Tiki.
| N° d'inventaire | 20729 |
| Format | 24 x 30 |
| Détails | 248 p., hardcover. |
| Publication | Paris, 2017 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782367341514 |
The purpose of this book is to immerse oneself in the world of the statues of the Marquesas Islands called tiki. Immediately identifiable by their large circular eyes, their wide noses with flared nostrils, their mouths that stretch across the entire width of the face, the powerful and stocky body, firmly planted on massive bent legs. The faces grimacing with ferocity. Key objects in the most prestigious collections in the world, museums or private, the tiki were also an object of fascination for avant-garde Western artists since the end of the 19th century, such as Gauguin and then a few years later, Picasso, the Dadaists and the Surrealists, fascinated by the indescribably strong presence of the abstraction of the tiki, by the power released. Nowadays, the tiki has become the most overused icon of ancestral Marquesan culture. For reasons that have their origins in the collective unconscious, our current world uses the powerful symbol of the tiki to embody the ancestral culture of the Polynesians. But when we take a closer look at what the tiki really were, there is suddenly a great silence, the same silence that one feels when one treads the paved ground of a large sacred site at the bottom of a valley in the Marquesas Islands. The silence left by the departure of the last tahua who took with them this sacred knowledge that they alone possessed. Dealing with the theme of the statues called tiki of the Marquesas Islands immerses us in the heart of religion, sacred rituals, but also in the fields of oral tradition and divine genealogies, of Marquesan founding myths, but also Polynesian. One cannot understand the statues without considering all aspects. We can truly speak of a concept of Tiki/tiki, and even of a culture, even of a civilization, because beyond the myth of the first man and the statues, Tiki conveys a civilizing model which spread widely among the Polynesian peoples, and participated in shaping their identity.
The purpose of this book is to immerse oneself in the world of the statues of the Marquesas Islands called tiki. Immediately identifiable by their large circular eyes, their wide noses with flared nostrils, their mouths that stretch across the entire width of the face, the powerful and stocky body, firmly planted on massive bent legs. The faces grimacing with ferocity. Key objects in the most prestigious collections in the world, museums or private, the tiki were also an object of fascination for avant-garde Western artists since the end of the 19th century, such as Gauguin and then a few years later, Picasso, the Dadaists and the Surrealists, fascinated by the indescribably strong presence of the abstraction of the tiki, by the power released. Nowadays, the tiki has become the most overused icon of ancestral Marquesan culture. For reasons that have their origins in the collective unconscious, our current world uses the powerful symbol of the tiki to embody the ancestral culture of the Polynesians. But when we take a closer look at what the tiki really were, there is suddenly a great silence, the same silence that one feels when one treads the paved ground of a large sacred site at the bottom of a valley in the Marquesas Islands. The silence left by the departure of the last tahua who took with them this sacred knowledge that they alone possessed. Dealing with the theme of the statues called tiki of the Marquesas Islands immerses us in the heart of religion, sacred rituals, but also in the fields of oral tradition and divine genealogies, of Marquesan founding myths, but also Polynesian. One cannot understand the statues without considering all aspects. We can truly speak of a concept of Tiki/tiki, and even of a culture, even of a civilization, because beyond the myth of the first man and the statues, Tiki conveys a civilizing model which spread widely among the Polynesian peoples, and participated in shaping their identity.