Robert-Goldwater-Library

Phantom Shields

via Artnet, 6-28-07:

Phantom Shield
New Guinea
Banz area, Western Highlands
ca, 1960-80s
Cavin-Morris

POP TRIBAL
by N.F. Karlins

During this year’s Tribal Art Fair, a new category of art emerged -- "Pop Tribal." From the Central Highlands of the main island of Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific came large wooden fighting shields emblazoned with Lee Falk's comic book hero, the Phantom.

The buff-bodied Phantom appeared on shields dating from the 1960s to the 1980s at several booths. The comic books they were based on may have arrived in New Guinea as early as the 1940s during WWII, where the Japanese and the United States fought along the coast, eventually making their way to the interior.

Though startling at first, it makes sense that a warrior (whose tribe already used masks) would adopt as his alter-ego a masked crusader who would never die.

Art from Papua New Guinea is as varied as the thousands of tribes scattered over the eastern half of the main island (the western half belongs to Indonesia) and its surrounding islands. Art from these regions has been prized for years.

But the peoples in the rugged interior valleys of highland New Guinea were isolated from the modern world the longest. They remained as they were for thousands of years, with fighting between tribes as a way of life. Colonial contact was made in the 1930s, and the highlands produced its first literate generation in the 1970s.

While other areas of New Guinea produced more carved figures, the highlands, focused on war, spent more energy on creating tattoos and body decorations that would increase their warriors' powers and on large fighting shields.

Whether or not you saw the Phantom shields at the Fair, one of the dealers there, Cavin-Morris, is presenting several Phantom shields within a larger show of art from central New Guinea at its Chelsea gallery at 210 Eleventh Avenue. That exhibition, "Geometrics of Aggression: Shields of the New Guinea Highlands," May 17-July 13, 2007, offers a far-ranging look at art from this little-known region.

Fighting shields were traditionally made from the trunk of the "tapi" tree, which was split, smoothed and painted. In the Wahgi Valley of the Western Highlands, typically shields had a circle representing the sun in the center and designs were "punctuated," or outlined in small holes. The Phantom shields appeared in this region painted in enamel over traditional designs.

Cavin-Morris has a fine display of these more traditional shields, along with smaller underarm shields from the Southern Highlands, carved pipes, gourd masks and a terrific lichen mask as well as stone ceremonial bowls that go back to the Neolithic (1000 BC).

A set of 12 arrows with tips made from the bones of human ancestors were considered very potent. Each was intended for a specific victim (male or female) and caused a particular kind of death (fast or slow through septicemia). They differ in shape and color.

A rare dance figure of carved wood decorated with feathers, shell, bone, pigment and woven fiber bands on the arms and legs looks eerie and is an absolutely wonderful piece of mixed media. It’s already sold, but there are still Phantom shields available for under $8,000.

A "Moka Kina," or pectoral, was displayed during a festival when hundreds of pigs were killed, roasted and eaten. A pearl shell is set into a circle of resin on wood with bamboo tally sticks in a row, with each stick counting as one pig. Only the wealthy could afford such a luxury adornment.

A pig-killing skirt was another prestige item. More like a girdle than a skirt, the woven and painted fiber wrapped around the torso. From this were suspended various woven strands with tufts at the ends that would swish with movement.

More enigmatic are the flat woven-fiber human or animal forms with holes in the head and navel, areas which are prominent in the wooden spirit boards from the southern coastal area of New Guinea, too. These "Timbuwarra" figures are earth spirits, appropriately painted in bands of earth colors. They were made by elder men in times of disaster, such as wide-spread disease, earthquakes or famine. Moved to the Spirit House and used for rituals, they were buried later to refertilize the earth.

I have read of men wearing them on their heads during fertility rites. Whatever other uses they may have had, their forms are visually striking and their palettes different from those used in other works.

"Melanesia" at Pace Primitive, installation view

For fans of New Guinea art, spring offered two other exhibitions in New York that featured excellent material from other parts of the region. Masterpieces from the more studied northern coastal areas around the Sepik River were featured in "Melanesia," which was on view May 11-June 16, 2007, at Pace Primitive.

The southern coast is the subject of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, "Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf," Oct. 24, 2006-Dec. 2, 2007, a long term show mounted while the Met's Oceanic Galleries are closed for renovation.

N.F. KARLINS is a New York critic and art historian.

Timbuktu features

The July-August issue of Natural History magazine features a five-page article on Timbuktu, an excerpt adapted from the authors' forthcoming book, Timbuktu: The Sahara's Fabled City of Gold (Walker & Co., 2007, due out in August).

