OCEANIC ART AND THE PRIMITIVISTS: A STUDY IN CONTEXTUAL

OBFUSCATION AND SELF-REFERENTIAL

ATTRIBUTIONS OF MEANINGS

by

JOSEPH M. BRAVO

GRADUATE RESEARCH PAPER

ART HISTORY 5123

Seminar in Research Methods and Writing

THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT SAN ANTONIO

Fall 1999

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv

INTRODUCTION 1

ABORIGINAL CONTEXT FOR OCEANIC ART 2

EUROPEAN CONTEXT FOR OCEANIC ART 11

PRIMITIVISM AND THE POLITICS OF APPROPRIATION 15

CONCLUSION 23

ENDNOTES 25

BIBLIOGRAPHY 27

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE PAGE

1. Sepik Canoe Prow 3

2. Aboriginal Bark Painting 6

3. Walembi Village, Mian’gandu Figure 7

4. Malanggan Mask 8

5. Maprik Openwork Ancestor Figure 9

6. Marquessan U’u War Club 10

7. View of the Ethnographic Museum in the Louvre, 1863 12

8. Trocadéro Museum, Oceanic Gallery, 1930 13

9. Paul Gauguin, Christ on the Cross, woodcut print, ca. 1896 18

10. Marquessan U’u War Club (detail) 19

11. New Ireland Mask 20

12. Easter Island, Bird-man Figure 20

13. Kerewa People, Agiba Skull Rack 21

Acknowledgements

I would like to record my thanks to the friends and colleagues who made this investigation possible. Foremost I am grateful to Mr. Gilbert M. Denman, Jr. who not only collected and donated the majority of objects in the San Antonio Museum of Art’s collection of Oceanic art, but has also consistently and generously supported both the museum itself and my endeavors in its collections. I would also like to express my gratitude to the staff of the San Antonio Museum of Art without whose assistance this paper would not have been possible. In particular I would like to thank Dr. Gerry D. Scott, III for his years of patient tutelage and for asking me the question, "Have you ever thought about Oceanic art?" and then affording me the opportunity to do just that. I would also like to acknowledge the essential cooperation of the museum’s registrar Rachel Mauldin, and her associate Karen Zelanka, who no matter how busy they were, made the objects in the museum’s collection constantly available. I also owe a significant debt to Dr. Kellen Kee McIntyre who encouraged me to bring my museum experience to bear in her class and allowed me to continue my investigation of this topic through this paper. Finally I wish to thank my wife Lori for her tolerance of months of incessant ramblings about u’us and yipwons as well as her invaluable help in my struggles against the evil Emperor Gates.

Oceanic Art and the Primitivists: A Study in Contextual

Obfuscation and Self-Referential

Attributions of Meanings

Introduction

Discussions of the paradigmatic shift in European aesthetics at the turn of the century frequently focus on the impact of what was then known as "primitive" art. By "primitive" Western artists and critics meant art created by non-European cultures that were presumably not as "advanced" as Western Civilization. As we shall see, terms like "primitive" and "advanced" are highly problematic and charged with implications that have more to do with the relative power of these cultures than with any real or imagined developmental state of the cultures themselves. Despite the changes that have occurred over the last thirty years in Western attitudes toward non-European peoples, the understanding of non-European art is still encumbered by the stereotypes invoked by the use of the word "primitive. Even the nature of the discussion of the impact of tribal cultural artifacts on the development of Modern art has changed very little since the end of the 19^th century. This is demonstrated by the fact that apart from its relationship with the development of the Modernist aesthetic, Tribal art is rarely discussed at all. To this day in museums like the Menil Collection and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the principle justification for displaying the cultural artifacts of tribal peoples is to demonstrate the forgone conclusion that it has changed the way Western art is conceived. This Eurocentric way of perceiving the value of Tribal art is fraught with peril, including misunderstanding the original cultural context of these objects, and as often, uncritically restating the standard platitudes of their impact on the development of Western art. In order to gain a more balanced view of this

topic, it is my intention to first examine the art of Oceania within its original cultural context, then to look at the cultural milieu of Europe at the time these objects first came to the attention of the public, and finally to examine the relationship between Primitivism and Oceanic art.

