Art in Oceania

The visual art and architecture of native Oceania, includes media such as sculpture, pottery, rock art, basketry and personal decoration. In these societies, art and architecture have often been closely connected, for example, storehouses and meetinghouses have been decorated with beautiful carvings, and so they are presented together here.

Up until the 16th and 17th centuries when European cultures arrived upon the scene, Oceanic cultures maintained various types of Neolithic technology. One exception was in the northwest of New Guinea, where the people living around Geelvink Bay (Teluk Cenderawasih) traded very small quantities of metal from the Indonesians of the Moluccas (Maluku). The art of forging was carefully guarded, almost as a cult secret; some tools were traded but only in amounts far too small to have made much impact on normal working conditions.

Throughout the rest of Melanesia and in Polynesia and Micronesia, the basic tool remained the stone blade, which was hafted as an adze or an axe, and at times interchangeably as both. Tridacna shell was sometimes used as blades in the parts of Oceania where stone was in short supply, including Micronesia and the Solomon Islands. When obsidian became available, it was chipped into blades for use as both weapons and tools. Other working materials included bamboo and bivalve shells, which allow extremely sharp edges. Some fine cutting and engraving was performed with unhafted boar tusks or with hafted shark and rodent teeth. Animal bones served as gouges, awls, and needles. All these tools were employed in working wood, which with only rare exceptions was the main medium used throughout Oceania.

Clay was also used, in the main for sculptures, for some small musical instruments (whistles), and for pottery in Melanesia and New Guinea. The making of pottery vessels was almost exclusively women’s work, apart from in several areas in New Guinea and the northern Solomons. The usual method involved spiral coiling of rolls of clay. The decorating of the pot was the work of men.

Some working of shell and turtle shell was done with simple drilling and abrading tools. The carving of stone, although obviously presenting far more difficult and time-consuming problems than wood, was undertaken remarkably often and occurred throughout the Pacific Islands; hammering, pecking, and polishing were the main methods. Even so resistant a material as greenstone was mastered by grinding with abrasives.

Paint and painting were thought to animate sculpture, at times literally, in religiosymbolic terms, as paint was considered to have magical, vivifying powers. Paints were usually ochres, with other vegetable-derived pigments. Water was the usual medium, occasionally added to with sap. Brushes were created from the fibrous ends of chewed or frayed sticks, small feather bundles, pieces of wood, and sometimes the most elementary applicator of all, the finger. Apart from sculpture, the surfaces used for painting were rock faces, bark, and tapa (cloth made from worked bark). Rock painting was very common in Australia, where panels of bark were also used. In Melanesia, paintings were made mainly on sago-palm leaves and sheets of tapa cloth. In Polynesia the women manufactured great quantities of tapa, which were then decorated with traditional designs using vegetable dyes. Some of the techniques they used included painting, stenciling with leaf templates, rubbing over relief-design tables, stamping, and printing with carved bamboo rollers.

The only areas where weaving was practiced were the Caroline Islands, the Polynesian outlying islands east of the Solomon Islands, some of the Santa Cruz Islands, parts of Vanuatu, the Saint Matthias Group (northwest of New Ireland), and several places on the northern coast of Irian Jaya. Spinning was unknown; instead of yarn or thread, strips of banana fibre were used on a simple backstrap loom. Weaving was a woman’s craft in the Caroline and Saint Matthias islands but was practiced by men elsewhere. A form of “finger weaving,” as in net making, was used by Maori women in creating textiles from flax fibres.

The architecture of the Pacific Islands was varied and occasionally large in scale. Buildings reflected the structure and preoccupations of the cultures that constructed them, with considerable symbolic detail. Technically, most buildings in Oceania were no more than simple assemblages of poles held together with cane lashings; only in the Caroline Islands were complex methods of joining and pegging known.

Oceanic artists’ quest for media was completely opportunistic; they regarded almost anything from the lavish natural world that surrounded them as potentially usable. The marine world provided shells of all kinds, particularly conus, cowrie, and nassa shells. Birds gave down, beaks, and plumes (those of the birds of paradise were especially prized); animals provided teeth, tusks, and skins; insects supplied wonderfully brilliant wing cases. The vegetable world was drawn upon for flowers, leaves, and fibres. The gathering of such materials into single objects was uncommon in Polynesia and Micronesia, but the practice was typical of Australian and Melanesian styles, and added brilliantly to their more spectacular effects. The most basic medium of all was the human body, which allowed for both removable and permanent decorations, including scarification, enhanced by treatment to raise keloid welts in New Guinea, and tattooing with needles and pigments elsewhere.

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