Art: Chieftains, Flacks and Feathers

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In Chicago, a package tour of Hawaiian art

Ever since the King Tut spectacular, corporations have been looking for glamour art shows to sponsor as public relations coups. The logic of this situation, pressed to its extreme, is that the museum curator becomes a mere appendage to the p.r. firm, which finds a "sexy" theme, sells it to the client, sets up the package and punches it into museum schedules. Such is the case with "Hawaii: The Royal Isles," a blockbuster without the block, which opened last week at the Art Institute of Chicago. Until 1983, as it trundles from one major museum to another around the U.S., this show of more than 300 objects will be flacked up as a "major" statement about the ethnic culture of the Hawaiians and the reactions of Europeans to it. In fact, it is nothing of the kind. Such a show would be eminently worth doing, but it would require a major curatorial effort. "Hawaii: The Royal Isles" (the kitschy title sounds a warning gong at once) took no such exertion. It was all scooped up from Hawaiian sources, mainly the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, and although it does contain a dozen or so objects of striking intensity and handsomeness, it is meager in general quality. Only international loans could have produced a first-rate show on this absorbing subject.

The reason for this is largely historical. Europeans, intoxicated with the cult of the Noble Savage, got interested in Hawaii through the Pacific explorers of the 18th century. Large quantities of porta ble Hawaiian artifacts went back on the boats to Europe, where they remain in the British Museum and other collections from Ireland to Germany. European collectors also gathered most of the paintings and drawings of real historical significance that whites made of Hawaii. (How much clearer our sense of English cultural attitudes to the Hawaiians would be, for instance, if the show had borrowed Johann Zoffany's ambitious Death of Cook from the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, instead of limiting itself to a small painting of the great explorer's death by the mediocre George Carter.)

Meanwhile, the Hawaiians destroyed their own heritage. In 1819 they were seized, as dying cultures sometimes are, by self-hatred; in an iconoclastic frenzy, urged on by Christian missionaries, they burned or broke nearly all their effigies of tribal gods. The few examples in the Chicago show suggest that the Hawaiians had appreciably less sculptural genius than other Pacific cultures, such as the Maoris or New Hebrideans; but the gaunt, intimidating ferocity of some of the pieces, especially a head woven from vine roots with its mouth outlined in dogs' teeth and its scalp matted with human hair, could coexist with a high order of technical skill. What survived the auto-da-fe in greater quantity was decorative art of lesser iconographic content: not gods, but feather robes, bone or whale-tooth ornaments, and the beautifully carved wooden containers, irregular in their polished silkiness, from which the Hawaiians ate their poi, a sort of tropical office paste made of taro roots.