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Tiki Modern | 
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| Author: Sven A Kirsten
Publisher: Taschen
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $26.27
You Save: $13.72 (34%)
New (28) Used (5) from $21.99
Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 34472
Format: Illustrated
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.6
Dimensions (in): 10.7 x 9.4 x 1.4
ISBN: 3822847178
Dewey Decimal Number: 645
EAN: 9783822847176
ASIN: 3822847178
Publication Date: September 12, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.
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Product Description
Sexy savage: Excavating Tiki's finest offerings TASCHEN's Book of Tiki provided the blueprint for the re-appreciation and revival of Tiki style. Almost completely wiped from the consciousness of Americans until recently, Sven Kirsten's tome put Tiki on the map as a unique pop culture phenomenon. Never before had Tiki culture's visual power and pervasiveness been revealed with such detail and insight. Not only did the book inspire the erecting of many new Tiki bars from New York to London to Berlin to Prague to Waikiki, but also motivated a myriad of Tiki artisans to pick up the chisel and carry on the forgotten tradition, while spurring many others to create their own home hideaways, making "Tiki" a household name again. This new follow-up book, which brings together the two recent retro trends of mid-century modernism and Tiki style, is bound to lift the Tiki craze to a new level. With his usual mixture of ironic detachment and genuine enthusiasm for the subject, Kirsten shows us how primitivism and modernism were two sides of the same coin in the 1950s and 60s. Decor deities and ersatz ancestors outrageously merged in the modern brutalist furniture from the house of Witco, a company that outfitted Elvis Presley's Jungle Room and Hugh Hefner's Chicago Playboy pool. This was design porn at its best. The author: Sven Kirsten was conceived on a freighter of his grandfather's Hamburg-Chicago Line. Following the call of the big world, he moved to California at the age of 25. Kirsten studied at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles and began shooting music videos in the late 1980s for The Cramps, Tom Waits, Sergio Mendes and others. After years of hunting down pieces of the puzzle ofPolynesian Pop, Kirsten has developed a singular insight into the Cult of Tiki and has become the country's most eminent Tiki archaeologist.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Tiki world available for everyone August 29, 2008
E. Cuadra (Barcelona, Spain)
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
Tiki Modern & the height of American influence August 12, 2008
KailuaGeoff (Florida)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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! July 1, 2008
Susan A. Dunifon
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 April 7, 2008
Reb Cav (Florida)
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.
TASCHEN book quality! Beuatiful Pics!!! They dont make'em like this anymore! April 3, 2008
David "Deckhand Davy" Zamora (Mudbowl Lagoons)
This book is absolutely AMAZING! The pictures are wonderful...colorful, big and vivid. There's pictures on EVERY PAGE...serious material here! Descriptions and the wonderful little tid-bits are executed nicely. Nothing was done as an 'afterthought'. There are even a few vintage items I was going to bid on at one time mentioned in this book...now I seriously regret it because of their rarity!!
If you're a tiki fan, new to tiki or just love art and Polynesian influenced pieces, this is a book you must buy. Pick it up..because once you do, you won't want to put it back down.
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