Oceanic art

It was a moving and, in many respects, illuminating encounter in July 2015 when I met my Abelam “father” again (he had provided us with a house he had originally built for his son in the late-1970s) in Kalabu village after 30 years apart. After so many years in which I had written my publications on the Abelam, especially those on their ceremonial houses (1989a/2015, 1990) and art and aesthetics (1989b, 1994, 1996, 2011), major topics of my previous works flared up during this brief reunion. They made me reconsider of how my work had been influenced by Anthony Forge, the theory of art he had developed in his articles and the many talks we had had together at his home in Canberra, in Basel and also at the Sepik Wenner Gren Conference in Mijas.  On the other hand, I realised how the living world of the Abelam had changed, also with major consequences regarding the very issues Forge and other later anthropologists, including myself (Losche, Mc Guigan, Coupaye), following partly in his footsteps had researched. In this short essay, I will reassess some of the issues of his theory of art in relation to my own work from the perspective of the 2015 meeting in the Maprik hills.

Page proofs of a chapter from the forthcoming book 'Cook Islands Art and Architecture' (University of the South Pacific Press).
One of the larger islands of the southern Cook group, Mangaia has a distinctive history of material culture and performance. At the turn of the nineteenth century there emerged a new and highly idiosyncratic form of performance costume featuring masks known as pare ’eva and katu tūpāpaku. These were used in tarekareka (glossed as ‘entertainments’), in which peu tupuna (ancestral activities) were recounted. It seems that by 1930 the masks were no longer being made. In this chapter I describe the masks and explore their cultural origins, context and possible reasons for their disappearance.

This article has been accepted for publication in The Journal of the History of Collections, published by Oxford University Press.

The voyages of Captain James Cook (1728-1779) inaugurated, among manifold historical processes, an encounter of textile traditions. Pacific Islanders were keenly interested in European fabrics; Europeans were fascinated by Oceanic textiles such as beaten bark cloth, which was extensively collected from Cook's first voyage onwards. Among manifestations of European interest, bark cloth sample books such as those produced as multiples by Alexander Shaw in 1787 have been a focus of research and curatorial activity in recent years. This essay considers a recently-identified book of specimens which pre-dates Shaw's by some fifteen years. It exemplifies a brief but seemingly intense European interest in Polynesian bark cloth, embracing the fabrics' technical, material, aesthetic, social and ritual aspects.

Created across the six islands of a remote archipelago in eastern Polynesia, the art of the Marquesas is one of the world’s most distinctive and remarkable art traditions. Though exhibited in major museums around the world, Marquesan art is nevertheless poorly understood, and the formation of collections still largely unresearched.

This book documents and explores the most extensive early collection from the archipelago. In May, 1804, participants in the first Russian voyage round the world, usually known as the Krusenstern expedition after the principal commander, spent twelve days at the island of Nuku Hiva. Inspired by the science and collecting associated with the voyages of Captain James Cook, the mariners interacted with Islanders, and made extensive collections of artefacts. While the lives of the collectors and exchanges among scientists led to these artefacts being widely dispersed, the research reported here has identified some 200 objects collected during the voyage which are now in museums in Russia, Estonia, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

The outcome of years of work in museum stores and archives, Tiki reassembles a collection of exceptional importance. A set of essays contextualise these precisely-provenanced artefacts historically, and in the life and environment of the Marquesas Islands. For the first time, this heritage is made accessible to Islanders themselves, and to interested scholars and curators.

This books is part of the Pacific Presences series.

Song and dance are a traditional means of strengthening culture and passing knowledge to successive generations in the Torres Strait of northeastern Australia. Dances incorporate a range of apparatuses to enhance the performance, such as dance machines (Zamiyakal) and headdresses (Dhari). The dances, songs, headdresses and dance machines work together to transfer important knowledge about subsistence survival, social structure, and cultural continuity. This paper explores how celestial phenomena inspire and inform music and dance.

This paper analyses the constituent elements of a popular sculptural grouping from the Iatmul/Sawos repertoire of wood-carvings (Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea). From top to bottom, the grouping typically consists of a bird, fish, woman, crocodile and mound; however, it exists in many variations and not all elements need to be present. One aim is to understand the template in terms of the underpinning mythology, i.e., in relation to the relevant ancestral narratives. Another aim is to trace the evolution of the design over time and to establish the range of expressions available to the component motifs, whether alone or in combination.

