Along the Way

Along the Way PURSUING THE ARTSY COW SKULL TAKES FORTITUDE PLUS A FEW BUCKS

Your good friend Bernard Fontana, a Tucsonan of trustworthy taste, admitted the other day that he had purchased a ceramic piggy bank in the shape of the San Xavier del Bac mission and enshrined it atop his television set. Said objet, made in Hong Kong, was offered for sale at a Tucson Hallmark shop.

It was a variety of kitsch adapted to Arizona, Fontana suggested, not alone in its class. Intrigued, my husband and I decided to make a survey to attempt to determine the breadth and depth of this aesthetic phenomenon in our state.

We started in north Phoenix's Paradise Valley Mall. At Honey and the Kid, a storeful of Arizona camp, we found joyful wooden coyotes, Gila monsters, and saguaros painted in brilliant primary colors and unlikely patterns. A neon saguaro glowed before a neon sunset, and we admired a pair of rattlesnake earrings in a Mexican-motif mirror.

Up the road, Price Club was selling plastic cacti in pots that resembled papier-mâché. An affluent-looking matron carted out a plastic saguaro with a three-week supply of potato chips. The decorator items are created by R&R International of San Diego, Hayward, Baltimore, and Dallas, who also make fake dieffenbachia and fake fig trees. One fake cactus arrangement shared its fake pot with a fake begonia.

Pushing northward toward the Grand Canyon, we came to a cluster of midrise-size statues of why not? Fred Flintstone and company. "Yabba Dabba Doo Means Welcome to You!" proclaimed a sign at the intersection of U.S. Route 180 and State Route 64.

Ersatz adobe walls accented with startling purple, blue, green, yellow, red, and orange "bricks" surrounded a children's amusement attraction. Day-Glo orange, purple, and green buildings in free-form stucco filled out the rest of the compound.

Inside, you can purchase scorpions entombed in plastic, cactus jelly, onyx Mexicans sleeping beneath onyx sombreros, horse-head bookends, and a T-shirt showing Fred climbing rocks. "Indian" blankets (40 percent polyester, 40 percent acrylic, 20 percent cotton) are marked "Made in Mexico."

You can pick up a fake turquoise bola tie or The Last Supper découpaged on a redwood slab. Or, if you prefer, nosh on some food kitsch: Fred's diner features brontoburgers and Dino dogs.

Across the street, shimmering in the surrealistically brilliant sunshine, stood four tepees bearing bright acrylic paintings of cow skulls. "The Fur Trader," said the sign; we couldn't pass up the place.

We walked past the collected cow skulls that graced the front yard. A woman filming the tepees with a video camera gave me a conspiratorial glance while German tourists snapped pictures of each other before the tents.

Proprietor Peter Kline quietly made three big-ticket sales while we were nosing around the Grand Canyon caps and black widows frozen in acrylic. One man paid more than $200 for an alpaca wall hanging.

We took a closer look. Among the blue-and-mauve sand paintings and the factorymade mocassins were extraordinary sights: a massive stuffed bison head, deer and pronghorn trophies, the pelt of a "Mongolian wolf." Tohono O'odham baskets, a Navajo wedding basket, and high-quality Navajo weavings occupied places of honor.

Best of all were the wonderfully decorated steer skulls. One was covered completely in turquoise chips, another sheathed in leather with a beaded medallion on the forehead, streaming strands of leather and beaded horsehair.

But the one that attained the level of "art" was a skull with a beaded U.S. flag emblazoned on its forehead.

On our return trip, we stopped at Prescott, a repository of arts-and-crafts kitsch. Tourist shops on Whiskey Row offer hat racks with labels for "cowboys' tack" and "cowgirls' tack;" quilts appliquéd with Guernsey cows; T-shirts appliquéd with mountain ranges, saguaros, agaves, and prickly pears; and two life-size Indians, brave and squaw, fashioned of cornstalks.

I guess we love kitsch because, like any cliché, it doesn't demand much from us. What the heck. If I'd had $250, I'd have bought that steer skull with the American flag on its forehead.