Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

charged with mana, a spiritual power, as it grows
directly from the head, which was considered the seat
of the human spirit. As with the Marquesan fan, this
necklace was a collaborative work and likely to have been
commissioned by a wealthy member of the community. An
artist skilled in working marine ivory would have produced
the refined central hook-shaped pendant. These pendants
have long been considered stylised fishhooks. They are also
said to represent ‘the tongue of god’ in a protruding and
aggressive manner. The pendant is fashioned from a whale
tooth, indicating a connection to Kanaloa, the god of the
sea, who provides a bounty of fish and seafood and whose
waters surround all the Hawaiian Islands. These kinds of
connections between art and life in the Pacific were and
are inseparable.
Many of the works in the Pacific Arts Gallery
were created to give younger generations a better
understanding of what it meant to be a member of
a community. Initiation on the Sepik River was often
part of the process of becoming an adult member of
the community. The initiate would undergo a period of
hardship and stressful rituals that culminated in a shortlived
confrontation with a powerful spirit in the Haus
tambaran (a place where spirits dwell). Pacific artists
conceived works with the greatest possible visual force for
the Haus tambaran in order to create a menacing reverence
which viewers would clearly remember and cautiously
regard all their lives, even if their glimpse was only fleeting.
Artists depicted otherworldly beings, ancestors or spirits
in forms that held a physical presence that conveyed the
ancestors’ will and underlined their mastery over the
environment in which the community lived. For some
cultures, this environment was shaped by the deeds of
distant primordial ancestors and was demonstrated by
connections to natural features – lakes, mountains and
coastlines. Animals such as crocodiles, hornbill birds,
sago beetles, sea eagles, bonito fish and sharks were also
incorporated into ancestral mythologies. These connections
were stressed to the young so they would never forget
their association with the local environment.
Visitors to the Pacific Arts Gallery may be unsettled by
the convulsive nature and compositions of some sculptures
that do not immediately conform to the Western eye.
In particular, the works from Melanesia hold great physical
complexity, an example of which is the spirit figure
Maunwial whose vestigial limbs, bulbous head and intense
colours are a synthesis of the concrete and the abstract.
Maunwial and several other works have been displayed
floating free of the wall, in much the same manner as they
once were displayed in spirit houses suspended from the
rafters by cords of fibre.
Recognition of Pacific arts has been a slow process due
to the blossoming of anthropology in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century when the arts of Indigenous
peoples were exhibited solely in museums and primarily as
documents to one aspect of human history. Appreciation,
however, did grow through the esteem shown by
individuals in the Expressionist, Dadaist and Surrealist art
collectives, including Pablo Picasso, Max Pechstein, André
Breton and Paul Éluard, whose passion was guided by an
aesthetic approach of pure contemplation and intuitive
interpretation rather than any deeper understanding of
the cultures of the Pacific. This appreciation blossomed
during the mid-twentieth century, as seen in the history of
the exquisite To-reri uno double figure from Lake Sentani
that has been internationally acknowledged as one of
the finest known works from the Pacific. For more than
a decade, when works from the Pacific were making the
slow transition from artefact to art, it stood in the gallery of
Parisian art dealer Pierre Loeb, overlooked and unsold. The
beauty inherent in the sculpture did not change, but the
comprehension and susceptibility of the viewer did.
In the intervening years from the building of our
Pacific Arts collection in the late 1960s to today, this same
transitory process means visitors to the gallery will see the
masks and sculptures as more than curiosities or specimens
of ‘the other’. They are objects of potent visual force
that stand equally next to art from any period, culture or
individual artist across the world. a
Crispin Howarth
Assistant Curator, Pacific Arts
Hawaiian people
United States of America,
Hawaiian Islands
Necklace [lei niho palaoa]
1820–1860 marine ivory,
human hair, plant fibre
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberrra Purchased 1970
artonview spring 2007 19