Sunday, April 5, 2009

singing islands

What is a singing island?

A name taken mostly from Phil Elverum's (The Microphones) Song Islands album.

It is also a piece of a Korewori proverb I read in my favorite section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New Galleries for Oceanic Art is behind Egypt, and also faces Central Park. It is filled with wooden canoes, shields, and statues of primordial ancestors from Polynesia, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea. All of the bodies of the statues are tall and thin, filled with holes, and covered with mythological animals and painted abstract designs. I am going to try and go back this week and find the quote I read about the 'songs of the islands' and take pictures of the ceiling. The center of the ceiling is covered with a tide of wooden panels that were once part of a ceremonial house.



Canoe Prow
19th–early 20th century
Middle Sepik, Iatmul
Papua New Guinea, Middle Sepik River
Wood, cowrie shells
L: 71 1/2 in. (181.6 cm)
The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1955
1978.412.705

"Crocodiles play a central role in the art and culture of the Iatmul people. According to one Iatmul creation account, an ancestral crocodile was responsible for forming the land. In the beginning, the earth was covered by a primordial ocean, into whose depths the crocodile dived. Reaching the bottom, it brought up on its back a load of mud, which became an island when it surfaced. From that island, the land grew and hardened, but it continues to rest on the back of the ancestral crocodile, which occasionally moves, causing earthquakes. Both now and in the past, the prows of most sizeable canoes are carved, as here, in the form of a crocodile. The scale of the present work indicates that it probably adorned a large war canoe, capable of holding from fifteen to twentyfive men. These large canoes, hollowed from a single massive log, were also used for trading and fishing expeditions. Although canoes are no longer used in warfare, contemporary Iatmul carvers continue to make large examples for use in trade and general transportation."



It could also be a moment like lighting a cigarette from a stove burner while it is still in your mouth and simultaneously catching your hair on fire and then laughing about it with your neighbor who did the same thing.




Now you're gone, I won't fall, fall in the fire
Oh no, I am lacking, I want what I see