Oceanic Art Surfaces at Met

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The New York Sun

The slit gongs are back. With their inwardly curving birdlike heads, the gongs in question are among the most potent and prepossessing deities in the pantheon of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fully a match for Canova’s Perseus in the Petrie Court or for any of the sundry Apollos that populate the old master paintings on the second floor.

But for the last three years, they’ve been in storage, as the Met has been renovating and reinstalling its galleries for Oceanic art, so called because its diverse artifacts were all created on the islands of the Pacific Ocean. These refurbished spaces are set to open to the public tomorrow, in the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

The renovated galleries (with works from Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, and New Guinea) mainly preserve the architectural features of the original, designed back in 1982 by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, the in-house architects of the Met’s expansion for more than three decades. This preservation is not necessarily a good thing, since there was always a somewhat weary, depleted adequacy to the old galleries that survives the renovations.

But one undeniable improvement is the removal of cluttered display cases and partitions in such a way as to improve the sight lines and make space for more objects. Those slit gongs, more than anything else, are what benefit from this revision. As you come upon the galleries through the new main entrance, heading south from the Precolumbian galleries, the tallest gong, flanked by two truncated shorter ones, rises up in beneficent salutation, whereas before all three were shunted to the side.

These slit gongs are so named because of the narrow rents that run down their hollowed shafts, carved from a single tree trunk. The idea is to whack the body of the object until a dull percussive thud is produced. What is so prepossessing about them is the weird bug-eyed heads that look, as stated, like birds’, but that also recall, oddly, the features of a human embryo.

Are they representative of the 425 other sculptures, paintings, masks, and artifacts on view in the Met’s Oceanic galleries, many of which are now being shown for the first time? That is hard to say, given the stylistic diversity and the geographical incoherence of the South Pacific, with its 25,000 islands and 1,200 diverse cultures, scattered across a part of the planet capable of containing the combined total of all the masses that now exist on the surface of the earth. Because most of these islands are so difficult of access, we know them primarily through artifacts such as those at the Met, and these objects turn out to be quite effective in conveying a powerful sense of the alienation, the foreignness, the indestructible exoticism of the cultures that produced them.

They include some of the works that viewers will remember from the galleries’ previous incarnation, among them a gauntlet of nine ancestor poles, ingeniously carved wooden totems created by the Asmat culture of New Guinea, as well as a 48-foot canoe, carved from a single tree trunk and capable of holding 20 men, also by the Asmat.

Very different, however, from what visitors to the old galleries may remember is the patchwork ceiling — 80 feet long and 30 feet wide and formed from 270 individual paintings that once adorned a ceremonial house belonging to the Kwoma people of New Guinea — that rises as a canopy over the Melanesia gallery. Until the renovations, there was space to display only a small fraction of this ceiling, which now appears in its entirety.

A further novelty of the renovated Oceanic galleries is the opportunity to display for the first time crafts usually associated with women, such as textiles and the captivating patterns of traditional Polynesian barkcloth.

As important as anything else, perhaps, is the new catalog of the Met’s Oceanic collections, written by Eric Kjellgren, the curator of this department. His fascinating work is conspicuous for being at once scholarly and consistently interesting. It never becomes mired in those nettlesome irrelevancies that mar so many other museum catalogs and it is a worthy companion of the renovated galleries it accompanies.


The New York Sun

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