Editorial
A little while back, I apparently clicked on the wrong thing online, and now I have been relentlessly targeted through social media by Trader Vic’s. Don’t get me wrong, I love the kitschy-tiki fabulousness of Trader Vic’s and I grew up going to their flagship restaurant in Emeryville, but they are aggressive in their marketing. Among the admittedly pretty cool ceramic cups for festive rum drinks and colorful Hawaiian shirts they’re hawking are a number of Papua New Guinea masks. While these appear actually to have been carved in New Guinea, to call them reproductions would be generous. Nonetheless, they’re inexpensive, decorative enough, and they appear to be selling. Some folks out there have some nice additions to their tiki dens.
Our cover shows a temple figure probably representing the god of war Ku-ka’ili-moku from Hawaii, late 18th–early 19th century. Wood (metrosideros sp). H: 128.5 cm. Acquired by a missionary deputation with permisson of Governor Kuakini from the walls of an ancient marae at Kairnna, Hawaii, 1822. Ex London Missionary Society (until 1911). British Museum, inv. Oc,LMS.223. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Victor Bergeron’s Trader Vic’s restaurants didn’t invent the tiki aesthetic, but they were instrumental in spreading it worldwide after they were franchised into the Hilton Hotel chain in the late 1950s. The South Seas “artifacts” these and similar restaurants used for decoration were largely, but not all, reproductions, and they helped spread exposure to and interest in non-Western cultural arts, though they were hardly the first to do this. Bertrand Goy’s detailed article in this issue delves into the history of the Paris Expositions Universelles, which were among the first to present these art forms to a popular audience. The panoply of masks, sculptures,
weapons, and jungly stuff that made up the displays in these events came to embody how these artworks would be presented, both in popular culture and museums, and the aesthetic still resonates. This approach carried forward for decades, and it proved to be a very diffi cult knot to untie, as Tony Eccles observes in his article on the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, describing the gradual transformation of a Victorian institution into a modern museum.
Various approaches have been taken to break the bonds of nineteenth-century aesthetics when approaching the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. It might surprise some to learn that the Pop Artist Keith Haring had a hand in this. His work was in part influenced by his exposure to these works, specifically at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and he sought to impart a quality of the dynamism of ritual into his art. Though one might say he was spiritually influenced, his works have little direct visual affi nity with nonWestern art, save for in a series of eight giant masks he created in 1987, which were presented at Tony Shafrazi Gallery the same year. Elena Martínez-Jacquet and Romain Brun unpack his references in their engaging article in this issue.
In stark contrast to the Expositions Universelles’ displays is Nichole Bridges’ exhibition Narrative Wisdom and African Arts, now on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum, which is about as resolutely non-Victorian as it gets. Ascetically installed, the mixture of sculptural masterpieces, objects of daily use, and contemporary artworks she selected for the show share the common thread of an important relationship with cultural narratives, as she describes in her article in this issue.
In 1914, famed Cambridge anthropologist A.C. Haddon and his daughter, Kathleen, spent several weeks traveling on their own from one end of the Gulf of Papua to the other. A few notes about this also appear in these pages, and I can’t help but wonder, after their experiences navigating the mangrove swamps by canoe and exploring the great ravis still filled with spirit boards and towering tapa masks, just what they would have thought of the Trader Vic’s dining experience. My guess is they might have enjoyed the pu pu platter.
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Jonathan Fogel
