‘MAYA’ EXHIBIT HELPS DEEPEN THE MYSTERY

The lost civilizations of pre-Columbian America trigger everybody’s fantasy machine. People who never peeped into a museum or cracked a book have muzzy images of Indiana Jones pilfering a gold temple idol or certain beer commercials on TV showing nubile virgins about to be sacrificed to ferocious, feathered snake gods.

A bit of real history soon teaches of Spanish conquistadors come to decimate Aztec and Inca, plundering gold and slaughtering thousands. For some school kids the story provides their first doubts about the virtue of European civilization.

Now we have a real and rare chance to inhale a deeper draft of the people who forged what was arguably the greatest of the Meso-American cultures, the Mayas. Their glorious accomplishment and tragic, unexplained eclipse are the subject of “Maya--Treasures of an Ancient Civilization.” The exhibition, on view at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park to Nov. 10, was organized by the Albuquerque Museum and surveys its subject in about 275 works assembled from 15 collections. Surprisingly, it is the first such traveling encyclopedia ever, despite its subject’s renown.

Hold on. Do we really want to become educated about the Mayans? Illusions are so delicious that wisdom might be folly.

Fear not. It is in the nature of pre-Columbian art that familiarity simply deepens mystery. Even George Kubler, who wrote a standard scholarly work on the subject, was constantly bemused by the way expertise only fostered greater enigma. He once said that the history of Meso-America was like a book in which we know the content of the chapters but not their order or interrelationship.

No one is certain where the Mayas came from, but they left behind magnificent architectural precincts in lands that are today Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Yucatan. At places called Peten, Copan, Tikal, Uxmal and Chichen Itza, they built steep pyramids and richly restrained ceremonial buildings. We assume they had ritual purpose because interior spaces and ball courts are unimportant compared to their ceremonial exteriors. Even muddled, however, we are struck with admiration to realize these classic, exotic edifices were built in an almost impenetrable rain forest by people who had no draft animals. Their great, intricate stone carvings were executed without the aid of metal tools.

The Mayas produced a high civilization with the technology of the Stone Age. While artists chipped away, Mayan thinkers developed systems of mathematics and astronomy so complex they are still incompletely deciphered. It is said their calendar was more accurate to nature than our own and that they were a people uniquely obsessed with time made permanent by computation. The Mayas were forever counting.

They continued to count through various developmental and stylistic phases from around 2000 BC to roughly AD 800 when the culture inexplicably hit the skids. The standard assumption is that it flourished as a kind of priestly theocracy and decayed under enforced influence of hawk Toltecs from Mexico. In their declining epochs Mayan art became aggressively blunted and they took on the nasty habits of mercantilism, militarism and bloody human sacrifice more often associated with their ferocious northern successors, the Aztecs.

All that and more is suggested in the exhibition, which, after a few caveats, nit-picks, reservations and demurers, turns out to be an entirely worthwhile endeavor.

First the irritations.

“Maya” undermines the seriousness of its own intentions by exhibiting symptoms of Blockbusteritis. This affliction is as common among today’s exhibitions as itchy noses in smoggy cities. Its epidemic dimensions incline one to ignore such signs as a tendency to compare oneself to “Treasures of Tutankamun,” the urge to establish souvenir gift shops and the urge for “fun” activities in connection with the show. In this case a “Celebration of Chocolate” is scheduled Sept. 28 and 29. Evidently this excuse to abuse one’s sweet tooth is based on the belief that the Mayas considered chocolate a luxury drink. Isn’t there also a theory they took hallucinogenic drugs?

In fairness, it must also be noted that a program of scholarly lectures and symposia far outnumber hooplas. All the same, hype is unseemly even when suave.

The second qualification is only a complaint if one approaches the exhibition veiled in the gauze of false expectations. Keep in mind that it is located in the Museum of Natural History. That means something. It means, for example, that art lovers are not permitted to fly into a rage when they discover that the very first object they encounter--a massive Late Classic stela from Copan--is not the real thing. Reproductions, anathema in pure art exhibitions, are considered cricket as educational tools in ethnographic exhibits.

