Post #19574 by bigbrotiki on Tue, Jan 14, 2003 8:16 PM

Nice stuff, kids! That Tiki is another example of WHY the moderns were inspired by primitive art:
Way before Western Europeans could conceive of it, the native artists exaggerated some feaures of the human likeness to the extent of abstraction.
His mouth is really just an exaggeration of the "growling" figure 8 shaped mouths of the classic Ku statues. In some of them the lips or teeth ALMOST meet in the middle, here they do.