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PREVIOUS COLUMNSThe 2008 Brief Guide to Gifting: The Plumbing Dharma Tells Me So Small Things and Simple Stories Journey from Gnomes to Neuticals My Inner Tiki: The Early Years Eight Things That Could Be Bothering George Commencement 2008: Advice for Extraordinary Circumstances The Problems of Boys and Girls (Avoiding Mental Crack-Ups & Tantalizing Technicolor) The 2007 Brief Guide to Gifting: A Primer for Advanced Beginners (Part Two) The 2007 Brief Guide to Gifting: A Primer for Advanced Beginners (Part One) Gobbledegook Logic (or Who Moved My Trapeze? The San Juan Islander Bodice Ripper...in Installments It Is Better to Give: A Brief Guide to Gifting McSweeney's Will Keep You Up at Night Growing Up and Liking It - a Menstrual Memoir My Taxes Pay Your Salary (Little Lady) or A Day at the Australian Tourism Board | |
My Inner Tiki: The Early Years
Walt Disney Parks and Resorts celebrated the 45th anniversary of the Enchanted Tiki Room this summer. The attraction opened in Disneyland on June 23, 1963 and was, for many of the children of my generation, our rite of passage into Tiki culture.
I had heard rumors that the Tiki Room, with its phantasmagoria of singing birds and spinning orchids and pounding Tiki drummers, once the cutting edge of family entertainment utilizing the very 60s-sounding invention "Audio-Animatronics", was becoming passé. I feared that if this Tiki icon vanished, discarded like the wilted hibiscus left swimming in an abandoned Mai Tai from last night's pool party, the next generation would have no touchstone for Tiki traditions. Once the Tiki Room vanished from Americana, what would happen to Trader Vic's, trashy import stores and blue drinks in fishbowl-sized stemware garnished with skewers of fruit? I could look ahead to a dreary future barren of Easter Island god lawn ornaments. I'd still have my Tiki torches, but Tiki lamp oil would only be accessible to the very wealthy or through an illegal tropical market. At the mid-west summer luau of tomorrow, elders would not have passed on the knowledge of the Tiki Appetizer and our children's children would no longer have the skill to spear a maraschino cherry, a pineapple chunk and a wedge of Spam onto a plastic sword. I was seriously disturbed that without the Enchanted Tiki Room, our nation would lose the treasure map that leads to our Inner Tiki. Thankfully, this rumor proved false. While it was closed for seven months for refurbishment and re-opened in March of 2005, it appears that the Tiki Room and all it represents is being preserved. After the shock of it wore off, I came to realize that while Disney interprets Tiki, it does not define Tiki. Tiki is bigger than Disney and its origins are like a perpetually refilling Tiki bowl in our collective consciousness. Tiki is not a style and it is not confined to a place in Anaheim. Tiki is our dark, jungle side. Our savage, undomesticated animal nature. The syncopated conga of our heartbeats. Even, our faith. But how do we paddle in the turquoise lagoon of our own inner Tiki? Where is that small, still place deep within our psyche where we retreat to refresh ourselves with spiritual rum and coconut, haunting marimba, moonlit palms and crashing surf?