Here, then, is the rub. The “Maya” exhibition is outstanding because it combines the virtues of the informative ethnographic display with a high degree of aesthetic interest. Artistic purists may wince at some lurid color photos of the Mayan homeland or the relentlessly popular-didactic organization into sections like “Exploration and Discovery” or “The Maya World.” Anyone who has soaked in Mexico City’s great Museo Nacional de Anthropologica may miss its truly grandiose sweep of this subject but will also have to admit that the ground is very well covered here in smaller scale.

The basic style of Mayan art puts one in mind of a blending of ancient Egyptian and classic Oriental. It has their courtly dignity and extreme stylization which yet manages simultaneously to be highly descriptive of reality.

We see, for example, a superb granite stela from Kaminaljuya in Guatemala. At first it looks like a pure design of floating arabesque hieroglyphs. Soon they focus into an elaborately caparisoned figure fusing with a fabulous winged creature. The visual language is the precise parallel of an incantation producing magical transformation.

A green stone tenoned head with corn headdress from Copan perfectly embodies the exhibition’s excellence. Art buffs can be swept away by the superbly sensitive carving. Visitors out for a lesson can note how perfectly the work embodies the Mayan ideal of beauty. They swooned at elongated heads, prominent bridgeless noses, crossed-eyes and filed teeth inset with jade. Hardly our idea, but it is the power of such art to convince us.

There’s a lot to take in here whether one follows the museum’s scenario or concocts one’s own script. A series of little ceramic figures of the so-called Jaina type may make the art crowd feel they’ve seen better ones somewhere, but they still do their work of telling us of the Mayas’ love of heavy ceremonial regalia with saucer-size earplugs and magnificent plumed headdresses.

Mayan mystery No. umpty-eight concerns their so-called “ballgames.” They certainly put courts in important spots, suggesting that the games were far more significant than mere sports events. Maybe they had magical overtones or were serious contests like knightly jousts. In any event, they produced fascinating paraphernalia like an ingenious monkey skull handstone or the so-called hachas. Made of flat stone vaguely resembling hatchets, they are often carved in the form of human heads. The one on view is a marvel of sculptural problem solving that turns an inch-thick slab into the impression of a head in the round.

The Mayas produced acres of wall painting that were mainly lost in time, but we get a clear idea of its curvilinear style in a fine selection of painted vases like one depicting a confrontation between three standing figures. Patterning on these vessels is so rhythmically paced that they are at once languorous and lively.

Such is the variety and interest of the trove that the chronicler is threatened with becoming the mere maker of an effusive list. Don’t miss the elegantly abstract altarpiece! Be sure to have a look at the endearing little animals! Oh, the catalogue! Clear and informative! Phew.

Perhaps the biggest surprise here is something of an organizational illusion. Received wisdom has it that the period after the introduction of Toltec influence and before the Spanish invasion was a time of decline for Mayan art. While this is historically accurate, the Postclassic art on hand here is so deftly selected that it contradicts generalization.

There is a clear loss of sensitivity, but new bluntness has its own theatrical power. The familiar mass of a reclining chacmool figure is highly conventionalized but nonetheless impressive. An Atlantean figure and a mythical bird head have a typical Toltec blockiness. To our eyes they are almost humorous like big stone Muppets. That’s it. This Postclassic art is like caricature. Sometimes the formal reduction reads to us like the wit of economy as in the striking little head of a deity from Mayapan. Other times as in some odd, spiky ceremonial flints or skull-like effigy vessel, the work appeals to a sensibility bred of contemporary Expressionism.

The final section of “Maya” is a melancholy look at looting and counterfeiting. The pre-Columbian archeological and artistic heritage has been severely compromised by years of unsystematic grave robbing by poor peasants desperate for money and greedy collectors careless of any value but their own aggrandizement.

Pre-Columbian art has become so popular that it is widely and accurately faked. Hey. Maybe the two abuses can solve each other. Promote pride in collections of fakes by ravenous aesthetes and leave the sites to careful posterity.