Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art, de Young Museum (review)

Acclaim and excitement greeted the Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art of John and Marcia Friede when the de Young museum in San Francisco reopened in October 2005. But by July 2006, the enthusiasm had ­flickered and fulminated because of clashes over national cultural property exported without valid permits. There are no accusations of looting against John Friede himself; he had bought from dealers, traveling to Papua New Guinea only once, in 1981.

Despite the jangle of discordant voices, there may be an important accomplishment. A practical strategy is emerging, proposed by the National Museum of Papua New Guinea. The compromise would open access to the works within Papua New Guinea. The Jolika, and later the de Young when it receives this promised gift of over 3,000 objects, could share items with the National Museum. This is in a climate in which the Metropolitan Museum and the Getty Museum are surfacing limply from arduous lawsuits requiring the return of objects plundered from Italy and Greece. There will be access to the de Young for contemporary PNG artists selected for a visiting fellows program, and there are plans for exchanges of artworks between schoolchildren in both countries.

The Jolika is the most important private collection of objects from Papua New Guinea and West Papua in the world. It is an immense contribution to bring together works that were formerly dispersed and make them accessible for viewing and research. The first installation of the works embodies the transformation offunctional objects in culturally specific ritual contexts into artworks for contemplation as masterpieces. Ceremonial tools efficacious in spiritual and everyday life, material embodi­ments of philosophies and ­cosmologies about creation, fertility, birth, love, war, death, continuity through ancestors, protections against danger, and healing, have now become nonutilitarian by definition. Yet had the works been displayed in an ethnographic museum, there may have been stinging criticism about separating them from an art space.

"Art," in the singular in the title of the collection, runs the risk of homogenizing works from societies in Papua New Guinea that speak 800 different languages. The exhibit focuses on the Sepik, the Papuan Gulf, and Milne Bay Province, with some objects from the Highlands. It includes only one relatively recent item indicating outside contact: a war shield from the 1960s featuring the Phantom comic-book character. New Ireland is not part of the collection. Few women's works are included.

Friede acknowledges that his is ­thelargest collection of West Papua objects outside of Dutch museums. It contains objects from Geelvink Bay, Lake Sentani, and the Asmat. Yet the omission of West Papua in the title of the collection matches an absence of discussion about its national cultural property. There is reason for concern, because in his 10 February 2006 public lecture at the de Young, Friede mentioned a scientist's simply gathering up skulls that he happened on in acave while conducting unrelated research. These skulls are part of the Friede collection. Opportunities to repair the absence of information and discussion about West Papuan cultural property must be possible in the Netherlands, the former colonial power. Colonized and oppressed by Indonesia, struggling desperately for autonomy, West Papua is enfolded under the very Papua New Guinea that, in July 2006, refused to accept refugees seeking asylum.

The display of the works in the de Young installation is dramatic. The cavernous, low-lit space recalls, intentionally or not, the filtered light of a ceremonial men's house. Casting their immediate surroundings into deep shadow, spotlights focus directly on masks, spirit boards, spirit canoes, ­ritual headdresses—and copulating figures that present opportunities for viewers' projections about idealized exotic sexuality. Skull racks and suspension hooks are imbued with an awe of the strange.

The atmosphere also evokes what the Surrealists sought in the art of Papua New Guinea: engagement with images of dreams, and violence they found primitive, elemental, disturb-ing, and desirable. Quai Branly, the museum that French President Jacques Chirac sponsored as his...