Robert-Goldwater-Library

Aboriginal film dominates awards

via BBC news:

8 December 2006

Australia's first Aboriginal language movie has dominated the country's top cinema awards.

Ten Canoes won six Australian Film Institute awards, including best film and best direction, at the star-studded ceremony in Melbourne.

Director Rolf de Heer said the film, set in the days before Europeans arrived, had touched its audiences.

Ten Canoes, which also won awards for best original screenplay, best cinematography, best editing and best sound, will be entered in the foreign language film category at next year's Oscars.

Filmed in the remote crocodile-infested swamps of northern Australia and starring a clutch of untrained actors, Ten Canoes revolves around the story of a young man who has taken a fancy to an older man's wife.

De Heer, who co-directed the movie with Peter Djigirr, was pleased the film had been so well received.

"Audiences everywhere find something in it," he said.

 

• Visit the official site of Ten Canoes

Be sure to click on "More Resources" which provides an impressive list of links related to Indigenous Australian history and culture

• Ten Canoes on IMDB

[image source]

Michael Rockefeller's pictures record New Guinea tribesmen beautifully

Documenting the dynamic moment: Michael Rockefeller's pictures record New Guinea tribesmen beautifully

Reviewed by Mark Feeney, Boston Globe staff | Dec. 10, 2006

... Rockefeller, who had been a history major as an undergraduate, had no background as a professional photographer. In fact, his primary responsibility wasn't visual: He was assigned the task of being the expedition's sound recordist .

Even so, his pictures are very good. It certainly helps that such a small percentage of the photographs he took are on display. But the exhibition includes a contact sheet, and the quality of its images indicates the rest of the show is no greatest-hits selection. Clearly, Rockefeller had an eye for composition and, what's far more unusual, a feel for the dynamic moment. He never posed his subjects. He didn't have to. There's one picture here, of a warrior caught from afar in exultant leap, that's so perfectly timed it looks almost comic.

The visual quality of the images makes it easy to forget that content mattered far more to Rockefeller than form did. Purely photographic considerations never obscured for him the defining documentary impulse of the larger enterprise. He was there to record not express. "Photography like other artistic mediums requires a very particular combination of talents," Rockefeller wrote in a journal he kept during the expedition, "and I now know that an eye sensitive to aesthetics by itself assures little."

What's most impressive about Rockefeller's pictures is how he managed to strike a balance between reserve (the photographer never tried to be anything other than an outsider) and immediacy (just as clearly, he presented his subjects with vividness and sympathy). One way he maintained his apartness is so obvious as to be easily overlooked: Almost none of the photographs was taken up close. The rare exception, like "Childhood friends," retains an innate gravity that carries its own sense of distance.

All of the expedition members had cameras. "There was a near din of clacking shutters every day," Gardner later wrote. "We each had other duties, but no one could escape the photographic mania."

Perhaps this accounts for the wondrous unself-consciousness the Dani show toward the camera. These strange rectangular objects around their necks were such a constant among the outsiders that they must have seemed like a talisman of their distant culture -- a bulkier form of necklace, say -- and thus unworthy of notice. Or maybe there was just something about Rockefeller's manner.

> See our earlier post ; locate the MMA copy of the catalog

Photo caption: Michael Rockefeller among the Dani, 1961, in a photograph which is part of Harvard's exhibition. (Jan Broekhuijse)

December Auctions

(l) Lot 244: Important Maori gable figure,New Zealand, Estimate: €100,000-150,000 ($126,700-190,100) [source]
(r) Lot 107: Chokwe figure, Angola,Estimate: €150,000-250,000 ($190,100-316,800) [source]

Christie's

African and Oceanic Art
Sale 5433
December 7, 2006
Paris
Browse the catalog

Sotheby's

Oceanian and African Art catalog [source]

Oceanian and African Art
Sale PF6014
December 5, 2006
Paris
Browse the catalog (free registration with Sotheby's is required)

Bonhams

(l) Lot 5014: Zuni owl, Hopi rattle, Estimate: $1,500 - 2,000 [source]
(r) Lot 5352: A Chavin effigy vessel, Estimate: $1,500 - 2,000 [source]

Native American, Pre-Columbian and Tribal Art
Sale 14044
December 4, 2006
San Francisco
Browse the catalog

(l) Lot 4008: An Acoma polychrome storage jar, Estimate: $250,000 - 350,000 [source]
(r) Lot 4085: A Hopi kachina doll, Estimate: $8,000 - 12,000 [source]

The Silverman Museum Collection
Sale 14804
December 4, 2006
San Francisco
Browse the catalog

French Auction Houses

Binoche SAS
Art précolombien   
Salles 1 & 7
December 1, 2006
Drouot Richelieu, Paris

(l) Lot 21: Masque Eskimo, Alaska, Collection Georges Duthuit, Est. 400 / 600 € [source]
(r) Lot 83: Masque Punu Gabon, Est. 250 000 / 300 000 € [source]

Calmels Cohen SAS
Arts Primitifs, Archéologie, Ancienne Collection Robert Lebel et à Divers
Salles 7-9
December 4, 2006
Drouot Richelieu, Paris
Browse the catalog

Fraysse et Associés SARL
Art Primitif: Afrique, Amérique du Nord, Océanie 
Salle 4
December 4, 2006
Hôtel Drouot, Paris
Browse the catalog [pdf]

Catherine Charbonneaux SARL
Archéologie
Salle 13
December 1, 2006
Drouot Richelieu, Paris

Exhibition of Michael Rockefeller photographs

Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
November 15, 2006-February 28, 2007

Boys playing at war with grass spears. Netherlands New Guinea, 1961, photo by Michael C. Rockefeller, PM 12.1.69.3.

• The exhibition is accompanied by a volume of the same name that features over 75 photographs, including all exhibition photos, an essay by curator Kevin Bubriski, and a foreword by the Harvard-Peabody New Guinea Expedition director and filmmaker, Robert Gardner.

• On March 8, 2007, at 5:30 p.m., Virginia-Lee Webb, Research Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, will give a lecture entitled Visualizing Art and the Ancestors: Photographs of Asmat Art and Artists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

From the Peabody Museum's web site:

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology presents the first, solo show of the photographs of the late Michael Rockefeller taken in 1961 in the highlands of New Guinea. This selection of black-and-white photographs have been chosen from the 117 rolls of black-and-white film (approximately 3,500 images) taken while Rockefeller was a member of the Peabody Museum's New Guinea Expedition (1961–1963). The photographs document the life of the Dani people dwelling in the Baliem Valley, high in the mountains of New Guinea, today Irian Jaya, Indonesia. In addition to their rich documentary content, these photographs reveal much about the sensibility behind the camera. Many of the photographs in the exhibition are vintage prints made in the early nineteen sixties. A few of the photographs were published in the volume about the expedition Gardens of War (Random House, 1968). Most have never before been published or publicly displayed.

"Coaxing" Reviewed

Mask (semese)
Papuan Gulf, Western Elema area, Kiri people
Cane or wicker framework, bark cloth, plant fiber, pigment, palm wood; 84 5/8 x 55 1/8 x 13 3/4 in. (215 x 140 x 35 cm)
The Field Museum, Chicago, Collected by A. B. Lewis 1912

via NYTimes:
Art Review | 'Coaxing the Spirits to Dance'
Works That Called Out to the Gods and Offered Them a Place to Dwell
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: October 27, 2006 {excerpts}

Helpful spirits, essential to the good life, didn’t come easily to the clannish peoples of the Gulf of Papua. They had to be coaxed. And in the coaxing lies the history of Papuan art, a religious pursuit entirely devoted to making masks, figures and spirit boards for habitation by the powerful local gods whose intervention was sought for success in hunting, harvesting, warfare, trading and treating the sick.

How the Papuans practiced their beliefs on the remote Pacific island of New Guinea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when they still had little contact with the West, is the complex and fascinating story told in "Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This exhibition of some 60 objects and 30 rare photographs of the works on site or in actual use is the first comprehensive study of the material, the Met says, since a pioneering survey in 1961 mounted by the former Museum of Primitive Art in New York. The current show was organized by the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, in collaboration with the Met, and the New York presentation was put together by Virginia-Lee Webb, the Met's research curator in the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

The art reflects the Papuan social order, which was based on families, especially those whose ancestry was identified with particular rivers and places. Each family’s totemic emblems and legends spoke of its land and spiritual heritage. The men in the society kept the traditions and made the art. They lived in long houses, apart from their women and children (who were forbidden to enter). The long houses, long huts with individual cubicles, served as communal residences as well as performance halls for the spirit-coaxing dances, and also provided a place for clan shrines, maintained to preserve each family's tree.

