Mesoamerica and Intimacy With Nature

It takes quite a mental leap to enter the world of ancient Mesoamerica from our contemporary, urban cocoon. The shift in sensibilities is dramatic and may even evoke some surprising jealousies if one contrasts today’s techno-efficient mind-set with the sturdy spiritual and aesthetic scaffolding that framed Mesoamerican culture.

The beauty and integrity of the work in the Mingei International Museum’s current show, “Precolumbian Flora and Fauna: Continuity of Plant and Animal Themes in Mesoamerican Art,” help make that mental leap inviting. Once transported, the ingenuity of form and depth of belief so abundant in the show can both nourish and instruct the mindful viewer.

The exhibit (through Feb. 17) does more than offer a rich survey of painted, carved and modeled animal and plant forms from present-day Mexico and its southern neighbors. It reminds us of what we have lost and may never recapture: a cycle of respect among the species, an interdependence that ensures mutual survival.

The Mingei show focuses on the continuity of certain motifs and belief systems across Precolumbian cultures, but the work itself speaks more of distinction, of individuals’ creativity, their endless, marvelous permutations on familiar forms and functional objects.

Both the show and its well-illustrated catalogue are divided into four sections.

The first three represent the three tiers of the Precolumbian cosmos--air, earth and underworld--and the final section presents contemporary examples of thematically related folk art from the Mesoamerica region.

“Precolumbian man used animals to understand and order natural phenomena,” explains guest curator Jeanette Favrot Peterson in her catalogue essay.

“Ancient societies structured their world view using plant and animal metaphors; they endowed their deities with powers symbolized by fauna and flora; their ruling elite borrowed from nature those characteristics they wished to emulate and control.” Hence, when a Mayan ruler wore a waterlily insignia, the flower’s associations with agricultural canals and the watery underworld bestowed power to the ruler over fertility and the underworld.

Tight visual and conceptual links bound the earth to its occupants in Precolumbian culture, which spanned roughly 3,000 years, from about 1,500 B.C. up to the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521. The crocodile, for example, was one of several fish-like creatures that came to symbolize the earthly realm, for it floated on water, just like land, resting atop the fluid underworld. Further, the patterns on the backs of crocodiles, turtles and toads were compared to the geometric patterns of tilled fields. And the snake’s shedding of its skin each year came to represent the Earth’s own seasonal renewal.

Sensitivity to the form, texture and behavior of animals ran high among the Olmec, Maya and Aztec cultures, and the candor and energy of the animal figures here bear witness to the artists’ close observation as well as his belief in the animals’ spiritual power. A clay monkey effigy (550-800 A.D.) with a sacrificial rope around its neck wears an expression of uncanny honesty, as if aware of the higher meaning bestowed upon his life and death as purveyor of creativity and vitality.

Dogs, though domesticated, were also eaten and offered as sacrifices to the gods in ancient Mesoamerica, which comprised Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, most of Mexico and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Most of the canine figures capture the animal’s frisky, friendly nature, nuzzling into another’s neck, gnawing on a bone, or squirming on its back, with legs poking up into the air.

The desire to depict essences of form and character overshadow any concern for detailed representation. Forms are often simplified and generalized. This paring down not only heightens the vitality of the forms but lends them integrity as abstract design, a fact not lost on such early 20th-Century modernists as Picasso and Braque.

Form and function meld gracefully in vessels whose openings double as dog tails, or whose handles are formed by the arching body of a bird. In one Mayan vessel of buff clay, a cylindrical base incised with delicate patterns supports a horizontal fish. The vessel’s opening, a large round hole in the creature’s belly, echoes the shape of the fish’s bulging eye and is subtly framed by the arch of its fins.

The show concludes with a small selection of masks, vessels and ritual objects from contemporary Mexico and Central America. Native beliefs have persisted, despite the Spanish imposition of Christianity in the 16th Century, and the continuity of themes and motifs during Precolumbian times still holds today.