Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  The museum has works by about two dozen artists, including Jasper Johns (his 1968 White Alphabets), Bruce Nauman (the giant neon 100 Live and Die), and Cy Twombly (a gorgeous chalklike scribble). There are also commissioned pieces by another dozen or so, including Kan Yasuda (meditative giant disks called Secret of the Sky), Jannis Kounellis (a work of rolled lead and driftwood and ceramics, positioned against a window like some industrial obstruction to the view), David Tremlett (wall paintings), and Richard Long (a stone circle on the floor mirroring a painted circle on the wall). There is in general one work by each artist; taken together, they form a miniature survey of late-twentieth-century art. My particular favorite is a series of photos by Hiroshi Sugimoto that look at first glance like multiple prints of a single ocean view, but are in fact of different oceans. They are hung on the museum’s terrace so that if you sit in one of the chairs provided, the horizons of the photos line up with the actual horizon, and the sea you are gazing at lines up with the seas of the photos. The effect is ineffably magical.

  Around the museum, scattered in various outdoor spots, are works and installations by Yayoi Kusama (the giant pumpkin), Alexander Calder (a standing fulcrum mobile that shifts with the wind), Dan Graham (Cylinder Bisected by Plane), and others. You can peruse the catalogue and go on a treasure hunt, but it’s nicer just to walk around, trying to guess who made the various pieces and what they mean, then checking the catalogue to see if you were right and what you missed. I loved Walter De Maria’s giant reflective globes, in which you can see yourself and the whole of this landscape. And there’s Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath: in the early evening, you can lie in a Western-style hot tub filled with medicinal herbs and experience cosmic harmony while you watch the sunset through the filigree shapes of giant scholar’s rocks (the craggy stones that Chinese literati once used to remind themselves of the landscape’s rough splendor).

  While you have to find the outdoor installations yourself, you are given a guide to the ones in the town of Honmura. A few old houses there, externally much like all the others, have been restored with special care. Inside you’ll find neither cooking pots nor futons rolled back for the day but, rather, room-size installations known as the Art House Projects. The James Turrell house, restored in collaboration with Ando, mixes traditional, Zen, and modernist elements. You walk into darkness, feel your way to a bench, and sit for at least ten minutes before your eyes are able to discern, glowing out of the void, five rectangles of blue light, a cobalt intensity breaking the blackness and throbbing away from and then closer to you. It’s pure meditation. The Tatsuo Miyajima house is flooded with water, and under the water, numbers in red and green on a series of LEDs change constantly, creating an effect that is eerie and haunting and unbelievably beautiful—at once primitive and futuristic. Visitors tread on a thin walkway around the edge. Several other Art House Projects are under construction.

  As you wander through the village to see these installations, stopping also, perhaps, at the town’s two shrines, the locals nod and smile. They like the art in their town; moreover, they seem to like the smartly dressed visitors from Tokyo and New York who have become familiar to them. Unlike many experiences of contemporary art, this one is warm. Here, the intellect, the senses, and the heart all find their satisfactions.

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  Since my visit, the Benesse Art Site has expanded considerably. The museum complex now encompasses nearby Teshima and Inujima Islands and includes three new museums on Naoshima, all designed by Tadao Ando. The Chichu Museum houses five paintings in Monet’s Water Lilies series, as well as work by James Turrell and Walter De Maria; the Lee Ufan Museum is dedicated to the work of the Korean minimalist; and the Ando Museum celebrates the architect. Benesse Art Site continues to commission artists to design its guest rooms. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller are currently at work on a double suite. The Teshima Art Museum, an artistic collaboration between artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa, opened in 2010 as part of the Benesse expansion. Teshima Island also hosts Christian Boltanski’s project Les Archives du Coeur, and the Teshima Yokoo House, a residence transformed into gallery and exhibition space. Inujima Island, third in the developing archipelago, now has its own museum, located in the remains of a copper refinery; the Seaside Inujima Gallery, featuring the work of Fiona Tan; and the Inujima Art House Project, five gallery spaces created largely of recycled materials. Interviewed by Lee Yulin about the larger Benesse project, its founder said that he had sought to create “an island of dreams for children.”

  SOLOMON ISLANDS

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  Song of Solomons

  Travel + Leisure, August 2003

  I will admit that part of the lure of the Solomon Islands was the name. When I made the reservations to go, I joked that I was leading a trend in eponymous travel. But I was tempted also by the sense that in its obscurity the destination preserved some kind of authenticity, whatever authenticity is. My second day there, I went to board a local flight and found that it had been canceled and that I’d have to go a day later. When I asked what the problem was, the desk clerk explained that the pilot had converted that morning to Seventh-day Adventism and could no longer fly on the Sabbath.

