Introduction to the Revised Edition by William H

Introduction to the Revised Edition by William H. Davenport From its inception this book was intended to be a presentation of sculpture from the old cultural regime of the Hawaiian Islands and directed, especially, to those persons who have an interest in so-called primitive or tribal art. J. Halley Cox and I agreed that the publication would be primarily visual, because, from the standpoint of Euro-American aesthetics, Hawaiian sculpture makes such a strong visual impact that it needs little verbal explanation or amplification. We would have liked to present the Hawaiian sculptural tradition fully in the context of the culture and society that produced it, but the necessary ethnographic and historical data for such a study were, and still are, not available. Especially, we wished that we could have offered definitive explanations of the conspicu- ous iconic and symbolic features, but much of that symbolism is not well under- stood and still a matter of conjecture, guesswork, and debate among a few concerned persons. Cox, the artist, was adamant that we should rely on photographs to convey the unique formal properties of the sculpture, even though he was a gifted painter and an exceptional draftsman. I deeply regret that I was never able to persuade him otherwise, because I believe that the quality of the book would have been enhanced had some of the statements about form and style been illustrated by his drawings. Nevertheless, we initially settled on a plan to study and photograph only the pieces that were close at hand in the Hawaiian Islands, for we felt that they were sufficient in number and variety to represent the entire group of surviving specimens that are now widely scattered among many museum and private collections. So, in 1954, with an old view camera and working space provided by the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, we went to work. It should be mentioned, too, that we probably would never have embarked on the project were it not for the support and encouragement of Dr. Kenneth P. Emory of the Bishop Museum and a small grant from the University of Hawaii. As the photography progressed another decision was made, to limit the study to figurative sculpture in wood. This limitation has been questioned by some reviewers, because there are some Hawaiian sculptural depictions of animals, as well as some small pieces fashioned from stone, shell, and the spines of the pencil sea urchin. The most significant and spectacular class of images not included here were those constructed of fiber and feathers (figure 42), which the paramount chiefs substituted for a class of wooden images. Also not intended to be included were the marionettes, which are not unlike some of the sculpture in wood. However, by error, one did get into this study. Dr. Katharine Luomala's subsequent research on marionettes (hula ki'iP convincingly shows that figure 3 is a marionette, despite its similarity to some of the images with upright arms in the drawing by Choris reproduced as figure 4. Minor decorative carving that might be seen as an extension of the type we refer to as support and xii supplementary figures (pp. 109-112, 169-191) was not included in this presentation either. The main reason for the decision to restrict the scope of the study was that such a limitation conferred a degree of unity and coherence on the presentation greater than would have been if everything that could be called "sculpture" were included. Granted, from the cultural perspective of old Hawaii, this was an arbitrary decision, for there are abundant data in the historical sources, limited as they are, to suggest that no justification for such a restric- tion existed in the culture of old Hawaii. Even in hindsight I am certain that were Cox alive to co-author this Introduction to the revised edition, he, like myself, would not regret that decision. As stated before, this book was not intended to be a reconstruction of the ethnography of Hawaiian sculpture. Rather, it was intended to be an essay about a group of objects that have sur- vived the society that fabricated them and from which only a few shreds of culture still persist. The sculpture discussed in this book now exists in another society with a very different culture and definition of art. In this context they can be regarded as belonging to a general cultural category that is called "art," and in a subcate- gory called "primitive art" or "tribal art." We do not know if such a conceptual or cultural category as "art" was ever a part of old Hawaiian culture. This book, then, is mainly a testament to the cultural redefinition and recontextualization of a selected group of objects. The concept of "primitive art," as our culture defines it, refers to objects (or actions) that, first of all, possess some artistic merit, according to our canons of aesthetics. Such objects are "primitive" or "tribal" only because they possess histories that link them to alien societies and cultures that had no writing. Late 18th- and early 19th-century Hawaii was such a society with such a culture. Thus, in putting this book together, we perceived our task as a double one: pointing out the formal properties that, we thought, qualify this group of objects to be classed as art in our culture and to present those fragments of known history that explain how the objects came to be and how they were used. It is important to remember, however, that when Europe- ans first began removing these objects from the Hawaiian Islands, thus increas- ing the chances that some specimens would be preserved, aesthetic merit was certainly not in the minds of the collectors. The concept of "primitive art" had not yet evolved in European culture. Moreover, the word "art" juxtaposed to the word "primitive" at that time would, most likely, have been considered a contradiction of terms. After the photographs of the pieces located in the Hawaiian Islands had been finished and a rough draft of the essay completed, Cox and I realized that we had not restricted ourselves to thinking only about pieces located in Hawaii, because some specimens located elsewhere were already so well known and of such comparative salience that they could not be ignored. Also, at the Bishop Museum was a file compiled by the late Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa) of photographs of Hawaiian sculpture located in other collections. We also knew from our own limited knowledge of Hawaiian collections located elsewhere that Peter Buck's file was incomplete, and many of his photographs were of poor quality. So, we decided to compile a catalog of all the known major pieces that we could locate or find records of and assemble a set of better pictures. During this search, Cox and I were fortunate to experience the thrill that only art and artifact researchers know: discovering pieces that were either incorrectly identi- fied or had lost their identification, hence the owners did not know what they were. While this book started as a joint project, by the time it was published it had become, primarily, the work of J. Halley Cox. In the intervening years Cox had sought out, handled, and studied most of the pieces listed in the Catalog in the first edition. No other person at that time had such extensive, firsthand knowledge of the surviving specimens of Hawaiian sculpture. He was a true connois- seur of the sculpture, not just because he had seen more of it than anyone else and, as an accomplished artist, was especially sensitive to even the most subtle aesthetic nuances of every piece, but also because he had carefully studied the art traditions of all the other cultures of the Pacific region. Therefore, he was acutely aware of the features that made Hawaiian sculpture distinctive with respect to other sculptural traditions in Pacific island cultures. His analyses of Hawaiian sculptural style, both in the section entitled "Style" and in the sub- sections under the heading of "Specialized Sculptural Forms," reveal an ana- lytic sophistication and objectivity that is rarely encountered in descriptive statements about a tradition of so-called primitive art. It goes without saying that Cox also knew the culture of old Hawaii as few people did because he had studied it seriously, had been involved in all of the early archaeological excavations directed by Dr. Kenneth Emory, and had undertaken special research projects for the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. Unfortunately, Cox died shortly after Hawai- ian Sculpture was published. One of Cox's insights into Hawaiian sculptural style is the similarity he saw of forms used in the lei niho palaoa and the chin-mouth-tongue complex, which is sometimes repeated in an overhanging brow, of the 'auma/ova-type images (pp. 41-44). This is a matter of visual form alone, and the illustrations clearly docu- ment the point. Ever the historian, Cox points out that while the distinctive Hawaiian shape of the lei niho palaoa evolved late in the Hawaiian Islands, the prototypic form had great antiquity in Polynesia. In point of fact, this protoform persisted into contemporary times in objects from the Fiji Islands, where archaeological research has located evidence of the culture that is ancestral to xiv all Polynesian cultures. So, the archetype form of the lei niho palaoa appears to have been a trait of Polynesian culture ever since that culture first evolved some 3,000 years ago.2 Another of Cox's observations resulted in his designation of the "Kona style" (pp.

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