The carved and painted "spirit boards" made throughout the gulf region, on the south coast of present-day Papua New Guinea, are probably the most easily recognized of the area's traditional artworks. Each board was meant to serve as a home for the rain forest or river deity embraced by a particular clan. Their central designs, passed down from fathers to sons and through marriages, typically represent a bush or river spirit, with a heavily stylized face and perhaps a small body, surrounded by various totemic symbols.
[...]

William G. Lawes (English, 1839–1907)
Young Men with Maiva Shields, 1881–89
Papuan Gulf, Port Moresby
Gelatin silver print; 5 7/8 x 8 in. (15 x 20.3 cm)
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

The show's many photographs depicting Papuan customs, habitats and arts were mostly taken by the anthropologists and photographers who visited the area as Christianity was beginning to take hold at the end of the 19th century. More than a few depict objects in the show in their original settings, like a cheerful Wapo spirit board that was placed on pig skulls in a long-house shrine, snapped in 1930 by the Swiss anthropologist Paul Wirz.

The dean of Papua's photographers, however, was an Australian, Frank Hurley (1885-1962), best known for his images of Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic in 1914. The first to use cinematography and aerial photography in the Gulf of Papua, Mr. Hurley collected objects and photographed places that no longer survive. His aerial view of Kaimari villages on the Purari Delta in 1922, shot from about 1,500 feet, gives a vivid idea of the territory and its watery byways.

[read full article]

New Guinea exhibition in Paris

OMBRES DE NOUVELLE GUINÉE: Arts de la grande île d'Océanie dans les collections Barbier-Mueller

Mona Bismarck Foundation, October 4–November 25, 2006

From the Foundation's press release [.doc.]:

From October 4th to November 25th, the Mona Bismarck Foundation will host 80 masterpieces of New Guinean art from the Barbier-Mueller collections, with equivalent emphasis on works from Papua-New Guinea and the province of Papua, Indonesia.

The exhibition will present the collection’s most important pieces, magnificent objects which testify to the extraordinary skills of the New Guinean natives (wood sculpture, objects made of tortoise shell, tapa, and stone). The selection of works on show will follow the geographical distribution of the catalogue which accompanies this exhibition. The collection’s masterpieces, a source of wonder both because of their uniqueness and for their prestigious “pedigree”, mark this initiation into the arabesques and metaphors of Papuan art.

• A French-language version of the accompanying catalog, edited by Philippe Peltier and  Floriane Morin, is currently available (€ 59); the English-language version is currently at the press, according to Christian Kaufmann (via PAA).

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf : images + video clips

click image above to play video.
 

via The Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf

main page

MORE ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

IMAGES

VIDEO

Each of these two video clips shows a digitized sequence from the original silent film by Frank Hurley entitled Pearls and Savages. Both masked performances were reenacted at Hurley's request. Hurley also made still photographs of the masks, two of which are included in this exhibition.

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf

Following up on our March post about the first installment of this exhibition at The Hood Museum at Dartmouth, we are pleased to announce:

Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf

October 24, 2006–September 3, 2007
The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor

Excerpts from the unpublished manuscript of the pioneering photographer Kathleen Haddon chronicle indigenous ceremonies and traditions of the Papuan Gulf in the early 20th century:

  Listen to the audio file [click above] (4.3 MB)

  Listen to the full audio program. (RealPlayer: 8:52 minutes)

   Subscribe to the podcast.

This exhibition presents some 60 powerful and graphically elaborate sculptures and 30 rare historical photographs from the Gulf province of Papua New Guinea. The sacred objects, alongside photographs that show them in context, demonstrate the deep connection between art and community life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawn from public and private collections, as well as the Museum's own holdings, many of the works are being exhibited for the first time in the only in-depth investigation of these art traditions in 45 years.

The selection of rare historical photographs—some exhibited for the first time—taken by early travelers to the Papuan Gulf is drawn from The Photograph Study Collection of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

Accompanied by a catalogue by Robert L. Welsch, Virginia-Lee Webb, and Sebastian Haraha, 2006.