  * * *

  Among the fantasies I have always harbored is one of the South Seas. While some people who dream of this corner of the world want lavish Tahitian resorts, I wanted desert islands untouched by the ravages of modernity and sky-blue seas with only an occasional canoe or school of dolphins to break the surface. I wanted to meet men and women who would be hungry for my news and generous with theirs. I wanted to be something between Captain Cook and Robinson Crusoe. I was very young when I first heard of the islands out there that had my name, and I was thrilled to discover that the Solomons were about as remote as anywhere else on earth. I wanted to go; I can’t remember not wanting to. In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville wrote that these islands, though charted and explored and visited, remained terra incognita.

  The Solomons, just east of Papua New Guinea, are a chain of almost a thousand islands, many tiny, a few quite large, about a third populated. The country covers more than 520,000 square miles of sea and receives about four thousand tourists a year. There are at least a hundred local languages and dialects; the lingua franca is pidgin, though many people speak English because the islands used to be a British protectorate. Traditional life and ceremonies are called custom: custom dances, custom bride prices, custom skull caves, and so on. Missionaries Christianized the islands at the turn of the nineteenth century, and almost everyone attends church services, but Christianity has not supplanted local beliefs and rituals. The Solomon Islands were long notorious for head-hunting and cannibalism, and on my first day in the capital city, Honiara, I stopped in a shop to ask about some pointy objects and found out that they were nose bones—to be worn through a pierced septum.

  The islands are perhaps best known in the West as the site of the major World War II Battle of Guadalcanal, in which the native population helped Americans defeat the Japanese who were trying to build an air base there. The country, one of the world’s poorest, has no overclass; subsistence affluence is the rule. Economic and power structures in the Solomons are dominated by the Malaita people, and strife between them and other populations is ongoing, but such violence has on no occasion affected visitors.

  The four of us—a friend from high school, Jessica; her husband, Chuck; my boyfriend, John; and I—flew into Honiara and met with our trusty agent, Wilson Maelaua, who was to get us through every difficulty these remote islands could throw our way. I had chosen to start with the island of Makira because Chuck had introduced me to Roger James, who was coordinating Conservation International’s operation there. Makira supports more single-island endemic birds than any other island in the Solomons, and CI is working to protect its interior rainforests. Local landowners have established a plan for forest management under the guidance of CI and other nongovernmental organizations, which entails showing the vil
lagers how the protection of the land serves their own interest as well as that of the world. Roger married a Makira bushwoman and has made a life more local than the locals’. “If you want total immersion,” he promised me, “I’ll give you total immersion.”

  Soon after we landed in Makira, we set off for the highlands, accompanied by Roger, a posse of local guides, carriers for our baggage, and John Waihuru, the bigman (pidgin for “man of status”), who was the expedition leader. We meandered through the valley for some miles, then came to the first of sixteen river crossings. We walked against the current through water up to our waists while the carriers balanced our rather substantial suitcases on their heads. From there we began the climb upward through the rain forest. As we scrambled along a path invisible to the untrained eye, each of us was helped by our own guide: gentle, steady, and—amazingly—barefoot.

  One thing you should know about the rainforest: it rains a lot there. We kept under mild skies for some time, but then the storms began—cascades, avalanches of water that drenched us within seconds. Our way grew muddy and slippery, and each of us clung to his or her personal guide. We seldom fell because we were in good hands, but we were always on the brink of falling, and the water beat into our faces, at one particularly inopportune moment washing out one of my contact lenses. We ached from the climbing and the slipping and the chaotic feeling that we didn’t know where we were or where we were going; from the river crossings when the current came up to our shoulders; and from the weight of our wet clothes. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the worst rain, John Waihuru announced, implausibly, that we were stopping for lunch. This seemed a ludicrous proposition, but as we watched, he and the other locals dragged sticks from the jungle, pulled down enormous fronds, and erected a shelter with a floor of banana leaves. Palms were quickly woven into plates, and within five minutes we were able to sit down on logs, dry off, eat, and recover from the morning’s climb.

  We made it to a halfway house where we would spend the night: a lean-to of dry leaves that felt impossibly luxurious after our long day. Another day of trekking brought us, near nightfall, to Hauta. The villagers who had not been part of our trekking party, some twenty-five people, lined up to shake our hands. Aside from Roger, we were the first foreigners they had seen in more than two years.

  Hauta was situated high in the mountains, with a commanding view, beside a fresh stream. The houses were made of leaves, and opposite the bigman’s hut, where we were to stay, was an almost equally large hut for the village pig. We went to the stream and washed off days of mud, then toured the garden plots where villagers grow taro, cassava, and sweet potatoes, the staples of local life. We had dinner in the shared kitchen hut by the light of the sunset and a fire that burned in a circle of stones. The villagers have metal blades on their knives, but aside from that, life in the bush is much as it must have been a thousand years ago with one exception: ramen noodles. These seem to have taken the Solomons by storm; for nearly a month, we had everything with ramen noodles: ferns with ramen noodles, cabbage with ramen noodles, taro root with ramen noodles, sweet potatoes with ramen noodles, green papaya with coconut and ramen noodles, even rice with ramen noodles. Having lived through the trip, I would sooner eat dirt than encounter another flavor packet. But that first night, I had not yet learned to deplore them, and though the food was not good at least it had the advantage of newness.

