Getting answers about the Asmat

Artifacts, artwork will be on display at new visual arts center at WSU

Fri, Aug 30, 2002

By BECKY WRIGHT
Standard-Examiner staff

"I always wear dogs' teeth when I'm doing something important," he explains. "this is my tie."

And he seems comfortable in dogs' teeth -- they go with his shorts and bare feet much better than a silk tie.

The necklace is part of one of the largest collections in North America of Asmat art and artifacts. Chiaramonte has traveled the world putting the collection together.

Thanks in part to him, the Asmat people, inhabitants of the island of New Guinea, are becoming well-known for their art.

Fifty years ago, they were better known for headhunting and cannibalism. But times have changed, and so have the Asmat.

To promote a better understanding of the Asmat people, Chiaramonte is putting their artwork in the spotlight with an exhibit in Weber State University's new Ethel Wattis Kimball Visual Arts Center in Ogden.

"A Spellbound Vision -- Viewing Asmat Art Through the Eyes of the Western Contemporary Artist" features Asmat art from Chiaramonte's collection, displayed with contemporary art inspired by the work of Asmat artisans.

Inspiration hits

Chiaramonte, a resident of Midvale, used to live a silk tie kind of life.

He came to Utah as a Certified Public Accountant, sent, he said, to take care of a corporate turnaround. While he did have some adventures in business -- "I fired Arthur Andersen in 1994 for doing what he did at Enron this year," he claims -- he finally decided that he didn't have the stomach for it anymore.

"I figured if I was going to deal with cannibals, I was going to deal with real cannibals."

Chiaramonte's interest in the Asmat started 20 years ago during a trip to Maui, where he saw some tribal art in the warehouse of a man who had been a missionary in New Guinea.

"I became captivated by it, not because I had any background in it, or knew necessarily what I was looking at. It just inspired me," Chiaramonte said.

Following his natural curiosity about people and cultures, he began planning trips in search of information about the Asmat.

"Because there's been nobody in this country who could be addressed as an expert in this art, and consequently nobody I could ask my questions, I sort of set out to answer them myself, and in turn answer anybody else's along the way," he said.

Not satisfied with trips to museums, Chiaramonte organized an expedition and went directly to New Guinea.

"I realized that the Asmat are probably the best woodcarvers in the world that are still doing a traditional art form in the traditional way -- but they're still alive and doing it, you know. It's not like we're collecting something that was made by people who died out a century ago," he said.

The Rockefeller story

Chiaramonte found the Asmat people still largely untouched by the outside world. The island was closed to most visitors from the early 1960s until 1991, he said, when a limited number were allowed in.

In 1961, 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller, led an expedition up the coast of New Guinea. High seas capsized his canoe, and he left other members of the group to try to swim to shore. He was never seen again -- leading to some speculation that he had been captured by cannibals.

"If people learn anything about the Asmat, the first thing they learn is the whole Michael Rockefeller incident, which has been tremendously overdone, overblown, over-media-hyped, over-everything," complains Chiaramonte.

"You can certainly believe that some guy who went yesterday and picked up a piece of what is supposed to be Asmat art -- and probably isn't -- and puts it on eBay today, is going to have three paragraphs describing that this came from the people who killed and ate Michael Rockefeller.

"In reality, what you'll find out is that, 1) There's a great deal of controversy to that whole issue in and of itself, and 2) That piece that's being called Asmat probably isn't. If it is, it's not coming from the 1960s time of Rockefeller, but was probably created yesterday and bought at an airport."

Chiaramonte concedes that cannibalism was part of Asmat life in the past.

"Cannibalism and headhunting was, like, at an all-out rage in the late 1950s, probably. From that point on, it was suppressed -- suppressed by government intervention and suppressed by the teachings of others who came in there.

"And through those processes, they have been taught, whether it's for good or for bad, that these things aren't good things to do. Now, it (cannibalism and headhunting) is extremely infrequent," Chiaramonte said.

The Asmat beliefs

Although many would judge the history of the Asmat harshly, Chiaramonte says the native people just did what they believed was necessary.

The Asmat believe that no one dies of natural causes, except for the very young and the very old. Death comes from war or from a spell cast by the enemy.

To allow the spirits of the dead to ascend to heaven, the death must be avenged. Unsatisfied spirits are believed to hang around and cause trouble in the village.

An elder of the village may question the body and spirit of the dead to ascertain who is responsible for the death. After a series of rituals, a raiding party captures a member of the offending village. The victim's head is cut off and the blood used to annoint a bis pole, carved to hold the spirits of ancestors to be avenged.

As prescribed by ritual, the brain is then eaten by a deserving village member and the body shared by the rest.

The Asmat now use symbolic substitutions in the rituals, according to Chiaramonte's common-law wife and business partner, Angela Keeney.

