紀要論文

オセアニア芸術とは何か : 王立美術アカデミー開催のオセアニア展によせて

What is Oceanic Art? Understanding the Exhibition "Oceania" at the Royal Academy of Arts

jpn

https://doi.org/10.15002/00021813

法政大学経済学部学会

86

3・4

305

329

2019-03-20

Version of Record

The aim of this paper is to examine so called Oceanic Art in a contemporary context. The exhibition “Oceania”, which was curated by two distinguished scholars, the art historian Peter Brunt and the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, was held in the Royal Academy of Arts in London from Sept.29-Dec.10, 2018. Oceania is the area containing Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia and Micronesia. Before contact with the West in the 16th century, the residents of Oceania had mastered navigation and craft-making but they had neither letters nor metal tools. Since contact, they have been involved in intercultural communication with the West, and they were gradually colonized by the end of the 19th century. Oceanic crafts and artefacts were gifted and traded to be brought to European museums as curiosities, and some European artists praised the aesthetic qualities of these exotic artefacts and called them Oceanic arts. European artists were inspired by the exotic designs and deformed styles of these Oceanic arts, which seemed original and unique from their perspective. Nevertheless, the style and design of so-called Oceanic Art had mostly been handed down from their forefathers and were connected to their religion, cosmology, and socio-cultural/socio-economic meanings. Some of the craftsmen must have had a really fine aesthetic sense but they had to follow a traditional framework to produce their crafts. Most of the artefacts in European museums have no indication of the artists’ names. Thus, while the category of ‘Oceanic Art’ was created in Europe, Oceanic artefacts occupied ambiguous ground between arts and crafts. Nevertheless, these artefacts are recently more often called ‘art’ on occasions like the “Oceania” Exhibition. As people in Oceania are likely to apply ‘art’ to their various cultural activities in order to show their pride in their own culture, some Europeans are reconsidering the concept of ‘art’, which used to be attributed to original products by talented persons, and now place art, instead, in the context of a community, culture and environment.

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