Sculptural Arts of Hawaii in the British Museum

Kava Bowl with Two Figurative Supports
© The Trustees of the British Museum

Sculptural Arts of Hawaii in the British Museum

Curated by Steven G. Alpert

"The Hawaiian sculptural tradition was so closely linked to the ancient religion of Hawaii that it came to an end with the overthrow of the old gods in 1819.
Many images were destroyed by the Hawaiians; many others were abandoned to rot and decay, as wood was the primary medium. Surviving in museums and private collections in various parts of the world are some 150 examples of sculpture of the human figure."
(Cox and Davenport: 1974)

This month, Art of the Ancestors illustrates ten masterworks of the figurative form in Hawaiian art that are well presented on the British Museum's website, which is dedicated to their online collections. A few previously unrecorded Hawaiian figures have emerged in the intervening years since Cox and Davenport's publication, Hawaiian Sculpture. Still, the number of surviving Hawaiian figurative renderings is numerically small compared to many thousands that clearly once existed.

When I think of Hawaiian figurative sculptural works, I am always reminded of and informed by their sheer brilliance. There are few sculptural traditions where a figure's posture, torso, bent arms, and legs bristle with such volumetric quality as to convey an innate force and compressed muscularity. In this aspect, only a small number of comparable traditions: The art of the Taino of the Caribbean, the Fang of Gabon, or the wehea Modang and Bahau peoples of Borneo in Indonesia immediately come to mind where traditional renderings of the human form at times might be compared to Hawaiian figurative carving. In each of these societies, artistic objects and statues are mythically-magically-ritually connected in ways that reinforce the inherent power of the ruling elite, their favored spirits, gods, and, in some cases, their ancestors.

In Hawaii, there was a class of highly trained male artisan priests who were carvers and celebrated under the rubric of being a kahuna. Kahuna existed in many fields. They could be either a male or female as they are the keepers of accumulated wisdom, someone who has consummate knowledge in the field for which they are acknowledged. Here, the term kahuna can be applied to someone who was not only a master carver but someone who had cultivated their own relationship with supernatural power to the extent that it could be imparted into their creations to concentrate and accentuate its mana, the divine force that permeates and defines everything within our universe. In fact, every possible skill, from the construction of temple sites, the healing arts, navigation, canoe making, all forms of the arts, sorcery, augury to even advice about matters of love, had skilled exponents that, depending on their area of expertise, also could possess the title of kahuna. To be a kahuna in traditional times, one had to be exquisitely well-trained and spiritually endowed within a very strict system of patronage that an ali'i or chief oversaw.

The first piece featured is a famous and often reproduced temple figure in the classic Kona style, as first articulated by Cox. It was originally collected before 1822 by the London Missionary Society. In the British Museum's notes, it is said to represent Ku-ka'ili-moku, the god of war, most likely. In 1819, Queen Ka'ahumanu disavowed every aspect of keeping kapu when she accepted the arrival of Congregationalist Missionaries from New England. The rules of kapu once governed every aspect of Hawaiian life (This concept was first recorded by a European when Captain Cook visited Tonga in 1771. The related word in Tongan, 'tapu,' became the etymological source for our word 'taboo' in English). The culture-altering events in which statues disappeared after conversion are reinforced by a line in the museum's notes: "Taken with permission of the Governor Kuakene from the walls of an ancient marae (temple) at Kairnna Hawaii, by the Deputation." The assuredness of this figure's growling stance is fierce while its surface displays a measured chipping that shows that it was carefully adzed by a master's hand. A second massively sized Kona-styled figure from the Big Island also said to be of the god Ku, who, as his title "the snatcher of islands" suggests, is an intimidating presence, particularly at an imposing height of 93 inches or 2.36 meters tall. This figure must have been a major, if not the primary deity, from a temple structure. Only three figures of such impressive height have survived (Hooper: 2006).

