For the love of art

Some people are calling this week’s gathering of the various members of the Pacific Arts Association a ‘conference’ or a ‘symposium’. Michael Gunn refers to it as a ‘swarm’.
“In a certain way, we’re a type of swarm,” said Gunn, the senior curator for Pacific Art at the National Gallery of Australia. “We migrate to a different location every three years and we mate with the local people, in an artistic sense. We come together, we mingle: it is, in a sense, a mating ritual.”
What each side is left with after this love-in, Gunn said, is a new child, a new creation, which may be something as simple as a new way of thinking.
“It will occur on both sides,” he said. “The people here will be left with a greater understanding of how museums think, or how the West thinks.”
Gunn was kind enough to abandon his computer in the conference’s war room at the Crown Beach to walk a reporter around the grounds, where master carver Michael Tavioni was spotted perusing an art book.
Rod Dixon, director of University of the South Pacific and a key organizer of the 10th international symposium, scurried by on his way to the bank. (“Without Rod, this wouldn’t have happened,” Gunn confided. “Rod organized everything.”).
Under a brightly-coloured marquee, Pamela Rosi narrated a PowerPoint presentation about fibre art in Papua New Guinea.
Everyone looked very serious and studious, as you’d expect from a crowd of academics, scholars and museum curators.
“What’s happening here is a dynamic between Western museum people and academics who look at the role of art in society, who look at art in terms of where it fits in with other art traditions around the world,” Gunn explained. “But also we’re responsible for maintaining the art, for keeping it forever. We don’t destroy the artworks: we honour them. We treat them like ambassadors. For us, that’s really important. When you treat an art object as an ambassador for its people, you’re raising the status of the people as well. We’re trying to raise the status of the people (in the Cook Islands).”
If that all sounds a bit, well, dry, Gunn emphasized there are benefits to be gained by local artists attending the symposium.
“They get exposure to the outside world,” he said. “There are curators from art museums and more general museums here from all over the world. Almost all the Western people who work in museums and have come here for this conference, we all, at some point, represent Polynesian art. We show it in our galleries and we will now show it having been here. We sat down with Cook Islands people and talked with them. They’ve told us their view and it makes much more sense than the view we come up with.”
Gunn said the curators will take that Cook Islands perspective with them when they return to their museums, where examples of Cook Islands arts and artefacts dating back to the arrival of the first missionaries are on display for all mankind to see.
“We will go back, having heard their view, and when we come to writing a book about these pieces, we will have this view,” he said. “So even though the artwork may not come back here, when it’s shown to the world, it will have a more accurate expression associated with it. And it will be an expression that came from people like Michael Tavioni. Their voices will be carried through us.”

By John Ireland

Herald Issue 463 10 June
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