Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia (review)

My first impression of the Ateaexhibition was the sight of two incongruous blue walls, rising some three meters from the floor of the Rockefeller Wing's special exhibition galleries. The freestanding walls formed a horseshoe-shaped space, creating a tardis-like node at the center of a long gallery of large pre-Columbian limestone sculptures and African wood carvings. The tardis(an acronym for Time and Relative Dimension in Space) is a police box that doubles as a time machine and transports Doctor Who through interplanetary time and space in the bbctelevision series of the same name. It is also a precise blue—vibrant and dynamic, the color of the Moana, the largest body of water in the world. The "Metropolitan" in Metropolitan Museum of Art conjures a feeling of dread for those of us from the perceived margins of the Western world. Part of that dread has to do with the anticipation of what one might find at the heart of a late capitalist empire, New York. How will art from the Pacific be treated in its cultural institutions, these complex places whose foundations are built on the legacies of colonialism, informed by a history of eugenics, in a city where advanced technology has pledged to light up every available dark space in the world? Here in Ateawas that dark space, or vavau—the long night of perpetual darkness that we Samoans categorize as the period before the arrival of Europeans and the advent of Christianity.

As a teenager in the mid-1970s, I was fascinated by the writings of the American counterculture, especially novelist Tom Wolfe, whose satirical ethnography of New York's Upper East Side socialites, The Bonfire of the Vanities(1987), had me expressly trying to figure out the meaning of the rally cry "I am a Master of the Universe." New York was the center of the universe, where masters of the universe lived. For my generation of young Pacific Islanders, who left our villages and migrated to large metropolitan centers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and the United States for our education, New York represented the decadent allure of Interviewand Artforummagazines, of Warhol's Factory, and of the No Wave movement coming out of legendary venues cbgband Max's Kansas City. By the time I left my own village, I certainly knew there was no longer a heart of darkness in the deep forest of my Samoan youth; that period of vavau was attributed to our "prehistory," before Christianity arrived. Traces of that period can still be found in the Indigenous art displayed in suspended animation in the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at New York's Museum of Natural History and the Michael C Rockefeller Wing at the Met. And so it was with great fortune that in August 2019 I found myself newly arrived at the Met to begin my six-month senior fellowship and standing in front of the Ateaexhibition.

Ateawould be Oceanic art curator Maia Nuku's first comprehensive show at the Met, based on her extensive research on divinities in Polynesia. Maia is of Ngai Tai Māori and British ancestry, and the first Indigenous Pacific appointee to the curatorial position for Oceanic art at the museum. At the heart of the exhibition is an 1869 diagram of a Tuamotu cosmogonic chant in which the universe unfolds in nine concentric canopies. The image of concentric arcs emanating from the head in the Austral Islands headdress is repeated in the dazzling whale ivory breastplates worn by chiefs across the moa (middle of the chest) and also can be discerned in the shell beads coiled around the ridge beam of the portable bure kalou, or majestic yellow and red crescent-shaped capes, of Kamehameha of Hawai'i. Atea...