His Work in Hawai‘i: Interview 1 with Jean Charlot, March 24, 1978, John Pierre Charlot

Papa, I’m starting an article on your work here in Hawai‘i and want to start off with a very general question: What is it about Hawai‘i that has inspired you to do so much work about it?

Well, I think that like Mexico, it’s a place that has deep roots into the past, not only interesting because they are in the past, but because they have extreme complexity and beauty.  In Mexico I did some archeological work, though I’m not a certified archeologist.  But there, the visual objects—frescoes specifically because I’m a fresco painter, sculptures, and whatnot—were of such beauty that the whole experience was mostly visual, even though, of course, I dipped into ancient languages there.  Here from the beginning—after all I came in that summer of ’49—and after looking around me, I decided on the subject of the fresco.  I was quite free to choose any subject, and I chose the relation of man and nature in old Hawai‘i.  That is the official title of the Bachman Hall fresco.  And that shows that from the beginning, I was sort of beamed on the past, we could just say pre-Cook Hawai‘i like we say Prehispanic Mexico.  And there was there a hurdle.  There was much less visual, in the sense of man-manipulated art.  And I had to get much more deeply into language and through language to find out the way the ancient people thought.  I would say that in Mexico, you get to the thinking of the people by looking at the art in the same way that you get into the feeling of the Old Masters, let’s say sixteenth-, seventeenth-century, simply visually looking at the art.  But here, I had to make an effort and get in what we could call the literary angle, not represented so much by literary compositions than by the anatomy of the language, which is of great interest.  So I started getting classes with Sam Elbert of Hawaiian language.  And I was not a good student, a regular student, coming to all the classes and so on.  And I was hooked that way, not so much with the eyes.  I’m not a landscape painter by taste, I would say, and the nature around me was beautiful, but didn’t become part of my workings at the time, my workings as a craftsman artist, if you want to call it that.  And much of the first fresco I did, which is ’49, even though it became visual images, started with that, well, relatively abstract business of the anatomy of the language.  Anyhow I was hooked on that thing, and that was one of the reasons why I accepted the place.  Others were economic and whatnot: having a job, having tenure here and whatnot, which came a little later.  But there was a very deep relationship there between myself and the, you can say the soil here.  Of course, I don’t have any Hawaiian blood, but it was an intellectual choice.  In Mexico it goes a little deeper simply because I am part Mexican.

In one of your writings, you speak about the fact that Western languages are linear and the Hawaiian is much more wavy, and I can see that as a visual thing in your Hawaiian swimmers, which have that kind of octopus-like feel.  But how did that anatomy of the language come out, say, in the first fresco?

Well, not so good.  I think later on I managed.  In the Leeward College mural,1 for example, I have a much closer tie between the visual forms and the comprehension I have, maybe right or wrong, the comprehension I have of Polynesian attitudes.  For example, I mean as a simple, let’s say, percentage, the Bachman Hall is really a bunch of people.  I speak of the ’49 fresco, which is at the bottom of the stairs.  It has many more people and a minimum, we could say, landscape.  In the Leeward College mural, the role of non-human nature, the landscape, if you want to call it that, is much greater.  That is, the actual area covered, if you want to do it mathematically, is much greater than the area covered by humans, by bodies.  And that comes closer to my first idea.  But I wasn’t—I was incapable, if you want, to put it into visual form in that first fresco because I was chock-full of, well, in knowledge and the tradition of Western art, which after all, coming from Greek art, considers the human body the most important cog in nature; in our little universe, not the great universe, but the little universe.  And there I remain a Western classic, if you want, in the sense that the human body is the language of that first fresco.  And I think that in the Leeward College, even though the photographers who reproduce the thing always insist on finding some person or even face to reproduce, the subject is made up of—in the part that represents the land—tree trunks, foliage.  There’s an enormous area there of the breadfruit foliage, which I think is a, well, underlines the point impressively, because we were many days painting all those leaves.  And they are the actors, if you want, in the play, in that play of representing the same thing that the first fresco.  It has the same title, The Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawai‘i.  And then coming to an island, it took me some time to find out the submarine reality of the island, which is a mountain, and that is not represented at all in the first fresco.  The first fresco represents the plateau that we call the islands of Hawai‘i.  In the second one, you get a profile cut, so to speak, into the situation of the island in the ocean, and the submarine reality comes forcefully.  In fact it is—when you enter the theater, the first thing you see is that submarine goings-on, which for the Hawaiians were as important or more important.  And in fact, their two greatest realities were the submarine reality, the one that Cousteau in our days has made somewhat visible, but also the subterranean reality of the volcano.  The volcano wasn’t a mountain for them; it was really a pit, and the bottom of the pit had more reality than the visual view of the cone, if you want, of the volcano itself.

I can really see that subject matter change, but how did the structure of Hawaiian language influence the style in which you portrayed those things, or do you feel it did?