Aboriginal context for Oceanic Art

For a discussion of Oceanic Art some background and definition of terms is in order. First, by Oceania I am referring to the geographical area of the Pacific Ocean that includes Austral-Asia, New Zealand, Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. This is a vast area covering hundreds of thousands of square miles of ocean and thousands of islands from Australia to Hawaii. As with any area of this scale, discussing things in terms of generalities is potentially misleading. It is not my intention to diminish the differences between these peoples or to understate the uniqueness of any particular island culture. Second, cultures do not remain static over time: in the case of Oceania some of these islands have been continuously inhabited for over ten thousand years and as such have had ample opportunity for cultural evolution not only in isolation but also by contact with their neighbors. Third, the idea of "art for art’s sake" is a purely Western notion and a relatively recent development. The people of Oceania have no such conception and thus the process of determining what products of their culture qualify as "art" is potentially difficult. For the sake of this paper I will assume that any object that is ornamented or conceived according to formalistic or iconographic conventions, regardless of whether its function is ritualistic or merely a practical daily life object (a distinction that we shall see is itself problematic), will be treated as a product of artistic production.

The first people to occupy Australia and New Guinea landed at the end of the Pleistocene era around 50,000 years ago. Excavations at Kuk Swamp in the Wahgi Valley of New Guinea have confirmed a continuous human habitation from 18,000 BCE to the present, with the first agricultural techniques appearing around 4000 BCE. Around 2500 BCE the Lapita people appeared in New Caledonia. These people were skilled pottery makers as well as remarkable sailors. They migrated east across the Pacific and Lapita style pottery appeared in the Marquesas as early as 150 BCE.¹

Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Polynesians, possibly starting from the Marquesas, sailed east to South America, most probably to what is now Peru. From there, somewhere between 400 AD and 800 AD, the Polynesians brought back the sweet potato. While definitive archeological evidence of this contact has not yet come to light, linguistic and botanical evidence suggests that both the tuber itself, and kumra, the Polynesian name for it, are of South American origin.² The advent of monumental stone architectural and sculptural motifs appears to move west across the Pacific, implying their antecedents might derive from pre-Columbian examples. These factors combined with the Polynesians prodigious sailing abilities tend to give credence to such hypotheses, and further investigation of possible exchange between Pacific Island and South American indigenous cultures merits investigation.

Around 500 BCE, a second important migration entered the Pacific. A Bronze Age group known as the Dong-son people migrated from Indo-China and the Yunan area of China bringing with them art forms and beliefs which spread rapidly throughout Melanesia and then into Micronesia and Polynesia as well. Dong-son influence can be seen in the decorative elements such as the spiral and interlocking scroll design, in the use of canoe-shaped soul boats, or funerary canoes (Figure 1), and in curved upswept prows and sterns.³

The development of Oceanic culture was well under way more than 2000 years ago. Since then the people of the Pacific Islands created their individual cultures in response to both natural developments in their environments and to contact with each other. Consequentially, the migratory patterns that probably began over 50,000 years ago were responsible for the presence of the people first encountered by the Europeans of the 17^th and 18^th centuries.⁴

Since first contact, Western preconceptions about what art is, for whom it is made, or how it functions in society as a whole clouded our understanding of Oceanic art. To the peoples of the Pacific, carvings made with human characteristics are not merely representations of ancestors. Depending on their context, they may be incarnations of those ancestors, or they may constitute physical containers that are periodically inhabited by either ancestors or mythological beings. Non figurative designs that might appear to be simply ornamental abstractions are often embedded with metaphysical content and may denote specific animals or complex narratives related to tribal mythology. The task of understanding Oceanic art is further complicated by the fact that frequently the meanings of individual objects are deliberately obscured by their creators. To tribal cultures, access to the meanings of art works are typically limited to members of a particular cult, to elders, and to initiated men. In fact it is this concern for secrecy that contributes to the empowerment of the objects themselves and to the importance of those who posses their mysteries.⁵

Oceanic art challenges almost all Western assumptions concerning the distinctions between the material world and the metaphysical or metaphorical realities. When dealing with a tradition so fundamentally different from our own, it is important to avoid either dismissal or exoticization of its cultural elements. Neither should we imagine a greater potential empathy with the cultural motivations of such societies than may actually exist. Such is the case with New Age interpretations of tribal world views which allow their proponents to descend into Romantic fantasies about Pacific Island cultures and their presumed harmony and spiritual interconnectedness with the environment. As Thomas puts it in his book entitled Oceanic Art, "to the western mind, the Oceanic belief that life is governed by a spirit world at once tends to cause us to understate the significance of what is mundane and practical, and it also obscures the more important cultural differences that permeate artistic production." ⁶

