Nobert 
Aas
can A 
ir attempt to make an art audi- 
Germany acquainted with Afrit, 
art arc, Agency for Contemporary 
' frican Art, introduced a residency 
progrJamme. While it was primarily 
designed to offer a period of retreat 
and withdrawal giving an 
opportunity for the creation of 
new works, it is also a chance for 
the Agency to present the artist as 
a spokesperson for his or her 
work as well. From experience 
0. H. 
Umezulike 
collecting 
laterials tor 
his work 
(above 
picture) 
Photo: N. Aas 
Humphrey 
Umezulike 
we know that encounter with the 
person facilitates appreciation of 
her or his art. Representing an 
artist, on the other hand, can only 
be convincingly done by any 
gallerist if he knows the works as 
well as the person. 
GLENDORA > 
& Gathering 
By a combination of fortunate circumstances, 
Nigerian sculptor and painter Dil 
Humphrey Umezulike became 'artist at art 
arc', our first artist in residence in the autumn 
of 1 994. In 1 993, a wider audience had got 
to know Umezulike when he provoked controversial 
discussions on the meaning of art 
with a major exhibition of his sculptures 
entitled 'Wasted Thoughts on Waste'. The 
show (which also included works by Olu 
Amoda) took place at Goethe Institute, the 
German Cultural Centre, in Lagos. For a 
period of three months in the autumn of 
1 994, he lived and worked at the premises of 
art arc in the southern German city of Bayreuth. 
The experience turned out to be a very 
productive and stimulating one, for both the 
artist and the gallerists. 
In addition to an opportunity to work in 
various media, Umezulike was able to meet 
people from the local art scene, get in touch 
with scholars from the University of Bayreuth 
(which runs a special research project on 
Africa) and get a good idea of similarities 
and differences of life in Germany as compared 
with his own country Nigeria 
During his stay, Umezulike presented 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1
himself as Diloprizulike, the Junkman 
from Africa. For years, he has been 
creating works of art from junk and waste 
which he picks wherever he goes. He 
sees his working process as a re-creating 
or even as giving a new, superior life to 
discarded objects by arranging them in 
an aesthetic way. For this purpose he 
hoards anything out of other people's 
use that he feels might be of use to him 
sometime. Visiting the artist's studio, one 
inevitably finds him sifting through the 
various layers of his collected treasures. 
From my own observation it seems 
I have an affinity to him by being a 
collector myself. I cannot throw away 
anything that is still in working order. 
Those things are valuable objects to me, 
and they may be of use at some later 
point in time. In this way, I am, very much 
like Dil Humphrey, surrounded by things 
other people see as junk, things whose 
history I know and of which I still see lots 
of functional possibilities. 
During the early days of his visit, 
Umezulike did a lot of drawing and some 
painting, all on paper. But at the same 
time he started collecting objects. Much 
to his disappointment, he was notable to 
find things by the roadside, as he is used 
to in Nigeria. I then promised to take him 
to the collecting points of our highly 
centralised system of refuse disposal: the 
garbage dump (where the waste is 
dumped by the lorries and transferred 
onto train to be carried off to the incinerator) 
and the only scrapyard of our city as 
well, a place I love to go to myself. 
The Material 
When we got to the scrapyard, 
Umezulike started to climb to the top of 
one of the scrapheads as soon as possible 
in order to declare himself Master of 
All Scraps. He added that he had done 
it in Nigeria before. 
Why should the artist want to own 
all the junk here and there? Of course, it 
is quite naive to assume that what other 
people see as junk Umezulike is interested 
in. Junk is not just junk to him. 
Objects take on a second appearance 
and character. Sifting through junk, he 
either discovers images that fit the ideas 
forming in his mind or he comes across 
bits and pieces that he feels 'have a 
potential' (in his terms). So the Master of 
All Scraps does not really sit on his 
imagined wealth like a madman, but 
hoards all the things he will eventually 
turn into his creatures. 
It is not everything that suits his 
purposes, and in no way does he collect 
indiscriminately, as the term scrapyard 
for his studio might suggest. When he 
goes through wastes, he carefully selects 
from the 'Discarded Property' (the title of 
one of his earlier works) those things he 
reacts to. Wherever he goes, he hunts for 
new meaf. But he also sets out in search 
for specific things to fit into a specific 
place in one of his assemblages he is 
working on. 
We went on a number of trips to 
the scrapyard, each time returning home 
with a trailer full of rusty and torn metal: 
break discs, pieces of bent steel beams, 
smashed typewriters, screws, nuts and 
bolts of all sizes, worn out lorry parts that 
had to be replaced. Dil Umezulike turned 
our empty garage into his artistic 
scrapyard (or studio), and only whervhe 
had furnished it with a wall to wall carpet 
of materials did he feel comfortable at 
work. 
With the habit of being ready to 
collect at any time and at any place, the 
components for Umezulike's sculptures 
came from a variety of sources. Apart 
from visiting the scrapyard in town, we 
collected roots from a nature reserve 
during a family outing one Sunday afternoon. 