This essay examines the intellectual and ethnographic sources of Miguel Covarrubias regarding Marquesan ornaments and tattoos. In particular, I analyze his understanding of the design of ornaments in the Marquesan art and the development of their motifs, as well as Covarrubias’ position regarding late nineteenth century anthropology and morphology, from which the so-called “biology of ornaments” derives. Through the study of a selection of Covarrubias' drawings and sketches of Marquesan art, it is possible to reconstruct the creative process behind the illustrations that he made for a 1935 special edition of Typee, Herman Melville’s first novel.
(Text in Spanish)

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

Page 1. Visual Resources Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 2007, pp. 291-336
"From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image," Wendy A. Grossman.
Photographs of African and Oceanic sculpture performing under both artistic and documentary guise are examined in this article for the rhetoric of the image, the embedded messages and significations that inflect the way one reads and understands photographs. Unraveling the complex process through which conventional, anonymous object photographs of African and Oceanic sculptures gave way to self-consciously artistic compositions in the first decades of the twentieth century, this study elucidates the way in which these images functioned in the promotion of non-Western objects as modern art within an epochal shift in modernist aesthetics. This investigation into competing notions of a corresponding photographic aesthetic that arose provides new insights into the symbiotic relationship between and among galleries, museums and photographers in advancing modernist strategies of representation and the manner in which non-Western sculpture was transformed fom artifact to art to fit this paradigm. The trajectory explored here from anonymous object photographs reproduced in publications such as Carl Einstein's Negerplastik (1915) to modernist images of African and Oceanic art by photographers Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), Man Ray (1890-1976) and Walker Evans (1903-1975) reveals how conventions and understandings of the medium and the context in which photographs were seen have inflected interpretations of both the images and the objects rendered.
Keywords: Modernist Photography; Primitivism; Surrealism; De Zayas, Marius, 1880- 1961; Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946; Guillaume, Paul, 1894-1931; Tableaux de Man Ray et objets des iles (1926); Museum of Modern Art, African Negro Art (1935)

Title: Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia: Shells, Bodies, and Materiality
Author: Anna Grasskamp
Series: Connected Histories in the Early Modern World
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

During the early modern period, objects of maritime material culture were removed from their places of origin and traded, collected and displayed worldwide. Focusing on shells and pearls exchanged within local and global networks, this monograph compares and connects Asian, in particular Chinese, and European practices of oceanic exploitation in the framework of a transcultural history of art with an understanding of maritime material culture as gendered. Perceiving the ocean as mother of all things, as womb and birthplace, Chinese and European artists and collectors exoticized and eroticized shells' shapes and surfaces. Defining China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production, source and supply between 1500 and 1700, the book understands oceanic goods and maritime networks as transcending and subverting territorial and topographical boundaries. It also links the study of globally connected port cities to local ecologies of oceanic exploitation and creative practices.

For more info, see https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463721158/art-and-ocean-objects-of-early-modern-eurasia

As the planet's largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO 2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep timescale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both 'spectacular' events, like oil spills and 'slow violence', occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as 'low-trophic theory,' a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

English and Italian text about Washkok Panels:..The matter is simple and essential , but not trivialized . There is always a highlight in the metaphorical aesthetic choice , and I do not think it's a case the scarcity of straight lines , or rather the triumph of curved and irregular graphics that recall the course of the Sepik River . Using in fact the theories of Gestalt Psychology Kwoma people evoke through the reproduction of the form all that remains imprinted in their minds, to govern the positive energy , whether those forms make reference to the strength of the Ancestors or Nature .

Popova, T., 2018. [A Review:] 1. Wieczorek, R., 2017. Putative Duplication Glyph in the Rongorongo Script. Cryptologia, 41(1), pp. 55-72. 2. Guy, J.B.M., 2003. Some Observations Drawn from the Putative Genealogy of Tablet G. Rapa Nui Journal, 17(1), pp. 42-43. 3. Guy, J.B.M., 1982. Fused Glyphs in the Easter Island Script. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 91(3), pp. 445-447. Polynesia Newsletter, 15, p. 2-5.

Keywords:  writing, rongorongo, folklore, rock art, string figure, string game, Rapanui, Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Polynesia, Proto-Polynesian, PPN

[DANISH VERSION]

15 år efter sin første Sepik ekspedition i 1934, er Axel Bojsen-Møller atter tilbage i det for ham forjættede land New Guinea. Denne gang med udgangspunkt i Port Moresby, hvortil han var ankommet med fly fra Townsville i Queensland i det nordli-ge Australien.
Bojsen-Møllers første mål på ekspeditionen var det 14.000 fod høje Mount Hagen.

This book studies the socio-cultural changes that occurred among the Asmat people (West Papua) during the postcolonial era, after the arrival of the first missionary in 1953. It compares Catholic and Protestant missionary strategies of conversion and the way the Asmat coped with newcomers’settlement on their land, evangelization, Indonesian political hierarchies, market economy, ‘tribal’ art collectors, schooling and Western etiologies.
Despite considerable academic interest in this area, regrettably few contemporary researchers in anthropology have published field-work based studies of the people of West Papua, unlike neighboring Papua New Guinea. We hope that this book will encourage young researchers to dedicate themselves to research in this rapidly changing part of the world.