Unheard Conversations: A Wonderful Collection of Carved Coconut Heads, by John Turner, Blurb, 72 pages, 103 color and 11 black-and-white illustrations, 2019. ISBN: 978-1714598229. Paperback, $85
Kitsch and art each have their virtue.
Art, at least when recognized as such, is reputable, upmarket even when inexpensive, and trades on originality. Kitsch is disreputable, down market even when expensive, and trades on clichés.
Yet kitsch can be fun, funny, and sometimes even meaningful. It is remarkably effective in evoking a time or a place or a feeling. Consider tikis, pink flamingos or Hello Kitty. It also can say a lot about a culture, revealing things that are otherwise politely unsaid. The ubiquity of mammy and pickaninny images in 20th-century popular culture – classic kitsch — speaks volumes about the racial attitudes of the time.
Neither art nor kitsch status are necessarily forever. A good percentage of good artistic taste from prior generations winds up as kitsch, or worse, from pretty Orientalist fantasies to pompous equestrian statues.
If the dividing line between art and kitsch is not always permanent, it is also not always crystal clear, and what began life as kitsch can positively beg for second thoughts. Margaret Keane’s big-eyed kids epitomized kitsch in the 1960s and 70s but today are increasingly recognized for their weird artistic merit. More pertinently, the work of Grandma Moses courted kitsch status, but its artistic power survived its reproduction in a myriad of déclassé formats.
John Turner’s Unheard Conversations is an admirable effort to rehabilitate another classic kitsch item, the carved coconuts once widely sold as tourist items in tropical locales like Florida and Hawaii.
Many of them actually belonged on the thrift-store shelves where they wound up. Typical coconut carvings, though no less fun for their tackiness, exhibit the lack of passion and original imagination common to tourist merchandise everywhere.
But some are different. On the continuum from kitsch to art, the carved heads that Turner collects and documents in this book emphatically fall on the art side — faces that would hold their own in any exhibit of portrait heads by folk and self-taught wood carvers.
Some display a strong element of caricature, some a grotesqueness that can border on abstraction. Others seem to constitute actual portraiture, capturing the faces of real people. The distinct personality and subtle details in these works are the opposite of kitsch.
The book includes some substantive musings on the status of this work as art and touches on the history of coconut head carving, which it dates to no later than 1890 in the U.S. Though Turner is serious about these objects, that doesn’t mean he always takes them seriously, however. There is lots of interesting coconut trivia in the book. For example, “falling coconuts kill 150 people a year, more than ten times the number of people killed by sharks annually.” Or: “In World War II and during the Viet Nam conflict, coconut water, filtered through an intravenous tube, was used as a workable, short-termed substitute for human plasma.” Or: A recipe for “Kona Coconut Stir Fry.”
On the more serious side, Turner spoke to a carver, Jesse Hankahi, in 1995, “My first attempt wasn’t that good. I learned almost everything by trial and error. I’m self taught. I’ve carved thousands of coconut faces over the years and made hundreds of mistakes,” he said. “I generally make faces without smiles, because smiles are difficult to carve. It usually takes me about ten hours to do a good face. I sell them for forty-five dollars.”
Turner’s photos of Hankahi carving a coconut and displaying his wares adds an important dimension to the story, emphasizing the fact that these objects have makers, not just producers.
Sadly, this kind of hand-made object, be it art or kitsch, has vanished in many places where it once thrived. There’s nothing like these carvings to be found any more in Honolulu’s International Market area, where Turner first encountered them back in 1959. An upscale shopping mall has been built there, and the booths in the rump market next to the mall mostly all sell the same selection of manufactured clothing and generic tourist gear, with not a hand-made object in sight.
Of course, not everyone believes these objects are worthy of respect, even if they might be deserving of affection. Turner quotes Harry Rinker, who writes widely on antiques and collectibles, saying he collects carved coconuts as “truly tacky collectibles.” He goes on to say in a 1991 column: “You are only deluding yourself if you consider any coconut head an art form. My best advice is to identify them as ‘primitive native folk art.’ This is a phrase that elevates them both in respect to artistic merit and monetary value. It has long been evident that the vast majority of the folk art community have little ability to distinguish trash from treasure, quality from kitsch, and low value from high value.”
Those are fighting words for some of us, needless to say. And I’ll gladly throw in my lot, alongside Turner, with the “folk art community.”
This review originally appeared in Folk Art Messenger, published by the Folk Art Society of America.