In addition the magazine's Online Extras: Web Links section features links to Unesco's and Worldheritagesite.org's web entries for Timbuktu; the Timbuktu Manuscript Project site; the web site of Shindouk, chief of the Tuareg community of Ouladnagim; and an extensive selection (pdf) of Ray Kea's Archaeology of West African Empires.

The Sankore Mosque in Timbuktu. (blueguy / ازرق flickr site) (PHOTO SOURCE)

Funerary sculpture to return to Kenya

Brooke Allen and Peter Ogego, Kenyan ambassador to the United States, at yesterday’s ceremony returning nine statues.

From the NY Times, June 26, 2007 (with correction):

9 Statues Uprooted From Africa Head Home
by ROBIN POGREBIN

For some two decades the nine carved statues were displayed in the Park Avenue apartment of the producer Lewis M. Allen and the screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. Tall and slender with rounded heads, the postlike figures seemed more like exotic conversation pieces than relics with a religious purpose, the Allens’ daughter, the writer Brooke Allen, recalls.

Yesterday all nine wooden statues were formally handed over to the Kenyan government in a ceremony at the United Nations. Eventually they will go on display at the Nairobi Museum.

Ranging from four to six feet tall, the objects, known as vigango, were looted in recent decades from the burial sites of the rural Mijikenda people on the Kenyan coast. Such figures are carved and posted at the graves of high-ranking members of a secret society called the Gohu, and the Mijikenda believe that bad luck will ensue if they are removed.

Alerted to their significance recently, Ms. Allen, the couple’s heir, decided that they should go back to Kenya.

“I spent a lot of time in Africa during my younger years, and I feel it gave me so much,” Ms. Allen said in an interview. “I feel very strongly about these things being returned.”

Asked whether her parents had been aware of their significance, she said, “I don’t think they knew.” Nor could she recall how they purchased the statues, although she estimated that it was in the early 1980s and said she doubted that her parents paid much for them.

Valued at $10,000 each today on the open market, vigango have often been looted from graveyards in Kenya, making their way into collections in the United States and Europe. Experts estimate that at least 400 are held in the collections of individuals and museums, including at least 19 museums in the United States alone.

Dispute continues over Bingham's Machu Picchu finds

In case you missed it the Sunday New York Times magazine's cover story, "The Possessed", chronicles the ongoing dispute between Yale University and the government of Peru over the disposition of archaeological materials excavated by Hiram Bingham in the early twentieth century.

Author Arthur Lubow profiles the many colorful parties to the dispute: Hiram Bingham III, the "imposingly tall and strong-minded" adventurer whose original promises to the Peruvian government are still not entirely clear; Richard Burger, professor of anthropology at Yale University, and his wife Lucy Salazar, ambassadors and negotiators for the university; Eliane Karp-Toledo, European-born wife of former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo, "a slim woman with long, wavy reddish blond hair and a fondness for fashionable versions of Andean woolens and ethnic jewelry"; Luis Lumbreras, "charismatic Marxist ... specialist on pre-Inca Peruvian cultures" with an unfortunate blot on his copy book; and Terry Garcia, executive vice-president of the National Geographic Society, caught between two unyielding institutions while trying to protect his own against potentially damaging blow-back.

All in all the stuff of a thoroughly engrossing telenovela.

PHOTO: The Explorer at Rest Hiram Bingham III, in his tent in 1912 after completing a season’s excavation. The final disposition of what he dug up remains in dispute. (Hiram Bingham, copyright © 2007 National Geographic)

African arts Summer 2007

selected contents from African arts, vol. 40, no. 2 (summer 2007):

first word

Building a Digital Library of Scholarly Resources from the Developing World: An Introduction to Aluka
Rahim S. Rajan, Heinz Rüther
p. 1-7.

[see our related post]

in memorium 

Léon de Sousberghe, S.J.: 1903–2006
Z.S. Strother
p. 8-11.

Frank Willett: 1925–2006
John Picton
p. 13-15.

articles

African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism in African Comics
Massimo Repetti
p. 16-35.

Hot Space, Cool Space: The Reinstallation of the African Collection in the Louis Kahn Building at Yale University
Frederick John Lamp
p. 36-51.

The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings: Reading the Shadow in Sam Nzima's Iconic Photograph of Hector Pieterson
Ruth Kerkham Simbao
p. 52-69.

exhibition preview

Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists
Rebecca Martin Nagy
p. 70-85.

African arts is available online via WATSONLINE.

