The Anthony Forge Memorial Lectures

2003

OUR PLACE WITHIN: FOUNDATIONS FOR A CREATIVE OCEANIA
Professor Epeli Hau'ofa
University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Epeli Hau’ofa’s address focuses on an actual attempt to carve out a space within our digitised and globalised world, that allows for free-ranging imagination and unfettered cultural creativity that are distinctive to contemporary Oceania. Among others, a main aim of this attempt is to nurture a growing sense of self-confidence necessary for greater creativity, and even more freedom to become. Cultural productivity that is creatively original is one of the best ways for the people of Oceania to attain and maintain freedom to remain themselves in an increasingly standardising and homogenising world. The lecture is accompanied by original music and a powerpoint slide show of art work produced at the Oceania Centre, University of the South Pacific. Epeli Hau’ofa is a PhD graduate of the Department of Anthropology, RSPAS, ANU, and now holds the position of Founding Director, Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture at the University of the South Pacific. His publications include an ethnography, Mekeo, a short story collection, Tales of the Tikongs, a novel, Kisses in the Nederends, and a series of three papers on the theme of A New Oceania.

2001

ART, RITUAL, AND THE CRAFTING OF ILLUSION
Professor Donald Tuzin
University of California, San Diego

Inspired by Anthony Forge’s important insights into the nature of Abelam ritual art, this lecture explores further the ineffable component of artistic expression and its role in magico-religious apprehension. Comparative evidence from New Guinea and Australia, together with ideas drawn from art theory, the philosophy of art, and studies of sensory perception, suggest that the crafting of illusion (visual or otherwise) is what engenders art’s sovereign association with the supernatural. Art disrupts the certainty of appearances and hints at their insufficiency, thereby momentarily calling the boundaries of the self into question. These conditions invite the pseudo-perception of a palpable, but invisible, presence - a derivative illusion, one that is highly useful to ritual activity and religious ideology. The lecture tries to explain how all of this happens.

1999

ANTHONY'S FEAST: THE GIFT IN ABELAM AESTHEICS
Diane Losche

Anthony Forge was the Foundation Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts at the ANU. He took up this appointment in January 1974 and remained in the Department until his retirement in 1991. Through a series of brilliant papers drawing on his fieldwork among the Abelam people of the Sepik region in Papua New Guinea, he almost single-handedly revitalized the anthropology of art. In this second memorial lecture, Diane Losche addresses a major theme in his work: the relationship between word and image. Focusing on the problem of what the Abelam say (or do not say) about the design elements in masculine initiation rites, she explores the relationship between what is said and the exchange relations that are involved in the ceremony. While the Abelam have no explicit way of talking about the design elements, initiation involves a constructed and aestheticized use of language. This lecture will investigate the word/image nexus from this viewpoint. Diane Losche is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. She teaches and writes on topics involving art and cultural difference and Abelam art and culture. Like Anthony Forge, she has worked among the Abelam. Diane Losche obtained her PhD from Columbia University, New York City and worked for 10 years as a curator at The Australian Museum. She is the author of The Abelam, a People of Papua New Guinea, and co-editor, with Nicholas Thomas, of Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific.

1998

The Inaugural Anthony Forge Memorial Lecture
STYLE AND MEANING: YOLNGU AND ABELAM ART COMPARED
Howard Morphy
The Australian National University

The relationship between style and meaning was arguably the central problematic of Anthony Forge's approach to the anthropology of art. He was concerned to demonstrate the relative autonomy of visual systems of communication and he believed that style was integral to the process of conveying meaning in art. In this lecture Howard argued that style has to be understood in terms of process and context perhaps more than formal properties. On occasions Yolngu and Abelam artists produce almost identical forms yet their meaning and the basis for their interpretation are fundamentally different. Howard showed how meaning is produced differently in the case of Yolngu and Abelam art and considered the implications this has for the concept of style in the anthropology of art. Howard Morphy is a Senior ARC Research Fellow at the Australian National University and Honorary Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.