French cringe ast images of colonial past

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.