Click on the MIT Press link (Art Index's online version is not up yet)

Digital Library of Scholarly Resources on Africa

The Summer 2007 issue of African Arts includes a 'first word' column on a promising new online scholarly research resource for Africa. This resource first came to the library's attention in early April, when Aluka announced the roll out of its cultural heritage site component.

[A future post will review the resource and give tips on navigation]

Aluka is "an international, collaborative initiative [to build] an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa," according to the project's History and Mission page.

Aluka seeks to attract high-quality scholarly content about Africa from institutions and individuals across the globe ... By aggregating these materials online, the Aluka collections link materials that are widely dispersed and difficult to access, opening up new opportunities for research, teaching, and broader public discussion. One of Aluka’s primary objectives is to provide African scholars and students with access to scholarly materials originally from Africa, but now out of their reach.

Aluka is a project of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization formed “to accelerate the adoption of productive and efficient uses of information technology for the benefit of the worldwide scholarly community.”  Aluka is affiliated with both JSTOR and ARTstor. Work began on Aluka in early 2003.

Aluka's target audience is primarily the "higher education and research community," with most resources selected and pitched to undergraduate students and their instructors. Some resources may have particular application to specialized researchers.

Access to Aluka is open to "any educational, research, cultural, or other not-for-profit organization that joins Aluka by signing a participation agreement." Outside of Africa a fee is involved. During the 'Preview Period' any institution with access to JSTOR (including this one) has free access to Aluka content. (There is no indication how long the Preview period will last.) The Preview period will end December 31, 2007.

In addition to the content areas themselves, additional pages highlight Featured Collections (for instance, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies) and a running list of Latest Additions. There is also an FAQ Page.

At the moment Aluka presents three constantly expanding 'content areas':

• Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa "consists of more than 180,000 pages of documents and images, including periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral testimonies, life histories, and speeches" reflecting the history of the struggle itself: "colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region."

• African Plants "comprises scientific data contributed by the African Plants Initiative (API) ... API's long-term goal is to build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking presently scattered scholarly resources about African plants, thereby dramatically improving access for students, scholars, and scientists around the globe."

• African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes "content area links high-quality visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites.The digital library includes photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler's accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research." [N.B.: Until June 30, 2007, downloading of the the datasets for three-dimensional site models, GIS data, and digital video has been disabled.]

It is this last collection which has the potential to provide the most valuable information for our research community. The collection is organized around what Aluka calls a "cultural landscape." As of April 2007 five cultural landscapes had been identified: Kilwa Kisiwani—a medieval city on an off-shore island in Tanzania; Lalibela, Ethiopia—capital of the Zagwe Dynasty and famous for its rock-hewn churches; The Asante Temples at Besease and Patakro, Ghana; Djenné and Timbuktu, Mali, celebrated for mosques in Sudanic style; and a preliminary collection of digitized photographs of African Rock Art. Future landscapes will include the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe; the stelae field at Axum, Ethiopia; Elmina, Ghana; Lamu archipelago located on Kenya's northern coast; and five rock art shelters and caves in South Africa’s Cederberg Mountains.

Each of these cultural landscape areas "includes a vast range of visual and textual materials ... [including] high-resolution, metrically accurate digital photographs, two-dimensional site plans, three-dimensional models of structures, towns, and landscapes, spatial/geographic information systems (GIS), digital video and panoramas of the sites, and in the future, computer visualizations with walk-through capabilities.

"Related contextual materials ... include, for example, a selection of digitized scholarly articles, monographs, and travelogues from the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University; some antiquarian maps of Africa from the Afriterra Free Cartographic Library; selections of narratives, drawings, and documents of and by the |xam and !kun people of southern Africa as collected in the 19th century by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek; and a unique collection of field notes and images from excavations at Kilwa Kisiwani carried out during the 1960s and early 1970s by Neville Chittick, the first Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa."

Nicole Peduzzi reviews Variations sur les arts premiers

Former AAOA fellow Nicole Peduzzi reviews Jean Guiart's Variations sur les arts premiers in the March 2007 issue of The Journal of the Polynesian Society (p. 75-76).

A copy is available in the Goldwater Library (this journal is not online).

The Journal of the Polynesian Society A P783

Variations sur les arts premiers. I, La manipulation / Jean Guiart (Essais pour l'intelligence du temps présent, 2)  K3 G94

[image source]

Sculpture Review Spring 2007

Contemporary Native American Sculpture of the Southwest and Vicinity

Hopi Katsinam: More than Sculpture
by Wolfgang Mabry

Allan Houser: An American Story
by Kathryn M Davis

Native American Sculptor Heroes
by Suzan Shown Harjo

Native Sculptors
by Patty Talahongva

The Spirit of Zuni Fetishes
by Suzanne Smith Arney (with the collaboration of Matt Wolf)

Sculpture Review is available online via WATSONLINE. 