The history of the relationship between Europeans and Oceanic peoples has from its onset been one of cultural exchange. Countless expeditions from England, Holland, France, Spain, America and elsewhere reached the South Pacific over two hundred years ago. Both cultures began to change almost immediately upon contact. The first Western sailors returned home with tattoos and neither the Europeans nor the Pacific Islanders have been the same since. Indigenous artists responded to contact with Europeans by depicting objects of foreign origin and by using introduced materials and styles. They adapted their art to the new techniques that became possible with the availability of metal tools.⁷ Objects that at one time would have been taboo for anyone but a chief or shaman to even touch, were replicated by the Oceanic artisans for the express purpose of decorating the drawing rooms and curio cabinets of European collectors of exotica. By the middle of the 19^th century, not only had the mechanics of artistic creation changed, so had its motivations.

In order to demonstrate the breadth of Oceanic artistic production as well as the multiplicity of its available meanings it is necessary to examine a few pieces. When the aborigines of Australia use sheets of bark to construct their wet weather shelters, they paint or scratch designs on the inside. Although few of the decorated sheets of bark from Southern Australia have survived, and none from Tasmania, a large number have been collected in recent years from northern and north-eastern Australia. In western Arnhem Land, the tribesmen depict both mythical men and women of creation times as well as spirit people who the aborigines still believe live in the hollow trees, rocks, and water holes of the rugged Arnhem Land plateau. Most of the bark paintings are secular, having been made within sight of women and children. There are others, however, which are painted during initiation rituals to instruct youths in the secret myths, but they are destroyed at the conclusion of the rituals.⁸ On a yellowing sheet of paper attached to the back of this painting (Figure 2) is the following description, deciphered as much as possible:

From this description, it is clear that a very complex narrative may appear to be merely an abstract design to an uninitiated European. Without the cultural key to the code, its meaning is unavailable. When initially confronted with enigmatic objects like this one, Western viewers erroneously concluded that the lack of the presence of human figures somehow made them "primitive." In fact this Aboriginal bark painting is a remarkably sophisticated depiction of a ceremony that implies even further levels of culturally specific meanings. It is our understanding of these objects in the absence of their original context that is primitive, not the works themselves.

The Sawos clans of the Middle Sepik River region of New Guinea tie large male ancestor figures (Figure 3) to the center house posts of their cult houses. Each sculpture represents a specific hero or ancestral creator. The Yamok people believe that these figures represent the original creators who "made the swampy ground firm." ¹⁰ Prior to hunting and war expeditions, these figures are draped with betel nuts and offered food. The spirit of such figures like this one, known as Mian’gandu to the people of the Walembi village, are believed to bring misfortune to the hunter or warrior who neglects the rituals associated with them.¹¹

All of the initiated are aware of the identity of the figure and it functions as a living witness as well as a testament to the myths and oral histories associated with it. This Mian’gandu has an intrinsically magical content that can not be appropriated by merely copying its formalistic qualities and transporting them out of the metaphysical environment that empowers the figure. Not only is the meaning lost in such appropriations but also the spiritual power of the image.

Religious ceremonies in memory of the departed, known as Malanggans, are still held by the people of New Ireland in Melanesia. They are also regarded as a means of enhancing the prestige of their organizers. The preparations alone for these occasions often take several years, and the festivals themselves last for months. The carvings used for the Malanggan ceremony (Figure 4) stand or hang in special houses or courts, secluded by a high stockade of bamboo or wickerwork. They constitute a magnificent gallery of mythological figures, personifications of the departed ancestors, totem animals and unique renderings of all historical and mythical events associated with the community. Most of the Malanggan carvings are owned by individual families, who are entitled to sell the right to produce them. The sculptor, however, is granted a good deal of personal freedom in the manner of execution, and this fact together with the large choice of motifs, makes for wide variations. The majority of the Malanggan sculpture, whether fully three dimensional or frieze like reliefs, consists of one piece carved in openwork with an unbridled creative enthusiasm.¹²

It would probably have come as quite a shock to the ever financially ambitious painters and dealers of the early twentieth century that these "primitives" had essentially copyrighted individual icons. Although they were not aware of this, the Western artists who appropriated these images in a wholesale fashion would certainly have ignored any obligations they had to the Oceanic artists who created them. The avante garde would not have tolerated similar appropriation of their own artistic creations. It is interesting to note that these Melanesian carvings are generally ritually destroyed after each festival thus guaranteeing that successive Malanggans will provide yet more opportunities for their owners to collect royalties. While this is not the main reason for their destruction, it does present opportunities for economic benefits in ways that the civilized artists of the West will not mange to exploit until Christo.

