Peter Probst's Osogbo and the Art of Heritage, informed by a wide-ranging and worldly intellect, is a boundary-breaking work. The research is interdisciplinary in scope, articulating art history with ethnography, performance and media theory, religion, and African studies. As Probst reminds us, ‘Yoruba research has always entailed a global dimension’ (p. 3), and he is especially concerned with exploring the complex intersections between West Africa, Europe, and the Americas. For those willing to travel these circuits with him, there are plenty of subtle insights and surprises along the way.

In the text, boundary crossing is never pursued for its own sake; Probst frames his analytic strategies with an eye to illuminating the phenomena at hand. He was initially drawn to the project curious about what had become of Osogbo's first emergence on the global stage. In the early 1960s, Osogbo became the center of an art movement revitalizing African forms for a new postcolonial age. By the 1970s, however, much of this creative energy had seemingly dissipated. When Probst began his research in the 1990s, the city was undergoing another renaissance as a site of heritage tourism. The research took shape as an effort to connect these two moments, complicating how we conceptualize both ‘art’ and ‘heritage’. Probst honors both sides of his chosen field quite well, as he situates aesthetic objects and practices historically while exploring the sociocultural circuits that produce heritage under unexpected conjunctures.

Probst provides a rich account of how African ‘tradition’ was constructed under distinctively modern circumstances – made and remade in a complex traffic between local, national, regional, and global scales. He documents how the 1960s art revival movement in Osogbo (as elsewhere in Africa) was sparked by modernist sensibilities. Artists such as Ulli Beier and Susanne Wenger came to Nigeria following the Second World War, fuelled by a sense of civilizational crisis. Prompted by interests in Rudolph Steiner's anthroposophy, art brut, and Situationist tactics, they approached African art as quintessentially other – a wellspring of creativity, diminished by colonialism, that needed to be revived and renewed to suit modern conditions. Beier sponsored workshops, art schools, and performances, creating the atmosphere of ‘an open house party’ (p. 41). Wenger, who had been initiated into the worship of Yoruba deities, formed the New Sacred Art Group and began to devote herself to the repair of ruined shrines. In this capacity she was asked by the palace to restore the Osun grove, but restoration, in this sense, was actually a ‘calculated rupture’ (p. 55), radically departing from classical Yoruba aesthetics. Her work unfolded in consultation and collaboration with a group of young Osogbo artisans and adepts, described (jokingly?) by townspeople as her ‘hooligans’ – young, male, unemployed, and engaged in pagan activity (p. 48). Wenger's engagement was never uncontested, and Osogbo art was soon to be significantly revalued. By the time of Festival of African Culture (FESTAC) in the 1970s, ‘what had been originally conceived in the spirit of modernism was now denounced as exotic primitivism’. In the age of the oil boom, Osogbo artists were accused of producing ‘export art’ rather than ‘authentic’ Nigerian creations (p. 63).

As the Osogbo art movement faded from prominence, Wenger's work in the grove continued. While her European roots remained suspect to some, others simply saw Osun's hand at work in the reshaping of the grove and promotion of the festival. In the context of extensive ‘cross-cultural border crossing’ (p. 161), modernized tradition and aesthetic innovation were soon reconstituted in the form of ‘heritage’, culminating in the addition of the Osun grove to the United Nations Educational , Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO's) World Heritage List in 2005. Probst is especially good at teasing out the ironies involved in these shifting regimes of value – not least the way in which UNESCO's conservative emphasis on integrity and authenticity could be reconciled with the postcolonial hybridity that characterized the Osogbo scene. Probst challenges conventional Western notions of heritage, and delineates the myriad ways that global processes were indigenized and recast to suit Yoruba epistemologies, aesthetics, and political agendas. Heritage has proliferated within modernity, linked to the spread of the nation-state and all its apparatus of ethnology, collection, media, museums, performance, and display. Inherent in its Western guise is a pervasive sense of loss fueled by the passage of time and the belief that something primordial and priceless is at risk.

But as Probst reveals, few of these assumptions hold true within a Yoruba worldview. Ogún, the Yoruba term for ‘heritage’, also means ‘property’, and might seem to echo Western notions of inheritance, implying both death and loss, but such is not the case: for Yoruba, those who bequeath and go before us are not ‘gone’, but maintain on-going and active relations with the living. Hence, with regard to the reshaping of the Osun grove, the Western concept of heritage preservation as protection against loss makes little sense – because Osun continues to be present and remains a vital force in the world. In Yoruba eyes, the commercial flourishing of a religious festival or the spreading global fame of the grove are anything but problematic; deities, after all, should shower prosperity and fecundity upon their devotees, generating wealth and spreading Yoruba truths to a wider world. ‘Spectacles like the Osun Osogbo festival have the capacity to generate this attention’, writes Probst, creating the ‘heightened perceptual state’ evoked by the German term Aufmerksamkeit. This describes a state of ‘open perception’, an ‘aesthetic attitude with a visual bias’ that works to ‘open up windows, as it were, and allow participants to see or rather to glimpse the realm of the transcendental’ (p. 118). Unveiling the unseen and cultivating critical perception is also the work of incisive analysis, and for all those who seek it, Probst's book offers the experience of Aufmerksamkeit in abundance.