TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101590/1015400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.6 KB | 270 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 80

Onward From Olmec


A monumental exhibit of Mexico's art redeems the "image problem"

By ROBERT HUGHES


    "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries," which opens to the
public this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City, is the biggest show of art to leave Mexico in 50 years.
There is no mystery about why it is happening. Mexico has, as
the flacks say, an "image problem" in the U.S.: people think
of drugs and corruption. Moreover, norteamericanos in general
are abysmally ignorant of Mexican culture, its immense age, its
stylistic types, its myths and its rich confluences. It makes
good diplomatic sense to use one to correct the other. With the
Columbian quincentennial of 1992 just 14 months away and the
economic prestige of America battered by Japan, Germany and a
general revival of Europe under the sign of the Common Market,
it is time to look for alliances closer to home.

    So Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari made sure
all the stops were pulled out for this exhibit. The country's
biggest media mogul, Emilio Azcarraga, put up the money. An
unprecedented tonnage of basalt, clay, obsidian, jade, gilt,
inlaid wood and painted canvas has been moved out of Mexican
churches, museums and private collections -- sometimes over
protests by local communities that resent having their saints
or gods borrowed by the government. On view are 365 objects,
starting in l000 B.C. with a five-ton stone Olmec head and
finishing in 1949 with Frida Kahlo's The Love-Embrace of the
Universe, The Earth (Mexico), Diego, Me, and Mr. Xolotl. Along
the way the show takes in the principal ancient cultures of
Mesoamerica, from the Olmecs through the great epoch of the
Mayans (A.D. 300-900) to the Toltecs and Aztecs; then the
viceregal and Catholic mission art that rose out of the Spanish
conquista in the 16th century; the impact of the Baroque and
the growth of a Mexican (as distinct from imported Spanish)
artistic consciousness in the 17th century; and so on to the
major Mexican artists of the early 20th century, Diego Rivera,
Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Kahlo and Rufino
Tamayo. (Artists born after 1910 are not included.) Wisely, the
Met sells the catalog at the end of the show, not the
beginning. Packed with illustrations, scholarly essays and an
introduction by the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz, it weighs
just under 7 1/2 lbs., and should have wheels.

    In a sense, this exhibition is an impossible task: you
cannot boil down so vast a visual culture and ship it to a
museum, especially when so much of the essential evidence
consists of immovable buildings and their ornament. One silver
altar frontal or a gilded retablo, no matter how impressive in
itself, cannot possibly duplicate the devotional frenzy of
incrustation that gives Mexican Baroque its special character,
any more than a few Chacmool figures and feathered serpents can
convey the impact of the step pyramids, ramps and avenues of
Chichen Itza or El Tajin.

    Yet it is worth doing because some kind of reintroduction,
no matter how emblematic, is needed. To most Northeastern
Americans -- Protestants, Jews, Irish Catholics -- Mexico is,
culturally speaking, an exceedingly remote place. The art of
the Mayans and Aztecs was more influential in the U.S. 60 years
ago than it is today. Then it was one of the monumental sources
of art deco, as a host of works from Frank Lloyd Wright's
architecture to the eagle-head gargoyles on Manhattan's
Chrysler Building attest. (Even the pylons of the Harbor Bridge
in faraway Sydney are based on that universal deco form, the
Mayan step pyramid.) What American corporation in the past 20
years would have thought of bringing a Mexican artist to do its
murals, as the Rockefellers in New York and the Fords in
Detroit brought Rivera? But this relationship soon lapsed: it
fell victim in the '50s and '60s to New York's own belief in
itself as imperial culture center and its incuriosity about
"provincial" cultures. Needless to say, this did not affect the
market in pre-Columbian antiquities, still less the appalling
rate at which Mexican archaeological sites were and are looted
for the North American market. But it virtually guarantees that
one's first impression of Mexican art will be its strangeness,
its vexing otherness, its complete originality.

    Nevertheless, as Paz points out, this has always been so,
right from the moment in the 16th century when the Spanish
conquistadors looked down on Mexico City for the first time and
saw, in the lakes and pyramids, a complete human world that had
nothing to do with their own -- not simple "savages" like
Columbus' Indians, but an immense hierarchical city of a
quarter of a million people, twice the size of Philip II's
Madrid. They were, as Hernan Cortes' chronicler Bernal Diaz del
Castillo wrote, "wonderstruck . . . witnessing things never
heard, nor seen, nor even dreamed." The Aztecs, like the Mayans
and the Olmecs before them, lived in an isolation more complete
than any of the world's other great civilizations': nothing had
come into Mexico for 2,000 years, and nothing had gone out.
Hence the feeling that any visitor to the sites of ancient
Mexico gets -- which is preserved in a diminished form in this
show -- that nothing in one's own inherited culture applies to
this one.

    The note is struck in the Met's foyer by a colossal head of
a feathered serpent carved in Tenochtitlan around the year
1500. A stone eating-machine: Would it be possible to have a
scarier sculpture than this, with its great recurved fangs that
also seem to function as archaic legs, like those of a
horseshoe crab, dragging the frightful effigy toward you? Not
for nothing did the designers of the movie Alien base their
outer-space monsters on Aztec sculpture.

    For it is the implacable and bloodthirsty conservatism of
Aztec art that forces itself on you first, even in the Met's
galleries, so far from the real context of the sacrificial
pyramids and the thousands of other effigies that make up its
body. Here was an absolutely ordered society whose chief
religious rite was human sacrifice -- penitential rituals, on
an appalling scale, whose aim was nothing less than to keep
reality in motion. The Mesoamericans believed that the world
could stop at any moment, that the very cosmos was always on the
brink of dissolution, its cycles maintained only by sacrifice.
The sun would not rise in the morning over the lakes of
Tenochtitlan if it were not refreshed by streams of blood.

    We find it hard to imagine such a society, not because it
was so cruel -- in that regard, pre-Columbian Mexico was no
worse than 20th century Europe with its wars and concentration
camps -- but because its cruelty, as Paz points out in his
catalog essay, was indissolubly part of its "senseless and
sublime" theological and moral system. "The Mesoamerican vision
of the world and of man is shocking. It is a tragic vision that
both stimulates and numbs me. It does not seduce me, but it is
impossible not to admire it." So might some Russian of the 3rd
millennium A.D. rhapsodize about the ancient sacrificial rites
of Stalinism, immolating its millions to the God of the Future.

    All old Mexican art is sacred art. There are rare moments
of what one might call realism. One is the remarkable Olmec urn
in the form of a hunchback, probably from La Venta; but its
immense vitality suggests that in Olmec cosmology, cripples and
dwarfs were invested with numinous power, along with jaguars
and eagles. Another is the 7th century stucco head from the
Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque, which is clearly a
portrait, perhaps of the ruler Pacal II. Yet even in this
effigy of an individual, the great bladelike nose and the
forward sweep of the headdress like the comb of a cockatoo
suggest a hieratic type.

    One sees premonitions of modernity, since 20th century
sculptors drew on Mexican sources for inspiration -- Henry
Moore's reclining women, for instance, derive partially from
the powerful crankshaft rhythms of Yucatan Chacmool figures.
But the best pieces here, such as the stone figure of a
standard-bearer from Chichen Itza with its fierce gaze and
crippled foot, are beyond such comparisons. From the delicately
modeled stucco glyphs of Palenque, imbued with an almost rococo
elegance, to the frightful severity of Aztec pieces such as the
cuauhxicalli, or blood receptacle, in the form of a stone
eagle, ancient Mexican sculpture is as powerful as any in human
history.

