It is my genuine, firm belief that if all you ever do to expose yourself to culture is that culture approved of by Disney, then your world view will be far narrower than any shared by any of the artists who created the Disney product we all know and love. Disney isn't high culture, but it isn't low culture either (something I've been trying to establish here for over a year now) and as such I genuinely hope to point the receptive spectator in the direction of related but challenging, exciting art which will significantly broaden the richness of the experience Disney offers.
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Sven Kirsten received much attention for his now semi-classic 2000 book The Book of Tiki, a huge celebration of all things Tiki Style in just 288 pages with a big, puffy cover. In it, he intelligently makes an argument for the 50's tiki revival being an inevitable and interesting part of American popular culture, despite being manhandled out of existence by a variety of factors. As such, what could come off as a chintzy exercise in cultural colonialism becomes an honest alternative to all the sour postmodernism, the sea of irony in which we float today. Tiki may have been silly, but he was all about fun and wouldn't slap your wrist for letting yourself believe in it for a while.
Well Kirsten's next book has come out, Tiki Modern And The Wild World of Witco, and it's even better. Although many of the same concepts have translated over, they're articulated a good deal better and with a great deal less irony than his previous work, pushing the tome in the direction in more a direction of serious study (albeit this is this author's bias which will be self evident). The tome is also much more narrowed in its' focus, not only delving specifically into aspects of popular culture which Tiki used in its' march through hearts and minds, but specifically addressing midcentury modern art manufacturer Witco, which used the revival of primitivism to transform these simple shapes of declasse Gods into beautiful, complex, yet always slightly gaudy flowing expressions of Modern art.When you look at prime examples of the Witco style, the best probably being the numerous bars which sometimes came complete with faux tiger hide furs, a sense that you're looking at something undeniably great but still cheap immediately comes to mind. And my God, the faces! If you thought the Haunted Mansion went overboard of the faces, wait 'till you see a Witco installation in glorious 60's Chintzy Color with an ocher shag rug floor - everywhere there's an unoccupied square inch of wood grain they carved a face right on it.
Ultimately the book traces the entire evolution of the style, from the original South Seas gods to the Tiki revival of the past few years. He spends much time dwelling on the modernist transformations of Tikis from ugly, sneering wooden phalluses to flowing, comic, irreverent images of fun and whimsy that fans of Rolly Crump's Tiki Gardens Tikis will find much in common with.
Ultimately this book is like a field guide to Disney's Adventureland style, a bizzare riot of authentic touches placed upon an architectural style gone totally amuck. Anybody who's spent a balmy summer evening in the Polynesian knows that the romance of the Tiki Torch is still very much alive there, and this book would be a perfect companion if it weren't so large and so beautiful you'd be afraid to leave the house with it!
One of Kirsten's more revelatory asides is that the Tiki Temples (his name for a tiki bar) were often entered by crossing a footbridge as a symbolic way of crossing water and entering a fantasyland. Well guess what folks, in Orlando you not only cross a bridge to enter the Polynesian, but also a far smaller one to enter the Enchanted Tiki Room, a detail which the Disney designers probably repeated instinctually because it was so culturally ingrained.
Reading the book and then visiting one of Disney's oasises not only makes you appreciate how rapidly Tiki subsided, how Disney built these Orlando installations in literary the last gasp of Tiki's hold on popular culture, how and why the Adventureland Style does what it does, and how rapidly later generations would corrupt it with more politically correct but less pure and innocent cultural styles such as Middle Eastern, a la Aladdin in Orlando's Magic Carpets and the bulwark of Paris' Adventureland.
It's a beautiful book and if you're a long time admirer of mid century American primitivism like me, then it's a veritable pleasure cruise.
The book, by the way, is published by the kings of graphical coffeetable style Taschen, and if you have interests in anything they probably have something they'd love to sell you. Taschen is like a big feast of wonderful, so be warned to imbide in moderation when you start looking through their site and adding books to your cart at $40 a pop.