For the Love of Abelam Art For the Love of Abelam Art By Michael Hamson I have a deep gratitude and appreciation for the Abelam people and their art. I credit the vitality of their culture, the continued relevance of their art, and their graciousness and willingness to share it on my first trip to Papua New Guinea in 1994 for lighting the fire that ultimately led me to become an Oceanic art dealer. It all started with me haplessly standing by the side of the road with a surfboard by my side in Wewak one Sunday morning as I waited for hours for a bus that never came to take me down the coast to a beach I had heard about. Finally, a white Land Cruiser pulled up to kindly let me know the public transport really does not run on Sundays. The driver was an American biologist working for the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research—based in Maprik. As I was soon to find out, Maprik is the center of Abelam territory. Map of Abelam area The Abelam live on either side of about a 20- to 25-kilometer stretch of the Wewak to Lumi highway from Wingei in the east to right before Balif Junction in the west. The Prince Alexander Mountains are to their north with many Abelam villages well up on its southern slopes. To the south the area flattens to rolling hills and kunai grass plains (fig. 3) all the way into the Sawos area and eventually to the Sepik River—from which most historians agree was where the Abelam originated. Early morning mist in the Abelam area The first European in the Abelam territory was the German anthropologist Richard Thurnwald (see Provenance) in 1913 as he traveled north from the Sepik to the coast. After that, very little contact occurred until gold was discovered near Maprik in 1937. Thurnwald and his companions during a trip into the interior of Kaiser Wihelmsland VIII 8566, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preuβischer Kulturbesitz Maprik is now a small town located in the northwest corner of the Abelam territory and serves as the administrative center. When I arrived there in 1994 it seemed a bit past its prime but still bustling with crowds of people in from the surrounding villages to sell produce and/or buy a few essentials like rice, tinned fish, kerosene, salt, or a cold drink from the large trade stores. Me with Peter Yipimi, 1994. My newfound friendship with the American biologist Phil Hyun was quite fortunate. Not only was Phil based at the laboratory in the center of Abelam territory, he knew many local men who spoke some English and was currently conducting research in many of the remote villages. I was immediately put into the hands of Peter Yipimi of Apangai village. Peter was the perfect guide. Not only was he a fully initiated man who was well known and respected in the area, but he was also well versed in the artifact trade, having been one of the lead negotiators to sell the contents of his hamlet’s ceremonial house, korombo, to Dirk Smidt and Noel McGuigan for the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden just seven years prior, in 1987. Abelam ceremonial house. Photo Michael Hamson 1994 What I found with Peter was extraordinary. Not that I stumbled upon any masterpieces of Abelam art, nor would I have been able to recognize them at the time if I had. But what I was introduced to, with Peter’s help, was everyday Abelam village life. Every morning Phil would drop Peter and me off at some footpath by the side of the road that led into the bush to some unseen village. With Peter as my entrée, we spent day after day visiting out-of-the-way villages, speaking with the old men, and looking at artifacts. What I encountered were people going about their daily lives, working in the gardens, repairing their houses, or strategizing their next yam exchange. Intermingled within this routine were the objects I had come to see—yam masks being repainted, drums readily brought out and beaten, old spears brandished like the old days, etc. It was utterly refreshing to witness tribal art still in place and used as an essential part of everyday existence. Sure, these villagers had the occasional tourist stumble through their lives and knew that some people regularly bought artifacts, but that had little bearing on how they conceived of their art. Abelam ceremonial house. Photo Michael Hamson late 1990s. The evenings found Peter and me racing along the narrow paths toward the nearest car road hoping to hitch a ride on whatever vehicle rumbled past back into Maprik town. Exhausted and often with a couple of artifacts in tow, Peter would take the time to explain where we had gone, whom we had met, and what the objects meant to the people we had bought them from. Over that first few weeks in the Abelam area I was able to visit a great number of villages and was always graciously welcomed and my questions patiently answered. Later in that initial trip to Papua New Guinea, I ended up going to the Sepik River and New Ireland, but that was nothing compared to what I had experienced with the Abelam. Me being gifted a prized long yam Thus, over the years I spent more and more time there. Because of the excitement I felt coming into contact with the Abelam people and their art, I shifted the focus of my life. I made my way back to Papua New Guinea as frequently as possible. I entered the graduate program in African and Oceanic art history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, later earning a master’s degree with a thesis on Abelam yam masks. Shortly thereafter I became a full-time Oceanic art dealer specializing in the art of New Guinea. All in all, over the next fifteen years, I made 46 extended trips to Papua New Guinea and spent a lot of that in the Abelam area. Of the 100-plus Abelam villages in existence, I visited most of them multiple times and spent the night in dozens, adding up to many months in situ. Me in Sunahu village. Photo Jeff Johnson 1997 The experience I gained was not that of an anthropologist who spends years within a given village, establishing long-term relationships, and really digging deep into the nuances of the culture. Compared to that, my encounters could be considered somewhat superficial. Yet, they were not. Time and time again, in village after