When we bought tools at a shop, 
Dil asked a customer whether he could 
have the elbow of a stovepipe which the 
man had just bought a replacement for 
At a friend's country place, he looted the 
lady's firewood. We drove home not 
only with ordinary billets in the boot, but 
with the broken hubs of wooden wheels 
and other beautiful objects as well. The 
hubs were to feature prominently in a 
sculpture titled 'Broken Hive of the Aggrieved 
Spirits' (metal and wood, 78 
cm), for example. From a demolition site, 
we returned with a tangle of bent steel 
rods which had originally been used to 
reinforce concrete. 
The Themes 
It is certainly difficult • or more 
likely impossible - to identify an overriding 
idea behind Dilomprizulike's work. 
The works Umezulike produced during 
his time as an artist is residence in 
Bayreuth seem to fall into four categories: 
calculated comments on the state of 
Nigerian society, instant reactions to 
emotional challenges from the outside 
world, attempts to express purely subjective 
impulses and depictions of so-called 
folk scenes. 
It is relatively easy to appreciate 
works that deal with aspects of social life 
in Nigeria in a very general sense. 
'Public Toiletting', one of the larger outdoor 
sculptures (metal, 167 cm), is a 
sculptural version of the ubiquitous signposts 
reminding people to keep their 
countryclean: 'Do noturinate here'. One 
must, quite obviously, understand it first 
of all in political terms: Some people 
shamelessly soil. 'Strangled by His Own 
People' (metal and wood, 40cm) comments 
on the treatment certain individuals 
experience from others of their own 
group. It is interesting to note that most 
works of this category are sculptures. 
There is one interesting exception, 
however, which belongs to the second 
type of works. The sculpture 'Neighbour' 
(metal, 218cm) is, I am convinced, an 
observation the artist made while working 
in his scrapyard. Some features of 
the work strikingly resemble our next 
door neighbour, an elegant lady who, 
from across the fence, was curiously and 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENDORA.v
D.H. 
Umezulike in 
his studio at 
'art arc', 
Bayreuth 
1994 (right). 
• 
m M
A , 
mm • , ;. , ^.. ;: . . •, % 
'The Broken 
Hive of the 
Aggire red 
spirits' (below 
left). 
The 
Moonman' 
(below right) WBmt 
Photo: N. Aas 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 1
carefully monitoring what that strange 
black man was doing in our yard. 
Most works from this group, however, 
are on paper. One of them, 'All 
International Trunks Are Busy' was done 
immediately after Dilomprizulike had 
unsuccessfully made numerous attempts 
to call friends in Nigeria. A voice on the 
phone had given that information (which 
now is the title of the work) and advised 
him to try again at a later hour. The 
drawing shows the artist's view/caller's 
perspective of the phone and his collection 
of complimentary cards scattered 
on the floor. In another work 
he tries to express on paper 
the impressions he had when 
he looked at a bookshelf 
through an opaque pane of 
glass: nothing but blurred 
dots and areas of intermixing 
colours. 
There are also works 
that result from of other, more 
private challenges. When 
Umezulike returned from an 
exhibition in another city, he 
was full of anger and frustration 
at the lack of hospitality 
he had met there. He then sat 
down to express the barely 
suppressed emotions which 
had been triggered off by 
this experience. 
It is very difficult to 
describe the characteristics 
of the third category of works 
by this artist. At times, he 
would just sit down with some 
materials in order 'to allow 
things to happen.' He would 
then try to 'let the ideas flow.' 
The result may be a more or 
less figurative drawing or an 
entirely abstract one which 
one might categorize an expression 
of an emotion. To 
these, the artist later on attaches 
titles very much tn the 
way of labels. In my view however, they 
might also arguably have been left untitled. 
There is, eventually, a fourth group 
of works depicting what is usually called 
'folk scenes.' One has become very disparaging 
of them, because they have 
been done to death as tourist art. But 
Umezulike's latest variants of the Milkmaid-
top'^, for example, which he has 
tried many times before, prove to be 
fascinating images. Out of his drawings 
I have seen, they seem to be the most 
mature ones. 
THE 
COMICS 
Sr T 
.Marvel .DC .Image .Acclaim .Manga .Dark Horse 
.COMICS .GRAPHIC NOVELS .ACTION FIGURES 
.TRADING CARDS .POSTERS & SCIENCE FICTION. 
Vol. 2/No. 1 GLENPORAr 
One day, Dil Humphrey sat down 
to find out what the effects would be if he 
violated the conventions of watercolour 
painting. On many occasions he did 
things that run counter to the established 
practices. Even if the results may not 
always be absolutely convincing, they 
proved to be stimulating and exciting in 
many-cases. One hopes the artist will go 
on turning things upside down in order 
to find out what their possibilities are, far 
off the beaten track and way out there in 
his 'jungles' where new discoveries can 
be made. GR 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts