ART REVIEW : Exploring Humanity in Indian, Tai Works

Art museums are often regarded as places of entertainment--pious entertainment but entertainment nonetheless. Serious study of the matter therein is seen as a peripheral pastime. It has been deleted from the curricula of most public schools and downgraded in colleges and universities. Recently the economy has dictated the erosion of museums--witness the County Museum of Art’s cuts in staff, gallery hours and exhibitions.

The idiocy of such cultural policy may now be coming home to roost. This fragmented and fractious world admits a crucial need for understanding between the peoples of the planet. It also admits it doesn’t quite know how to go about fostering and nurturing that understanding.

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Two relatively modest new exhibitions at LACMA make the point. “Textiles and the Tai Experience in Southeast Asia” includes a lot of pretty cloth, but it’s about more than woof and warp.

“Pleasure Gardens of the Mind: Indian Paintings From the Jane Greenough Green Collection” consists of 61 small paintings that mark developmental points in art of the Indian subcontinent from the 16th to 19th centuries. It comes with a catalogue written in gracefully accessible style by Pratapaditya Pal, LACMA’s senior curator of Indian and Southeast Asian art, and his associates Stephen Markel and Janet Leoshko.

Anything Indian borders on a long and complex history. This event, slightly over-simplified, reflects the taste of two ruling dynasties--the Muslim Mughals and the Hindu Rajputs. Both were enthusiastic patrons of agreeable and courtly arts that mirror their pleasures, fantasies and beliefs.

Luckily for viewers not in the mood for hard lessons, this show is arranged in thematic groups that dramatize, rather than chronicle, the Indian imagination.

Pictures are so small as to border on miniaturization. Their style is a melange of native, Persian and European influences. Their look is a paradoxical blend of worldliness and naivete that gives them the aura of an ultra-sophisticated rococo folk art.

Flattened surface patterning lends their narrative content fairy-tale dreaminess. Extremely sharp underlying draftsmanship and apt color testify to a profound level of expressive control.

Hindu patrons liked religious themes such as the lush “Krishna and Radha With Milkmaids.” Its setting will remind Westerners of the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve translated into a courtly pair. The nice thing about this art is that its themes always dribble away from the esoteric toward the human. The most convincing sections are on Romance and Courtly Life.

They suggest that the celestial is never far from the temporal and that, combined, the outcome is poetry that speaks across cultures. “Sohni Swims to Meet Her Lover” predates the song about forging the deepest river and climbing the highest mountain but the effect is the same. “Jilted Heroine in the Moonlight” uses an astonishingly subtle combination of grayed greens and lavenders to convey a magical tryst gone awry.

The most spectacular of these pictures happen to roost in the section on life at court. A portrait of a courtier tells us there were artists at work with eyes as elegantly penetrating and discreet as those of Hans Holbein. An autumnal “Tiger Hunt” is more like the hunters’ after-the-fact lyric account than the bloody reality.

If such groupings are revealing, the one called “Musical Modes” is absolutely telling. India has long pursued a tradition that was only taken up by the West in the 19th Century: the attempt to use the arts to evoke one another. Indian melodies--ragas--are supposed to personify themes that are then translated into poetry that attempts to both capture the spirit of the raga and call forth visual images. Then there developed a tradition of painting that aims to visually parallel the melodies. Some images such as “Vasant Ragini” are fairly literal scenes of dancers and musicians. Much more germane is an image such as “Asavari Ragini.” It intends to call up a ragini (a six-part raga) about the spirit of a somber early morning and is personified as a woman sitting beneath a tree taming and teaching writhing serpents.

In viewing these marvelous paintings, you can sometimes hear as much as see them. It is easy to identify with an old art from far away that has already accomplished what we are all still trying to do--understand life and make ourselves whole.

Meanwhile, “Textiles and the Tai Experience in Southeast Asia” is about the way cloth is almost literally used to weave the social fabric in Thailand.

The word Tai , according to LACMA’s ever-informative, didactic wall labels, identifies groups of people who speak that language and live mostly in Thailand and Laos, with others scattered about Burma and southern China.

Many of these folks are Theravada Buddhists. They believe in a form of reincarnation where merit accumulated in this life determines one’s status the next time around. This belief props up a social hierarchy that is heavily stratified with royalty and monks at the top, high officials in the middle (where they belong) and the lay population where it always is.

This traveling show was organized by the Textile Museum in Washington and supervised here by associate curator Dale Carolyn Gluckman, all in celebration of the 60th birthday of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit of Thailand. The point of the whole operation, according to the catalogue, is to show that it is the not-so-humble textile that knits together Tai society.

Properly read, all these patterned hip-wrappers, shoulder cloths, pillows, banners and offerings act to keep the Tai status quo. Costumes identify individuals as members of particular cultural groups. Textiles given as gifts usually flow up the pecking order from inferiors to superiors. They only go downstream when they are royal gifts bestowed as marks of favor but the pay-off comes when the recipient wears the gift as a mark of fealty to the ruler.

The most refined and beautiful textiles on view look more Indian than Tai because they are. In the 17th Century, when Thailand was still called Siam, textiles from India became the currency of a flourishing international spice trade. The royals monopolized these textiles, which, instead of the native product, came to symbolize Siamese aristocracy.

The way this material is presented encourages us to think that there is something singular, exotic, rigid and utterly foreign about this use of costume and fabric.

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We are informed that among the Tai, costume is used to make distinctions between the genders. Lest you feel we are free of such social control, try going to the market in your spouse’s accouterments.

We are informed that as Tai grow older they wear more somber colors. Don’t Americans make distinctions about the appropriateness of certain costumes for certain ages? If a woman in her 80s shows up in hip-hop finery, we say she is a colorful character.

Without papering over crucial cultural distinctions, it’s important to remember that age-old impulses to define people by appearance don’t go away. Neither does the longing for immortality and magic.

Two talismanic jackets in the show are artistically powerful. They are intended to protect their wearers against physical harm or malignant spirits. Isn’t that superstitious and charming? Sure it is. So is my St. Christopher medal and your lucky baseball cap.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; “Textiles and the Tai Experience in Southeast Asia” through May 9, “Pleasure Gardens of the Mind,” through June 13, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.