Ibiebe Alphabet and Ideograms as Motifs for Fabric Embellishment

The invented Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Ibiebe alphabet and ideogram (writing system) have not been explored maximally and redesigned as recurring motifs to embellish contemporary fabric. These are artistic codified graphical images that represent the visual translation of myths, legends, ideal concepts, and the philosophies of the Urhobo cultural heritage from Delta State. They are mostly explored in paintings and sculptural pieces for aesthetic and refinement purposes. Whereas, it is pertinent to encourage the integration of the creative potential of indigenous culture as visual concepts into contemporary works, since art is a potent medium for cultural dialogue. Therefore, this paper seeks to redesign the versatility and ingenuity embedded in Bruce Onobrakpeya’s formation as a recurring motif for fabric embellishment. It is essentially to provoke creativity, the development of knowledge, skills, in-studio experimentation/exploration, and the creation of new design possibilities with a diverse visual relationship. The Aesthetic theory propounded by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) and the Modern Creativity theory by Kanematsu, H. and Barry, D. M. (2016) were adopted. The approach is exploratory and descriptive and relies on literal information. It will serve as an encyclopedia of redesigned motifs that cut across visual history.

Toward an Aesthetics of Obscurity: From Baumgarten to Blanchot

This article analyzes the notions of clarity and obscurity in the work of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and Maurice Blanchot, arguing that the latter’s thought of the “other night” proposes a radical reversal, indeed, a corruption, of Baumgarten’s founding of aesthetics as an ocularcentric discipline governed by clarity. Baumgarten, laying the groundwork for much of the “distribution of the sensible” that dominated the field of aesthetics after him, conceives of the poem as the paradigmatic instance of an aesthetic cognition of the sensible that is founded on the triad of clarity, attention, and liveliness. He thus opposes the poem to both the obscure fundus animae, the ground of the soul, and to utopian poetry, neither of which can be poetized. By contrast, Blanchot’s literature dissolves this triple foundation into a writing of obscurity, distracted fatigue, and a “death resurrected”; literature opens aesthetics to that which had been constitutively excluded at its founding moment. The clarifying powers of the poet-aesthetician are replaced by passive “fascination” and a “passion of the image” that delimits a radically different, countercosmic, and thus utopian space of literature.

Introduction

The relationship between Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–62)1 and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is as profound as any in the history of philosophy. In depth, it rivals such rightfully famous relationships as those between Socrates and Plato, between Aristotle and Aquinas, between Russell and Wittgenstein. More than one-third of the ...

The Intermediate World: A Key Concept in Beautiful Thinking

The term ‘the intermediate world’ is a key concept in Den skønne tænkning (Beautiful Thinking) and the metaphysics of experience presented by this book. The metaphysics of experience is about the experiences of transcendence and beautiful thinking that take place in the intermediate world. In the article “The Intermediate World,” this subject is introduced through a discussion of thoughts and concepts formulated by Paul Klee (Zwischenwelt), Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (beautiful thinking), Aristotle (phantasia), Immanuel Kant (expanded thinking), Mark C. Taylor (imagination), and Eugenio Trías (the limit). The text depicts the intermediate world as the level of experience at which the understanding does not yet distinguish between subject and object. The intermediate world is thus not a realm between human and world, nor is it something outside the world we know. The intermediate world is rather the present world in its most original state: the ‘place’ where we find the source of all experience and cognition, a source called ‘basic experience’ characterized by sensation, faith, and comprehension. In this realm, imagination is active and takes the form of an objective force rather than a subjective mental power. Imagination opens mind and world, thus allowing not-yetactualized possibilities to become perceivable.

Why Looking at Objects Matters

Within museum studies, there has been a recent interest in engaging with objects and their material effects as something other than vehicles for human cultural meaning. This article contributes to this interest by offering a philosophical argument for the value of close sensory engagement with physical things, an argument found in the works of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714–1762), who is famous for fathering the modern philosophical discourse on aesthetics. Baumgarten outlines what he terms sensate thinking, defined as an analogue to rational thinking, and insists that this form of thinking can be analyzed and sharpened according to its own rules. I discuss how Baumgarten’s aesthetics might be useful for how the curator approaches objects in exhibitions and for understanding how visitors’ sensory engagement with the objects can be important beyond the deciphering of historical narratives and conceptual meanings.