On Art

...On Art MIDDLE AMERICA'S CHOSEN PEOPLE BY JAMES R. MELLOW It is difficult to feel properly sympathetic toward the Aztecs Their sudden rise to dominance over Middle America was phenomenal They thought of themselves as a chosen people--a myth apparently nourished by early years of hardship as a truculent, nomadic tribe, living on the fringes of more affluent societies Entering history, so to speak, around 1367, they hired themselves out as mercenaries to a neighboring tribe, the Tepanecs, thereby earning a reputation as brutal warriors and acquiring a taste for luxury In the process, they learned the usefulness of violence and trickery in politics, a lesson that enabled them to maintain power once they achieved it Thus they allied themselves with the enemies of their former employers to recapture the territories they had earlier helped win away Elizabeth Kennedy Easby and John F Scott, authors of the informative catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum's large and striking exhibition, Before Cortes Sculpture of Middle America, estimate that it took the Aztecs less than 100 years--more nearly 60--to extend and consolidate control over their neighbors In that time, they converted their island city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) from a collection of rude huts to a monumental ¦mmetropolis of stone with spacious plazas, temples to their principal deities and those of the tribes under their rule, a system of canals and four great causeways connecting the city to the mainland According to some estimates, at the beginning of the 16th century Tenochtitlan had a population of 75,000, making it the largest city in Middle America But the cost of building it had been great The Aztecs had to embark upon a course of military aggression and exploitation, exacting huge tributes from the defeated One can only wonder at the manpower needed to construct such a city in so short a period, since none of the Indian cultures had discovered the use of the wheel and wheeled vehicles--except ironically, for children's toys The Aztecs were inclined to use the arts--architecture, sculpture, painting-as emblems of their imperial power, but in the beginning they had to rely upon the enforced services of the skilled artists and craftsmen of conquered tribes The most drastic tribute the Aztecs forced upon their subjects, however, was devotion to their peculiarly bloodthirsty religion They acted as guardians for a pantheon of deities--chiefly their war-god, Huitzilopochth--who could only be sustained by a perennial stream of human sacrifices In one particularly gruesome rite the victim was laid out on a ceremonial altar while his chest was opened and his heart torn from his body The Aztecs were not the first people to develop such forms of ritual sacrifice--it was customary in many of the older cultures Since a ruler could confer the honor of dying for the gods upon a younger brother or some relative, there is plausible evidence that the practice was used to eliminate troublesome political rivals In some societies, the practice even acquired a few benign features Favored victims were allowed a year of luxurious living before the fatal day But the Aztecs systematized the custom, turning it into a regular bureaucracy of death Indeed, the scale of their sacrifical offerings eventually became so great that it required further military conquests and tributes of victims One Aztec ruler was said to have sacrificed 80,000 men on a single occasion The figure is conceded to be an exaggeration, but his name--Ahuit-zotl--has survived into modern times as an epithet for an especially fearful bogeyman It is understandable, then, that when Cortes arrived in the New World, he found a good many allies for the conquest of Mexico among the tribes that had been living under the scourge of the Aztecs The Aztecs' contributions to Mexican culture, though they make up only one portion of the Metropolitan's exhibition, provide a vivid last chapter to the history of Middle American civilizations They produced some handsome works of sculpture--one thinks especially of the large stone serpent representing Quetzalcoatl, the plumed-serpent (one of the divinities shared with other tribes) and the beautifully expressive pottery head of "Five Flower,' a god of games and love But their art was no more impressive than that of, say, the Olmecs and the Maya, also included m the show The latest of the Metropolitan's centennial celebrations...

...Before Cortes, is comprised of more than 300 works, ranging from crude pottery figurines of the Preclassic period (1150-550 bc) to the somewhat barbarous gold jewelry of the Aztecs It covers a span of 2,600 years and an area extending from Mexico to the Panama Canal All of the works have been drawn from museums in Middle America and the United States, as well as private collections on this continent and in Europe Among the latter are several items--a gold labret (or hp plug), masks and small sculptures inlaid with bits of shell and turquoise-believed to be from the early consignments of loot that Cortes shipped back to Europe, thus inviting other adventurers to the systematic pillage of Middle and South America Barbarous and splendid these might be suitable adjectives for the sculpture of Middle America While one encounters any number of examples that are, formally, very sophisticated, there is a sense of the brutal and the macabre underlying much of the work The bestial is everywhere in evidence jaguars, serpents, alligators--cult-animals whose fierceness incorporated aspects of the gods (On the other hand, m the case of the more mundane objects, like the dog vase from Teotihuacan, animals often have an almost Disney-like cuteness ) The representations of Xipe-To-tec, "Our Lord of the Flayed One," a god worshipped for the renewal of life and vegetation, posed a particularly challenging problem The ritual practiced for this deity involved first flaying and skinning the human sacrifice, and then sewing a priest into the victim's skin--so the sculptor had to render both the skin and the man of god m it The several examples of this subject in the exhibition include an awesome Aztec statue of a standing figure that at first sight looks conventional enough, until one notices the lips projecting through the gaping mouth, the stitching over the heart incision, and the intricately tied knots at the back of the figure holding the skin in place on its new wearers Some of the most beautiful objects in the show are stone yokes, sleekly carved with figures of serpents, beasts, human skulls These are replicas of equipment used in ceremonial ball games--the object of which, apparently, was not to let the ball fall into one's territory The games had a ritual function, the large rubber ball used--sometimes lethal in itself--being a symbol for the sun The unlucky loser, it seems, had the honor of being sacrificed after the game One says "seems," because the social customs of the Middle American Indian cultures and the precise functions of their art forms are often a mystery It is still virgin territory for the archeologist and the historian to explore and study There is little point m calling the art of Middle America primitive, except for the earliest phases of its development One finds m it too many superb stylizations indicating that the work was carried out under the same high formal imperatives one might expect m the works of modernist sculptors the smooth, highly abstracted stone figurines from Mezcala, for example, or a parrot-headed hacha from Xochicalco (another item used m the ritual ball games) bearing a stunning resemblance to some of Picasso's productions If the round, ball-shaped head from Guatemala, carved out of volcanic stone around 100-250 ad, does not match the extreme simplification one associates with Brancusi, it operates from a similar radical desire for a quintessential form m which the features are barely articulated The end of these highly evolved, ceremonially oriented cultures is a dismal story The Aztecs, for instance, were at the height of their powers Soldiers with Cortes, and Cortes himself, wrote about the magnificence of the city of Tenochtitlan and the splendor of Mocte-zuma's palace, the royal gardens, the royal aviary, they noted the fullness of the royal treasuries, which Moctezuma allowed them to see The arrival of the conquistadors marked a confrontation of the cruelest aspects of Indian culture with the greediest characteristics of Eu-lopean civilization The ending also contained its share of ironies, including one of those extraordinary coincidences that would be too incredible for fiction Among the superstitions Moctezuma harbored was a belief in the prophecies of a legendary Indian king named Quetzalcoatl who had tried, unsuccessfully, to abolish human sacrifices He had sailed off into the Atlantic, vowing that he would return to reclaim his lands and establish an era of peace at the beginning of the Indians' next 52-year calendar cycle Sculptured effigies portrayed Quetzalcoatl as bearded and wearing a cross-like insignia Cortes landed on the shores of Vera Cruz in 1519--bearded, bearing the emblem of the Catholic Church It was the year "one-reed" m the Aztec calendar...