precedence of the urban vinyl toy

Tribal Sculpture: Masterpieces from Africa, South East Asia and the Pacific in the Barbier-Mueller Collection by by Douglas Newton, Hermione Waterfield, and Pierre-Alain Ferrazzini



This is truly amazing catalog of tribal scupltures.

Also , if you are ever in Paris you need to check the New Museum of Native Art by Jean Nouvel. The collection is pretty astonishing and exhibition spaces give homage to the complexity and cultural heritage of the artifacts they house.

Its obvious that you can see how the birth of abstraction in art during the turn of the 20th century is heavily influenced from tribal sculpture. One can help but make the correlation between Picasso and France's collection of native art from Africa and part of Southeast Asia. (For the reference sake, the post will label tribal art as native art.) However, most importantly, native art can be considered a dialogue of how ancient civilations revered and thought about aspects of the human body and nature. From elongated chins of men's faces and expressive curvatures of the bellies of pregnant women, the from and texture of these scupltures not only speak of a specfic time period but a specfic dialogue of those times.

So, the question that this project (Toy Icon) asks is what dialogue are current urban vinyl toys promoting- in any at all? The vinyl toys are influenced by street art, contemporary art, manga comics, underground punk and hiphop, video game culture and so forth. Completely different from the issues of idol workship, the family nucleus and hunter/gather cultures of tribal sculptures. THAT IS A GIVEN. Yet, the abstraction and "cartoonization" if you will of urban vinyl toy characters have become multi-faceted and in the various subcultures of today. From goulish skulls wearing overalls to the over-zealous expressions of manga inspired characters, vinyl toys produce a charm about them that reflects the individualization ideology of Western civilzation. Themes are so various and yet at the same time so recognizable. That is one of the reasons, why this project involves urban vinyl toys as means of communication- not as an endpoint but an "in-between" for dialogue.