This openwork ancestor figure (Figure 5) probably originally decorated the korumbo, or spirit house, of the Abelam People of the Maprik District of New Guinea. At times of ceremony, whether for initiation or harvest, the interior of the korumbo is decorated with a staggering quantity of painted panels and wood carvings, some close to five meters long, and so heavy that ten men are required to carry them.¹³ Among the Abelam, all of the main forms of artistic expression are group endeavors, under the supervision and guidance of a master-artist who instructs them in the iconographic canon and traditional motifs. Even the individual carvers find themselves surrounded by groups of men and boys offering comments and criticisms.

These "primitives" producing their art collaboratively in what amounts to an academic environment, complete with a maestro directing the process, does not fit easily into the romanticized view of the savage headhunters of New Guinea. If the European Primitivists had had to tolerate the critics kibitzing on the works in progress in their studios they might have collected a head or two themselves.

The u’u war clubs (Figure 6) of the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia were the exclusive property of the warrior caste, a group of men who also functioned as paid mercenaries for allied chiefdoms. The clubs are huge in comparison to those in the rest of the Pacific. They are said to have been individually tailored to reach from the ground to the owner’s armpit. The remarkable carved decoration of each u’u is unique and their makers employed endless variations on the traditional themes of the human face, sacred lizards and tattoos. The clubs were left to soak in a taro field where they acquired their deep black coloration, which was heightened by rubbing them with coconut oil.¹⁴ The carvers were highly respected in the Marquesas because they shared in the mana or metaphysical power gained by the users of their handiwork. A master carver would have made several clubs for powerful warriors and thus acquired a portion of the mana that each of these objects had gained in combat. For this reason, the carver was a very powerful individual and imparted some of that mana to any new clubs he might produce. This made him even more powerful and his clubs all the more desirable.

The notion that an artist might gain prestige and thus power from their mere association with the accomplishments of those who acquired his or her work was an idea certainly familiar to those Modern artists who were actively collected by the likes of Mrs. Guggenheim, Mrs. de Menil and Nelson Rockefeller. It was not likely appreciated by these same Primitivists that this phenomena was equally applicable to the artist of the Marquesas.

European Context for Oceanic Art

Even a cursory examination of the history of European exploration makes it clear that the islands of the Pacific Ocean were initially investigated, especially in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, with greater enthusiasm than the more readily available geography of Africa. In general, Oceanic objects preceded those from Africa into the treasuries and exhibits of Europe. Captain Cook brought back Oceanic material to Vienna, and museums and universities in trading cities like Hamburg and London had substantial Oceanic holdings by the beginning of the nineteenth century.¹⁵

The cultural artifacts of the Pacific island peoples were initially viewed in the context of mere exotic curiosities. Oceanic art simultaneously allowed the European viewer to imagine the romance of what he or she fantasized the process of exploration and discovery to be, while reaffirming their own sense of cultural and personal superiority to the savages who had created the objects on view. It was not long, however, before self-congratulatory condescension evolved into forthright economic exploitation.

As early as 1848, in a letter advocating the creation of ethnographical museums, P. F. von Seibold urges that it is particularly important for those nations that posses colonies to establish such institutions in order to "awaken interest in the public and of merchants in them [colonies] – all necessary conditions for a lucrative trade." He further advocates that the most hideous and savage examples be displayed in order to testify to "the strangeness and inhumanity of their customs." ¹⁶ It is evident that the first reaction to Oceanic objects by the vast majority of the people of Europe was to immediately dehumanize the creators of what they literally believed to be monstrosities. Once dehumanized they could be exploited with impunity. In fact, the flowering of the founding of ethnological museums in the immediate decades following this period was due at least as much to political and economic competition among the colonial powers as to the emergence of Darwinian theory. Mistaken notions equating naturalistic representational conventions with inevitable evolutionary development only further enabled the colonialists to rationalize their presumed genetic and cultural superiority. The very idea of the ethnographic museum can be traced to the third quarter of the nineteenth century when Oceanic collections were removed from their association with the antiquities departments of museums in Berlin, Paris, and Rome.¹⁷

