National Maritime Museum, London will run an exhibition named Jeremy Millar: Given on view from 28 September 2009 to 17 January 2010, at the Cabinet Rooms, The Queen's House.
Jeremy Millar explores how events in history resonate with our understanding and experience of the present. His artistic practice frequently takes as its starting point important events in the history of ideas to develop a poetic enquiry within a fictional, and often scholarly, framework and sensibility. Given presents in the historic Queen’s House a series of newly-commissioned artworks that take as their starting point a very particular journey.
In 1914, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski invited his childhood friend, the artist and writer Stanislaw Witkiewicz, to act as his draughtsman and photographer on an expedition to New Guinea. They set off from Folkestone in early June and their arrival in Australia a few weeks later coincided with the outbreak of the First World War.
The pair argued about how to respond and Witkiewicz returned to Europe to fight. Malinowski stayed and continued his research, which was to become one of the foundation stones of social anthropology. In May 2009 MiIllar travelled to Kiriwina off the coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG), where Malinowski conducted his most famous fieldwork. Here, Millar made a series of photographs 'as Witkiewicz' might have done, had he continued his journey.
Although Witkiewicz never reached PNG, the country nevertheless become an important place for him, emblematic of what one might term 'tropicality'. This is seen most clearly in his Metaphysics of the Two-Headed Calf: a Tropical-Australian Play in Three Acts (1921) – a strange drama set in New Guinea and Australia. The play has never been staged in PNG and only twice in Australia: firstly in a 1973 amateur production in Alice Springs and secondly a fully professional performance, directed by Roger Pulvers, at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne in 1980. For Given, Millar invited two theatre directors – Adrian Guthrie in Adelaide, Australia and John Doa in Goroka, PNG – to stage the play in the manner they considered most appropriate to their cultural circumstances.
Malinowski’s research looked into the Kula ring, an exchange economy between the island communities in the Massim region of PNG. In this system ceremonial objects are never held as possessions, but rather move around the ring, with soulava, or ceremonial necklaces, moving clockwise: they are described as being given 'with the left hand'. During his travels to PNG, Millar obtained a soulava from the National Cultural Commission in Port Moresby that had already been withdrawn from the Kula. Six Polish coins, from 2002, minted with a portrait of Malinowski in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of his death, have been entangled into the soulava, which is displayed in a museum showcase.
The picture shows Jeremy Millar, As Witkiewicz (Gumakawai Sitautau, Chief, Osusupa Clan) I, 2009. Courtesy and copyright of Jeremy Millar. -- www.nmm.ac.uk
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