village, by the light of the kerosene lamp, sitting on the veranda of someone’s house, the people I met, the conversations I had, and the stories I heard were real. An Abelam big man dressed for a yam display The old men were open and happy to have a visitor from California interested in their art and eager to hear their stories. The elders seemed a bit frustrated with the young people in the village who cared only about town, beer, and the latest action movies pirated at the video stores in Maprik or Wewak. So they took advantage of my willing ear and, I believe, honestly explained the artifacts I was interested in. After years of such evenings, in villages across the full width and breadth of the Abelam region, what developed was not a knowledge miles deep but instead a broad, general, and complete understanding of how certain objects were used and considered throughout the area. Me speaking with some Abelam big men—my field assistant Alois Bisik is standing in the pink shirt at the right. For a thorough and exact account of Abelam culture, I had to turn to the good work of the early anthropologists. The first was the American Phyllis Kaberry, who in 1939/40 based herself in Kalabu village. Her stay, coming just two years after significant contact with the West, gave Kaberry an excellent opportunity to record Abelam customs and social organization. She found that for purposes of initiation, ceremonial life, and yam exchanges, the Abelam split themselves into two ara, with each man having a life-long partner in the opposing ara known as a tchambera. Tchambera competitively exchange yams with each other and are responsible for initiating their opposite’s sons. Phyllis Kaberry Abelam villages normally number between 100 and 600 inhabitants and are composed of several hamlets each, at least in Kaberry’s time, with a ceremonial house, korombo, the iconic, tall, wedge-shaped structures with elaborately painted façades reaching up to 80 feet in height. Across the façade is a long wooden lintel, tikit, normally composed of a row of ancestral spirit faces. Inside is a wide-open space that is compartmentalized during male initiation to create separate rooms where specific scenes with brightly painted wooden sculptures are staged. In normal circumstances the interior of the korombo is cool and dark with a few large slit-gong garamut drums about, some spears propped up along the side, a bapa kumbu helmet mask sitting dustily in a corner, and, of course, several large wooden figures, nggwallndu, lying in stately slumber. Abelam ceremonial house, korombo Two large Nggwalndu ancestral figures, photo Michael Hamson, early 2000s. In front of the ceremonial house is a large open area called the amei, used for public activities such as speech making (always a popular pastime), the display of long yams, and some communal portions of male initiation ceremonies. Around the amei are yam storage houses, a couple of subsidiary buildings related to the korombo, and a few residences. The rest of the family houses tail off along the paths leading to and from the amei. During the day the village is basically deserted save for a few very old people and a couple of pods of the youngest kids, as most everyone else is out in the gardens until dusk. Starting in the late afternoon people come streaming back—men carrying logs used for house building, women with string bags, billums, hanging on their backs filled with firewood or garden produce, young girls with dinged-up aluminum pots full of drinking water, and small boys dragging the large bush knives in the dirt behind them. Long yams waiting to be decorated and displayed For all my time in the Abelam area, the objects I was most successful in collecting were yam masks and cassowary bone daggers. Both object types were generally small, beautifully done, and something the people had held onto despite the intensive missionary activity of the previous 50 years. Yam masks are just one component of decoration that transforms the ritually grown long yam into the ancestral spirit, ngwallndu, that enabled its massive growth. The small masks are most often made from what appears to be cane but is actually the outer layer of a Lygodium vine. The technique used is actually coiling and not the commonly assumed weaving or plaiting. Besides these cane yam masks there are styles made from the extremely light balsawood (primarily in the Wosera) and hardwood examples from the central and eastern Abelam areas. Old man from the Wosera with some fine old yam masks In the Oceanic art world, yam masks have always been considered well down the traditional art hierarchy—with figurative sculpture always at the top and ritual dance masks a distant second. Because yam masks have always seemed fairly available and their light, cane construction did not have the gravitas of other genres of tribal art, this led to their being somewhat marginalized in the market. In the field, with my technique of walking place to place well off any dirt roads, I was able to visit small, out-of-the-way hamlets often overlooked by other automobile-based artifact dealers. As such, I was able to acquire some outstanding yam masks over the years. You cannot be deterred by the dust and water residue that might cover an otherwise beautiful yam mask. When considering yam masks I look for tightness of construction, quality of form and composition, and, most importantly, field use—as evidenced by layers of pigments. I stress field use because that is the truest indicator of cultural relevance and suitability. If the object has extensive signs of field use, then it has been repeatedly deemed worthy by the people who made it. Many of the reasons I collected yam masks also hold true for cassowary bone daggers. Among the Abelam many men still held onto their bone daggers from generations past. They are small, beautiful, and durable—and still used as weapons—and are worn on the upper arm as personal decoration and are handy in the garden and for house building. The ancestral motifs carved onto their surfaces are often tiny masterpieces of Abelam graphic design. One of the earliest enthusiasts of this art form was Douglas Newton, former director of the Museum of Primitive Art and chairman