The power and diversity of Oceanic art

By ROSS BOWDEN

The islands of the Pacific, stretching from New Guinea to Easter Island, are the source of some of the world’s most distinctive and powerful visual art. The forms this takes vary greatly from island to island. They include monumental stone carvings (Easter Island), wood figures, ceramic sculpture, bark paintings and elaborate body decorations made from paint, shell, fur and other natural materials.

Fig. 1. Installation in the Oceanic Room, Trocadero Museum of Ethnography, Paris 1895 (from W. Rubin ed., ‘Primitivism’ in 20th century art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984, p.258).

The variety of these art styles reflects the underlying cultural and linguistic diversity of the region. For instance, New Guinea and adjacent smaller islands directly to the north of Australia are the home of over 1000 languages, each as different from the others as English is from French or German or Hungarian. Each of these language groups has a distinct history and culture and typically also a distinct style of painting, carving and architecture. Oceanic languages also tend to be very small, the majority having only a few thousand, or even a few hundred, speakers.

Europeans have collected Oceanic art, principally wood sculptures, from the earliest days of Western exploration in this region. Some of the most prized collections in major international museums, especially in Britain and Germany, were acquired by such celebrated voyagers as Capt. James Cook during the last decades of the 18th century at the point of, or very soon after, first contact with the West.

Impact on the development of twentieth century Western art

Together with that of Africa and some other parts of the indigenous world, Oceanic art has also had a major influence on the development of modern Western art. Major collections of Oceanic art and artefacts had been on public display in London, Paris and other European metropolitan centres since at least the 1880s (see Fig. 1) and by the first decade of the 20th century these began to have a radical influence stylistically on the work by Matisse, Vlaminck, Picasso and other avant-garde painters and sculptors, many of whom were regular visitors to ethnographic museums and to the ‘curio’ shops where such objects could be bought.

Some became major collectors of indigenous art. This influence coincided with changes that were taking place quite independently in Western art. This concerns the gradual shift, between about 1870 and 1907, from what art historians call a ‘perceptual’ mode of representation to a more ‘conceptual’ one. By the middle of the first decade of the 20th century Picasso and other avant-garde painters and sculptors believed that the perspective-based ‘perceptual’ tradition that had dominated Western art since the Renaissance had reached an end point and were looking for a way to break away from it and develop an entirely new aesthetic idiom. Indigenous art provided crucial clues as to how this could be done.

What drew avant-garde artists to Oceanic art – principally sculpture – were precisely those features stylistically that distinguished it from European equivalents. The bulk of indigenous sculpture is made from what was conventionally thought of as a ‘primitive’ material (wood) using a very ‘primitive’ technique (direct carving, in contrast, say to modelling in clay and casting in bronze).

In indigenous art the human figure is also depicted in radically different proportions from European models: the head is often disproportionately large and the organisation of the body bears only an indirect relationship to its muscle and bone structure. Avant-garde artists were equally intrigued by the way in which colour in Oceanic art was often integral to sculptural form: to remove the colour would often radically alter the perceived ‘form’ of a carving.

Following their ‘discovery’ of Oceanic and other indigenous art forms during the first decade of the 20th century avant-garde painters and sculptors applied its lessons in many ways. One involved taking up carving in wood with hammer and chisel, a technique that had not been used regularly in Europe for almost 500 years. Gauguin, one of many who made wood carvings directly inspired by Oceanic figures, took the even more radical step of moving to the Pacific, first to Tahiti and later to the Marquesas. In doing so, he became the first great Western artist to live for a substantial part of his life outside Europe.

Fig. 2. Albert Giacometti, Head of a Man on a Rod (detail), 1947. Plaster, 59.7 cm high. (From Primitivism…, p. 34).

Another, illustrated by Gaugin but also many others including Surrealists such as Max Ernst and Matta, involved incorporating images and motifs of Oceanic origin into their own work. Major avant-garde artists even made adaptations in modern media of individual Oceanic pieces. One striking example (Fig. 2) is Giacometti’s sculpture in plaster entitled Head of a man on a rod (1947).

Fig. 3. Overmodelled and painted human skull, New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), 17 cm. high. (From Primitivism…, p.34)

This was unquestionably inspired by the New Ireland ‘overmodelled’ skull illustrated in Fig. 3 which Giacometti would have seen in Basel during the 1940s when he was a regular visitor to that Swiss city’s great ethnographic museum. Such adaptations still have the capacity to shock students undertaking courses on Oceanic art for the blatancy of what many see as ‘plagiarism’.

