PACIFIC ARTS ON DISPLAY

Press, 29 March 1980, Page 17

PACIFIC ARTS ON DISPLAY

Art of the Pacific. By Brian Brake, James McNeish and David Simmons. Oxford University Press, in association with Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, 1979. 240 pp. $39.95.

(Reviewed by Michael Trotter)

In recent years there has been a great upsurge of interest in Pacific art-objects. Polynesian artifacts change hands for truly fantastic prices at overseas auctions, with private collectors paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for particularly favoured items and even fairly ordinary pieces fetching tens of thousands of dollars. Those of us who are strangers to the opulent world of international art dealers, but who still wish to indulge in- the current fashionable interest in Pacific art, have been served by a procession of books containing high quality illustrations of selected portable artifacts from museum collections. Indeed the repeated appearance of some items time and time ' again has by now achieved something of a monotony, and the producers of such books must be faced with, increasing difficulties in trying to devise presentations that are in some way different from previous publications. “Art of the Pacific,” by Brian Brake, James McNeish and David Simmons, is ■certainly different, Many of the

•photographs are of now familiar objects, but they are in the main superb photographs, and as well there are many other artifacts that have only rarely or never before been illustrated. Special lighting has been used with the skill one might expect from Brian Brake to give much greater feeling io many artifacts than can generally be experienced when viewing the actual objects themselves in museum collections. (The purist, of course, might argue that such objects can be really appreciated only in the situations for which they were designed.) The book contains 176 photographs, nearly half of which are in colour. The generally high quality of these makes all the • more noticeable the very occasional lapses where the eye is distracted by material used to support the artifacts while they were being photographed. The standard of printing is good, and while colour registration is not perfect, it is quite acceptable. Artifacts depicted include canoe fittings, house carvings, human figures, masks personal ornaments, musical instruments, ritual and ceremonial objects, containers, and tapa cloth; it is a selection of what might nowadays be classified as artobjects rather than a comprehensive coverage of Pacific art. Photograph captions are well prepared and informative, and appear to be unusually free from errors.

There is an introductory text to each of the main island groups in Melanesia and Polynesia, and these too are commendably objective with very little evidence of ’the ethnological dogmatism that oiten tends to creep into works of this nature.

A feature of “Art of the Pacific" is a collection of 10 edited “conversations" with people living in the Solomons. Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia. New Hebrides, Samoa, Rarotonga, and New Zealand, which are interspersed between sections of photographs. They are both delightful and thought-provoking at the same time, and serve to remind the reader, not that he is looking at “living arts of living peoples” as the dust jacket blurb would have it, but rather of the very considerable social and cultural differences that still exist between peoples of the Pacific. Only the “conversations” and the Introduction pages are numbered, and detail photographs of objects illustrated nearby are neither numbered nor captioned. This can be a little annoving, especially as the term “next page" is used incorrectly in some instances. Perhaps it is pedantic to be concerned at how words are broken at the end of a line these days, but I cannot help disliking divisions such as “diap-hram” and Tutangimamae” — they suggest a degree of slovenliness not otherwise apparent in a very fine publication.