Art’s visual efficacy: The case of Anthony Forge’s Abelam corpus

Abstract

Losche joins O’Hanlon and Roscoe in ascribing to Melanesian aesthetics a practical sensitivity toward art objects. These become visually efficacious not by using morphology to represent or communicate meaning, but by primarily producing effects in their vicinity, that is, by causing change in the state of things. Losche and O’Hanlon also stress that this is how Abelam themselves conceive and speak of their art’s functioning. The Abelam assess art objects in terms of their effect—that is, in terms of their power to transform attitudes and desires (Losche 1997, 44–45). Per Losche’s interpretation, shapes such as the spiral used in carvings and paintings central to initiation and yam rituals help generate change in the mental state of the participants. The main role of Abelam art is to rechannel male attraction away from the opposite sex and toward the growing of long yams and the rituals attached to the korombo house (1995, 57–58). “The apparent lack of congruence between visual design and verbal referent” (51) disappears when one treats groups of identical graphic elements not as representing the same object, but as reproducing the same function (1997, 46). In the world of the Abelam a spiral shape variously identified by Forge’s informants as “legs of pork,” “immature fern frond,” or swirling water (Forge 1970, 289) is meant to reproduce their shared generative function: one gives a leg of pork to one’s exchange partner, initiating a whole series of exchanges; immature fern frond hides inside itself many leaves waiting to be unfurled; swirls of water indicate places in a river where “spirits involved with conception” reside (Losche 1995, 53–54). By reproducing the shape, the design partakes of the generative effect as well, and starts to “act as a machine or apparatus for inducing transformation in other things or persons” (54).13