The Affecting Presence

Paul Roscoe, an anthropologist from the University of Maine wrote an excellent article called “Of Power and Menace: Sepik Art as an Affecting Presence” and while he discusses the power of the art and its effectiveness within the individual New Guinea cultures that produced it. I think that this same power is an important and relevant characteristic of the piece that we in the West can sense and appreciate. The affecting presence that is found in the best pieces of New Guinea art is the sense that the spiritual being originally manifested by the piece still lurks within. It is a presence that can be terrifying and menacing or intentionally subdued and restrained but is always powerful. It is the quality that looks back at you and tells you that there is something beyond the wood, the cane and the paint. It is the presence that made the piece effective in its original context and continues to draw us today. It is the feeling that we are in the presence of something beyond normal, something once and always alive, something extraordinary.

Karawari River Figure, 19th century, 67” in height, published in Die Yimar Am Oberen Korowori, 1974, Fig. 42, Bruce Moore collection, San Francisco.