French cringe ast images of colonial past

Kunang Helmi-Picard, Contributor, Paris

The fall in France this year spotlighted the interest shown here for Pacific and Indonesian art. Asian art is also the focus of the Asian Art Week which started on Nov. 7 in Paris.

In September the director of the Museum for African, Oceanic and American Indian Art in Marseille in southern France announced the purchase of the Barbier-Muller collection of over 50 Indonesian sculptures.

This was a welcome follow-up to the show Messages de Pierre with its choice of Austronesian art from the Indonesian archipelago.

The museum in Marseille was founded in 1992 and partially occupies the architecturally imposing building Centre de la Vieille Charite on a site overlooking the harbor. Since its inception the museum has been slowly acquiring new collections to complete its first donation, a legacy of Pierre Guerre.

Although not generally a feature of the average tourist itinerary, the port city of Marseille deserves a visit -- and now if only to view the collection of statues from the Indonesian archipelago.

In Paris, the splendid art deco premises of the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts -- formerly Musee des Colonies -- has always provided an appropriate background to exhibitions dealing with the Pacific or Africa.

Enormous carvings on the outside and giant frescoes inside illustrate the French perception of the peoples and habitat of the Pacific and Africa when the museum was built in 1931 for the Colonial Exhibition.

The impressive tiled floors of the main hall led those invited to the recent opening of Cannibals and Vahines -- Imagery of the South Seas, accompanied by the soothing sound of ukulele music by a trio in flowery Hawaiian style shirts. But many Europeans were clearly embarrassed when they realized how strangely their ancestors from the early 19th century viewed Oceanic people.

Nowadays the book illustrations and travel descriptions of great explorers of the Pacific Ocean seem quaint and unbelievably naive, whether in English, French or German. The adventure fiction of Jules Verne figures prominently among the books on show, besides the homage to two great French navigators, Bougainville (1729-1811) and La Perouse (1741-1788).

Visitors, obviously from the former French colonies, appeared highly sophisticated and very remote from the emblematic images of gruesome cannibals or appealing Tahitian vahines (roughly translated as temptresses), but they too were equally fascinated by the absurd imagery, the acutely ethnocentric view of the other. The plethora of these images reflect the two great questions then facing the new science of anthropology: race and social progress.

The exhibition curated by Roger Boulay and Germain Viatte attempts to treat eight themes with a wonderful, but bewildering variety of objects like carvings and tourist souvenirs, books, images including postcards, film footage and music. The themes are the following:

* the cannibal -- the archetypal savage, terrifying to look at. A journey to hell -- shipwrecked in the Pacific the castaway uses all his cunning and trickery to survive among the savages.

* the vahine -- the archetype of the loose woman which at the same time feeds the myth of the noble savage and the sweet life.

* journey to Eden -- the traveler is welcomed into enchanting places by gentle people who do not have to work because nature provides for their needs.

* the antipodes -- these were the countries where people were believed to live upside down, a recurrent theme in school books, these were the reverse side of civilization and morality.

* the gates of the galaxy -- the ideal place to encounter aliens.

* the white man "gone native" -- frequently the image of the tattooed sailors and castaways turning into tribal chiefs appears in popular writings and imagery.

* the native "gone white" -- this figure justified the civilizing mission of the West and is the reverse of the previous figure.

Unfortunately there is a visible lack of a coherent itinerary to the show, so that the visitor is left to wander around the displays without any notion why these themes were chosen to classify the imagery.

The two film booths proved very popular, with extracts of such films as Chez les sauvage du Pacifique (1930) by Martina and Osa Johnson or Chez les mangeurs d'hommes (1928) by Andre-Paul Antoine and Roger Lugeon.

Very amusing was the collection of Bounty coconut chocolate advertising films and posters spanning 50 years until the present. Ironically, as one of the sponsors of the show which aims at proving how wrong this 19th century imagery had been, Bounty still plays upon the image of the "journey to Eden" theme to sell their immensely popular chocolate bars wrapped in dark blue and white paper.

Direct access to the rooms displaying Oceanic and Australian aboriginal art gives visitors an opportunity to compare and contrast stereotypes shown in the exhibition with ancient and contemporary art produced by Oceanic peoples. Various activities for children such as workshops, story telling and role playing should help to work on stereotypes, preconceived ideas and prejudices and shed light on the stirrings of racism.

Unfortunately the fate of the magnificent Museum of African and Oceanic Arts at the Porte Dorie in Paris has yet to be decided by the French cultural authorities. Meanwhile, construction of the new Musee des Arts et Civilisations is under way at the Quai Branly, next to the Eiffel Tower.

Visitors to Paris should take this opportunity to view a thought-provoking show until the end of February, and admire a stunning venue which may not be open to the general public much longer.