Rediscovering the Lost Art of the South Pacific
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We might be loath to admit it, but for many of us, our first impression of South Pacific culture was the Tiki Room at Disneyland. The exhibition currently on view at the Met, the first by any museum devoted to the vital art of the Marquesas Islands, provides a welcome antidote.
Best known today as Gauguin’s final residence, this archipelago 800 miles northeast of Tahiti was first settled by Polynesian sailors two millennia ago. The islands boasted the most sophisticated tattoo designs of the Pacific, and – outside of Easter Island – the most impressive sculpture. Notwithstanding their lack of metal technology or a written language, the Marquesans covered their furnishings and tools with designs of remarkable refinement. Especially striking was what we might today call “body art.” The islanders themselves were works of art, adorned with elaborate jewelry, exotic hairstyles, and complex tattoos extending sometimes from head to foot.
“Tiki,” the familiar bug-eyed figures with huge heads and bar-like mouths, were the most recurrent motif of their art. This exhibition includes a large wooden tiki sculpture once installed at a ceremonial site, and several smaller stone versions that would have been family possessions. Like all Marquesan art, these were viewed not as aesthetic objects (the Marquesans had no word for “art”), but as practical, necessary means for communicating with the spirits of deified ancestors. Today, their vacant stares seem to combine an animal-like alertness with a supernatural knowingness.
Sections of bone from the arms and legs of slain enemies, carved with tiki figures, served as jewelry and household decorations; no two of the dozen here are identical. Even more intricate are ear ornaments carved from ancestors’ bones. These have the aspect of miniature, serial icons – representations of tiny stylized figures squatting side by side, or in some cases, face to face.
Several fans, woven of extraordinarily fine strands of grass and leaves, were used on festive occasions by high-ranking men and women. The handles of two have tiki carvings with pinched segments and triangular heads disquietingly reminiscent of insects.
Among the most impressive objects here are three war clubs, all showing subtle variations on a single design. The broader end of each one features a fearsome face whose eyes and nose are in turn made out of tiny projecting heads. The eyes are ringed by concave, articulated circles and high-arching brows that enhance their intense expression. Beneath the face, each club’s shaft has elaborate carvings of stylized eyes or turtles. In all three, the sequences of arcs exude a graceful strength, their comprehensive design contrasting startlingly with their not-so-subtle purpose. Indeed, this mixture of the primal and the sophisticated, the brutal and the sensitive, is the exhibition’s intriguing undercurrent. (According to the catalog, the slight bloodletting incurred in the ear-piercing ceremony for a chieftain’s child might require a special measure – a human sacrifice, the corpse to be hung on an elegant fishhook.)
The exhibition includes two especially rare items: wooden sculptures of human legs, completely covered with geometric carvings similar to the leg tattoos of living Marquesans. Tenons on their tops (and the fact the islanders had no tradition of legged furnishings) support the theory that they were parts of furniture commissioned by a French official.
The exhibition catalog explains that while most works in the show reflect authentic, pre-contact traditions, the highly elaborate patterns on pieces like these sculpted legs suggest they were produced in the late-19th century for the burgeoning curio trade. The particularly intricate carving of some ear ornaments may also be a post-contact development, made possible by the introduction of metal tools.
The tattoos, of course, perished with their owners, but nearly a dozen sketches and prints by visiting Westerners give an idea of their complexity. Almost all islanders received their first tattoo in adolescence, with different patterns for boys and girls. For men of elevated social status, the tattooing was a continuous process, so that by age 30 a man might be covered from head to foot. Contemporary explorers were amazed by the extent of the tattooing – and its exquisite neatness. The sketches and prints also show the remarkable hairstyles of men, who shaved off most of their hair, leaving just two topknots.
By the time Gauguin moved to the islands in 1901, such exotic practices were a thing of the distant past. Regular contact with the West after Captain Cook’s visit in 1774 steadily eroded Marquesan customs. Western sailors brought not just beads, fabrics, and metal implements, but also firearms, tobacco, and new diseases. Missionaries suppressed age-old rituals and converted islanders from the gods they had associated with every activity from breadfruit preparation to childbirth. So few traditionally decorated implements were left by the late 19th century, in fact, that tattoos became the most significant remaining examples of their art. By the 1920s, epidemics and social upheaval had reduced the population to less than 5% of pre-contact levels.
The catalog describes a rejuvenation of Marquesan culture in recent decades as modern islanders look for ways to blend technological progress with tradition. But the most vital expression of their culture, captured before its fateful encounter with the West, is surely now at the Metropolitan Museum.
Until January 15, 2006 (1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).