Sacred Treasures of the Maoris

By Patricia Blake

A rare exhibit of primitive carvings comes to the U.S.

It was the most unusual opening in the 114-year history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The ceremony began at the unaccustomed hour of 6:32 a.m. on the vast expanse of steps fronting New York City's most venerable art institution. There, five Maori women lifted their voices in unison with the rising sun and intoned the karanga, a ritual call of welcome. Instantly, a booming responsive chant was heard to echo from a block up Fifth Avenue, where a group of Maori tribesmen had forgathered. Then up the steps they came: 90 Maori dignitaries, some I with albatross feathers in their hair and tasseled white cloaks draped over their business suits. Leading the procession were two nearly naked warriors who stuck out their tongues and brandished their spears at evil spirits.

When the visitors from New Zealand reached the museum entrance, they touched noses, Maori-style, with their waiting American hosts. These included J. Richardson Dilworth, the Metropolitan's chairman, and officials of the American Federation of Arts, which organized the exhibit of Maori sculpture, and the Mobil Corp.. which helped pay for it. The ceremony ended with a tour of the show by tribesmen, who paused and prayed before each major piece of sculpture and offered incantations.

The ritual was not a photo opportunity staged for the occasion. It was required, said Maori leaders, to lift the tapu, or religious restrictions, from the exhibit's 174 pieces, which the New Zealanders believe are imbued with the living spirits of their ancestors. After the Metropolitan show closes Jan. 6, Maori leaders will travel abroad once more to conduct tapu-lifting rites when the exhibit opens at the St. Louis Art Museum in February and the M.H, de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco in July.

Until the Metropolitan's epochal show, the religious art could be viewed only in widely scattered New Zealand museums that hold individual pieces in trust for their Maori owners. The decade-long effort by the museum's chairman of primitive art, Douglas Newton, to bring the work to the U.S. was conspicuously worthwhile. For Americans, a walk through the Metropolitan's exhibit is a voyage of discovery, as astonishing as the sight of Maori art must have been in 1769, when Captain James Cook's Endeavour first touched New Zealand's shore. When the ship's artist, Sydney Parkinson, went inland, he marveled at the Maoris' "particular taste for carving."

As Parkinson noted, the means used to carve were primitive, but the effect was wondrously sophisticated. What he failed to divine was the reason: carving has been regarded as a sacred occupation since A.D. 900, when the Maoris first sailed in their canoes from other Polynesian islands to the place they called "the land of the long white cloud." To create the taonga whakairo, or decorated treasures prized by the Maoris, a sculptor was expected to combine artistic skill with such qualities as leadership, courage, religious learning and generosity. So revered was the artist that he worked surrounded by student acolytes and apprentices, while women, who were regarded as inferior beings, were prohibited from watching him in the act of creation.

Besides decorating utilitarian objects of all kinds with the characteristic Maori spiral, the master sculptors devoted themselves to carving monumental male figures that represented their ancestors. These wooden sculptures, often colored in red ocher, topped the gables and lintels of Maori houses. Others served as posts in palisades or as rods holding up the ridge-poles of roofs. The most impressive figures straddled the narrow gateways leading to storage houses or fortified villages.

Even for the uninitiated viewer, the ancestral figures truly project the qualities the Maoris attribute to them: ihi (power), wehi (fear) and wana (authority). Often as grotesque as gargoyles, the heads are covered with the distinctive Maori designs used as tattoos. The slanty, abalone-shell eyes are as impenetrable as mirrors. Sometimes a broad-based tongue juts out in the Maori gesture of raging self-assertion. The broad, lumpy body may be scrunched down in the warrior's crouch, or, ready to spring, the fighter may hold a paddle-shaped club designed to strike a blow at an enemy's temple and then to lift off the top of his skull.

Dominating the show by its size (16 ft. 5 1/2 in.) and superabundance of ihi, wehi and wana is the figure that once served as the gateway of Pukeroa pa, a fortified village. Though it is difficult to date most Maori sculpture precisely, this piece was made in the mid-19th century. Less fierce than similar gateway figures, the figure still casts a gaze threatening enough to intimidate any potential thief prowling through the Maori show.

Sadly, however, the proud masculine presence of the figure from Pukeroa pa has been diminished by the intervention of 19th century missionaries. The clerics wanted the genitalia removed from Maori sculptures. Many ancestral figures remained demonstrably unscathed, but others were particularly hard hit, like the celebrated Kahungunu, who was known throughout his tribe for the size of his sexual equipment. At the Metropolitan, he may be seen pointing pridefully to the tip of his long-vanished penis.

The most aggressive figures were carved on waka tupapaku, or wooden burial chests that Maori mourners upended in caves to scare off intruders. As cannily lit by the Metropolitan, the waka tupapaku from North Island glowers in the shadows with unearthly menace. But terror is not the only emotion the piece is intended to convey. The figure's stylized arms calmly repose upon its protuberant belly, as if to reassure the person whose bones are contained within.

The Maori master carvers did not always create objects of massive size or religious significance. They could show a unique touch with such humble household necessities as the fishhook. The curve of the shank was obtained by training a branch of a living tree. When the hook was to be used by a man of high rank, it was topped with a dainty head. The deadliest of the Maori weapons, the sharp-sided club used in hand-to-hand fighting, is of similarly graceful design. Both categories of artwork bear an eerie resemblance to the 3000 B.C. figurines from the Cycladic Islands in the Aegean.

Though Americans have reason to be grateful to the Maoris for entrusting their sacred treasures to the care of foreign museums, the tribesmen themselves take scarcely any credit for the marvels wrought by their artists over a thousand years. One traditional Maori poet declares, "The authority, the awe, the divine and the artistry,/ I inherited these gifts from my ancestors.'' --By Patricia Blake