These institutions were called museums, but it should not be presumed, as a modern use of the word might imply, that the objects contained therein were intensively studied and cataloged. The cultural artifacts of Oceania were not displayed with aesthetic intent nor was their exhibition curated to provide information and context to the material. Given the dehumanized standing of the cultures, and the simplistic applications of the evolutionary theory of the period, most museums did not see this material as being worthy of such careful treatment. The principle reason for displaying it in the first place was, after all, to degrade the very cultures the objects represented. Cases were usually crowded with objects that were not organized by region or culture or category. Artifacts frequently flowed out of cases onto floors or were occasionally left in their shipping boxes laying up against the walls (Figure 7).

By 1918 Rene` Verneau in giving an account of how ethnographic museums are used by the public, mentions how artists who treat exotic subjects find its documents indispensable. As a result of this interest, gradually museums begin to change their treatment of non-European cultural production and begin to display it on an "art-historical-aesthetic basis." ¹⁸ In 1928, at the Trocadéro (Figure 8), public halls were separated from study rooms with distinctions based on the relative uniqueness of the objects. The more typical or representative an object was the more likely it would appear in the study rooms. The more unique, the more likely that it would be aesthetically displayed in the public halls.¹⁹ The ethnologists were late to realize the aesthetic impact of Oceanic art and did so only after artists and private collectors had shown their appreciation for it. It would therefore be inaccurate to say that the museums led or somehow guided the taste of these artists and private collectors. The museums did, however, provide access (such as it was) to this material for an extended period of time, and over time this constant exposure allowed for the evolution of a taste that could come to appreciate this material, even if only in a limited, colonialistic or romanticized way.²⁰

Eventually some ethnologists began to look favorably upon "primitive" art precisely because it was at the opposite pole from the post-Renaissance European tradition. A. R. Hein is credited with being the first of these to point out the aesthetic worth of "primitive" art and he lamented the lack of attention paid it by the aestheticians. Hjalmar Stolpe was among the few ethnologists to suspect an intrinsic meaning to Oceanic art when he condescendingly observed that "savages have a desire to repeat as often as possible representations having a symbolic meaning."²¹ Emil Stephan, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, argued that "primitive" art "both for the form and for the meaning of that form, which is its content, must be understood and evaluated within the framework of its own culture." ²² Ernst Grosse was ahead of his time when he said, "Strange and inartistic as the primitive forms of art sometimes appear to be, as soon as we examine them more closely, we find that they are formed according to the same laws as govern the highest creature of art." ²³ Alois Riegl opposed the evolutionary model when he proposed that the abstract styles be considered on the same level as the more naturalistic forms. As Goldwater observed, this position would make him the prophet of abstract expressionism.²⁴

Over the next three decades, partly because influential European artists had begun to refer to Oceanic artistic production by appropriating some of the formalistic aspects of its imagery, and partly because of events arising out of the consequences of two world wars, attitudes toward non-European art began to change. European artists like van Gough and Gauguin were referring to Oceania. Artists like Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp had started to collect it. Meanwhile, Surrealists like Tristan Tzara and Andre Breton had been making considerable profits from dealing in Oceanic artifacts.²⁵ These artists frequently used Oceanic art as a precedent for, and thus a justification of, their own artistic methods and productions. In fact these individuals, as well as others, indelibly colored the discussion of what many still refer to as "primitive" art. It has only been since the breakdown of the former colonialist infrastructure and the ostensible rise of national self determination, that we endeavored to freshly consider the value of tribal cultures. It is a tragic irony that while colonialism oppressed, exploited and dehumanized the peoples of Oceania, in its wake the New World Order (with its institutions like the IMF, WTO, and the UN) will likely eliminate the sustainability of the remaining vestige of Oceania’s indigenous culture. Conversely, it is Oceania’s status as a culture in eminent danger of being lost that has renewed some of the focus on it. Indeed the idea that this culture is already in the past, liberates the contemporary Western viewer from the anxiety caused by contemplating the existence of a culture so dramatically different from one’s own.

