Alastair Sooke
The Royal Academy’s Oceania is a five-star ‘splash’ hit
Agreat cascading tidal wave of blue greets visitors to the Royal Academy’s latest exhibition, the first ever survey of Oceanic art held in Britain.
This blue tsunami is an enormous ultramarine embroidered textile, 36ft long, dominating the central octagonal hall at Burlington House. Suspended high above our heads, it flows down before “splashing” on to the ground, its chevron-like pattern evoking the rippling surface of the sea.
This dazzling “textile drop” is an artwork by Mata Aho, a collective of four Maori women inspired by traditional Polynesian textile art. It is also a warning. Woven out of pieces of ordinary tarpaulin, it offers a frightening vision of a plastic ocean, clogged with human junk, threatening to overwhelm us as sea levels continue to rise. Mata Aho’s evocation of the sea is a fitting start for the RA’S show thematically, because it is, of course, the ocean that connects the thousands of islands of the Pacific, from New Guinea to New Zealand, Fiji to Kiribati, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) to Hawaii.
There are 190 diverse objects in this ambitious, astonishing exhibition, which marks the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s departure from Plymouth on HMS Endeavour on the first of three voyages to the Pacific between 1768 and 1780.
Many of the exhibits at the RA are spectacular. Some are 500 years old. All, though, remind us of the strong links that bind together the far-flung peoples of the Pacific. These links astonished Cook, and now we too are invited to marvel at this scattered civilisation for ourselves.
Traditionally, exhibitions of Oceanic art group objects according to three regions invented by Europeans: Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia. The RA adopts a different approach, recasting the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, which covers more than one third of the Earth’s surface, as not a void on a map but the exhibition’s principal “theme”. Here, its waters are a sort of conduit, facilitating communication and cross-fertilisation between seafaring peoples.
A pair of objects in the first gallery vividly illustrates the point. Both are wooden sculptures. One dates from the 14th century, and, until now, has never been exhibited outside New Zealand. The fascinating thing about it is the squat male god or ancestor at its centre, because he does not resemble historical Maori art, but rather the Tahitian sculpture displayed alongside. This depicts two (female) figures that, with their stumpy anatomy, triangular faces, and frontal poses, look remarkably similar. It dates from the turn of the 18th century, and was acquired by Cook in 1769.
How did two artists working more than three centuries and 2,650 miles apart produce such complementary, kindred-spirit imagery? The answer is that their worlds were connected by sea-going boats, as we discover in the impressive opening gallery. Devoted to the theme of “voyaging”, this room forms one of the high points of the show. Here is all the paraphernalia for successfully navigating, profiting from, and living in sympathy with the ocean: fishing canoes and ritual canoes, weather charms and navigation charts, paddles and pearl-shell fishhooks, prows carved to resemble crocodiles, intricately decorated splashboards.
I was smitten by a painted wooden vessel from c 1900, dug from the trunk of a breadfruit tree on a small island north of New Guinea, with an outrigger used for shark-fishing. As streamlined as a torpedo, it is as sleek as anything by Brancusi; almost a modernist sculpture in its own right. At either end, two tapering, antennaelike pieces of wood stand delicately to attention, evoking a shark’s tail or fins.
Likewise, the 19th-century “stick charts” suggest the extraordinary navigational expertise of the Marshall Islanders. Complex arrangements of shells and strips of wood, bound together with fibre, these charts record patterns in the ocean’s swell and the movement of stars and are as delicate as a wind-chime.
As the exhibition proceeds, some objects will be familiar. The magnificent gallery devoted to ancestors and gods, for instance, contains a couple of well-known deities from the British Museum. The next gallery contains two Hawaiian feathered god images, also from the BM, which are both frightening and faintly comical.
For the most part, though, Oceania will ignite your imagination. Here is a helmet fashioned from the spiny skin of a porcupine fish, alongside a suit of armour made from plaited coconut fibre. There is an unforgettable 18th-century costume worn by a “chief mourner”, crafted from a list of valuable materials that reads like a fantastical prose-poem, evocative of other worlds and times: tropicbird feathers, pearl-shell strips, a barkcloth turban, discs of coconut shell (some in the form of a sacred sea turtle).
Who could conceive of such fabulous things, more radical than the most outlandish creations dreamed up by Alexander Mcqueen? Too often, in dry-as-dust ethnographic museums, artefacts like this linger half-forgotten in the twilight, embarrassing reminders of our colonial, plundering past. At the RA, though, they are presented spot-lit and centre-stage – and they hit you like a revelation.
Moreover, Oceania does not shy away from the interactions between Islanders and Europeans from the 18th century onwards. Towards the end, the exhibition tackles this important part of the story with sensitivity. We are presented not with a simplistic tale of avaricious Europeans despoiling “paradise”, but a more complex narrative of two-way encounters between the Pacific and the West.
Five years in the making, Oceania is a blast of a show, attesting to the versatility and ingenuity of the human imagination. You will have your own favourite exhibit. Look out, though, for mine: a 20th-century “orator’s stool” from New Guinea, with red and white concentric rings emanating from yellow eyes. Those rings reminded me of a Western cartoonist drawing a hypnotist’s irresistible stare. I defy you to hold this Oceanic ancestor’s gaze and not fall, mesmerised, under his spell.
‘How did artists more than three centuries and 2,650 miles apart produce such kindred-spirit imagery?’
From Sat until Dec 10. Details: 020 7300 8090