Post #727603 by aquarj on Mon, Sep 15, 2014 11:37 PM

Chiming in late...

Holy cow Sven, when you say heavy imagery, you mean HEAVY imagery!

On 2014-08-11 18:40, GROG wrote:
GROG going to put legs on it and use it AS a coffee table.

Ha! When I first heard murmurings of a book for a curated exhibit, I pictured a more minimal catalog, so the heft is a major first impression. But like the precedent set by the prior offerings, it's the second and third impressions that reveal more intrigue beneath the veil. Not to mention the fourth impression, namely the PHYSICAL impression it makes on my chest if I try reading it in bed.

Anyway, most of my thoughts echo a number of comments already in this thread. One of the things that impresses me most is how this volume navigates competing objectives for a third book on the subject:

*1. Make it a standalone book capturing the narrative of tiki history that is new to the majority of the exhibit's audience, and maybe even the book's audience too

2. Introduce material, imagery, and ideas that will be new even to the familiar tiki crowd (how is that still possible??!?)

3. Correlate the book specifically with the exhibit. In a way this seems like the hardest part of all given all the forces at play. There's the fact that the exhibit obviously contains elements that appear in the earlier books. There's the commercial aspects of marketing the book itself (and the exhibit). There's the artificial academic barriers to presenting anything from pop culture (bad) or American culture (even worse) in a respected European museum, especially if done without focusing endlessly on the socio-political puffery that those kinds of people inhabit 24/7.*

Given those kinds of challenges, and probably many more, it's amazing to me how Tiki Pop seems to have zipped the arrow right to the bullseye at the center of all these interrelated rings of intention. It IS GREAT to see the large-format images, and the overall collection, and the unique organization of chapters and focuses for this outing, and the new take even on familiar ideas and forms.

Great job Sven, we are fortunate to have the fruits of your labor. Fun to read the backstory on how the cover image came to be too.

Another thing that this got me thinking about was the seemingly bottomless well of material from the heyday of tiki. Does this stuff ever end? How the heck are we (collectively that is, not me) still finding new discoveries? It seems like there has to be something unique about the polynesian pop phenomenon in the way that it permeated the culture at its peak and produced such a golden horn of tiki.

And then Tiki Pop triggers the observation that naturally follows: if you look at the explosion of tiki art that we see today, it's different but in many ways similar. People scattered across the country (and world?), from different walks of life and ages and personal histories, finding a new resonance with this form, this icon of tiki, to not only collect but to create. I bet in 20 years or so, this time in tiki history will be recognized as a unique renaissance. And the rigid academics of today with their need for pigeonholes and stereotypes continue to miss the point when they chalk it up to cultural appropriation or some other dismissive condescending box. Sure there's a cultural context, but what they fail to grasp is the inherent power of THE FORM of tiki.

Getting back to a less serious take, probably many TC readers go through the book with the same kind of "spot the tiki" fun as I'm about to do, but here's a couple juxtaposition pics with pages from the book.

Chris Reccardi painting from the M Modern show

Same front, but...

Different back

-Randy