The Materiality of Contemporary Art in Vanuatu

Abstract

Close examination of material forms and the social relations within which they are embedded soon reveals that things have the capability to affect the way people think. Here, I focus on the recent development of the category of contemporary art in Vanuatu, a nation comprising over 70 inhabited islands in the south-western Pacific ocean. Contemporary art in Vanuatu is a local classification that draws on both traditional objects and iconographies to create new objects in new media, thus making fundamental material distinctions between image and object, traditionalism and contemporaneity. Appropriating Gell’s invocation to practise ‘methodological philistinism’, I came to realize during fieldwork, that artworks as well as artists were able to effect material negotiations between often competing rhetorical distinctions. In this way, the material distinctions made on the sites of objects categorized as ‘art’ reflect a series of cross-cultural encounters and exchanges. Here, understanding the materiality of art objects themselves, and the material concerns of their producers allows the anthropologist to disentangle complex sets of cultural classifications and values.