    Is there a common thread, a "Mexicanness," that links the
Mesoamerican cultures to the Europeanized art of Mexico after
the conquista? After seeing this show, who could doubt it? It
lies in the metaphorical fierceness of its images: their
intensity, their mania for the tangible, the dramatic, the
lush, the syrupy -- their exuberance, in the original Latin
sense of blossoming and fruiting out. When the Spaniards took
over Mexico and began imposing Catholicism on its peoples, art
played an immense role in conversion and the maintenance of
faith. A European religion obsessed with blood sacrifice soon
filled the void left by the expulsion of the Aztec gods. And
since most of its images were made by Indians, curious eddies
of meaning formed. A 16th century prelate in Mexico City orders
Indian craftsmen to recut an Aztec relief of the earth god
Tlaltecuhtli into a column base for a church. He wants the
god's image to go facedown on the earth, so as not to offend
pious eyes. The Indians gladly obey, since in their scheme of
things Tlaltecuhtli has to lie on the earth anyway; they think
the priest is respecting their old god, the priest thinks the
Indians are obeying his new one, and everyone is happy.

    Nowhere else in Christendom would there be such a fixation
on the broken bodies of saints and the wounds of Christ: gory
popular images of the tormented Jesus, of which a (relatively)
restrained one from the 18th century is on view at the Met,
would make an Episcopalian keel over and might have made even
Torquemada feel queasy. If the peons suffer, Christ must suffer
far worse to hold their allegiance. Spanish Baroque mutated
wildly in the tropics, becoming even more ecstatic, hortatory
and pain laden than it had been in Spain itself.

    It may be that none of the "high" painters of Baroque Mexico
represented here, like Cristobal de Villalpando or Juan Correa,
mattered on a more than local level; affected and provincially
fancified, none of them achieved within their art the
distinction of Mexico's great Baroque poet, the nun Sor Juana
Ines de la Cruz. But though much of the sculpture in this show
is gaudier than carrousel horses, some pieces are as
extraordinary in their formal refinement as in their devotional
sadism -- the star example being the processional image of
Mexico's first saint, the Franciscan missionary Felipe de Jesus,
martyred in Japan in 1597, represented palely swooning like
a young dancer on the abstract X of two spears that spit him
through.

    The most interesting works from the 19th century are not so
much the official portraits with which Mexican artists
commemorated their criollo patrons, and still less the
neoclassical renderings of Aztec kings and warriors that
emanated from the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City. Rather
they are the sharper and more provincial images by Jose Maria
Estrada and the self-styled amateur Hermenegildo Bustos, whose
portraits have a steely conciseness, respectful of the sitter
but untouched by flattery. Mexican art had its own "heroic"
landscapist, the less showy counterpart of Bierstadt or Church,
named Jose Maria Velasco. But it did not, properly speaking,
have a major school of national painters until the 20th
century.

    This happened with the confluence of modernism, Marxism and
nostalgia for the fresco cycles of pre-Hispanic antiquity that
turned in the 1920s, under the patronage of Mexico's Minister
of Education Jose Vasconcelos, into the mural movement: Diego
Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. The
special value of this show is that instead of treating these
Big Three as isolated characters, it presents a dozen or more
other Mexican artists of the time in some depth -- starting
with the spectacularly gifted Saturnino Herran, who would
certainly be as celebrated today as Rivera himself if he had
not died in 1918 at the age of 30, and ending with Rufino
Tamayo, who is still alive at 91. Tamayo's paintings, like The
Merry Drinker, 1946, are based as much on Mexican popular art
with its bright organic colors as on the inspiration of
Picasso; broad humor and even a fierce grotesqueness are never
far away. And the main body of his work lies within the scale
of easel painting, whereas Rivera's does not. Murals, by their
nature, cannot be moved around, and so Rivera's coverage in the
show hardly does justice to his enormous talent; it is a mere
footnote to the big Rivera exhibition seen in the U.S. in
1986. As for Orozco and Siqueiros, their work has suffered the
fate of much propaganda art. It tends to look coarse and
melodramatic, even on the small scale of the easel painting.
One much prefers the fierce, narcissistic and mysteriously
sweet images of Frida Kahlo, which anchor the end of the
exhibition.

    In sum, this show bites off more than it -- or you -- can
chew. But it makes you want to go to Mexico, to know this
culture better, and on its own terms. As cultural diplomacy,
it is a vivid success.