Pacific Arts N.S. Vol. 25, No. 1 (2025)

The French collection of Pacific art is under the care of several institutions, including the Musée National de la Marine, Musée du Louvre, and Musée Picasso. However, the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac (MqB-JC) remains the core of the Pacific collections in France. Over the past decade, this museum has made significant strides in showcasing Pacific art through exhibitions, loans, research, and collaborations. This chapter consists of an interview with Stéphanie Leclerc-Caffarel, curator of Pacific Collections at MqB-JC, and Miriama Bono, director of the Te Fare Iamanaha Musée de Tahiti et des Îles. They discuss recent museographical approaches that support post-colonial identity and cultural renewal in the Francophone Pacific art community. The interview highlights collaborative projects aimed at increasing the visibility of contemporary Francophone Oceanian artists. Key questions include the artists’ positioning within the Pacific art scene, the relationship of Francophone Oceanian communities with national Pacific art collections, and the roles of key institutions in fostering artistic dialogue.

Reviewed by: Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde Patricia Laurence Modernism and the Museum: Asian, African and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde. Rupert Richard Arrowsmith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. iii + 223. $110.00 (cloth). The radical change in London's artists and writers in the years leading up to the First World War can best be seen, Rupert Arrowsmith argues, as "an unprecedented engagement and dialogue [End Page 617] between tradition and the rest of the world" (199). Yet the histories and literary and artistic studies of the period have, he notes, largely been written by scholars with little knowledge of cultures outside of England. This lack of trans-cultural knowledge has led to "a distorted view of Modernism as essentially a European invention" (1). Many studies of modernism are then, Arrowsmith charges, geographically, culturally, and aesthetically myopic. Arrowsmith, given his own extensive travel in various parts of Asia and his study of European and Asian sculpture, is eminently qualified to make the charge, but it is not new. We have read the Eurocentric argument before in the writings of Edward Said and in the work of Astradur Eysteinsson, who notes that "While everyone seems to agree that as a phenomenon modernism is radically 'international' . . . this quality is certainly not reflected in the majority of critical studies of modernism."1 What is new in Arrowsmith's study is his rigorous research and his focus on a small canvas, the sculpture of Jacob Epstein and the poetry of Ezra Pound, who were part of a coterie of London avant-garde artists. Arrowsmith's premise is that a vast mass of new aesthetic experience, mainly from Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands, was transmitted to artists through the developing collections of several London museums. Consequently, other aesthetics were mapped onto the so-called British modernist aesthetic without acknowledgment. Sculptors, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and Eric Gill, and writers, like W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, James Gould Fletcher, D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and T. E. Hulme, were bricoleurs who absorbed foreign techniques and perspectives that animated and renewed their art. Arguing for the influence of London museums, Arrowsmith illuminates Said's theory of "orientalism" in demonstrating that a nineteenth-century Eurocentric narrative was structured into the layout of the British Museum: "a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient."2 He physically traces where the "foreign" art of India or China or Japan was positioned in the museum—far from the sacred space of Greek and Roman art, considered the pinnacle of "civilization". Other art with other values was often deemed rubbish, reinforcing England's comforting cultural polarities of civilized and barbarian art. The fine sculpture of India, Japan, China, and Africa was classed not as art but as artifact, and jumbled together on the second floor of the museum with non-sculptural and anthropological findings. Spaces for art, largely designed by curators with archaeological rather than aesthetic backgrounds, notes Arrowsmith, established a hierarchy of aesthetics based on Western "superiority". But it is the argument of this book that newly-hired curators such as Laurence Binyon challenged this hierarchy. Binyon, Assistant Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, was a leading expert on the art of Japan, China, and Korea and began to introduce the visual art of these cultures into the British Museum Print Room. This room was the most exciting division of the Museum in terms of acquisition as Binyon built a world collection on a shoestring between 1900 and 1915. Arrowsmith's ingenious research in the Visitor's Book of the British Museum Print Room has verified that Ezra Pound first visited in 1909 and returned in 1912, a period during which Asian art was often exhibited. Arrowsmith produces original research on Pound to complement the extensive work of Zhaoming Qian, and illustrates that Pound was engaged in the aesthetics of China and Japan, intrigued by the diminishing boundary between word and image, a possible future for Western imagism. Jacob Epstein, in seeking new paradigms for his work outside Greek and Roman bounds, also became engaged...

