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TIKI Lives Again Nov 16, 2008
TIKI Modern is the best collection of TIKI related information yet to be published. If you are looking for a good coffee table book with entertaining reading and lots of photos about a time when American's were taking their minds off the Cold War, you will not be disappointed.
Tiki world available for everyone Aug 29, 2008
Hi tiki-lovers!
I've just purchased this book and I think it's a real bible about the style. The edition, as usually Taschen does, is stunning, and the typography, page composition and presentation is simply tiki-retro (even connected with the Atomic Age aesthetic).
As some of the reviewers has mentioned, ther's a lot of Witco stuff. This aspect, although can be questioned, is essential for the european people, because we haven't had this way of decoring in our continent. It's like if you write a book about Formula 1: if you dedicate a main part to Ferrari you're talking about one of the must-to-know!
Five stars from Barcelona!!
Jose Maria
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Tiki Modern & the height of American influence Aug 12, 2008
While its predecessor volume, The Book of Tiki, is a straight-forward exploration of the Polynesian popular culture that came to fruition in early 1960's America, Sven Kirsten's Tiki Modern... and the Wild World of Witco is a more ambitious attempt to place this peculiar phenomena in the larger social, artistic and intellectual context of the time period, primarily as exemplified in the three-dimensional art and furnishings of William Westenhaver.
Both volumes offer an incredible wealth of playful imagery depicting all of the various idioms in which the concept of "tiki" found (and continues to find) expression. This makes Tiki Modern an entirely essential Volume 2 in Kirsten's ongoing attempt to catalog the genre for the growing number of tiki devotees worldwide.
For the intellectually curious, however, Tiki Modern is more than an extrapolation on the first book's suburban tiki archeology. It is an entirely sober effort to explain how a passing suburban infatuation can be understood as a metaphor for America's conflicted psychological condition at what could now be called the apex of her global cultural influence and power.
The World of Witco- a Westenhaver-sculpted map of the world - as depicted on the inside covers of Tiki Modern is the perfect expression of what Kirsten has tried to achieve with this book. On one level Tiki Modern and Westenhaver's map convey the limitless scope and raw energy of space-age primitivism, but on a deeper level they illuminate America's emergence from an inward-looking, pre-war isolationism to a self-conscious and over-sized sense of itself as a global superpower.
A careful reader will linger over the text in Tiki Modern as well as the well-cataloged art and be inspired not only to appreciate and perhaps collect Witco furniture, scupture and paintings, but to seek out and understand how North American society interpreted itself during a period in which the wealth and idealism of the New World pushed the boundaries of technology, art, fashion, architecture and music into realms both sublime and grotesque.
If one looks carefully, the seeds of America's eventual failure to fulfill its imagined destiny as a unifier of peoples and cultures can be glimpsed in the pages of Tiki Modern and within the wild world of Witco. The photograph on page 15 depicting TV host Steve Allen astride a New-Guinea-style crocodile is perhaps the best expression of this quixotic optimism. For those more tactile, I'm certain Kirsten would suggest taking a seat at one of Westenhaver's exotic bars, or perhaps lounging on a dragon sofa.
Moderism at its best! Jul 01, 2008
A MUST HAVE for anyone interested in the atomic/tiki/moderism era. Lots of information and historical photos all in one book. I also recommend another book by this same author (Sven Kirsten)entitled, The Book of Tiki. You will not be disappointed!
A Must Apr 07, 2008
We have several tiki books and this one is fantastic. Very good quality. Lots of information and wonderful pictures. We have some of the author's other books and they are equally good.
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