Understanding art of Oceania

Press, 16 July 1983, Page 18

Understanding art of Oceania

Art and Artists of Oceania. Edited by Sidney Mead and Bernie Kernot. Dunmore Press, 1983. 308 pp. Illustrations. $29.95. (Reviewed by Michael M. Trotter) Earlier this year I attended a conference in Nelson at which an art gallery director spoke on the need, and the ways, to entice the public into his building in the hope that some appreciation of art might rub off on to the visitors when they came in for such mundane reasons as to get food at the Gallery’s cafeteria. Apparently the idea of enticement is nothing new. One of the contributors to “Art and Artists of Oceania” relates that, in the world’s first museum in Russia, Peter the Great encouraged visitors with a glass of vodka and a meat sandwich. An underlying question posed by this book, however, is whether it is enough just to get people to look at art objects as they are so often arranged in museums and art galleries. Certainly credit must be given to the museums for preserving examples of works of art that might otherwise have been destroyed when, in the case of Oceania, the indigenous cultures were overtaken by European concepts, society, and Christian religion. Usually, however, we see these displayed pieces in isolation, out of context, and more often than not in terms of present day European concepts of art. Ethnologists spend years studying carvings, ornaments and amulets from other cultures, proposing theories and borrowing ideas from each other as to

manufacturing methods, purposes, origins, historical links, and traditional restrictions. Great numbers of these museum pieces were collected from Oceania up to 200 years ago, and almost none of the mass of information about them that would have then been available was documented. They were seen simply as curiosities, or perhaps trade items that could be sold to European collectors. Others are of much more recent origin; in many places the manufacture of traditional art objects and practice of traditional art forms is still carried out or has been revived. Rather than adopt a “Sherlock Holmes” approach (as author Sid Mead calls the study of the end result), much information can be obtained from the present-day artists and craftsmen themselves, or from those who still remember much of the information pertaining to the making and use of the older objects. Judicious use of early texts, particularly the traditional chants and family histories often written laboriously in copybooks, or even the few published observations by early European visitors, can provide a valuable background to surviving objects and associated rituals and ceremonies. Today we are in the midst of changing attitudes to Oceanic art. It has become increasingly more interesting, more valuable, and most important, it is now being taken seriously in modern artistic circles. One result of this growing interest has been the holding of the Second

International Symposium on the Arts of Oceania, at Wellington in 1978, and from this has come “Art and Artists of Oceania.” This book is a welcome antidote for the surfeit of coffee-table and “arty” publications, particularly on Polynesian art, that we have seen in recent years. It tends to deal more with contemporary art than that so valued by traditional collectors, but today’s oceanic artists, and their art, are essentially a product of their own past, little influenced by European schools and styles. Obsolete forms are also discussed and there is, for instance, one article in the book on Maori tattooing or “moko” (see illustration). It is interesting to note, incidentally, that the author of this article sees present-day tattooing as having comparable importance to its wearers (or is it participants?) as did the moko of old. The 18 chapters, by as many writers, in this book cover a wide range of topics, the most important being about attitudes to Oceanic art. Others range from the every-day, but very important “Tokelau Cuisine” (a far cry from the typical gallery display but undeniably art), to the somewhat esoteric “Art, Ethno-Aesthetics and the Contemporary Scene.” One or two writers seem to retain a slightly patronising or imperialistic attitude to Oceanic art, and their chapters sit a little uneasily among the rest, but on the whole the book is a most important statement about the art of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia in today’s world.