[image source]

Goldwater Library Summer Hours

During the summer months the Goldwater Library will be subject to occasional partial or all-day closures. If you are planning to visit the library, you are advised to call ahead to confirm that the library will be available (212 570-3707).

(Regular hours: 10:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.)

Upcoming closures:

African Cinema Pioneer Ousmane Sembène Dies

From the NY Times:

UPDATE (June 12): An appreciation of Sembène by New York Times writer A.O. Scott appears here.

Ousmane Sembène, 84, Dies; Led Cinema's Advance in Africa

by A.O. Scott (June 11, 2007)

Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker and writer who was a crucial figure in Africa’s postcolonial cultural awakening, has died at his home in Dakar, Senegal. His family, which announced his death on Sunday, said Mr. Sembène  had been ill since December. He was 84.

Ousmane Sembène in 2005. photo source:Seyllou/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Widely seen as the father of African cinema, Mr. Sembène took up filmmaking in the 1960s, in part because he believed that film could reach a wider and more diverse African audience than literature. “Black Girl” (1965), his debut feature, is commonly referred to as the first African film. Combining realistic narrative techniques with elements of traditional African storytelling, it tells of a young woman named Diouana who commits suicide after traveling to Europe with her French employers.

Diouana’s identity crisis foretold some of the central themes of Mr. Sembène’s later work — he directed 10 features and numerous shorts — and of the nascent African cinema more generally. The tensions between tradition and modernity and between newly independent African nations and their erstwhile colonial masters are sources of drama and comedy in his films, which are nonetheless focused on the lives of ordinary people, frequently women.

“Xala” (1974), which many critics consider his finest film, takes a humorous look at polygamy, traditional African medicine and the contrasts between urban and rural life. Neither mocking nor nostalgic in its treatment of traditions, it is as much driven by the personalities of its characters as by its ideas about African life. At the same time, the characters’ foibles are clearly symbols of political and social dysfunction.

Xala. photo source: FilmReference.com

A similar logic obtains in later films like “Guelwaar” (1993) and “Faat-Kiné” (2001). Writing about the latter movie in The New York Times, Elvis Mitchell noted that some of its scenes could have been “whipped up into a tempest of tear-jerking” but that Mr. Sembène’s “trademark empathy” and sense of detail served as antidotes to melodrama. Even when he addressed painful and controversial subjects — as in “Moolaadé” (2004) which chronicles a middle-aged woman’s campaign to halt the practice of female genital cutting in her village — Mr. Sembène tempered moral fervor with warmth and humor.

Ousmane Sembène was born on Jan. 1, 1923, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. He left school at 14 and moved to Dakar. There and in France, he worked as a fisherman and an auto mechanic, among other jobs, before being drafted by the French Army in World War II. His experiences as a dockworker in Marseilles formed the basis of one of his novels, “The Black Docker.”

He studied film at Gorky Studio in Moscow, turning to the medium because, as he put it in 2005, “everything can be filmed and transported to the most remote village in Africa.” After making three short films, he submitted the script for “Black Girl” to the Film Bureau of the French Ministry of Cooperation, an agency set up by the government of Charles de Gaulle to assist African filmmakers. The script was rejected, and while Mr. Sembène was able to complete the film independently, some of his later films would run into trouble with both French and Senegalese authorities. “Mandabi” (“The Money Order,” 1968), was attacked in Africa for its portrayal of political corruption and economic devastation, and “Emitai” (1972) was suppressed in France for five years because of its harsh depiction of colonialism.

“He could criticize Africa, he could criticize racism and he could criticize colonialism,” said Manthia Diawara, professor of comparative literature and Africana studies at New York University, in a telephone interview on Sunday. “He never spared anybody.”

In spite of occasional controversy, Mr. Sembène’s mastery and originality were celebrated both in Africa, where he served as an inspiration for later filmmakers, and internationally. He won prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 1968 (for “Mandabi”) and 1988 (for “Camp de Thiaroye”), and at Cannes in 2004 (for “Moolaadé”). He was a founder, in 1969 of FESPACO, the biennial festival of film and television held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Cheick Oumar Sissoko, a fellow filmmaker and the Malian minister of culture, said that with Mr. Sembène’s death, “African cinema has lost one of its lighthouses.”

Mr. Diawara added: “He really is the most important African filmmaker. The one that all subsequent filmmakers have to be measured against.”

• Click here for filmography of "Ousmane Sembene" at imdb.com