I complained in this recent post Vaka Moana – in sombre tones of the low light and strange wall tones at the gallery and was interested to see this recent Culture Monster post Oceanic art on the rise about a show at the San Diego Museum of Art. Oh no, those same wall colours again!
(I’m gritting my teeth linking to Culture Monster; did they nick their name from the already well-established, funny and very informative C-Monster?)
Thanks to the new D700, and its ability to take good pictures almost in the dark, here are some of my own images, from the Vaka Moana exhibition, of pieces deeply embedded in culture. Apologies for the less than ideal photos, no flash used…
Wasekaseka, whaletooth ivory necklace. Fiji.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Art,
Pacific
More from the recent Voyages of the Ancestors – Vaka Moana exhibition: here’s a rebbelib or chart-stick, a navigational teaching aid from the Marshall Islands.
From the caption in the gallery:
Marshall Islands sailing systems demand extensive knowledge of local currents and swells. Rebbelib are used to instruct apprentice navigators about the direction of ocean currents and the resulting swell and wave patterns as these currents encounter and then move around islands, marked by cowrie shells. Used only as teaching aids, rebbelib were not taken on to canoes.
This is an art piece in its own right – a device with hints of Duchamp’s Large Glass (with it’s “playful physics”); or like a Rover Thomas work, depicting land form, in this case relating to sea but no less instructive of country.
Tagged as:
Art,
First Australians,
Pacific
Dating from 2,600 -2,700 BP (before present), this pot was found in a limestone cave on Aiwa Island, off Lakemba Island in the Lau Group of Fiji.
By this period, when the Austronesian settlers in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa were developing a distinctive Polynesian culture, Lapita pottery was often plain with no surface decoration.
Why is it that exhibitions with an ethnographic focus often use dark and sombre wall tones wherever possible? I recently visited the Voyages of the Ancestors – Vaka Moana exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, and you almost needed a torch (flash light) in there. (Vaka means sea canoe, moana means ocean, in several Polynesian languages.)
This was a show with some really special works, and a great story about the relatively recent migration and settlement of the Pacific Islands – a huge canvas of sea and sky articulated in the gloom of the gallery.
From the Museum’s Signals magazine, in a fascinating article by Kerry Howe (PDF) of Massey University, New Zealand:
The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth’s surface. Western navigators started to explore it about 400 years ago (in the 16th century). It took them several hundred more years of difficult exploration before they had much understanding of the Pacific. Thus a common Western view was, and sometimes still is, that this ocean is vast, featureless, dangerous, and its tiny islands are hazardous to navigation.
However, this was not the case for the inhabitants. As the map below shows, settlement occurred between 4000 and 700 years ago, and the sea, rather than being the impediment that Westerners saw, was the home, the highway and the source of sustenance and culture for these peoples.
[click to continue…]
Tagged as:
Art,
Pacific