Woodcarvers, the wow-ipits, play an important part in Asmat religious life.

"Art is the culture. It's the means of communication with the spirit world," said Chiaramonte. "Consider the world as a triangle. On one point are people like you and me, living here today. On another point are people who (are) deceased. On the third point are spirits that are deceased but have moved on to Safan (heaven).

'the Asmat believe that one spirit can travel freely between these worlds, and art is the method of communication between them."

The Asmat also believe their own spirits wander the other worlds while they are sleeping, Chiaramonte says. "You don't want to wake somebody from sleeping, because their spirit may not have time to get back to their body, and they'll wake up dead."

Keeney says the Asmat believe there's a spirit in everything.

"We were watching them building a men's house, and there was this man running around like crazy. He tied this red shirt on his head, and he was carrying sticks and clods of dirt, and he was running around, screaming and yelling, and shooting arrows out in the air and throwing dirt clods around. We asked, "What is he doing?" and they said he was chasing all of the evil spirits away, because there was no spirit resident in the house yet."

Asmat artists carve the giant bis poles with the images of ancestors to house the spirits of the dead until they can be avenged and go to heaven. They also make ancestor carvings to invite good spirits into their homes and canoes to protect them.

Such carvings are part of the Chiaramonte collection.

Jungle adventures

Of course, Chiaramonte doesn't just come back from Asmat with art -- he also returns with tales of adventure.

On one trip to New Guinea, Chiaramonte went into the highlands.

"It was a situation where you have kids who are 9 or 10 years old crying and screaming off into the jungle when they see white faces, because they saw a ghost," he said, explaining that white is the color of death in Asmat art.

Because of his pale skin color, Chiaramonte thought the villagers would be too afraid to harm him. But his darker-skinned Indonesian guide might not have been safe, so he hired a local guide who said he had ancestors and relations in the trees.

In the jungle, his guide started making what seemed to be bird calls, and the birds began answering.

"Then all of a sudden, they stop, and these two little naked women step out, and they were using this as their means of communication. He was basically telling his people out there, "I'm coming in here with a ghost, but he's not a malevolent ghost, so don't kill us. I'm one of your relations and I've brought some stuff for you. We just want to hang out with you for a day or two."

Chiaramonte was invited to stay with the people in their tree houses, which he estimates had 500 square feet of floor space, but he declined and slept on the ground.

"I wouldn't sleep in there, because they (the people) are tiny. I only weigh about 150 pounds, but that's a lot of weight 50 feet off the ground on little sticks."

He had other reasons as well: The tree people, who were not Asmat and had not been exposed to Western civilization to the extent the Asmat have, were still practicing cannibals.

"Cannibalism, for them, is a method of their system of justice. Adultery -- we're gonna eat you. Steal from somebody -- we're gonna eat you," he said. 'let's say, I would have been there and, that night, there had been a lightning storm and a bolt of lighting hits the tree house and the tree comes down and somebody gets killed. It would be your fault. . . . "

Touched by Western life

Chiaramonte says the area is much more open to visitors these days, and Western commerce and visitors have had quite an impact in Asmat.

Having become one of the experts in Asmat art, Chiaramonte traveled to The Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress on the island of New Guinea to correct an old catalog of its collection.

Upon close inspection, he discovered that bowls believed to be patterned after canoes were actually meant to look like turtles. But he had a difficult time buying turtle bowls for his own collection. Why should they continue to carve bowls from wood when they can get plastic?, the Asmat asked.

While he hopes the Asmat can hold onto their culture, Chiaramonte admits that may be a bit selfish. Western influence is not all bad -- the infant mortality rate, once about 75 percent, is down to about 50 percent, and malaria treatments are helpful in the tropical environment.

Changes don't happen overnight, and Chiaramonte thinks the Asmat will still seem exotic to us for a long time -- but he hopes not too exotic.

A series of photos by Keeney will be part of the exhibit at Weber State. The photos, documenting the lives of women and children in Asmat, may help people see beyond the old headhunter stereotypes.

"We try to see them a little different. We see them as people," said Chiaramonte. "All they are is a bunch of people hanging out in the woods, and they're just like us. Very little that they ever do is very different. People say, "Well they've got that big bone sticking out of their nose." . . . There's no difference here. That bone in their nose is just another earring or necklace or anything else."

PREVIEW
WHAT: "A Spellbound Vision -- Viewing Asmat Art Through the Eyes of the Western Contemporary Artist"
WHEN: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday through Oct. 12. Reception with remarks by Steve Chiaramonte and an art performance by Ingo Wegerl, 7-9 p.m. Thursday
WHERE: Ethel Wattis Kimball Visual Arts Center, Weber State University, 3750 Harrison Blvd., Ogden
TICKETS: Free