Pacific Art: Persistence, Change and Meaning (review)

The sixth international meeting of the Pacific Arts Association, held at the Field Museum in Chicago in October 1999, honored Philip J C Dark as he retired from twenty-five years of editing Pacific Arts, the association's primary publication. More than one hundred people in attendance heard nearly fifty papers. From this exuberance of scholarship and appreciation, the editors have selected twenty-nine papers to document the current state of research on Pacific art, especially from the perspectives of visual anthropology and art history.

As with all volumes drawn from anuncoordinated volunteering of presented papers, this volume faces an obvious organizational problem. The editors have solved it by arranging selected essays not by geography, but in thematic assemblages, treating not just aesthetic subject matter, but the possible permutations of the messages that artful objects bear. Many of the authors address questions of agency and meaning, and ask who the "active parties" in making, selling, collecting, and consuming art are; accordingly, inaddition to studying objects as objects, the authors examine relations among artists, patrons, collectors, and museums.

The book establishes its tone with a testimonial by Hirini (Sydney) Moko Mead, who, assisted by Dark and others, founded the Pacific Arts Association in 1974, and an introduction by Robert L Welsch, who discusses how the association's meetings and publications have registered ongoing intellectual shifts. The first essay, "Persistence, Change and Meaning inPacific Art: A Retrospective View with an Eye towards the Future," Dark's keynote address at the meeting in Chicago, reaches into many cultures to ground in experience an esteemed scholar's discovered wisdom; it urges devotees of Pacific art to ponder how artistic meaning can vary within a single community from year to year, even from crowd to crowd and person to person.

The editors have sorted the other essays into five parts. Of these, part 4, "Studying Agency and Objects," is perhaps the most traditionally conceived: it provides case studies of artistic concepts and their changes over time, as embodied in material objects. Roger Neich ("The Gateways of Maketu") uses historical accounts to study formal persistence in wood carvings done by Ngati Pikiao, living on the coast of the Bay of Plenty, Aotearoa. Peter Gathercole ("'Te Maori' in the Longer View") contemplates Māori carvings assembled for an exhibition in New York in 1984 —objects whose assembly and presentation influenced other exhibitions and stimulated the reconsideration of artistic displays. Jo Anne Van Tilburg and Cristián Arévalo Pakarati ("Reconstructing the Rapa Nui Carver's Perspective") evaluate the experimental replication of stone carvings on Easter Island. Adrienne L Kaeppler ("The Structure of Tongan Barkcloth Design"), repeating a personal academic refrain, reviews the development of metaphor and allusion in Tongan visual imagery. Similarly, historical methods mark the essays by Steven Hooper ("Memorial Images of Eastern Fiji") on posts wrapped in barkcloth or sennit to commemorate chiefs, and Eric Venbrux ("The Craft of the Spider Woman") on Tiwi bark baskets.

Also in a traditional vein is part 3, "Exploring Museums, Collectors and Meanings," which considers the process of gleaning significance from collections. Shirley Campbell ("What's in a Name?") discusses the search for meaning in carved and painted boards that decorate oceangoing outrigger canoes used on kula expeditions by people of Vakuta, Trobriand Islands. The same concern animates essays by Deborah Waite ("Exploring Solomon Islands Shields"); Barry Craig ("A Stranger in a Strange Land") on Kenneth Thomas's ethnography in the North Sepik area of Papua New Guinea; Liz Bonshek ("Objects Mediating Relationships") on material collected by Raymond Firth on Tikopia in 1928 ; Carol E Mayer ("In the Spirit of a Different Time") on more than 1,200 objects collected by Frank Burnett and donated to the University of British Columbia in 1927 ; and Anita Herle ("Objects, Agency and Museums"), reflections on the centenary of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait...