No matter what you think of a statue, no statues have ever been erected to critics. Instead, they become pillars — often literally — of a community. "I think of them," says sculpture conservator Glenn Wharton, "as my babies, and I visit as often as I can."
One of his favorites is the classic King Kamehameha statue in Kohala on Hawaii island. So much so that he wrote a well-received book, "The Painted King — Art, Activism and Authenticity in Hawaii" ($19, University of Hawaii Press), a kind of science memoir of his work stabilizing the century-old piece.
The work of Boston artist Thomas R. Gould, then working in Italy, the piece was commissioned in 1878 to mark the centennial of Capt. James Cook’s "discovery" of the islands. Hawaii politician Walter Murray Gibson persuaded the Legislature to pony up $10,000 for the work, and King David Kalakaua thought it was just the thing to smarten up the grounds of Iolani Palace.
After it was placed aboard ship in 1883, the statue went overboard when the craft foundered off the Falkland Islands.
Luckily, the kingdom had insured the piece, and Gould knocked out a duplicate in record time. But enterprising Falklands salvors dredged up the original and placed it on another boat to Hawaii, and the captain sold it to the kingdom for roughly $1,000.
The statue had beaten its replacement to the islands, but it was damaged, with saltwater corrosion pitting the metal, holes bashed in it and the forearm broken off. What to do with two statues? The damaged original was pieced back together, painted to cover the corrosion and presented to Kohala, Kamehameha’s birthplace. It stands there today, alongside the road in Kapaau, and unlike the dark-bronze and gold-leaf pristine duplicate now standing in front of Aliiolani Hale across from the palace, it is painted in bright "lifelike" colors.
"I try to visit at least once a year to check on it," said Wharton, who thinks it may have been the first figurative monument in the islands. "The problem with it has always been that no one really owns it. The community in Kohala has always taken care of it."
Other publically owned statues in the state are maintained by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Wharton has trained a volunteer group in Kohala how best to care for the statue. In 1994, Wharton, a conservator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was hired to "touch up" the Honolulu duplicate in anticipation of a Kamehameha celebration.
"That was mainly repairing where birds had scratched off the gold leaf, and giving the finish an oil sizing (to glue down the gold leaf)," Wharton said. "There was a lot of car soot on it, which we took care of with soft brushes and a mild detergent. Out in public like that, statues can get ravaged by acidic pollution and airborne chlorides from the sea."
That job completed, the state asked Wharton to make an assessment of the North Kohala statue, even though the state had no responsibility for the piece. State workers who had previously tended the piece had stopped in the 1980s.
"In a subtropical environment like Hawaii, the elements play a special role. Statues need regular cleaning and coating, just like your boat or car," Wharton said. He began to develop a strategy for stabilizing the Kohala statue, and eventually funds came from outside Hawaii for the work.
Wharton discovered he had to scrap his professional curatorial planning and his East Coast preconceptions. He found the process of change, however, fascinating, so much so that he wrote the book about his journey.
"We think that the artist should not be dictated to about what materials to use, that the artist has the right to create it his own way," Wharton said. "The taxpayers and commissioning agencies generally respect that, and I originally planned to take the statue back to Gould’s original vision, similar to the Honolulu statue."
Kohala residents, however, convinced Wharton that the community-led painting of the statue in lifelike colors was not just part of the piece’s artistic legacy, it was a cultural heritage as well. Kohala people, he was told, don’t care for outsiders telling them what to do.
He realized the "Painted King" couldn’t simply be stripped, buffed and polished.
The process had to include a community dialogue on how best to proceed. "We had to engage the local stakeholders, to bring people in," Wharton said. "The people of Kohala — they liked the paint. It ran against my training to respect the artist’s original interpretation, but the community, over the years, had taken ownership and altered the physical approach. It became a project about community, about the process itself, opening a window into the community’s relationship with their Hawaiian past. They became very engaged."
Told early on that Hawaiian elders would have to be involved, but not to approach them, "little by little they came forward, and the kupuna got involved," Wharton said.
There were many public meetings and intense discussions, even school projects that debated the painting issue. Eventually there was consensus on a painted statue.
For Wharton the Hawaiian concept of hooponopono, of community reconciliation, was revelatory to a conservator used to working alone.
After cleaning, stabilizing and repair, the Kohala statue got its new coat of paint. It was rededicated the eve of Kamehameha Day 2001.
Wharton returns when he can to check up on his baby. North Kohala now seems like a second home.
"Money’s tight everywhere, and public-arts agencies are always struggling," Wharton mused. "You can battle all day to get people to take care of public art. Not in Kohala!"