of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Newton’s 1990 exhibition, New Guinea Bone Carvings, was the first serious showcase of these wonderful objects. Sunahu man with superb cassowary bone dagger The strength and viability of a culture can be measured by its longevity and its outside influence. This holds true for the Abelam, as one can see from the number of objects of neighboring cultures that clearly show Abelam stylistic traits. Some of the best wooden yam masks, in my opinion, actually come from the Bukie culture to the northeast of the Abelam. Some exceptional cane yam masks come from the Ilahita Arapesh to the Abelam’s west. A number of superb cassowary bone daggers originate in the Sunahu villages of the Kwanga culture to the southwest of the Abelam. Anthony Forge One of the few anthropologists who did study New Guinea art was the late Anthony Forge (see Provenance). In a couple of influential essays, he tried to understand the way art communicated among the Abelam. He posited that art was its own form of communication that did not rely on verbal cues to construct its meaning. It was a groundbreaking way of looking at tribal art. Not only was Forge a prominent anthropologist, he was also a serious field collector who really appreciated the object for what it was. While Papua New Guinea has been subject to a fair share of anthropological research, very little of it has focused on the art. There are many interesting and exact tomes collectors can muscle through to learn the specifics on any number of New Guinea cultures. However, the objects those cultures produced, no matter how beautiful and accomplished, are often mentioned as an afterthought—thus Oceanic art enthusiasts are nearly always left a bit wanting. As such, it is sometimes up to an art dealer like myself to fill in the gaps and to not only present the best objects available, but to provide some basic, understandable cultural context. Group of Abelam, Kwanga and Bukie cassowary bone daggers, Wewak, PNG. Photo Michael Hamson 2004. With decades of experience from handling thousands of Abelam objects I have a profound appreciation of their art. Of course, this is my personal aesthetic that has been honed, some might say jaded, by decades of field experience and tempered by the harsh realities of the Oceanic art market. That being said, a beautiful object with significant age and ritual use is one that is appreciated amongst the Abelam as well. To train my local field assistants, we would meet on the veranda of my house in Wewak, where I would lay out a group of pieces we had recently collected, for example, cassowary bone daggers. I would then go from person to person asking them to pick the ten best, ranking them from one to ten. I would then ask them to explain their choices. At the end I would pick my own top ten and describe my thought process and what I know the Western art market appreciates and values. Normally all of us had the same six or seven in our top ten. If a dagger was beautifully carved and had a worn, glossy surface that felt good in the hand, it was nearly always esteemed by all. Ancestral figure used as building material on a southern Abelam trade store. But let’s not kid ourselves. The Abelam, like all cultures, have continued to evolve and change over the decades. The people are still very religious but now that energy has shifted to Christianity. They still garden as before but incorporate cash crops such as coffee, cacao and vanilla. Very few ceremonial houses remain. Even in the 1990s and early 2000s when I was field collecting it was not unusual to find the once sacred sculptures discarded, burned, buried or even repurposed… Men digging up an old Abelam figure they had buried when hearing I was around buying artifacts. Abelam ceremonial house lintel partially burned and discarded. Let us not consider this a shame. People and societies change, new beliefs are adopted and priorities shift. We all do it and not always for the best. And while the ceremonial houses and the large ancestral figures they housed have mostly disappeared, other aspects of their traditional culture remained strong. I remember being in Maprik town during an Independence Day celebration where the local government sponsored a singsing competition for all surrounding villages to perform their traditional dances with a chance to win a 500 kina prize. It was a Saturday, and the various groups danced and sang and beat their drums one after another all day until a winner was announced that evening. The award and money were given to the eventual winner but what struck me was that all the groups never stopped performing. I was staying at a local guesthouse and could hear the singing and dancing all night long and even as I left the next morning. There was pride and fun and laughing but it was more than that, something transcendent in the repetitive sound and motion that was truly, exclusively their own. Abelam ceremonial house lintel stored underneath a residential house. My field collecting days are long over. What I am left with are these old field photos, ever more hazy memories and a strong sense of the Abelam’s pride, humor and graciousness. My connection to the culture is now exclusively felt through the artwork I encounter in my work. There is no shortage of Abelam objects in collections and a steady stream enter the market each year. Not everything is great, they too catered to the occasional tourist that ventured into their villages and of course the hungry artifact dealers. But amongst the average and mundane are the exceptional—that often, unbelievably, go unrecognized. The Abelam are a large and powerful group of people who were known and envied for their spiritual and artistic production; whose neighbors aggressively tried to mimic these practices in hopes of gleaning some of that power. Abelam art is varied in genre, materials and style and was prolifically created for untold generations. Over the centuries the world has given rise to some phenomenal artists, many of whom lived and died in the rolling hills south of the Prince Alexander Mountains, growing yams, speaking Abelam. Southern Abelam man wearing a bapa kumbu mask smoking a cigarette. Abelam Gothic
