THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 23
“Suspicions Left Behind ” is one of forty pictures in “A Countervailing Theory.”
ANNALS OFA RT
WHO IS TO BE MASTER?
The radical vision of Toyin Ojih Odutola.BY ZADIESMITH
A
woman stands in an otherworldly
landscape, looking out. The land-
scape is sublime, though not the Eu-
ropean sublime of cliffs, peaks, and
mist. Here the sublime is African. It
has many textures—conglomerations
of stone, waterfalls, verdant grass-
lands—and may remind Nigerians of
their own Jos Plateau. The woman
stands with her left leg raised, survey-
ing it all, with no sense of urgency;
indeed, she appears to be in a state
of philosophical contemplation. She
seems assured both of her mastery over
this land and of her natural right to
it. This sovereignty is expressed pri-
marily by her body—the fabrics she
wears, the pose she strikes, all of which
find their reflection in the land around
her. The same dark lines tracing her
impressive musculature render the rip-
pling rocks; the ridges of her bald head
match the ridges in the stone; the lux-
urious folds of the fabric are answered
by the intricate layering of the earth
beneath her feet. Toyin Ojih Oduto-
la’s “The Ruling Class (Eshu)” appears,
at first glance, to be a portrait of do-
minion. For to rule is to believe the
land is made in your image, and, more-over, that everyone within it submits
to you. Structurally, it recalls Caspar
David Friedrich’s depiction of En-
lightenment dominion, “Wanderer
Above the Sea of Fog”: the same raised
left leg, the same contemplation of
power in tranquillity, the echoes of
hair, pose, and fabric in the textured
landscape. But the red-headed man
with the cane and his back to us has
been replaced by a black woman with
a staff, facing forward. The script has
been flipped.
The show containing this image
is called “A Countervailing Theory.”
Countervail: to offset the effect of
something by countering it with
something of equal force. The word
could not be more apposite. We are
in a cultural moment of radical coun-
tervailing, perhaps as potent as that
experienced in the sixties, when what
was offered as counter to the power
of the gun, for example, was a daisy
placed in its barrel. A period of hier-
archical reversal, or replacement, of
this for that. And “The Ruling Class”
might seem wholly part of this coun-
tervailing movement, oppositional
and constructed of opposites: black
replacing white, by way of a restricted
black-and-white palette of charcoal,
chalk, and pastel. A picture that offers
a new image of power as counter to
an old one.
But that’s not the whole story. And
Ojih Odutola—who was born in 1985,
in Ife, Nigeria—is an unusually story-
driven visual artist. Her 2017 breakout
show, at the Whitney Museum, “To
Wander Determined,” with its depic-
tion of two imagined Nigerian dy-
nasties united in marriage, involved
world-building equal to that of any
novel, and in “A Countervailing The-
ory” the “story,” as the title implies, is
not merely a flipped script but also a
theory concerning countervailing it-
self. The forty pictures in the show are
hung on a curving wall at the Barbi-
can, in London, and unfold sequen-
tially, like a Chinese scroll. Together,
they lead us deep into the wilderness
of our present ideas about power—
who should have it, how it should be
wielded—and then out again, a jour-
ney as much philosophical as visual.
What are the possibilities and the lim-
its of countervailing, as a political or