong feeling of the masses, human crowds, in towns, in wars, emigrating from famines, escaping from horrors, looking for light…” Depicting Christian iconography like Crucifixion, the apocalypse and the last judgment, temptation, and the occult, which all enjoyed a particular prominence during this period as in previous centuries, he was not only speculating about the biblical message and its significance, but he was setting off on his own, “the artist’s own concern about the world in which he lives.” By drawing a parallel between the teachings of Christianity and the contemporary political situation, he expressed the anguish and anxiety of his generation. It is interesting that this kind of pursuit in his art came after the endless war and the great famine and the revolution that devastated the old nation. Recovery from the cataclysm and the massacre of officials and several hundred intellectuals and students by the new government, along with the agony of the red and white terror, was not to come soon. There were times when the government barred the Church from offering the commemoration for the dead, or for family members and the community to mourn and bury the dead. Famine hit again and again, the war continued, and the repression intensified. For the devoutly religious society and the dominant culture where biblical tradition is alive and active, the agony can be explained only by the work and the will of God. The sense of emptiness and the void that needs to be filled forced even the mournful middle-class society in Addis to turn to the faith of our fathers for consolation after the tragedy. Worku, as an individual, was unable to shake off these cataclysms and cruelties. Rather, he searched for and found a contemporary, meaningful, and forceful theme and offered his works as a eulogy for the victims, using painting as a requiem and commemoration for the dead. To Worku, in a way the crime is not the Revolution itself, but the people in complicity with the Revolution. Even if the people hadn’t chosen the catastrophe, they are accountable for how they reacted to it. The patriots became the torturers; the influential became the captors; the believers turned to unbelievers; the intellectuals became opportunists, and the guerilla fighters and the killing field, the house of torture and detention camps multiplied daily until no one was left unaccountable. To him, the revolution is a collective drama; the destiny it generates will be collective, and he does not want to go into denial as an attempt to evade responsibility. But as an artist, he opposed involving himself in any type of artistic corruption and limitation. Like the monks and the Behatawes and the hermits before him, who searched for the truth meditating in the wilderness and taught the masses to pray for the society in hard and good times for generations, Worku, the “solitary artist,” mourn and caution his generation in a spirited effort by fusing in his art the allegorical symbol of cataclysm of even more distant but ever more present Biblical tradition. *I have known Worku for more than 30 years, as both an admirer and a co-worker. I first saw his works in 1971 at an exhibition in the Addis Ababa city hall gallery and met him in person latter at the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts in 1978 when I joined the school as a staff member. Ever since, I have been keenly following him and inquiring about the motives behind his art, and I have been deeply moved by his spiritual persona. I remember Worku telling me in 1986 that one of his favorite paintings is the 16th century western painter Pieter Bruegel’s work, Parable of the Blind, a copy of which hung on the wall of his studio at the School of Fine Arts. Although it has nothing to do with his style, the content and the candid tale of the painting reveals how much of the parable was true to the Ethiopian situation. As he was a self-contained, guru-like artist, I knew then he was giving me a hint to get through his paintings which had to do with the current situation. And we both recited at the same time: “ Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Given the situation and the danger he might have been in, I was anxious to know why he was painting saints and disciples and religious themes. His response was: “ Because I adore them; I venerate them, and they are my characters”. In his works of the 1990s, I noticed a different approach and iconography. The Ethiopian flag, for example, is hung on a cross as if crucified. As I tried to get a hint from him, he said: “I will tell you this for the record. My mission as an artist is to paint and produce a work of art. I am not interested in interpreting my work. If the public really wants to get something out of my work, with a little bit of effort, they can understand and appreciate it. To teach them to understand my work is the responsibility of other individuals, institutions, and the establishment.” Worku is a painter of great sensitivity who wants his works to speak his thoughts to the viewer rather than for him to tell anyone what they mean. Whatever I said in this short essay is only a cursory attempt to decipher the works that were produced during only at a specific time in his life. Presently Worku paints and run Goshu Gallery in Addis Ababa with his wife Barbara. By: Esseye Medhin, 2002 |
