2017 The provenance, date and significance of a Cook-voyage Polynesian sculpture (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Provenance, date and significance of a Cook-voyage Polynesian sculpture.
Accepted for 2016 Thomas, N.J., Biers, T., Cadwallader, L.C., Nuku, M., and Salmond, A. Antiquity. 2016.
2009
In 2003-4, the Musee d'Orsay, Paris, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, mounted an exhibition, Gauguin Tahiti, examining the French artist's career in Tahiti and the Marquesas between 1891 and his death in 1903. The organizers, George Shackelford and Claire Freches-Thory, assembled paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and ceramics by Paul Gauguin around his celebrated monumental painting, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? of 1897-8 (from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).1 A striking feature of the exhibition was the inclusion of a number of Tahitian, Marquesan, and other Polynesian objects. These were meant to lend context to Gauguin's works, and to exemplify the indigenous artefacts to which he was in part responding. Yet these Polynesian objects turned out to have the disturbing capacity to command attention in their own right, even when pressed into the service of a purely Western art history concerned with Gauguin's artistic progress f...
Micronesian Figural Carvings from Chuuk State
Journal of the Pacific Arts Association, 2017
This article examines Kutu Island figural sculptures as well as other figural sculptures from atolls in Chuuk State Federated States of Micronesia including numerous illustrations.
Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums Volume 2
2018
Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices. This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders' perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively. Volume II illustrates the sheer variety of Pacific artefacts and histories in museums, and similarly the heterogeneity of the issues and opportunities that they raise. Over thirty essays explore materialities, collection histories, legacies of empire, and contemporary projects.
CURIOUS ENCOUNTERS: VOYAGING, COLLECTING, AND MAKING KNOWLEDGE IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 2019
Encounters in archives can be as problematic and unpredictable as those between people. In her examination of the bark cloth collected in the South Pacific by James Cook and others (chapter 6), Billie Lythberg opens up this kind of inquiry further; she considers the swatches of bark cloth as “ethnographic fragments” that reframe the original cloths on very different scales, abstracting them from their original meanings and local uses on the Pacific islands where they were made. Across Oceania, barkcloth (tapa) is a collectively produced art form with great social and spiritual significance, as well as everyday uses. The extraordinary compendia of barkcloth swatches, cut and pasted into limited-edition printed books by a London bookseller, crystallized one version of the encounters of Cook and his sailors and naturalists with Pacific islanders. These books, with their brief explanations of the different kinds of cloth from different places, and occasional stories of how they were acquired, also functioned as palpable relics of Cook’s voyages, memorializing and aestheticizing encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders. The barkcloth books are thus hybrid archives in themselves, incorporating distinct cultural forms into a novel, transcultural form and thereby transforming (and diminishing) them.
Pacific Presences: Oceanic Art and European Museums Volume 1
2018
Hundreds of thousands of works of art and artefacts from many parts of the Pacific are dispersed across European museums. They range from seemingly quotidian things such as fish-hooks and baskets to great sculptures of divinities, architectural forms and canoes. These collections constitute a remarkable resource for understanding history and society across Oceania, cross-cultural encounters since the voyages of Captain Cook, and the colonial transformations that have taken place since. They are also collections of profound importance for Islanders today, who have varied responses to their displaced heritage, and renewed interest in ancestral forms and practices. This two-volume book enlarges understandings of Oceanic art and enables new reflection upon museums and ways of working in and around them. In dialogue with Islanders' perspectives, It exemplifies a growing commitment on the part of scholars and curators to work collaboratively and responsively. Volume I focuses on the historical formation of ethnographic museums within Europe, the making of those institutions' Pacific collections, and the activation and re-activation of those collections, over time and in the present. Sidestone PACIFIC PRESENCES 4A
in association with Sailing through history: conserving and researching a rare Tahitian canoe sail
2009
The British Museum has a unique canoe sail in its collection, which is likely to be the only Tahitian canoe sail ('ie) to have survived from the early era of sailing canoes. This sail is just over 9.5 metres long by 1.5 metres wide, curving at the top and bottom, and is characteristic of the Society Islands. It dates from either the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It is constructed from finely plaited mats of cut pandanus leaf, with fibre loop fasteners secured along its edges, and has remains of the ropes that ran up each side of the sail and were used to tie it to a mast. Canoes and sails of this type were observed and documented by early European voyagers. Islanders and Europeans were fascinated with each other's maritime technology and collected techniques and examples from each other. Several canoes and sails from the central Pacific were brought back to Britain and France in the eighteenth century and one of the richest collections of Polynesian maritime techno...