Primitivism and the politics of appropriation

Given the cultural context in which the European Primitivists encountered Oceanic art (a context short on reliable information regarding this material and full of cultural presumptions about it), most of the meaning and value these Europeans associated with it was not in fact derived from the art itself, but rather was attributed to it by virtue of their contemporary cultural and political concerns as well as their individual psychological and philosophical needs. Many Western intellectuals were disenchanted with existing notions of imperialism and the failure of colonialism to satisfy the material and political needs of Europe. For these people tribal art offered an alternative to what they perceived to be the decline of Western civilization that had been brought on by the rise of capitalist industrialism. It reminded them of what they imagined to be a simpler more natural time before the chaos of their increasingly impersonal modern world. Some were not particularly dissatisfied with the geopolitical status quo, but instead were merely continuing the longstanding European tradition of Romantic fascination with all things exotic. Others had recently become aware of the writings of the good doctor from Vienna, and as such were intrigued by the apparent direct connection between Freudian symbolism and Oceanic imagery. Some artists of the period certainly found the novel forms in Oceanic art useful in their favorite sport, namely shocking the bourgeoisie. Regardless of their particular personal motivations, the Primitivists’ principle interest in Oceanic art was not in what value it had in its original context. But, much like the original ethnologist, they were concerned with how they might use it to further their own individual and collective agendas. To understand how the Western propensity to attribute rather than derive meanings from Oceanic imagery has to a great extent determined our contemporary views regarding tribal artistic production, it is essential to examine the nature of the relationship between Primitivism and Oceanic art.

Since any analysis of the European use of Oceanic imagery seems to inevitably begin with Paul Gauguin, I will accede to this tradition. Gauguin himself approved Achilles Delaroche’s description of him as a painter of primitive natures,²⁶ and as such would have relished the position he has achieved as the godfather of Primitivism. It is interesting to note that when referring to what was in his day known as "primitive" art, Gauguin preferred the term "barbarian." Gauguin’s choice of this word had less to do with observations made during his time in Tahiti than it did with the fact that "barbarian" accentuated the contrast with the concept of "civilized," a construct that he virtually pathologically rejected. This psychological need for a representative of the opposite of civilization, a civilization that in many ways rejected him as much as he had rejected it, drives him to create noble savages rather than discover them.

In his woodcut Christ on the Cross ca. 1896 (Figure 9), Gauguin appropriated the basic form and carving style of the u’u war club (Figure 10) of the Marquesas. His reference to the u’u is not so surprising since much of his artwork reflected concerns with pattern and flattened surfaces. The rich tradition of intricate relief work practiced by the brilliant carvers of the Marquesas provided him a fertile ground for artistic stimulation. That he appropriated the design motifs from a culture not his own is not as disturbing as the fact that he did so without the consent of the Marquesans, who, incidentally, would have been disinclined to grant him such license. They associated mana with these objects and they would have only tolerated the use of such motifs by an initiate.

Gauguin frequently associated Roman catholic iconography with aboriginal motifs, and this piece is no exception. The crucifix represented on a war club was probably not intended to evoke comparison of the bloody history of the religious wars of Europe with the activities of the Marquessan warriors who used such a club. It is more likely that the presence of the crucifix was representative of his desire to ennoble the art of the "barbarian" in the minds of the European viewer. If this was in fact the case, then ignoring the original context of the u’u’s formalistic conventions as ornaments for a mercenary’s instrument of death constituted a cynical misrepresentation of evidence for the Christ-like nobility of these people. It is probably equally likely that Gauguin made the association simply because of the superficial resemblance between the u’u and the cross. Regardless of why these disparate images merge in his Christ on the Cross, it seems that to some extent Gauguin had made his mind up about the Tahitians before he left France, and he was not going to let the reality of island life deter him from foisting his fictitious Polynesia off on an unsophisticated European public. In this way he managed to colonize Tahiti and Europe simultaneously. To some extent it was wood cuts like this one, but to a greater extent it was because of his life and his writings that Gauguin so excited the Surrealist.²⁷ While he was largely responsible for directing their attention to Oceanic art, he was also the principle filter through which the Surrealists comprehended it.

