NEW GUINEA SHIELDS - Oceanic Art Society

NEW GUINEA
SHIELDS
Animated by Spirits
10 May - 23 June 2012
Cavin-Morris Gallery
210 Eleventh Ave, Suite 201
New York
in collaboration with
Chris Boylan
Sydney, Australia
NEW GUINEA
SHIELDS
Animated by Spirits
Cavin-Morris Gallery
New York 2012
60 page full color
catalogue available
• mysteries@aol.com
• cboylan@tpg.com.au

9. WAR SHIELD, Asmat (opposite)
Jerep River, Western Asmat region, West Papua. Early 20th Century
Wood, pigment
Collected at Weo village. 1986 by Chris Boylan.
H. 182 cm / 73”
This fine, old shield is crowded with diverse
motifs, in lively juxtaposition. The central
motifs depict the flying fox (tar), others,
shell nose ornaments (bi pane) and heron
(pomar), all important headhunting symbols.
The motif at top of the shield is a stylised
rayfish head. When it was collected in 1986,
the shield was being used as a door to a
hut in Weo village. I remember the owner
saying, “You don’t want that shield, it is
broken”, as the back of the shield faced
outwards. But when he turned it, I did get
the shield, and it is one of the finest Asmat
shields I collected in the field.
10. WAR SHIELD, Asmat
Wasar River, Western Asmat region, West Papua.
Early 20th Century
Wood, pigment
Collected at Pupis village, 1986 by Chris Boylan
H. 189 cm / 75”
18. WAR SHIELD, Wiru people (opposite)
Pangia, Southern Highlands, PNG Early 20th century
Wood, pigment
Collected by Stanley Moriarty, M1658, 1967. Ex- John Rix collection, Sydney.
Ex-John Friede collection, New York.
H. 130 cm / 52”
The Wiru are a small group in the remote
southern corner of the Southern Highlands.
The surface of this shield is uncarved, with
a colourful abstract figure in white, orange,
yellow and black.
Moriarty suggested the design on this quite
large shield represented a timbuwarra, a
woven spirit figure made only among the
Wiru. These woven figures represent earth
spirits more powerful than ancestral spirits,
thus implying that protective motifs on shields
can invoke more powerful spirits than mere
ancestors to help the warriors in warfare.
18a. TIMBUWARRA FIGURE
Wiru people
Pangia, Southern Highlands, PNG
Mid-20th Century
Rattan, pigment, candle nuts.
Collected by Fr,. Albert Alexandrunas,
early 1960s, Ex-John Friede, New York
H. 116 cm / 46”