No, I think you are right.  My first visual alphabet connected with the knowledge of language, or the small knowledge of language I have, is that series of swimmers, and you compare them with the octopus.  I don’t speak Greek, I don’t speak Latin, but it’s easy to transpose their attitudes into images, which, of course, I’m well-versed with.  And that importance of man that—I wouldn’t say ridiculous importance, it wouldn’t be correct—but the supremacy of man in nature in both of them is equally important.  With the Greeks, there is perhaps a little more abstraction, that is, the Greek image of a body is not the image of an individual body.  It’s just thought already; the same reason why the Greeks were laughing at Paul when he told them things about resurrection and so on.  They liked their body as of this world; it was an ideal for them.  The Roman, that is, the Latin—which…I vaguely understand church Latin for some reason—though it is a terribly lawyer-like language in which things are clearly expressed and the supreme quality that rules the language is that lawyer’s knowledge that reason or reasonable constructions—it’s a little bit what you find in Thomas Aquinas, I think—are all-powerful and all-demonstrative.  Let’s say that Latin doesn’t touch me much because as an artist I get somewhat out of that idea of the value of logical reasoning and get into grounds, which maybe is the reason why I have an affinity, let’s say, with Zen and those other things that are extra-reason, that get out of any possible reasoning.  That’s the way I suppose the artist works.  The inspiration, as it is called, is anti-lawyer decisions; it’s something else.  And I know that it is very powerful.  So the pleasure I had in Hawaiian languages and in many ways in knowing Hawaiian people who were enough Hawaiian to get along the ways of the ancestors was a not too polite, I would say, belittling of those things that seemed immovable to the Latins, that is, the presentation of a case pro or con something.  And I think that a double issue, that double possibility or multiple possibility in everything is better expressed, both in the Hawaiian language and in that certain…well, I call it Zen simply because the European, the Europeans have chosen that word to describe that area of instinct rather than thought that moves certain Oriental people and in another way, but similar, the Oceanian people.

It certainly is true, you know, that all through Hawaiian history and reports in Hawaiian literature, you see them cultivating those unconscious areas of the mind.  In your meetings with Hawaiian people, did you kind of feel yourself making contact on that level just because you as an artist have developed that area yourself so much?

Well, you have studied those things and expressed them in your radio talks,2 I think rather well.  There is a certain, we could call it nearly chastity in avoiding the yes or no in everything.  And that is totally against the grain of, for example, the Roman, who if he could not, if he contacted people who did not believe in the Roman yes or no…  I think, for example, we have a very detailed story in the Gospels of the Roman consular official who was in charge of those barbaric guys, and his Quod scripsi, scripsi is the Roman way: “I’ve said that.  That is it, and that’s the end of it.”  And the Jews being Semites had many ways of escaping that “it is or it is not.”  And it was a good thing for them because they could get more easily into, for example, the lyricism and the instinct that you find in the Psalms and whatnot, things that are close, close enough to the Polynesian attitudes; and that feed on emotions that do not need to be proven; they just are there.  And they are just there, not in what we call the heart, but much more in what we call the na‘au, in that Polynesian term which cannot be duplicated as far as I know in other languages.  So there are reasons.  I don’t say the Polynesians are unique; I just say that they are what we could call nearly anti-Roman.  That is, the clear solution they know is a lie.  You have to find unclear solutions and keep them unclear to get close to the truth.

I guess I’m asking more a personal question: Because the Hawaiians have, you know, explored those areas of reality and because Westerners very often haven’t, this is one reason I think that there’s been so little comprehension here in Hawai‘i and so little accurate evaluation of Hawaiian culture.  Do you think that because you as an artist had developed those areas of your mind, that you were…that this was a help for you in understanding what was going on in Hawaiian culture, and do you think that that was one of the things that allowed you to make personal contact with Hawaiians in a way that a lot of Westerners haven’t been able to do?

Well, I would say so.  I would say that the artist—I mean the artist who lives on, you could say, inspiration, not one hundred per cent, but to a great per cent—is close enough to those Hawaiian attitudes.  And we have met, of course, all kinds of Hawaiians.  Some of them have accepted the Western—I call it Western to simplify—attitudes and have attained the grades and ranks in the Western civilization that are of importance.  And we can come there to Peter’s play3 in which he shows that fellow who had become, I think, in his play a senator, had also lost some tremendous values that were at least as important as those of having a rank among the newcomers so to speak.  And that is why probably I was more interested in the older people, though, of course, that shouldn’t make too much difference, but when I arrived, the people who were keeping the, let’s call it non-reason or unreason—which is the way of, well, reasoning, if you want, of Polynesians—were the old ladies.  They just hadn’t needed to dip so deeply into the Western world, and the question of staying within the family—you like to use the word ‘ohana nowadays—had kept them much more pure along the ancient ways than the men who had to go out, get their jobs, and at least pretend to being the same as the Captain Cook crowd that invaded the islands.  They are simplifications, all those things, of course.  But being an artist is a very good way of being perhaps—we have had here a bunch of Zen priests and so on, and those people take very easily to that Hawaiian way of submission to a certain vagueness, and that vagueness in itself is a description of the mysteries, which are much more truthful about the world than clear definitions.