  After dinner, we sat in a big communal hut with a small lantern on the floor and learned, to the locals’ immense amusement, to chew betel nut, a skill I hope never to use again. Betel is a mild intoxicant to which most Solomon Islanders are attached; you chew it until it gets soft and then dip a rolled pepper leaf into mineral lime to potentiate the pulp. The nut makes your mouth water, and you spit a lot as you chew it. It also turns your whole mouth a lurid red; chewed regularly, it makes your gums recede and your teeth fall out. If you’re not used to it, it can also give you a horrendous stomachache. It makes you dizzy. The lime can easily burn the roof of your mouth. It was a late eight o’clock by the time we had stopped spitting and curled up on the floor of our hut and drifted into deep, captivating sleep.

  The next morning, we were led across the stream. On the far side, spear-wielding men in loincloths jumped out of the bush, yelling savagely, and we nearly jumped out of our skins; this, we later learned, was part of the traditional ceremony performed for even a local guest. Just beyond the spear-bearers, a group of village men were waiting for us, and in double file they led us into the village, playing bamboo panpipes, bent at the waist and swaying with the music. The sound was a cross between a steel drum’s and a bassoon’s; the movement, primal Martha Graham. They led us through an esplanade of ferns, up to the higher part of the village, where the women put on each of us a necklace of seeds and a headband of flowers, inviting us to sit on a sort of porch attached to the biggest hut. The music got richer and wilder. Big pipes in the central clearing, some seven feet tall, were propped on wooden stands, and the villagers played these as if they were a giant vibraphone, with the soles of rubber flip-flops for mallets.

  The villagers asked what we wanted to see. We wanted to know how they built a hut, so they gathered sago palm leaves and showed us how to fold them over rods of wild betel-nut wood and sew them with rattan and layer them to form a roof or wall. They showed us how to rub gahuto sticks to start a fire, how to weave traps from aohe roots, and how to make a pudding by grinding up smoked ngali nuts in a giant mortar and pestle, mixing them with taro, stuffing it all into the central part of a bamboo rod, and roasting it in a fire. Finally, they showed us how they carved the rough but elegant wooden bowls from which we had been eating. We stayed the afternoon learning all these things and trying to imitate, in our appreciation, what might be local etiquette. If I had come in search of another world, I had found it.

  Back at our hut, hens were trying to lay eggs on our sleeping mats, and when we had straightened that out, we ate eels caught that day (with ramen noodles). After dinner, we were preparing to go to bed when we heard the sound of music again. It’s hard to say that any of what we had seen was artificial; greeting ceremonies are so rare that they are partially reinvented on each occasion, and no foreigners had come to Hauta in a long, long time. But this sudden playing at night was completely spontaneous. Someone had felt like music, and the mood had spread. The pipers came to our hut with their instruments and played under the full moon, with the women singing at the back in chorus, and we listened for perhaps an hour to this abrupt beauty, so festive, so strange. Then they asked whether we had music in our culture, and when we said we did, they wanted to hear it. Suddenly we were the exotics. After a hurried consultation, the four of us decided to sing “Oklahoma!” and “Jamaica Farewell” and “America the Beautiful.” They asked whether we had other kinds of performance in our culture. Maybe dance? So Jessica and I stepped down, and to the eerie music of bamboo pipes in a clearing in the rainforest under a springtime moon, on the uneven ground at the top of a mountain, we did swing dancing; and when we did a dip at the end, we got hoots and hollers, and the music ramped up, and the mood lasted, miraculous as loaves and fishes.

  We spent two days coming back down. While the carriers took the same steep route we’d followed on the way up, to keep our belongings dry, we took a gentler one that involved, however, more river crossings, including one swim across deep rapids (in our clothes—there was no way to keep anything dry). By this time we had become close to our guides and talked to them about all kinds of things, trying to answer all their questions and explain our lives: what big cities were like, and why we had all spent so many years in school, and the rules of football, and why we didn’t know anything about farming. One of the party had brought along his panpipes and played as we descended, and the birds called to one another through the rain.

  When we reached the shore, we went out for a walk without our guides, and along the beach we offered candy to children, who ran away as soon as we talked to them. “Hi!” we kept
saying as we distributed the sweets, only to discover later that hi means “copulate” in the local language (in which the word for “father” is mama). Then we had another brief comedy: in this tropical land, no one thinks of sunbathing, and when one of our party lay down on the beach, villagers assumed he must be fighting the chills of malaria and came to provide remedies.

  * * *

  Following our sojourn on Makira, we chartered the Solomons’ only real yacht, the thirty-five-foot catamaran Lalae, to take us island-hopping. After a week of jungle climbing and mud and sleeping with chickens, the immaculate white of the boat, the homemade chocolate cake, the attentive service, and the always-full basket of fresh fruit were a revelation. The boat is built for fishing, and I caught a large barracuda the one time I threw a line overboard. Our dashing captain, Steve Goodhew, a veteran of the Australian Royal Navy, caught an eight-foot marlin and a host of smaller fish.