The Surrealists took the appropriation of Oceanic art literally. They acquired the objects themselves. In the spring of 1926, in the first exhibition held in the Galleri Surrealiste, paintings and photographs by Man Ray were displayed alongside more than sixty pieces of sculpture from Indonesia and the Pacific Islands. Pieces like this mask from New Ireland (Figure 11), owned by Breton, featured prominently in this exhibit including a bird-man figure from Easter Island which appeared on the cover of the catalog.²⁸ (Figure 12).

The conflicted interests that were at work here merit examination. The contemporary European context for these images has already been established as to the accentuation and sensationalization of the violent implications of Oceanic material. This, combined with the general taste for things exotic during the period, made the choice to include so much of this material a shrewd decision by the producers of what otherwise might have been an easily overlooked debut. The commercial effectiveness of this strategy was not lost on the organizers of the exhibit and is further evidenced by their choice of the Easter Island image for the cover. Man Ray ostensibly displayed his work in this context to offer comparison with his own work. This was an appropriation of not only the objects themselves but indeed of their auspices. The auspices of these objects was taken deathly seriously by their makers and original owners. The Pacific Islanders would have viewed such appropriations as a form of psychic violence.

If one ignores the question of the provenance or expatriation of these objects for a moment, it might not seem so pernicious that people like Andre’ Breton collected Oceanic art. However, it is troubling that Breton also collected art produced in insane asylums, and that in his mind these two things were related.²⁹ Breton’s philosophical motivations for the inclusion of these objects need not be called into question to realize that as a collector, dealer and major proponent of Oceanic art, he had a great deal to gain financially by their exposure in such an exhibit.

While it is certain the Surrealists were fascinated by the formalistic aspects of these pieces as well as what they believed to be the Freudian implications of Oceanic representational conventions, it is equally certain that the Surrealists’ association with Oceanic art was good for business. In essence the Surrealists appropriated every aspect of Oceanic art they could including imagery, objects, auspices, exposure and resulting profits. They did so with remarkably little concern for the original context of the objects or any genuine regard for who their creators really were.

This type of exploitation of the cultural artifacts of Oceania has continued virtually unabated to the present and any discussion of the relationship between Primitivism and Oceanic art should also include an examination of how it affected the way art museums treat Oceanic cultural material. Ostensibly, one of the effects the Primitivist artists intended was to replicate the sense of alienation and confusion felt when he or she encountered Oceanic objects without any sense of place or history. In this way they recreated a similar phenomenon to the Oceanic artists by creating art in which that which is hidden is less important than the fact that something is concealed. Indeed they seem to have accomplished this rather well since the typical civilian walking through the galleries of a contemporary museum frequently reacts in much the same way to most Modern art as he or she does when confronting with an Agiba skull rack (Figure 13). Remarkably little has changed in the last one hundred years regarding the popular position of Oceanic art in the West. It seems that what has changed is the public at large has now grown as alienated from the art of its own institutional culture, as the Western viewer was once only in the presence of something completely alien. That so little progress has been made in the popular imagination of Oceanic art is at least in part due to the impact of Primitivism. Art museums tend to exhibit Modern art as well as non-European cultural material in an identical fashion as if this were self-evidently appropriate.

Many museums try to replicate the tabla rasa sensation in the way they design their exhibits. Surrealist paintings are organized so all the works of a particular artist hang together in one gallery as if to provide a completely self-referential context from the point of view of the artist. The scantiest of label copy reaffirms the presumed utter subjectivity of the aesthetic experience and in fact discourages any historical or intellectual investigation of the works themselves. It is even frequently argued that the absence of label copy is to avoid intellectually intimidating the viewer, as if the viewer was not intellectually intimidated enough by being forced to stand in front of one enigma after another without any frame of reference by which to comprehend them.