It’s sort of not your way and it’s not the Hawaiian way to sit down and discuss those kind of meetings of the subconscious mind that can take place.  But did you ever talk about that?  I know that you knew some older Hawaiian women who were very much like that: Johanna,4 obviously, and Jennie Wilson.  Did you ever talk to them about that or were there specific instances where you remember kind of seeing what was going on?  Do you remember the first times it struck you that Hawaiian culture was like that, very much rooted in that unconscious mind?

Well, I have the prologue to the Two Plays.5  And my visit to Aunt Jennie, which was perhaps one of the turning points in my attitude, we couldn’t say of investigator, but of interest, of course, and knowing more about things.  And I think she summarized the very best in a way of those things, maybe because she had been married to the man who, having become the mayor of Honolulu6 or whatever it was, had deeply imbibed the attitudes anyhow and presentations that are correct with what I like to call a little ridiculously the invaders of the islands.  I mean what I call the Captain Cook crowd.  And as all wives, I suppose, she was not ready to give in to her husband and follow the same ways.  So it increased in her a little bit what we could call the angle, the savage angle nearly, and she was very good at it, she was very good at being explicit about her refusal of certain things that would have been the polite thing to be as the wife of the mayor of Honolulu.  So it was a nice, it was a nice thing.  Then the other thing was that she was really readying herself for death as she was really quite old, and she said marvelous things about, not about any faith or dogma or any such thing, but it was the same thing with Johanna Cluney—those people have at least a third of their being in sort of a spiritual plane. To begin with, they live on visions.  Johanna was having those visions about her art.  And they were real visions.  They saw the things she was going to do, not in a dream because she was awake, but as a vision.  And so instead of walking in a proper way, that is, right foot, left foot and so on, like the reasonable people do, those people jump suddenly into something, and the thing becomes real.  But the reason, the root, if you want, of the action is not reason, but vision.  It’s a tremendous difference.  And that I’ve seen.  I mean there’s been quite a number of times when I’ve seen the thing happen.  I don’t speak only of Polynesians.  I was very impressed when that Zen bishop came here and looked at my pictures and suddenly just stopped motions and, like a hunting dog who has discovered a bird, let’s say, in the bush, became totally immobilized for, I think, a good minute or even a little more, looking at the picture.  And then he got the gist of it.  It was a picture which was tied up with the Mayan past.  It represented a Mayan weaver.  It was a mixture of what I had seen in Guatemala—I was just coming back from Guatemala—and specifically of a terra-cotta picture of a weaver which may have been of the third or fourth century.  And when he came out of it, he didn’t try to explain.  He just said, “This has to do with very great antiquity.”  And I was pleased to have my things, which is my way of having visions, if you want, realized, absorbed, and the juice of it getting into that Zen bishop, and his explanation was sufficient to know that we were on the same beam, the both of us, the maker and the receiver, so to speak.

I think that this has been something that Hawaiians have picked up in you and in other people like Robert Louis Stevenson.  They seem to have an infallible nose for people who have their minds in the unconscious like that.  As an artist, that must have given you a big entrée.

Well, it’s quite probable.  I think just the sort of a good will and—I wouldn’t say an open mind in the sense of making effort, as they say, to keep an open mind—but openings in the mind through which there can be a connection.  There is no doubt about that.  And I think that’s why the bunch of carpetbaggers which have invaded Hawai‘i since it became a state are punished in the sense that they don’t know where they are and they don’t know who those other guys are, what moves them, and in the end, they don’t know what they are.  I suppose eventually they’ll get out.  That’s my hope anyhow.

You said recently that you liked Hawai‘i because it had a heroic past.  I know that word heroic is an important one in your vocabulary, and I’d like you to tell me a little bit how you see that heroic, the heroism of the Hawaiian past.

Well, if you compare the goings-on of Hōkūlea,7 for example, and the unrecorded-on-paper but very real treks, canoes, and whatnot of the ancient Hawaiians, you have there something which is good Western going-on in the Hōkūlea, or not so good, but again something that was heroic in itself.  I think heroism doesn’t have to be an action.  It just has to be latent.  And in that sense, for example, to speak again of those things, the way Aunt Jennie approached death and Johanna Cluney approached death are on a heroic tone.  It doesn’t have to be a great action.  But if you want heroism in the Western sense, that is, something that is great or beautiful, you have many stories that are not anecdotes, but that are history.  There is the story of two chiefs or lesser chiefs that in those plays with spears were—I think it was Kamehameha was supposed to have seven men throwing seven spears at him, and with his own spear, he would throw those things away.  There were rehearsals of those things before showing it to the English guys, and two of the men missed and grazed him.  And so they were punished, not very nicely, because you take a sort of a large ball of wood and put it under the armpits and so on and discombobulate the body of the guy, so their arms or their legs cannot move.  And then they were put somewhere to be killed the next day.  And those two men passed the night chanting to each other the epic chants of their families, of the past, and so on.  Through the night, they went on chanting before being killed the next day.  It’s not heroism in the sense that each one was not doing an individual thing, but they were bathed in that heroic atmosphere, which seems to me the natural one for the past of Hawai‘i.