Davies Pacific Center

841 Bishop Street, Honolulu, HI 96813

1971

Francis Donaldson and

Exposed aggregate concrete and acrylic on canvas.

Average sculpture size: 15 ft. x 20 ft. x 4 in.

Approximate painting size 6 ft. x 18 ft.

$100,000

Theo H. Davies & Co. Ltd, under the aegis of Hawai’i’s percent-for-art law.

Part of the Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Art in Public Places collection, it is “in good shape.” [1]

[1] J. Johnson for the Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, email to the author, September 13, 2023.

TVS digital records

“Tom Van Sant's five large, concrete intaglio sculptures...humanize and localize the building.” [1]

“Installed in 1971, the designs were created in the Los Angeles studio of the sculptor. Molds were carved from polystyrene, and cut in pieces suitable for shipment to Honolulu, where they were reassembled on a large platform. Lifted into place on the building, the concrete was poured by the contractor, Hawaiian Dredging and Construction.

After the forms were removed and the murals were sandblasted, Van Sant sharpened up detail directly on the surface, the total process resulting in a crisp linear style. The reliefs demonstrate the cooperation essential between artist and craftsman in the production of large and technically advanced works of art.” [2]

Van Sant’s Industries of Hawaii exists because: “in 1967, Hawai’i became the first state in the nation to adopt a percent-for-art law with the enactment of the Art in State Buildings Law, which designating one percent of construction costs of new buildings for the acquisition of works of art, either by commission or purchase." [3]

“The Davies Family was one of the industrial giants of nineteenth century Hawaii. The project consists of five interior and exterior sculptured panels, representing sugar cane, pineapple, cattle, whaling, and shipping industries of Hawaii, developed by Davies, Dole, and other pioneers. Included is a painted mural, acrylic on canvas, titled Hawaiian Visions, also by Tom Van Sant.” [4]

Objects of their time and place While his relief sculptures acknowledge the workforce that made industrialization possible, Van Sant’s Hawaiian Industries is otherwise an unalloyed celebration of the achievements of the Davies company, one of the ‘Big Five’ trading and agricultural companies in the Territory of Hawaii.

Van Sant’s hagiographic approach would have been unexceptional when the work was made, but from a 21st century perspective, Hawaiian Industries can be viewed as the glamorization of “a long, painful history of western conquest and Native Hawaiian dispossession.” [5] For, driven by the Big Five, the “shift from a lifestyle based on subsistence” saw foreign agribusiness gain control of the region, reshape its environment, and introduce crops which overtook “indigenous plants that supply food and medicine to Native Hawaiians.” [6]

The meaning expressed by Hawaiian Industries stands in contrast to what we know about the artist. “Tom loved Hawai’i” [7]. He visited the islands on painting trips as a young man, completed at least five sizeable commissions in the state, and honeymooned there in 1965. [8] He also “loved nature” and his commitment to preserving its diversity was powerfully expressed by his Geosphere Project of the 1990s. [9]

The dissonance between Van Sant’s passions and the history his work applauds is especially present in Hawaiian Industries’ whaling panel. The scene describes a view of the ocean as seen from above. Undulating horizontal lines connote the surface of the water. Under it, occupying the diagonal length of the frame, is a whale. Above the whale but following its diagonal thrust, is a small boat. It carries five men. One stands in the bow, poised to hurl a spear. The other four face him, rowing the vessel. 

The panel is elegant and dramatic, its lines are crisp, and its narrative seems clear. Until, that is, we notice a contradiction: the whalers face the bow of the vessel as they would in a canoe; but, they’re not paddling, they’re rowing, and rowers face away from the bow. Which poses the question – is the whalers’ craft meant to be a canoe or a whaleboat?

Although “open-ocean whaling was not a traditional practice” in Hawai’i, canoe construction had been perfected many centuries before US whalers introduced the whaleboat, an oar- and sail-powered vessel that drew on European boat building traditions.[10]

Might Van Sant have combined the canoe and the whaleboat in Hawaiian Industries to honor both Hawai’i’s canoe traditions and the Davies family’s connections to the whaling industry? Or might this hybrid vessel be a covert reference to the subsumption of indigenous life by modern industry?

Both interpretations seem farfetched. Van Sant was imaginative and daring in his use of new materials and processes, not with his use of imagery. Far from creating new visual metaphors, his works to 1971 had relied on traditional iconography and a straightforwardly illustrative approach to image-making. More probable than either of the previous explanations, the artist simply decided that the scene would look more dramatic if the rowers faced forward.