While this style of presentation may be in keeping with the original context of Modern art, when applied to Oceanic, or virtually any art created outside the Western aesthetic conventions, it does a great disservice to not only the cultural artifacts themselves but also to the visitors to the museum who are offered a frustrating and even insulting experience rather than an edifying and educational one. James Clifford argues this method of exhibition presumes that "an ignorance of cultural context seems almost a precondition for artistic appreciation." ³⁰ As Thomas McEvilley observes in his discussion of the 1984 exhibition at MoMA entitled "Primitivism," in Twentieth century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, the principle function of such exhibits "is to revalidate Modernist esthetic [sic] canons by suggesting that their freedom, innocence, universality, and objective value are proven by their affinity to the primitive." ³¹ Although an artist may never even have seen a particular work of tribal art, the MoMA remains undeterred, because a fortuitous resemblance is sufficient evidence of affinity. This is a position that McEvilley correctly describes as "wishful thinking." ³² Indeed, according to Clifford, "the tribalism selected in the exhibition to resemble Modernism is itself a construction designed to accomplish the task of resemblance." ³³ Even William Rubin, the curator of the MoMA exhibit, in a letter to the editor of Art Forum concedes to McEvilley that "…our story is not about "the Other" but about ourselves." ³⁴ This curatorial approach represents a continuation of colonialist assumptions that the Oceanic art derives its predominant value from merely its association with the Western art on display in the same building.

According to this aesthetic, the original cultural context and even the original artists are negated and are thus irrelevant to the observer’s experience, which is to be focused exclusively on some presumed culturally and psychologically transcendent awareness of the essence of the form itself. This reflects, at least at the subconscious level, a desire on the part of these institutions, and of the artistic establishment in general, to continue to dominate not only the former colonial cultures but also the viewing public This public, like the creators of the Oceanic objects themselves, are as Gerald McMaster observes at the mercy of these forces.³⁵

Conclusion

In the title of this paper I referred to the self-referential attributions of meanings. By the use of the term "self-referential" I meant to direct the reader’s attention to the fact that an analysis of the relationship between Primitivism and Oceanic art yields information about how our culture relates to foreign cultures and, as McEvilley states, reveals "an ethnocentric subjectivity inflated to co-opt such cultures and their objects into itself." ³⁶ What is perhaps the most striking feature of this relationship is the lack of any significant illumination of the intrinsic nature of Oceanic art. It is my contention that this relationship has been determined by the dynamics of the relative power between the colonizer and the colonized and that this dynamic has done a great disservice not only to the Pacific peoples who produced these artifacts but also to those who would try to understand Oceanic art itself.

Endnotes

1.Anthony J. P. Meyer, Oceanic Art. (Germany: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1995), p. 13-14.

2. Ibid., 16-17.

3. Ibid., 17.

4. Ibid., 17-18.

5. Nicholas Thomas, Oceanic Art (London, UK: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1995), p. 9.

6. Ibid., 11.

7. Ibid., 12.

8. Douglas Newton, Art of Oceania, Africa, and the Americas from the Museum of Primitive Art (Great Britain: The Curwen Press Ltd., 1969), p. 209.

9. This passage was found on a yellowing sheet of paper attached to the back of Totem and Bandicoot Dance, Painted by Dain in Yawui. Kilingimbi Methodist Mission, Arnhem Land, in the Oceanic Collection of the San Antonio Museum of Art, Accession Number 77.1050.46.

10. Marian M. Pfeiffer, Monumental Ancestor Figures of the Sawos: Identification of the Yamok Style Group, Middle Sepik River, Papua New Guinea (Dallas, TX: Mater’s Thesis, Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, 1983), p. 256.

11. Allen Wardwell, Oceanic Island Ancestors Art from the Masco Collection (Detroit, MI: University of Washington Press in Association with the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1994), p. 58.

12. Meyer, 349.

13. Ibid., 258.

14. Wardwell, 234.

15. Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 4.

16. Ibid., 4.

17. Ibid., 7.

18. Ibid., 9.

19. Ibid., 9.

20. Ibid., 11.

21. Ibid., 23.

22. Ibid., 23.

23. Ibid., 24.

24. Ibid., 27.

25. Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (Great Britain: Westerham Press, 1978), p. 227.

26. Goldwater, 68.

27. Ades, 185.

28. Ibid., 227.

29. Ibid.

30. James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," Art in America vol. 73, no. 4 (April 1985), p. 171.

31.Thomas McEvilley, Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (Kingston, NY: McPherson and Company, Publishers, 1992), p. 39.

32. McEvilley, 39.

33. Clifford, p.166.

34. William Rubin, "Letters on "Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief" and Primitivism in 20^th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984," Art Forum vol. 23, no. 6 (February 1985), p. 45.

35. McMaster, p.251.

36. McEvilley, 52.