33. WAR SHIELD, Simbu (opposite)
Gumine region, PNG. Early 20th Century.
Wood, fibre, cassowary feathers, pigment.
H. 170 cm / 68”
This shield is an early shield with elegant
form, subtly curved, and painted in vibrant
colors that “shimmer” on the field of combat.
The design motif may be anthropomorphic,
with the centre being the “navel” or “heart’,
and the radiating white lines forming an
abstract figure; alternatively, it depicts “the
sun”, which in some Highland tribes relates
directly to creation spirits. Cassowary
feather spikes adorned the top of Wahgi
shields in warfare, worn like a headdress,
and representing both the fighting prowess
of the cassowary bird, and the power of Mi,
a cassowary ancestor.
The shields of Simbu, a very mountainous
region to the east of the main Wahgi Valley,
are often larger than their neighbours; this
is due to fighting technique, where three
or even four men were protected by
a single shield.
34. WAR SHIELD, Simbu
Chuave region, PNG. Early 20th Century.
Wood, fibre, pigment
H. 152 cm / 64”
Mock battle, Wahgi Valley Western Highlands PNG, 1936. Photo Mick Leahy.
Animated
by Spirits
Melanesian shields are gatekeepers of culture. They are alive,
even on a wall, even though we the viewers cannot hear
the kinetic cacophony of terror, bravado and heightened
awareness that attends its use in the field. There are things
a shield on the wall can and cannot tell you. Shields make
journeys that begin with conception and continue through
protection, destruction and prestige before they settle on a
wall. They are animated always by the voices of spirits.
This may not make sense unless you witness a war through
documentary or in actuality. It is synaesthesia at its most
vivid. A battle is not only aggression, though there is no
shortage of bluff either. A battle is sound in the screaming
threats and insults of adrenalized voices, in the creaks and
grunts of birds and insects disturbed by the ruckus, in the
thunk-thunk thunk of arrows that have found targets in the
skin of the shield or the dull thud as they contact human
flesh. It is the eagle whistle of the song of the arrow spitting
its way through the humid air. A battle is color in the riot
of body paint and adornment from feathers to shells as they
catch sun... along with the ethereal headdresses and the
captivating geometrics of the marks and patterns on the
shields themselves.
War also includes the theatre of movement as men move
through the head high green bush, shields on their backs like
the carapaces of colorful beetles…insect like in pattern and
movement. And yes, you know through it all, that as brutal as
it might seem, this is the male epitome of the Mythic. War is
not female and at its most basic it puts man in daring distance
of that most challenging and chthonic spirit of all: Death.
We may see the shields as magnificent manifestations of
form and symbolic content but this symbolism is rooted in
earth, fire, blood and the forest. A warrior who has dropped in
battle is carried off the verdant battlefield on a shield and is
mourned as he rests upon it. Its gentle curve holds his body
as intimately as a baby-carrier but also presents him on a
pedestal of painted ceremony.
The concept of war transcends the individual mind; on
the field of war he is part of a noisy organism; the raised
emotions are communal. If he lives he remains part of that
organism which encompasses community and ancestors
and his placement as an individual; if he dies he passes to
the collective realm as an ancestor himself, mourned as an
individual before he passes into the spirit realm.
Knowing this enriches the object on the wall and infuses
it with its own animistic soul. It is still alive, not merely a
symbol. It activates the universe no matter where it is. It
carries sound and the ghosts of movement and the essential
impact of alpha males in their own environs. Knowledge will
allow you to feel its pulse.
I love the shields as I love books. I love what they contain
beneath the spectacular grace of their covers. A Melanesian
shield on a wall in a home, museum or gallery is a beautiful
formal object. There, in an expressionistic roughness of relief and
textural pigment, carving and natural patination, is a dance of
free hand symmetry and asymmetry. The colors are matched
to culture and Place, mineral and surprisingly subtle in their
layout. In the field they announce presence; on the wall they
become seemingly simple compositions that immediately
occupy a Contemporary art realm. The complexity is all there
in concept and process. Nothing else can say what they say and
how they say it and that is what a work of art does. Because they
are outside the canon of Contemporary Art they have a lithe
freedom not to explain themselves directly though they skirt
solipsism because of their full-throated cultural and community
voices. They sing to ancestral spirits.
We know what they are. They are shields. They come from a
non-Western place where indigenous drawing and cultural
function have not been wrested from them by arbitrary
critical theory. They have looked this modern for hundreds
and hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years they have
advertised and protected the testosterone charged bodies
of men defending, avenging, and taking land. They have
been charged with voices and blessings of the invisibles, the
ancestors. Their pigments have spiritual valences and are
infused with sky and earth magic. They have been used as
temporary mobile shelters, hiding phalanxes of bowmen or
single spearmen. They are utilitarian on earth and they are
utilitarian in a metaphysical realm.
I do not think it is so farfetched to understand as much as
possible the contexts and intentions of the makers of these
pieces and to allow these factors to influence our aesthetic
perceptions. We become a combination of the families
behind the warrior watching him carry this symbolic
representation of his Place in the world as well as the
perceptions of those standing opposite him on the battlefield
also reading the shields as the shouted war poem of an
individual warrior bard.
We bring our own Western ideas of aesthetics to the table and
this is bound to be even more variable then the indigenous
interpretations. The individual demands we make as Western
collectors, writers and curators vary about the importance
of age for example, and the formal formulas we demand.
We obsess on the way color is used; we ascribe importance
to whether it is kaolin or housepaint or ground minerals;
whether it has been used in battle or it is new. We even obsess
on which Westerner previously owned the piece.
The Melanesian shield is a visual theatre of mediation and
arbitration between the numinous world and the physical
one. My aesthetic sense and my intellectualized demands for
authenticity constantly dance around each other in much
the same way they do around any other kind of art. I also
want a sense of Place, a sense of mystery, a sense of man’s
impermanence, and hence his mark upon the world as a
response to its demands. The best art is made as an amulet
against personal obscurity and the best shields tap directly
into that rich slipstream of raw or refined beauty that says,
“Look at me. And remember me always.”
Mock battle, Lai Valley Southern Highlands PNG, 2004. Photo Chris Boylan.
A battlefield may be the last time you are seen as a man, a
warrior a family head. You may return unscathed or you may
join and become an ancestor. This renders the battlefield an
essential doorway into the spirit realm and it means you must
enter it in the most dramatic and full form of your manhood
and maturity. Prowess in battle is one way to do this. In
choreography of death you emulate the fiercest beings with
blade edge and arrow tip and a combination of stealth and
boldness. You not only have a human role, you step into an
archetype. You are a gatekeeper of culture. You are individual
and community at the same time. “The One and The Many” as
it is called in Jamaica. This is a tiered role of performance and
cultural continuity.
The circumstances of alpha survival demand appearances
be kept up and the manifestations of these appearances
become aesthetically profound. On the battleground these
profundities must be projected outwards as clearly and as
succinctly as possible in a visual language immediately
understood by all indigenous participants.
Anthropologists and art historians may differ on the specifics of
individual meanings to patterns and icons but the efficacy and
impact must be internalized by the living and non-living alike.
The purpose of this art is to mediate between worlds; to reaffirm
and further the relationship between human and tangible
and intangible planes of existence and forces of Nature. The
tangible is Place itself as well as its local demands like eating,
drinking and things necessary for survival. The intangible is the
spirit realm and all the ancestors who dwell there.
The Melanesian shield then stands as a nexus point in visual
culture that absorbs and sorts out all these tensions. It doesn’t
just occupy a wall. It now lives there as it continues its work.
Like the Phantom who appears on shields beginning in the
eighties: It never dies.
Randall Morris
New York, March, 2012

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SHIELDS OF
NEW GUINEA
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Animated by Spirits
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