The exhibition is made possible by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

It was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College [more info], in collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 

Papua New Guinea vs. de Young Museum

The Jolika Collection of New Guinea, Marcia and John Friede Gallery, de Young Museum

via ArtInfo:
Experts Say Artifacts at De Young Museum Looted

SAN FRANCISCO, April 24, 2006—San Francisco's de Young Museum has come under fire since revealing a newly donated collection of Papua New Guinea tribal artifacts. Experts in the field have closely examined the 400 works and concluded that at least 9 were likely looted from the impoverished island nation, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

The $100 million collection, being donated to the museum by Annenberg family heir John Friede, was cross examined in the latest edition of Nature magazine. Experts identified nine items, including a wooden gong and a carving of a copulating woman, that could "allegedly be traced back to worldwide trade networks, in which misappropriated specimens are sold to antiquities dealers," West Coast correspondent Rex Dalton wrote in Nature.

Anthropologists had already sounded the alarm even before Nature published the article. One anthropologist, who had once worked at New Guinea's national museum in Port Moresby, questioned whether a mask in the collection had been judged a cultural treasure by the New Guinea government, and therefore should never have left the island, immediately after the exhibition opened. In February, a second anthropologist from the Bay Area identified two other pieces from the collection that raised concern.

Christina Hellmich, recently hired as the curator of the de Young's New Guinea collection, said there was "absolutely no question" that Friede bought the artifacts on good faith from international dealers and hadn't engaged in illegal exports from Papua New Guinea. Friede plans to donate about 3,000 relics to the de Young.

The San Francisco Chronicle: War Drums Pound over de Young Display

Images © 2006 Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums, photographer: Jorge Bachman.

more info:
San Francisco magazine (May Issue)
Whose Art Is It Anyway? by Michael Stoll. 

LATimes,  June 3, 2006
The Papua New Guinea De Young dilemma
By Lee Romney
Papua New Guinea claims the San Francisco museum doesn't have a right to items in an exquisite collection. It adds a twist in the debate over cultural treasures.

Pissed-off Maori: Imitation, inspiration or appropriation?

via NZEdge:

Imitation, inspiration or appropriation?
2006 has seen a rash of advertising and design taking inspiration - with varying degrees of offensiveness - from Maori art and culture. An Italian ad for the Fiat Idea showing a group of black garbed women performing a mock haka has gone to air despite warnings of cultural insensitivity from NZ diplomats. According to Brad Tattersfield of NZ's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, "we advised the advertising company that the use of Ka Mate in this way was culturally insensitive and inappropriate. MFAT advised the advertisers to either use a Maori group or a haka composed for women. However, the advertising company indicated they were proceeding despite this advice." In the US, an American developer's proposal to build a Maori-themed apartment complex in Texas has divided Maori opinion. While activist Ken Mair calls the plan "cultural theft and possibly theft of intellectual property" author Alan Duff thinks Maori have bigger problems to worry about: "Greece is not up in arms because Las Vegas did Ancient Greece themes in their casinos. Why are we so precious about things that don't count?" Finally, cult US fashion brand Paul Frank has released a T-shirt print titled 'Warrior Julius,' depicting its distinctive monkey mascot with a full facial moko.
(4 July 2006)

via The Art Newspaper:

New Zealand Maoris furious over plans for a themed apartment complex in Texas
By Jason Edward Kaufman | Posted 19 October 2006

NEW YORK. A proposed Maori-themed apartment complex outside Dallas recently served as a platform for the New Zealand natives to proclaim their pride. In June, after California-based Legacy Partners announced plans to build a residential complex featuring Maori themes and folk art in suburban Plano, the company received dozens of emails charging the company with "cultural theft." Complaints centered on the name of the complex, "Kiora Park," taken from the Maori expression of welcome. The problem was that the phrase is properly transliterated as "Kia Ora." "How many more mistakes will there be?" Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia asked. "We're all very proud of the culture and more than willing to share it with people who come here, but to have it transplanted into Dallas, that sounds a bit incredible," she said.

No harm was meant, explains Richard Brownjohn, a vice president in Legacy's Dallas office. "Our marketing people thought it had an unusual ring but was something people would easily pronounce. It was spelled as one word at first because Americans might butcher the spelling and we wanted it pronounced right. We didn’t think it would get Maoris upset," he says. The name was quickly changed to "Kia Ora Park".