100 Tiki Notes
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- 100 Tiki Notes
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1. Tiki walked into a bar …
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2. The American bartender said, “Move over, Tiki, you are a Pacific Islander god/dess, you do not exist …
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3. “Your islands belong to us long time, since the first missionaries on gunboats squirted their diseased spirit over your fragrant seas …
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4. “Make way for tiki kitsch, and all kinds of cheap simulacra …
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5. “Accept your welfare check and stand down, we don’t serve you anymore …
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6. “We serve up your image.”
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7. There’s an avant-garde American artist in Los Angeles who makes a speciality of tiki kitsch assemblages …
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8. His tiki kitsch is in all the museums in LA—at museums where no contemporary Pacific Islander American art is …
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9. He grew up in a LA household with tiki kitsch, that’s how he feels he loves it …
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10. A lot of connected artists in LA were saying, Dan, you should get to know him, you both deal with the same subject …
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11. He saw my work in my studio where I collaged a photo of a Polynesian wooden dildo that he fabricated in a homoerotic collage I made of Hawaii Five-O actors …
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12. I sent him Facebook friend requests, I think he reported me to Facebook, they shut down my account for a day.
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13. There’s a tiki kitsch artist in Orange County, California, who makes sixties’ cartoons like paintings of Americans going wild with tiki kitsch abandon …
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14. At his show in the Orange County, California, art district, American patrons were saying to each other, “Let’s go, there’s all these brown people here now …”
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15. Meaning the Mexican Americans who had taken over opening nights in the art district … [End Page 585]
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16. The American tiki kitsch artist and invited American patrons left after their own private preview at the gallery, before the zombies like me showed up for the public opening …
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17. I asked the university art students who were security, “Wouldn’t you be insulted if this was a kitsch representation of your culture?” They looked puzzled.
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18. I found a hot website of endless photographs of American women intoxicated worshipping giant Tikis … tiki kitsch originated in pornography and alcohol …
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19. I was in a museum in Palm Springs and noticed a tiki kitsch photograph of American women in white bikinis on a volcano by a famous American conceptual artist …
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20. What is location but concept? What is history but possession?
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21. American soldiers back from World War II brought memories of the South Pacific, which to them represented women’s breasts and getting drunk …
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22. American Samoa women, because of the tropical heat, walked bare breasted in the 1940s, but American military saw this as a sexual invitation, leading to a first law against bare breasts …
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23. Tiki kitsch begins with notions of paradise and ends with pornography, porn is about covering up the body.
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24. Tiki porn begins with the Western patriarchal notion that females are savages and ruin paradise …
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25. Tiki kitsch is religious kitsch in a bar, the great god Tiki is dead, drink …
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26. After World War II, the first tiki kitsch bars opened in LA, and mass production porn industries began in LA …
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27. Tiki porn and antiblackness, the notion that the devil is black images, and my ancestor Tiki is a devil …
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28. Tiki porn is the notion that native people are sick and must be cured but cannot be cured …
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29. Tiki kitsch is doubting that Pacific Islanders existed before tiki kitsch.
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30. Tiki porn is the notion that the devil is everywhere, especially in black holes, the devil is a naughty Polynesian woman, and I am.
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31. Tiki porn is Adam and Eve in Paradise for two weeks.
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32. Tiki porn is any romanticized story of the kidnapping of native girls by explorers and soldiers and missionaries, silhouettes at sunset, private Hollywood. [End Page 586]
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33. Tiki is this list in search of this poem.
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34. David Zwirner said of Jeff Koons, “He says if you’re critical, you’re already out of the game.” If you have a reason to be critical, you’re out...
