The Art Market in Southern Oceania

Abstract

combination of a Qantas excursion fare with a Polynesian Airlines Polypass allowing unlimited access to all their flights between Tahiti and Sydney for a month lured your roving reporter once more to the South Seas. Having previously described the art markets in Easter Island, French Polynesia, and the two Samoas (African Arts, vol. 13, no. 2, 1980, pp. 66-70), and having received some supportive response, I will now try to sketch the cultural situation of each island group we visited and to give some idea of whatever objets de vertu may be available there. As displayed in Adrienne Kaeppler's remarkable show and catalogue 'Artificial Curiosities': An Exposition of Native Manufactures Collected on the Three Pacific Voyages of Captain James at the Bishop Museum in 1978, Captain Cook in the 1770s and other early travelers in this vast empty ocean found objects of astonishing beauty and technical perfection. Polynesian traditional arts were very finely crafted, with tight abstract all-over surface patterns on relatively simple forms-paddles, bowls, panels, ritual tools of hard dark wood, and small sculpture in stone, ivory, and wood-a rich and somber style in keeping with these stern, hierarchical, and repressive societies of kings, priests, commoners, and slaves. Magellan came first in 1520, Quiros and Urdafieta soon after, Tasman in 1642, and Roggeveen in 1722, but not until the arrival of those two remarkable scholars, Captain James Cook and Captain William Bligh, did these islands become known to the Western world. Then came the whalers, the sandalwood traders, the blackbirders looking for slaves for Queensland, Fiji, and the Peruvian Guano Islands, and finally the missionaries. Never was the clash of cultures so total, so fraught with misunderstanding-the very opposite of the Spaniards who recognized in the Aztecs a culture so parallel to theirs as to suggest demonic involvement. To these somber aristocratic Polynesian cultures came ill-educated and imperceptive missionaries from the London Missionary Society, certain of the rightness of their narrow views and the superiority of their culture, and out to civilize Heathen forthwith. These brave but wrong-headed missionaries had one great defense for their cultural depredations: the universal practice of cannibalism among both Polynesians and Melanesians until about 130 years ago. Indeed, the unwary both local and foreign are still today occasionally assigned to the pot in Papua New Guinea. Contrary to the cartoons on the subject, the captives were routinely brained by clubs or rocks, eviscerated, and jointed before being baked in earth ovens known to us from modern Hawaiian tourist luaus. Both sexes and all ages were eaten, and heads and hands were often thrown away. Women were rarely allowed to eat human flesh, long pig-just one more case of sexism. missionaries also found support among the aristocrats, who soon realized the value of supernatural sanctions, not to mention foreign armaments, in holding and extending their power. Today the missionaries are gone, but their ugly and unChristlike view of human nature lives on, prohibiting dancing, most music, jewelry, and alcohol, and limiting the arts and the other good things of life in these innately poor islands. But in spite of social and supernatural sanctions, the drums do beat, the bodies sway, and the elders disappear into the shrubbery on their way home from church to imbibe the local jungle juice made from oranges, bananas, or coconut. Islanders soon learned to be adaptable, and indeed, the pervasive myth of the South Seas manifest from Melville's Typee through Dorothy Lamour films to Blue Lagoon is one of utopia, or as the Fiji tourist ads read, The World Way It Ought To Be. Generally the Polynesian argonauts, with their alleged easy virtue and paradoxically repressed and compulsively tight art styles, get a good press, while the mystical Melanesians, with their bloody mythology and dramatic art styles, get a universally bad press. Before we begin our tour of the islands, an addendum: even though Western Samoa was discussed in a previous report, it may be well here to mention the very fine large kava bowls called tanoa to be found at the Handicraft Corporation on the Beach Road in downtown Apia at $40-$60. ultimate salad bowl, made of very fine dark, hard-grained wood, each is hemispherical in shape and supported by sixteen or more small cylindrical legs around the circular flat rim. Kava, made from the ground and steeped root of the pepper plant, looks and tastes like tepid dishwater in which a styptic pencil has been dissolved. Even so, it has ritual significance, and one is honored to be offered it.