This is the Pacific Arts Association’s first issue of Pacific Arts utilizing an open access on-line journal platform. Pacific Arts has been published for more than four decades and has been a valuable vehicle for scholarship focusing on the arts of the Pacific region. For many years it was one of the few journals that would accept Pacific material. Today, however, Pacific Arts and Oceanic Visual Studies are not only acknowledged with numerous labels, they link with multiple disciplines that investigate the artistic production of the region.

This work is a book review considering the title Repositioning Pacific Arts: Artists, Objects, Histories: Proceedings of the VII International Symposium of the Pacific Arts Association, Christchurch, New Zealand edited by Anne E. Allen and Deborah B. Waite.

Reviewed by: Living Art in Papua New Guinea by Susan Cochrane Paul Sharrad Living Art in Papua New Guinea, by Susan Cochrane. 2013. isbn 978-1-922007-51-3; e-book, 233 pages. Produced and distributed by Contemporary Arts Media/Artfilms. Available through http://artfilms.com.au: dvd or cd $162.59 university/college, $138.20 school/technical and further education (tafe)/community college, $81.29 private use. Susan Cochrane is a rare enthusiast of oceanic arts, one who bridges diverse roles of collector, curator, conversationalist, and critical commentator on Pacific art, particularly that from Papua New Guinea and New Caledonia. After thirty years of impressive travel in the region, giving papers across Oceania and beyond, and attempting the difficult feat of promoting the region’s culture to the world through hardcopy art publishing—readers may have come across her Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea (1997) or Bérétara (2001)—she has put together an online interactive compendium, Living Art in Papua New Guinea. This e-book brings together materials going back to the 1950s from Cochrane’s own archive and that of her parents (links to these are in the book) with contemporary statements from artists, all of whom have actively participated in the project. A feature of the collection is that its electronic format allows the commonly seen static artworks to be complemented with moving images of their social context and with associated forms of performative art. Even among the former group, there are things such as large pots and [End Page 586] public sculptures that are not often seen outside of Papua New Guinea. The design is a delight: landscape pages with lots of white space and text surrounded by lively images of birds, animals, and spirits, some familiar from the widely circulated styles of Akis and Kauage. The version I reviewed had a few photos strangely turned on their side, but that may well have been due to the format I was working with on a computer download. Many of the black-and-white photos are stunning for the events captured and for their rarity, irrespective of formatting. The text includes links to clips and other information on topics such as “women in contemporary society,” “the Baining Fire Dance,” “carved canoes,” “the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art,” and “bamboo bands.” The volume also includes an impressive mix of essays, gallery catalogs, and YouTube clips. The author admits to her amateur status as a photographer and the spontaneous nature of some of the fieldwork clips, but regardless, they are all visually captivating and informative and suggestive of immense possibility for future works on Oceanic art to bridge the gaps between artists, collections, and audiences in homelands and abroad. One envisages more links being added in later editions. Her style is clear and personal—people-centered as well as descriptive of the works. Academics dedicated to a specific art form or region might want a bit more detail, but in a national survey like this, Cochrane covers major art areas and manages to pack in a good deal of information about each one. There is a bit more on the PNG Highlands and a bit less on the Sepik than might be expected through the first three-quarters of the book, but this is rebalanced with a “Sepik journey” toward the end, tracking movements from village production to global circulation. The book is divided into three sections: a survey of “the Arts of Papua New Guinea”; “Kastom and Contemporary Culture,” covering artistic collaborative work, women’s creative work, natural resources, body art, singsing performances, and the spiritual as manifest in haus tambaran and haus lotu; and “Village-Urban-Global.” This last section marks a particular strength of the publication in that it deals with PNG art as a dynamic, living thing (sometimes a bit too dynamic, as seen in the painting of police chasing street art sellers away!), not something to be fixed in “authentic tradition” and abstracted away from lived contexts as objects for a gallery. There is a solid bibliography and a short glossary. For anyone wanting to introduce a friend or student to PNG art, this is definitely the book to go...

Taking a broad approach to the concept of recycling, I refer to a range of works, from sculpture to film, street art and poetry, which depict issues of importance to Indigenous peoples faced with the (after) effects of colonisation. Does the use of repurposed materials and/or the knowledge that these objects are the work of Indigenous creators change the way we respond to these works, and if so, how?