Fig. 4. Surrealist Map of the World. Published in Variétés, 1929 (from Primitivism…, p. 556)

One of the ways the Surrealists, who rose to prominence in the 1920s, acknowledged their debt to the art of the Pacific was in their famous Surrealist Map of the World (Fig. 4). This gives pride of place to the Pacific and represents the size of islands and continents not on the basis of their actual dimensions but according to the esteem in which they held their art.

Great prominence is given to New Guinea and the adjacent islands of New Britain and New Ireland, as well as Easter Island. The latter, although only a speck on a conventional map, is substantially larger than Australia. Aboriginal art, it is worth noting, held little interest for the Surrealists or any of the other great pioneers of modern European art and exerted no significance on its development stylistically.

Oceanic art today

Contrary to widely held stereotypes about indigenous societies that circulate in the media and pass for ‘knowledge’ in most schools and even universities, Pacific peoples were not opposed to European settlement and actually welcomed it for the unlimited cultural riches it made available. These riches were both material and non-material.

Steel tools make clearing forest for gardens much easier than stone implements; modern medicines cured ancient and debilitating diseases such as yaws and elephantiasis; and the peace which colonial powers imposed on warring communities made regular travel beyond the boundaries of a person’s own language group possible for the first time. This is not to say that people turned their backs on their cultures.

Pacific Islanders, including converts to Christianity, admire the achievements of their ancestors, such the land they won through warfare from neighbouring groups, and enjoy listening to the stories and performing the songs and many of the dances they inherited form their forebears. But like indigenous peoples everywhere they are pragmatic and are prepared to give up those aspects of their traditional cultures which conflict with other things they want.

Fig. 5. The Kwoma ceremonial men’s house named Wayipanal, Washkuk Hills, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea, 1978 (from Ross Bowden, Creative Spirits: Bark Painting in the Washkuk Hills of north New Guinea, Melbourne: Oceanic Art Pty Ltd, 2006, p.4).

For instance, in the Sepik River region of northern Papua New Guinea every language group formerly had its own style of ceremonial architecture (Figs 5 and 6) and of decorating buildings with bark paintings and wood sculptures. Masterly examples of vernacular architecture are still constructed in some of the remoter parts of this region but the majority of communities have given up constructing large, lavishly decorated buildings because too many of their young men, who provided the work force, are living away from home attending school or university, or working in paid jobs.

Fig. 6. Bark paintings on the ceiling of the building illustrated in Fig. 5, 1982 (from Ross Bowden, Creative Spirits, p. 5).

Over time the knowledge of how to construct these buildings, and perform the complex rituals that were staged within them, is being lost, something that the people themselves often regret but acknowledge they can do nothing about. Paradoxically, the best way of preserving indigenous art forms, and of developing them creatively, is to encourage a vibrant commercial market for the art. In Australia the emergence of a commercial market has directly stimulated the preservation and development of both traditional and new indigenous art forms.

Collections of Oceanic art in Australian museums

There are number of major collections of Oceanic art in Australian museums. The two largest are in Sydney and Melbourne. But for whatever reason very little of this has been on public view since the 1960s when the wonderful displays of art and artefacts from New Guinea, New Zealand and other parts of the Pacific, and the evocative dioramas that illustrated ways of life in island communities, were dismantled and placed in storage. The Museum of Victoria effectively closed its great collection to the public when it converted the magnificent display galleries in what is now the State Library into storage rooms.

The people of Victoria deserve an opportunity to see their State’s collection of Oceanic art. As already noted, the art of the Pacific has had a major impact on the development of 20th century Western art and this fact alone should justify the State giving it pride of place in a major exhibition space. Melbourne also has a substantial population of people of Pacific Island origin and the Oceanic art in the State’s collection would be a source of both instruction and pride for the descendants of the people who created it.

A new museum of Oceanic art would attract many visitors from overseas who often come to Australia to find representative collections of the art of the Pacific. Perhaps it’s time we demanded that the great treasures of Oceanic art currently hidden away in storage rooms around Melbourne, which many Victorians do not even know exist, should once again be brought out into the light of day and made available to the people who actually own it.

Audio excerpt: Ross Bowden speaks with Peter Hylands