Based on a presentation by Sam Singer at the OAS Savage Club Forum, 2017
I want to thank OAS for bringing all of us, scholars, collectors, museums, dealers, and auction houses together for this auspicious and exciting symposium.
My father, J.R. Singer, was a navigator on the ships of U.S. Army Transport Service in World War II carrying supplies to fight the war in the Pacific. He always said Australia was one of the greatest countries in the world. He also said it had the most handsome men and the most beautiful women — and the best bars in the world. He just turned 96 and sends his regards to all of you.
Everything I am going to show you today in my presentation is part of a collection my wife Sharon Rollins Singer and I put together over the course of the past 20 years. Almost all of the artworks are pieces that Sharon and I picked collectively.
Approximately 95 percent were joint decisions. About 5 percent of the collection is independent, meaning that either she or I had a strong opinion about a piece — more so than the other — and begged the other to purchase it. When I use the word “I” in my talk to today, please know that it is really “we” as everything we have collected and love is a joint effort as a couple.
Today, I hope to accomplish 3 things:
- Discuss the attraction and advantages of the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ style of displaying art, which we first experienced at the Pitt Rivers and the British Museums and its impact both on the display of art and its aesthetics in our philosophy of exhibiting our artworks.
- How the Cabinet of Curiosities (or Wunderkammer) displays of art, which groups objects together, can have an important impact on viewing, judging, enjoying, and displaying artworks.
- Show photographs of our home and particular pieces of our collection so you view our collection and philosophy first-hand —and hopefully enjoy our tastes.
I also want to thank every other dealer in this room — and a few that aren’t here — for sharing and selling their passion — a profession that promotes culture, understanding, sharing of ideas and concepts, and the sharing of values and beliefs across borders. Tribal arts, the first arts, create a focus on the most important of arts–those that are not made and created for commercial sale, such as modern and contemporary art, but instead were made to change the outcome of life and death battles, initiate boys and girls into a deeper understanding of belief systems, promote heritage and ancestral spiritual beliefs and taboos, and to make the world a better place for the people who made these fantastic artworks.
First let me address what drew us to tribal art. Both Sharon and I grew up in academic households. Her father was a professor of economics at Stanford University and my mother and father both were professors at UC-Berkeley. In both of our households we had the opportunity to meet fascinating scholars, traveling exhibitions, and the good fortune to meet many returning students from the American Peace Corps who had travelled far and wide to foreign lands to teach English, healthcare, and improve the lives of the disadvantaged. The combination of meeting, seeing and visiting the homes of other professors who specialized in international studies and Peace Corps volunteers who brought back examples of exotic artworks gave us an early interest in unusual and different views of art and culture.
Sharon had the added benefit of living and traveling with her family throughout Latin America when she was a girl as her father studied the economies of our neighbors to the south.
The combined heritage of our backgrounds led us to collect something different than what our contemporaries collect. We are deeply fortunate to have discovered Oceanic, Himalayan and Indonesian art as they are our passion outside of our four sons and our communications agency, Singer Associates Public Relations in San Francisco.
Before I show you photographs of our home in the San Francisco Bay area, let me address why we are influenced by thecabinets de curiosités style of displaying tribal artworks. Early on in our collecting odyssey, we visited the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, and the British Museum, and were also fortunate enough to see the British Museum’s exhibition “Medicine Man: The forgotten museum of Henry Wellcome.”
The grouping of objects at the Pitt Rivers and British Museum (and later travels to Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence, Italy) piqued our interest.
The ability to compare and contrast a large group of similar objects as well as a group of diverse objects allows the eye and the mind to study them in a way that the minimalism of most museums does not. Seeing a group of the same art object executed by different hands allows one to study the form of the object, but also the variances and individual artist’s interpretation of the standard expectations. So, as opposed to museums of modern and contemporary art (and most museums), where the norm is to force viewers to view a single object at a time, the delight and education of seeing many art objects grouped together is a stunning and eye-opening education of taking the norm and expanding upon it. That’s what makes it art!
We were smitten by the creation of groups of artworks that allow an individual to study their sameness as well as their individuality of form. As we collected Oceanic and other tribal artworks, we consciously thought of creating groups of objects, e.g., wooden Sepik and Ramu masks, woven Abelam yam masks, Papuan Gulf marupai, Boiken figures, Massim lime spatulas and betel mortars, bone daggers, shell currency from the Pacific, bullroarers, combs, headrests, ancestral figures, Karawari figures, Sepik figures and charms, Telefomin doors, stone club heads, Australian Aboriginal shields and totemic pattern sculptures, and more, etc. You get the picture. As you will see in my presentation today, we have created many groups of objects throughout our house.
Many thanks to Michael Martin and OAS for inviting us to this fantastic symposium and this club.
Caption:The interior of our home in San Francisco Bay area. Image courtesy Sam Singer.
Caption:From left to right: Abelam cassowary bone tool or ornament, Numakum/Gweligim Village area; Schouten Islands dagger, but turned into a bone tool or ornament over the course of time, late 19th century (you can see the somewhat Sepik-style faces in it); central Abelam cassowary bone dagger, 19th century; Yangoru Boiken bone tool. Image courtesy Sam Singer.
Caption:The interior of our home in San Francisco Bay area. Image courtesy Sam Singer.
Caption:A cabinet in our home in San Francisco Bay area. Image courtesy Sam Singer.
Caption:Huon Gulf betel mortar, ex-Jolika Collection Marcia and John Friede. Image courtesy Sam Singer.