Artist Statement Dan Taulapapa McMullin (bio) Tiki is a word I avoided much of my life. As a Polynesian, I associated Tiki with tiki kitsch that is not only impossible to avoid but must, I realized, be addressed. The abject associations of tiki kitsch sometimes makes identifying as Polynesian feel like inhabiting all the dumbed-down representations of us in movies, books, magazines, paintings, songs, cartoons, tourist items, and jokes. But to avoid tiki kitsch, that manufactured parody of our deity Tiki, is to avoid the history of Tiki himself. How can I say that tiki kitsch is not part of who I am, and indicative of something powerful in my life, that is, my political resistance and my creative process? If I look for authenticity, I might find that such a thing doesn’t exist. From a certain kind of village people painting with cubist elements that tourists collect the world over, to conceptual art pieces in international biennials that represent identity based on the visual moment of our colonization, to popular forms of Pacific art whose standards are set in the media, the world of Pacific art today is hybrid and complicated. Finding authenticity is not only about the objects of art—most museum collections of Pacific art are rife with fakes, and tiki kitsch began in the Western tradition of manufacturing fake Pacific art. If Western contact had happened a hundred years after the historical moment we know of, I think our basic cultures today would each be different, because our ancestors were changing all the time. Authenticity is about personal choice and understanding: it is the narrative we create and live. I grew up in the aiga in Samoa, in my great-grandmother Fa‘asapa’s faletele, in the nu‘u, but now I live far away in time and place in a gay artists’ town in upstate New York with my partner, Stephen, and my nu‘u, such as it is, is woven in with the Internet, the telephone, the airport, the screen. My life is tiki kitsch. And my life is Tiki. [End Page 583] Artist Notes on the Paintings Tiki in Frozen Hell is composed of computer-altered photographs that were printed on transparent mylar, then collaged in layers on a panel, with some acrylic painting. The main photograph is from a series I took of my hands in black gloves; a finger puppet, sexual, critical, satirical, queer, and expressive; referencing sculpture, the Polynesian body, and deity. The fire circle is from an altered found postcard of Samoan fire dancing. To quote Gertrude Stein, “the figure wanders on alone,” meaning the modern condition of identity, which makes us see ourselves as mirrors of ourselves. This is a piece about memory and forgetting, a Black Orpheus. Tired of Tourists is based on a found photograph of hula dancers from an old Honolulu newspaper, which I altered in Photoshop so that the final figure is changing into a plumeria tree. I printed it in black and white and filled in the plumeria with colored pencil; also in part of the text I left my change of mind as part of the piece, which is about desire and metamorphosis. Fake Hula for Alien Tiki is also based on found photographs; in this case the main photograph was from a collection of pornography from the 1940s–1970s that I found on the Internet, of which this is perhaps the tamest image. Tiki kitsch pornography consists of European American women writhing in pagan ecstasy before a tiki of some sort, in this case a space alien tiki. I altered the image by adding the crown of Sauron, and images of Sala Baker, the Polynesian actor who played Sauron, and Orcs in The Lord of the Rings, a film I interpret as a form of tiki kitsch given its location in Aotearoa–New Zealand and within the history of New Zealand film. Polynesie is a sort of collage of found images, although I painted it entirely with vinyl and oil paint on canvas. The lower two figures are from a painting by Paul Gauguin. He often used postcards from Samoa and elsewhere even while painting in Tahiti and the...

