So Tobias Schneebaum began his remarks first
singing then translating an Asmat canoing
chant at Lehman College Art Gallery.
Schneebaum curated a small show there of a
dozen man-sized Asmat war sheilds he
collected.
The Asmat are -- or were until recently --
archetypal savages, the Others of both
western and eastern civilization. Dark-skinned
people, they were headhunters and
cannibals and went about naked. The
warriors wore sculpted bone plates in their
noses to look like wild boars.
The understanding of these people and their
art has unfolded together with dramatic
material and political developments. The
Asmat homeland is in southern Irian Jaya, a
province of Indonesia, half of the island
of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea, formerly
an Australian protectorate, takes up the
rest of the island). Long unmolested in
their vast swampy homeland, Asmat art and
their society come to our gaze like
artifacts, objects unearthed in the frantic
ground-turning of the world that followed
WWII and decolonization. They were first
studied during the final years of Dutch
colonial rule. More recently, Catholic
missionaries observed, collected and helped
protect Asmat. (The works here are from the
Crozier-run American Museum of Asmat Art in
Saint Paul, Minn.)
Western study and collection, "salvage
anthropology," has been inseparable from
efforts to conserve these people and their
habitat. Many have sought to protect them
and their land from the consequences of
heavy-duty resource extraction, drilling,
logging, mining, exploitative wage labor --
the full blast of modern global Capital's
hot breath in a stone age paradise.
"Stone age" -- this odd 19th-century
designation from the "ages of man" is a
persistent shorthand characterization of
the Asmat. Indeed, as late as the 1970s,
Asmat upriver had no metal, only stones
(themselves imported) with which to work
wood. Their sheilds were carved with
chisels made from flattened nails scavenged
from river-born ocean flotsam. But the
"stone age" tag harks back to the earliest
moments of positivist "human sciences,"
when archaeology was being developed,
when Oceania was being explored, exploited
and represented to a Western public still
imbued with the image of Rousseau's noble savage.
The Asmat are not so easily inscribed within a
Christian universe. Instead they are
written into the realm of science as if in one
of its own earlier moments, still awe-struck
at the diverse wonders of creation.
The war sheilds are carved from the
buttress roots of giant mangrove trees by
village specialists working in the men's
houses. In carving and butchering, cutting
down and killing, there is an equation in
Asmat of body and tree, of flesh and wood.
The sheilds are carried into battles staged
to redress grievances and waged with spears
and arrows. (These particular sheilds are
"really old," that is, Schneebaum believes
them to date from the '40s or '50s, the
instantly mythic period when head-hunting
was still going on.) These battles of the
Asmat are not war like that waged in New
Guinea between Japan and the Allies; nor
even police work as performed by the
colonial Dutch. This war is not a means for
Asmat to resist "pacification" by
Indonesian soldiers prepping Irian Jaya for
resource extraction and settlement from the
main islands of a crowded nation. Like the
head-hunting raids of the past (effectively
ended by the early '60s) this is ritual
warfare, carried out to restore balance
between villages. It is men's work. The
sheilds like their bearers have penises
(that is, the top part of the sheild is so
conceived).
The sheilds are installed so that they
stand away from the wall. Schneebaum
insists upon their identity as three-
dimensional objects, although not, of
course, as "sculpture." Within the space of
the museum this installation alludes to
those who once stood behind the sheilds.
Under the pressures of analysis (like
Schneebaum's own years-long survey that
separates these works into style regions),
the sheild designs turn into blazoned
images as in medieval heraldry, highly
abstracted glyphs representing animals
associated with head-hunting. Under the
pressures of commodification, these sheilds
first go on the wall to become paintings,
merging with other two-dimensional work.
The things go up on walls, and the glyphs
upon them go up on screens and pages,
becoming simply images, clip art to be used
anyhow.
This destiny is part of the pathos of
commerce in ethnic and tourist arts. But
there is a sense in which these Asmat works
resist this process in their form. These
sheilds, conceived and produced for
internecine war, were intended to paralyze
the enemy. Now they are turned out to the
world. In the context of the museum and
shop window, they still retain some of this
martial charge. Standing away from the wall
these sheilds of the "warlike Asmat" make a
type of badge of indigenous resistance.
In part, this reflection is occasioned by
the context.
The exhibition of Asmat sheilds at Lehman
College is accompanied by a show of bark
paintings, string bags and arrows made by
the Maisin and Gimi people of Papua New Guinea.
Sponsored by Greenpeace Pacific and the
Wildlife Conservation Society and organized by
David Gillison, an artist studying birds in
New Guinea, this exhibition is specifically
designed to introduce cultural artifacts to
the New York market. The hope is that the
Maisin and the Gimi may thereby gain a source of income
that will help them resist the economic
pressure to allow the deforestation of
their rainforest lands.
This commercial voyage of the Maisin and Gimi people
was made in concert with their better-known
Asmat cousins, and it is intended that they
be read together. (The "voyage" is made by
art goods as surrogates; none of these
peoples were present.) The sheilds of the
Asmat embody the pure value of the
ethnographic as a realm apart, an entire
socius outside our contemporary economic
and political arrangements. The Asmat are
"proof" that the systems which rule our
lives and fortunes are not natural and
inevitable, that indeed the world could be
entirely otherwise than it is now. Many of
us want that in the form of a token, a
little piece of that possibility.
At the opening, guests fingered the
beautifully figured bark cloths of the Maisin
as organizers hinted darkly of homicidal
Malaysian timber barons. As the gallery is
made over into a theater of preservation,
to spend is to participate in the adventure
of resisting evil forces.
I do not at all intend to mock this effort.
Some in Greenpeace have died in the job of
protecting the little-regarded peoples of
the Pacific. I spent and glowed with self-
satisfaction. I networked and soaked up the
aura of dedicated young heroes. And I
concede at once that this effort is not
ill-conceived. To turn these things from
artifacts into products, to hasten their
commodification, seems almost necessary to
protect the habitat of human and animal
alike.
Still, I fear that when politics and business
are mixed, too often they hobble each other.
Further, the artworld is presently over-determined
as a nexus for moral and political imperatives.
Surely there is some better way of carrying
these sheilds into battle in the heart of
global capital than waging primitive
commerce.
"Ancestor Shields of the Asmat," Feb. 4-May20, 1997, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bedford Park Blvd. West, Bronx, NY 10468. By subway: take the IRT 4 or IND D to Bedford Ave. or the IND line to the Bedford Park Blvd. Station. Walk west to the campus.
ALAN MOORE is a New York critic and
art historian.
