Edition: U.S. / Global

Art: 3 Shows at Brooklyn Museum

Published: March 4, 1988

DESPITE its relatively low profile among New York City's leading art institutions, the Brooklyn Museum remains conspicuously active. Three diverse shows have recently been mounted by the ambitious institution, which at the same time is organizing a tremendous expansion. Starting next Friday, master plans by the five finalists who competed to redesign the museum will be publicly displayed for the first time. The jury's choice, a team headed by Arata Isozaki and James Stewart Polshek, is already plotting the first phase - renovation of the old west wing - in an effort intended eventually to double the institution's current size.

Meanwhile, the Brooklyn has imported ''Assemblage of Spirits'' from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts: an extraordinary exhibition of intricate, provocative, elaborately decorated carvings and sculptures made by residents of New Ireland, a small island that forms part of Papua New Guinea. Concurrently, the Brooklyn's curators have mounted a retrospective of Alex Katz's prints that now fills the prints and drawings galleries, and they have commissioned the large, curious installation by Daniel Buren crowding the museum's grand lobby.

The strange, brightly painted, delicately crafted works that make up ''Assemblage of Spirits'' - carved during the last part of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th - depict complex conflations of human and animal forms and contain symbolic meanings ambiguous even to those who made them. Wood, sponge, seashells, fiber and stone have all been employed in the making of these objects, which, points out William Siegmann, a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, are strikingly different from anything else produced by the cultures of Oceania.

These are remnants of an elaborate - and still existent - ritual indigenous to the people who live on the north coast of the little-known South Pacific island. Following the death of a community leader, family members arrange what is called a malagan: the funerary festival, sometimes taking more than a dozen years to organize following the death and lasting up to several weeks, involves the creation of masks, poles, friezes and other sculptured and assembled objects. A malagan concludes with the initiation of young community members into the adults' ranks. It thus serves both as a ceremony of death and a ritual of social rejuvenation.

As the exhibition and the outstanding accompanying catalogue emphasize, malagan is in many respects as interesting for what it reveals about the social ties binding the diverse peoples of New Ireland as it is for the carved works produced. By requiring for its organization the assistance and financial support of an extended family, this ceremony brings together in a display of solidarity the clans of the island at precisely the time when a leading member of the community has died. To commission the carvings and to organize the accompanying feasts, dances and other performances that are part of a malagan, favors are both requested and returned, establishing a network of obligations that acts as a kind of informal economic bond among New Ireland residents.

The ceremony consists of several phases, one of which calls for the use of masks and the last of which involves the other wooden carvings. These have been painstakingly executed by artisans behind a makeshift wall, and are revealed to the assembled community only at the conclusion of the malagan, when the wall is ripped down.

The works themselves, considered by the family to have served their purpose once the malagan ends, are discarded or left to rot - so it is largely thanks to the curiosity of European visitors and collectors that New Ireland carvings from decades ago have survived. ''Assemblage of Spirits'' brings together objects from collections in West Germany, the Netherlands, Australia and the United States.

The iconography of malagan objects is at once obscure and revealing. Only certain creatures are included in the repertory of images or motifs, and they seem to reflect aspects of social or spiritual order in New Ireland. Birds, fish and snakes are commonplace; clans associate with specific creatures and they own certain motifs, much as a company owns a trademark. These can be used by others only if purchased from the clan. Some of the images are based on the dreams of clan members; many have no specific meaning. But most contain references in one way or another to the notion of transformation - from one creature to another, from social instability to social order, from life to death - a notion central to the spirit of the malagan.

The objects are symmetrical in design, full of elaborate, open-work carving, and covered in stripes, patches and dashs of colorful pigment. There are fantastical, sometimes frightening, often confusing-to-read creatures - winged, batlike humans, snakes that emerge from a bird's head and disappear into an open human mouth; ears made of fishes and crustaceans.

The inventiveness, variety and liveliness of these forms, their spirited, complex application of color, their potent expression all strike the untutored Western eye. Whatever they may signify to the New Irelanders who made and employed them as part of the ritual cycle that constitutes malagan, these carvings have a grace and eloquence that transcends cultural boundaries.