Books

Oceanic Art

Review by Nicholas Rothwell

This startling and sophisticated re-examination of Pacific art in all its diversity promises to redefine the field. Nicholas Thomas, a scholar of Marquesan culture and history, is, according to his publishers, currently researching contemporary art and the politics of identity in New Zealand - and it shows.

Out of the window, in this landmark volume, the latest in the world’s most popular series of art handbooks, go the old certain ties of oceanic art connoiseurship: Pacific artists are presented as our contemporaries, refining, adapting, reinventing their work for the last years of the century.

“My sense of the dynamism of Pacific art owes a great deal to contact with artists and communities in the Marquesas, Fiji and Aotearoa (New Zealand),” declares the author.

This, then, is not a stroll past the musty display cases of European ethnography collections, but a guided tour of today’s Pacific, together with a survey of the uses of art in societies strug gling with drastic change.

Thomas presents the art of the ocean not as a particularly love ly category of the “primitive”, but as a system of strategies adopt ed by different cultures for focusing power and “embodying” themselves.

He looks at the transformations of established cultural forms: thus, in Papua New Guinea, the bilum, or string bag, and in parts of Vanuatu the woven basket have been converted into modem symbols of identity. In several Polynesian cultures, tapa, or bark cloth, has become a channel for new self-definition. Thomas even presents the revival of tattooing among young New Zealand Maoris as a valid form of artistic enterprise.

Several preconceptions about oceanic art are exploded; among them the notion that the region’s primitive artists were uninterest ed in narrative: Thomas points to Austral Islands ancestor statues, the bamboo carvings of New Caledonia, and the textiles of the Carolines, before arguing from the example of the impressive ‘storyboards’ of Belau that contact with western culture has not been a cause of inexorable cultural decline: “The interest and importance of neo-traditional work is conse quently now more widely appreciated by curators and the tribal art market,” he remarks, “even if disproportionate value is still placed upon work that appears to predate contact.”

The author’s sympathies, then, are plain. He does reprint pic tures of several acknowledged masterpieces of primitive art, and provides detailed and subtle explanations of the ritual place and significance of ‘art-works’ in traditional Pacific societies.

But his concluding chapter is an up-beat survey of contempo rary trends, which performs, at least, the service of showing the diversity of production in countries such as Papua New Guinea and New Zealand - both of them societies where the (re)creation of national identity requires a new form of communal definition.

How successful, then, is this manifesto?

“Oceanic Art” contains extraordinary passages describing a new understanding of the way that art functioned in several Pacific societies. One feels, instinctually, that “this is how it real ly was” - feels close to comprehending the way these cultures once operated, with all their glamour, brutality and variance.

Oceanic art, for Thomas, could be an affair of the body, the dance, the pig-killing ceremonies.

These indigenous traditions continue, and evolve, but in many cases they are “secret and sacred”, and “still relate uneasily to Christianity and commercialisation.” The splendour of art-works, in places such as the Sepik, or the Solomons, was originally linked to the need for societies to define and differentiate them selves: in the Sepik, for instance, variation went so far that “vir tually no generalisation about Sepik art can be sustained”.

But this art, for Thomas, was not actually doing the same thing as western art: even fighting could, in some sense, be art, as it was with the Asmat of West Papua, or in parts of the Solomons, where a “defiant, highly aestheticised terrorism” centred on martial works, such as elaborate shields, that Western collectors now admire.

What, then, was Pacific art, and what will it become? In one intriguing passage, Thomas argues that some art forms were not looked at as things of beauty: they “were rather used to effect cer tain accomplishments: to parade a particular form of power, to overwhelm others, or to overwhelm oneself.”

This brief affordable, well-illustrated and suggestive book contains a wealth of wonders. It is unlikely to be read by anyone with complete equanimity.

A different kind of pleasure in Pacific art is provided by a lav ish work of reference just launched in Sydney. Also titled “Oceanic Art,” this two-volume work contains photographs of some 800 ‘traditional’” Pacific masks, ornaments and statues, many hidden in the reserve collections of Western museums. It is the result of a lengthy compilation effort by anthropologist and antique dealer, Anthony Meyer. Critics welcoming its Australian publication justly described the work, which is full of beautiful images of beautiful objects, as in some sense “a work of art”.

It certainly carries an appropriate price-tag: distributed in Australia by Sandstone Books for the publishers, Konemann, it retails for $A 150. ■ (“Oceanic Art” by Nicholas Thomas, publisher: Thames and Hudson, series “World of Art”. (price in UK pounds sterling 6.95)