About the Artist: Lisa Hilli Katerina Teaiwa Born in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and living in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia, Lisa Hilli is a contemporary artist with lineages from PNG (Tolai/Gunantuna), Finland, England, and South Africa. Her work highlights the in/visibility of Black and Melanesian women’s bodies through themes of landscape, history, and archival research, which she explores through photography, video, textiles, and installation. Her major works have culminated in touring exhibitions, including Trade & Transformations (2018), Social Conditioner (2015–2016), Vunatarai Armour & Midi (2015–2016), and Just Like Home (2010–2013), while others have been featured at galleries and events in Australia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Hilli holds an MFA from RMIT University and is currently an experience developer for Te Pasifika Gallery at Melbourne Museum. She has been an artist in residence at institutions in PNG, Australia, and Finland, she worked with Pacific communities in Australia and Solomon Islands to create short films for the eleventh Festival of Pacific Arts (2014), and she cofounded the Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle and the Contemporary Pacific Arts Festival (Footscray Community Arts Centre, 2013–2015). Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Atong Atem As Hilli discussed on The Art Show with Namila Benson regarding her three-video animated work Afrophobia, her experiences as a Black woman have deeply shaped her creativity. For instance, on the politics of Black womanhood and afro-textured hair, she explained, “Hair is such a key identifying feature of who I am. . . . It’s a powerful marker on my body. . . . I’m standing in my strength and being proud of who I am, and it took me a long time to get there. It’s something that’s used as a significant tool of political movements . . . that definitely unites Black people across the world” (abc Radio National, 10 June 2020). The art featured in this issue can be viewed in full color in the online versions. [End Page vii] Click for larger view View full resolution Damien Kereku, Vunalagir Vunatarai, Tolai People, Wearing Midi, by Lisa Hilli, 2015. Returning the midi to the Tolai male body helped me understand its historical and contemporary significance to Tolai people today. Through remaking a midi, I learned the power of embodied and ancestral knowledge. This is the first midi to be made in over a hundred years. Click for larger view View full resolution In a Bind, by Lisa Hilli, 2015. Pigment print on cotton rag; 76 cm x 51.5 cm. Frustrated by museum displays of fractured, decontextualized, and disembodied Melanesian cultures, I challenge the viewer to contemplate the tensions between a perceived artifact and the fact of my body. Through this impractical mask and while standing on my matrilineal lands, I reduce my body to hair texture and skin tone to signifythe historical and contemporary legacies of derogatory labels and geographical terminologies based on Melanesian and Papua Niugini peoples’ physicality. Click for larger view View full resolution Raim Wearing Vunatarai (Matrilineal) Armour, by Lisa Hilli, 2015. Cotton, cardboard, digital photographs on paper; diameter 46 cm. Vunatarai (Matrilineal) Armour draws on matrilineal strength and Tolai knowledge systems. I center and reinsert my vunatarai (clan) totem— Makurategete (cordyline and croton plants)—onto paper tags usually attached to museum artifacts that are generally devoid of cultural makers’ identities. Stitched onto red cloth, the circular and repetitive design feminizes the midi, a historical Tolai male body adornment. This work is worn by my mother, Raim. Click for larger view View full resolution Sisterhood Lifeline, by Lisa Hilli, 2018. Photo commissioned for the exhibition The Commute, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. Vinyl wall mural; dimensions variable. A creative response to a personal experience of institutional racism, Sisterhood Lifeline celebrates and honors the sacred space that Black women and nonbinary people hold for each other through vulnerability and strength. This photographic work unapologetically affirms the bodies that are familiar to me and serves as a call for all people of color to boldly take up space when working in cultural institutions to bring about change. Click for larger view View full resolution Social Conditioner series, by Lisa Hilli, 2016. From left to right: Me...

The journal was established in 1990 and is currently issued as an annual volume in a new series that began in 2006. In 2020, the journal moved to eScholarship, the open access scholarly publishing program of the University of California/California Digital Library. For information on upcoming calls and submission guidelines, please email us or visit our website.

‘Varilaku: Pacific Art from the Solomon Islands’, curated Crispin Howarth, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 24 February–29 May 2011 What a delight, an exhibition of art solely from the Solo...

Pacific Arts N.S. Vol. 21 No. 1 (2021)

Pacific Arts, Festival of

Repositioning Pacific arts: artists, objects, histories: proceedings of the VII International Symposium of the Pacific Arts Association, Christchurch, New Zealand

Pacific Arts N.S. Vol. 22 No. 1 (2022)

Named after Jean Marie Tjibaou, the Tjibaou Cultural Centre is the result of Tjibaou’s vision and of a long history of cultural policies in France. This chapter explores the cultural dynamics of this project from its inception, and argues that it needs to be reinvigorated today, just as the history of its cultural adventure must be told. This chapter is in three parts and it is told by two voices: the introduction is co-written by Susan Cochrane and Guillaume Soulard and is followed by a first section on the formation of the Centre’s key collection of contemporary Kanak and Pacific art (FACKO) authored by Susan Cochrane. The last section is an extensive interview of Guillaume Soulard, the current art director of the Centre Culturel Tjibaou.