Well, I'll tell you...after, of course, I talk about me. I had my first conscious encounter with Tiki in what turns out to be a very traditional way. In the summer of '67, my mother and I took a train from Detroit to Montreal to attend the World's Fair. I remember Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome and a brief romance with Serge, the 9-year-old-son of our innkeeper. But what I remember most was a performance of Polynesian dance at the Oceanic Cultures exhibit. The dancers and their swishing costumes were spellbinding. And, somehow, I persuaded my frugal mother to buy a grass skirt and lei from the souvenir kiosk. There was nothing remotely authentic about the outfit...the skirt was really an apron with thin fluorescent green vinyl strips hanging down; the lei was a string of big red plastic hibiscus. It was pure Tiki - that weird juxtaposition between gorgeous exotic and kitschy trash that was irresistible to me then and now. The art form that has evolved into what we now call Tiki Modern or Pop Primitive was first introduced to Westerners in much the same way. Europe and America entered the 20th Century in a state of severe repression. Art, literature, philosophy and social behavior were all heavily restricted by the Victorian sensibility and society was desperate to fiddle with their sexuality in an approved fashion. Cultural exhibits and world fairs were all the rage, and displays often included people from far-flung parts of the globe performing in reconstructed faux villages. According to Sven Kristen, Tiki cultural historian in "Tiki Modern", the exhibits allowed Victorians a chance to "fantasize about succumbing to 'primitive urges'." Viewing semi-clothed performers must have been like watching pornography for the audience, and an interest in primitive arts, objects and fetishes that "were charged with exotic, ritualistic and erotic power" attracted both intellectuals and collectors. Apparently, while one still felt obliged to cover the legs of the piano to prevent any lustful thoughts arising in the Victorian household, it was also quite appropriate to have a well-endowed fertility god or two sitting around for decorative interest. The artistic avant-garde of the early 20th Century was, however, really responsible for awakening Western sensibility to primitive art forms. According to Wiki, "Primitivism was an art movement of late 19th century painting and sculpture; characterized by exaggerated body proportions, animal totems, geometric designs and stark contrasts. The European cultural elite discovering the art of Africa, Micronesia, and Native Americans for the first time were fascinated, intrigued and educated by the newness, wildness and the stark power embodied in the art of those faraway places." The popular romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had first conceived of the notion of "primitivism" in the 18th century, wherein the noble savage, "uncorrupted by the influences of civilization, was considered more worthy, more authentically noble than the contemporary product of civilized training." (Wikipedia). By 1900, another Rousseau, the painter Henri, had gained prominence on the Paris art scene with his untutored, primitive paintings, as did famous primitivist painter, Paul Gauguin. "Gauguin, like Pablo Picasso in the early days of the 20th century, was inspired and motivated by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called 'primitive art' of those foreign cultures." (Wiki) Picasso, Modigliani, Derain and their set made a break with the realism of the past and by applying the geometric forms that permeate primitive art, modern art was born. This movement was later expressed in a design revolution that included Le Corbusier, Eames, the Bauhaus movement and modern architecture. By the 1950s, the Moderns has set the form for commercial artists and designers that would echo everywhere from furnishings to illustration, album, book and magazine covers, menus, upholstery, advertising, architecture and decorative arts. But was it Tiki?
Not quite yet. We had primitive art that informed modern art and then design, but when did Americans co-opt a Polynesian aesthetic and transform it into lounges complete with flaming drinks, Bali Ha'i beauty salons and a string of Tahiti Motels in New Jersey? There are many converging influences, but Tiki-ists point to entrepreneurs Ernest Gantt, (a.k.a. Don the Beachcomber), and Victor Bergeron, Jr. (a.k.a. Trader Vic), writer James Michener, Hawaiian statehood, jazz, the Beats, and World War II. Kristen suggests that the Pacific War had introduced American males to Oceanic culture and they brought home memories of the beauty of the South Seas as well as the perceived "easy sexuality of the Polynesian maiden - something unavailable to men" in the 1950s. Jazz music and the Beats introduced swinging rhythms and hand percussion to popular music. When Hawai'i was given statehood (if "given" is the accurate term) in 1959, Americans became familiar with island culture and cheap air travel allowed them to experience it firsthand. Both Don the Beachcomber's and Trader Vic's were restaurant/bar franchises cashing in on the popularity of thematic Polynesian atmosphere. The popular musical "South Pacific" and James Michener's book "Tales of the South Pacific" on which it was based further drove the imagination of 50s America into a paradise fantasy for "urban pleasure seekers." The desire for tropical leisure and lifestyle shot across America in the 50s-60s and spawned countless interpretations in motels, clubs, bars, restaurants, lounges, bowling alleys, residential developments, apartment complexes, retirement villages and, ultimately, home décor. If you doubt the Power of Tiki and think it was simply a flashy fad, quickly sparked and quickly extinguished, then you, somehow, snoozed through an astonishing and significant era in Americana consciousness or you simply weren't born yet. The waterfalls, torches, lava rocks, pool huts, carved gods, lagoons, footbridges, plastic palms and all the other Tiki accoutrements were so coveted that Americans forgot that it wasn't real. Imagine the sort of suspension of belief it took to stay at the Trade Winds Motel in Spokane, or go for a night out to the Kalua Room at the Hotel Windsor in Seattle and feel elegant rather than perfectly foolish. If you lived in Southern California or Florida, you at least had a climate and flora conducive to fostering your delusion of a tropical paradise. But being able to pretend that coconut palms were part of the normal scenery during a stay at the Leilani Village in Brookfield, Wisconsin or a visit to the South Seas Club in Anchorage, Alaska requires an enormous capacity for make-believe.