Photograph of a Hawaiian wooden figure of war god *Ku-ka'ili-moku* standing on a post
Late 19th-century
Gelatin silver print
Oc,B17.7
© The Trustees of the British Museum

Of the British Museum's many containers and bowls, three utilizing human figures are illustrated here. Each skillfully boasts ways in which the human figure could be structurally incorporated into a utilitarian object, such as its functional legs, handle, or base. The first example is most likely a kava bowl ('ava in Hawaiian). The bowl's support figures loom large here with their reflective mother-of-pearl eyes and gaping mouths lined with cut and polished sections from the canine teeth of pigs. A Hawaiian chief is said to have presented this bowl to a member of Cook's sojourn there. It was then given to the British Museum by the famous naturalist and patron of science, Sir Joseph Banks, in 1780. The second is a double bowl connected by a figure proffering one bowl with outstretched arms while the other end is attached to the figure's derrière and legs. "Its sex is ambiguous because, despite its male loin cloth, a vulva is indicated beneath." (Hooper: 2006) That the figure's coiffure contains feathers and dog hair suggests an item possessing mana and sanctity in association with someone of authority. Bowls for food were managed by specially chosen attendants, who "carefully disposed of the chief's scraps to avoid them being used against him in sorcery. Bowls for the disposing of a chief's food scraps could be inset with shells, but also with the teeth of slain enemies." (Hooper: 2006) The last container is a poi bowl supported by three heads with shell eyes that triangulate into one body. Adrienne Kaeppler, in her work on material from Cook's voyages, has suggested that this finely formed and beautifully inlaid piece is also most likely from Cook's second voyage based on a very similar figure at the end of a well-known ladle in Vienna's Weltmuseum. (ref: Art of the Ancestors: March 28th, 2019, no. 14)

Photograph of a Hawaiian wooden food bowl held by two carved naturalistic figures
Mid 20th-century
Gelatin silver print
Oc,A69.36
© The Trustees of the British Museum

Two other rarified pieces of special note are recognized here. The first is a near portrait-like hunkered figure that was collected in 1825. It exudes vigilance, vitality, and athleticism. While it is unclear which exact deity is being portrayed and honored, Cox and Davenport equated this figure's powerful volumes and posture as having a 'sense of potential action' which reminded them of the boxing matches witnessed by early visitors as well as the hula ku'i Molokai, the athlete's dance. The British Museum notes state that this figure is similar in style to two larger female figures that were found in 1904 in a dry lava-tube cave at Honokoa Gulch on the Island of Hawai'i. Their finish is well preserved. These statues, as well as a number of the items illustrated here, demonstrate the smoothly polished surfaces on indoor wooden figures, whether they were from a marae complex or the personal protectors or familial deities of high-ranking Hawaiians. Wood would sometimes be exposed to plant juices and stains, while darker hardwoods appear to have been intently rubbed with hand friction or tapa cloth, bamboo or dried breadfruit leaves, or candlenut oil to give an item a more pleasing or glistening surface.

James King, in his report on Captain Cook's expedition's final voyage to Hawaii, describes a carving from Honaunau where they found "a black figure of a man resting on his fingers and toes, with his head inclined backwards; the limbs well formed and exactly proportioned, the whole beautifully polished." The scholar Adrienne Kaeppler (1982:87) has noted that the stool illustrated here was collected at the Royal Mausoleum at Hale-o-Keawe by Captain Lord Byron in 1825. The British Museum's notes quote Bloxam, the expedition's botanist, who penned that this stool was "the idol upon which all the Kings when they entered the Temple used to rest themselves before sacrifice." (Kaeppler: 192.87. Hooper: 2006)

As a seat or resting stool, this sculpture's seemingly servile posture may suggest that it was a symbol of hierarchical and political control that radiated a ruler's power and his lineage for all to witness. The fact that the teeth are human may indicate that they came from slain enemies, fitting as a prelude to ritual sacrifices. Stepping on another's back is a universally recognizable symbol of dominance and subjugation. Whether it was intended to visually catch the moment when intelligible recognition, alertness, and mana meet, or purposefully done to accentuate aristocratic disdain, aggressive facial gestures from grimaces to tongue waggling to scowls — what Kaeppler has aptly called "the mouth of disrespect" — feature prominently in Hawaiian art. Still, the question remains: why would guises of defiance and contemptuousness be so conspicuously depicted in a culture that created so much pronounced beauty? Various scholars have suggested that such features may have perhaps been influenced by ritualized competition, intense rivalries, and the routine acts of war between chieftainships. When one combines such emotively rendered facial expressions with muscular bodies of unusual planes and volumes, it can be said that the finest human images exude torque, a term that I normally associate with powerful motors and their angular acceleration. The word 'torque' is appropriate here as we can describe it as the rotational equivalent of linear force that allows us to appreciate Hawaiian figurative sculpture as rotating objects with brio, something that can be seen from many angles with a universal sense of respect, awe, and pleasure.

— Steven G. Alpert, founder of Art of the Ancestors