Why does this detail matter? Because, despite Van Sant’s love for and familiarity with Hawai’i, it demonstrates that he chose drama over accuracy when depicting the “mighty canoe,” an object so fundamental to pre-contact Hawai’i that it was central to the reconstruction of Hawaiian national identity in the 1970s. [11]

There is a parallel here to Frederic Jameson’s analysis of the tourist snapshot, which transforms a beautiful view “into its own material image.” “The concrete activity of looking at a landscape...is thus comfortably replaced by the act of taking possession of it and converting into a form of personal property.” [12] In other words, once Van Sant had transformed the canoe into its own material image, it became his to manipulate as he chose.

While figurative artists may have always manipulated images of the world, Jameson was identifying a particularly modern process by which “things,” including feelings, relationships, values, ideas, and identities, “shed their independent ‘being’ and intrinsic qualities and come to be so many instruments of commodity.” [13]

When Hawaii’s agricultural economy declined after World War Two, state-sponsored advertising campaigns successfully marketed a version of Hawaiian identity to primarily North American consumers. In search of luaus, leis, big waves, and the aloha spirit (“that extra warmth that conveys a personal interest in satisfying the customer’s needs”), visitors to Hawai’i spent $645,000,000 in 1971, over $2 million more than the value of agricultural products in the same year. [14], [15]

Boosting the visitor wave, US pop culture of the time teemed with Hawai’ian visions. In South Pacific (1958), Ride the Wild Surf (1964), the Elvis Presley vehicles Blue Hawaii (1961) and Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), as well as the Beach Boys’ Hawaii (1963), to name just a few, the clichés of state-sponsored commodity fetishism were polished and repeated.

In this context, Hawaiian Industries (along with two other Van Sant works, Hawaiian Visions and Luau), can be understood as part of the process of commodifying Hawaiian history and culture. Which is not at all the same thing as blaming the artist for “a long, painful history of western conquest.” Rather, it is to say that his artwork satisfied the requirements of the Davies company, the state, and the artist, by manifesting the perspective of a loving and privileged tourist.

Reflecting the manufactured dreams of his day, Van Sant’s not-quite-canoe positions Hawai’i as a place in which one’s own desires will be fulfilled, as a locus for exploitation rather than a place in which indigenous culture is to be recognized and respected. Like a signpost to deep water, it expresses an attitude that may be endemic to dominant power everywhere.

[1] Don J. Hibbard, "Davies Pacific Center", [Honolulu, Hawaii], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012

[2] G. & W. Radford, Sculpture in the Sun, Hawaii’s Art in Open Spaces, University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1978, pp 18-20.

[3] Hawaii’s State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Art in Public Places, “Percent for Art Program,” https://sfca.hawaii.gov

[4] Tom Van Sant: Tom Van Sant, Artwork Information, TVS digital record.

[5]J. Letman & J.C. Wong, "Hawaiians call Mark Zuckerberg 'the face of neocolonialism' over land lawsuits," The Guardian, January 23, 2017

[6] National Library of Health: Native Voices, “Commercial agriculture and whaling transform Hawai’i, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/268.html

[7] Conversation between the author and Marilyn Van Sant, December 2023

[8] As indicated by the article “Van Sants Honeymoon In Hawaii,” Los Angeles Times, Nov 22, 1965, pg. D11.

 [9] Conversation between the author and Marilyn Van Sant, December 2023.

[10] H. Van Tilburg, “Search for the Lost Whaling Fleets of the Western Arctic,” NOAA Ocean Exploration, September 28, 2015

 [11] Vilsoni Hereniko and Sig Schwarz, “Four Writers and One Critic,” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson, Roman & Littlefield, 1999, p.63.

[12-13] Frederic Jameson: “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 130-148, Duke University Press, 1979. 

[14] Jocelyn Linnekin, “Consuming Cultures: Tourism and the Commoditization of Cultural Identity in the Island Pacific,” Tourism, Ethnicity, and the State in Asian and Pacific Societies, ed. Michel Picard and Robert E. Wood, University of Hawaii Press, 1997, p. 235.

[15] Donald H. Wolbrink, “How Hawaii Survives A 10 -Year Tourism Boom,” Landscape Architecture Magazine, Vol. 64, No. 2, January 1974, p. 33.