But, back to my tender Tiki years... The following summer, I packed up my hula skirt and lei (seriously...I wore it everywhere) and visited my older sister in Hollywood. That side of my family worshipped pool and cocktail culture, and it was my first opportunity to experience Tiki Party Life - the sort of entertaining that includes a lot of rum, Martin Denny records on the hi-fi and shredded coconut over canned mandarins. We swam at night in the dream-light blur that only swimming pool lights can create. Adult party guests stood in the shadows of flickering Tiki-torches wearing paper leis, Aloha shirts and bikini tops. And I made my first visit to the Enchanted Tiki Room. Nineteen sixty-seven may have been the Summer of Love, but 1968 was the Summer of Tiki for me. I can't say I went on to develop an obsession with all things Tiki after that, but it was my first design crush - the first time I was fully conscious that art and music and lifestyle could be recombined in novel ways. Step into the Enchanted Tiki Room at eight years old, and life as you have always known it completely transforms. I think I embraced Tiki Life so willingly because it was such a contrast to the crimes of interior décor with which I suffered in my regular life. The aesthetics on our socio-economic rung were pure trash and our surroundings were polluted with disparate items scavenged from some sort of domestic house wares nightmare. It was so schizophrenic that my mother draped crocheted doilies over the orange plastic and chrome barstools in a depressing attempt at elegance. Faux American Colonial maple end tables nestled up against an orange vinyl sofa that looked like it was spawned in the ladies lounge on the mezzanine of Penney's. Over this hung an autumn woods scene in a gilded frame acquired free with coupons at the grocery store, Either out of denial or complete ignorance, we behaved as if our possessions were valuable enough to require care. We Lemon Pledged the laminate bookcase to a lustrous sheen. We put a clear plastic cover over the plastic covered couch, ensuring its preservation throughout eternity. We did not put our feet up on the genuine-simulated-wood-grain coffee table. Installing new carpet involved unrolling an avocado-colored 8' x 10' Herculon rectangle bought for $7.95 at the hardware store. We were not, however, singular in our grotesque decorating ambitions. The 1960s: Early 1970s was an unparalleled era in hideous design and god-awful goods. Manufacturing was keeping pace with a big consumer market with very little education in visual art, and almost no collective cultural history on which to draw. The mass-produced furniture and decorative accessories of mid-century post-industrial America warped our design receptors to the point where bad taste was completely unrestrained and running amok everywhere like a rabid raccoon (at least in my neck of the woods). But its fakery notwithstanding, Tiki transcended all that. Despite perverting Oceanic iconography and design into a cartoonish parody, artists, designers and architects were drawing on an organic aesthetic. Perhaps by reflecting the natural world, island art stirs a primal memory that may have similarly attracted Picasso and his running buddies. Even though Americans chopped it up into counterfeit products that every capitalistic entrepreneur from Disney to WITCO* exploited, Tiki was founded on a significant artistic tradition.
I think this goes a long way to explaining why Tiki faded as a design form, but did not die. Now it is ensnaring a whole new generation of artists and enthusiasts in its seductive visual web. The impact it had on me was nothing short of religious. And that's where all roads really lead. After the last torch is extinguished at the end of the backyard luau, and the last pineapple tidbits are fished out of the pool, we long for some sort of guidance as to how to live our lives once the party is over. And Tiki gives it freely ...turn around quickly and you'll see the eyes of the Tiki gods following you from behind the plastic foliage. Just stay with me...we'll get there next time in My Inner Tiki: the Happy Talk Years. More Notes-to-Self: Unless otherwise specified, the information herein is either from what I remember of my college design courses and my own opinion (so, don't quote me as gospel), or the brilliant survey book "Tiki Modern" by Sven Kristen (2008) published by Taschen. To get in touch with your own Inner Tiki, I recommend going to www.Pandora.com and creating a radio station featuring either Les Baxter or Martin Denny. Both will fascinate you with the "haunting beat of savage drums" (and it's free!).
Recipe for a Trader Vic's Scorpion, the ultimate Tiki cocktail:
Serve in Tiki Bowl with two straws. Trader Vic's Tiki Bowl* At one time, WITCO, a manufacturing company specializing in carved furnishings, located in Mt. Vernon, Washington (of all places), was the foremost maker of Tiki and Polynesian themed products in America. WITCO went out of business in 1977. © 2008 Ingrid Gabriel
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