O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : ‘Himalayas’: Nice Objects, Little Context

The temporary exhibition galleries at the Bowers Museum these days are filled with depictions of serenity, power, rage, compassion and a fair amount of athletic sex. Not to mention complex patterning, long-winded storytelling, meditative splendor . . . and the otherworldly sounds of resonant bass chanting, buzzing horns and silvery bells.

This is the realm of “Art of the Himalayas: Treasures From Nepal and Tibet,” an exhibition of 119 works spanning the 10th to 19th centuries, organized by the American Federation of the Arts.

In terms of the attractiveness and significance of the art and of the scholarly nature of the individual catalogue entries, the exhibition is first-rate.

What’s missing is a sense of the broader cultural context of the work--a dimension even the most atmospheric recorded music playing in the galleries can’t convey all by itself.

In selecting the objects for the show--which come from a private New York collection--curator Pratapaditya Pal favored aesthetic quality over historical or symbolic significance (as he writes in the catalogue). As the Indian and Southeast Asian art expert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Pal certainly is well-equipped to make such choices.

On the other hand, as he notes, the works are “primarily esteemed (by Tibetans and Nepalis) for their spiritual significance rather than their aesthetic allure.” Even a careful viewer is liable to leave this show with little understanding of this significance.

Granted, anyone with a modicum of sensitivity to art can sense the vivacity and organic wholeness of the sculptures, and the eye-catching vividness of color, hypnotic repetition and serpentine line in paintings of deities (known as thankas in Tibet and paubhas in Nepal).

Nevertheless, Himalayan art is daunting to Westerners, especially in terms of its basis in two unfamiliar religious traditions (Hinduism and Buddhism) populated by numerous gods, goddesses and bodhisattvas, each of which is liable to appear in a multitude of forms. (Tibetan art is predominantly Buddhist, whereas the Nepalese works reflect both Hindu and Buddhist faiths.)

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To do this show justice, you really need to read the introductory chapter in the catalogue, which sets out major distinctions among the religions, the cultures and the different forms of art in a refreshingly readable way. Since very little of this information is included in the wall texts, it’s a shame the museum hasn’t developed a brochure incorporating the essay for viewers who cannot afford the $35 catalogue.

Without such guidance, the show breaks down into a seemingly endless array of objects--segregated by country and time period, to be sure, but all too liable to register as a repetitive blur.

This is a serious drawback all too common to “jewel box” presentations of work from other cultures. I’d have preferred a more didactic show with fewer works more aggressively compared and contrasted in relation to a specific cultural theme.

The most frustrating thing about the exhibition is that it gives you no feeling for the way the objects are used in daily life--the way they were hung and lit (sometimes by flickering lamps) in monasteries, displayed in ritual ceremonies and paraded in religious processions.

After all, none of the works in the show were made to decorate a home or to impress the Joneses; virtually all were used as meditative aids in a lifelong attempt to attain enlightenment.

In the absence of context, tiny clues loom large.

One of the more engaging objects from Nepal is a tiny gilt copper sculpture of the “cosmic” many-armed form of a god named Samvara embracing his petite wife. Lingering traces on the deity’s body of the vermilion (pink) powder thrown by the faithful help to conjure a real world of ardent worshipers.

On the other hand, viewers are obliged to imagine the big, pop-eyed gilt copper head of Bhairava, from 16th-Century (or earlier) Nepal, raised above the heads of the faithful as it went bobbing down the street during the festival of Indra.

Couldn’t someone have dug up a photograph of the event--which still occurs every year--showing how a pipe inserted in the mouth of the mask dispenses beer to the celebrating throngs? Photographs of such works in situ help viewers see them as objects used and venerated by real people, not just fancy doodads in a museum display.

After all, photo blowups have become staple ingredients of ethnographic museum shows. Why is it that recent temporary exhibitions at the Bowers--no matter what their source--have such an airless, prepackaged quality, as if the objects might be contaminated by concrete reminders of their origins?

Marooned inside large red cloth-lined Plexiglas cases, the detailed surfaces of the sculptures are frequently hard to make out even when you bend down to their level.

The low light levels required to preserve the painting surfaces are even further weakened by poorly focused lights that don’t allow viewers to see details clearly. (As I walked around with the catalogue, I frequently found myself consulting the illustration to see details rather than the real work in front of me, since the photograph was much clearer!)

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As it is, the works that stand out most clearly in my mind tended to be the ones that look the strangest, or the loveliest, or seem particularly expressive--as well as the many “loving couples” locked into cozy embraces or sexual positions.

Initially somewhat startling to viewers accustomed to the asceticism of Christian religious art, the couples are meant to convey the state of “spontaneity” achieved by combining “female” wisdom and “male” compassion.

Buddhist imagery commonly depicts male and female divinities actually engaged in stand-up sex; in Hindu art, the pair are more often shown in an intimate embrace. (Another Hindu way of portraying this concept is with androgynous single figures, male on one side and female on the other.)

The sweetest-looking couple is a Western Tibetan sculpture of Vajrasattva and his spouse, from about 1300. Vajrasattva, a big dude in the Buddhist pantheon--”no less important than a transcendental Buddha,” according to the catalogue entry--certainly seems to be enjoying a public cuddle with his buxom spouse.

The most elegant lovemaking pair are blue-skinned, many-armed Chakrasamvara and his red-skinned wife, Vajravarahi, who are endowed with aerobicized bodies in a Tibetan painting from the latter half of the 15th Century.

You want nasty? A bodhisattva named Vajrapani assumes one of his “terrifying” forms in a gilt bronze sculpture from 15th-Century Tibet. Snarling demonically at his equally fierce wife, he enjoys her sexual favors while brandishing a thunderbolt, offering a gesture of reassurance, and crushing enemies underfoot. (Hey, there’s no end to what you can do with six arms.) In fact, he’s a good guy, changing his form like a comic-book hero to protect innocent worshipers.

Among the objects from Nepal is a large 17th-Century painting of the cosmic form of Kali, filled with mind-blowing minutiae. Kali, the black goddess of death, is shown here in her cosmic form, with 1,000 arms (painstakingly detailed in concentric circles) and a pyramid of enchanting bird and animal heads--not to mention ranks of other deities and a tapestry of brilliant design motifs.

Two quietly appealing Nepali sculptures of real people (as distinguished from gods) date from the very late-17th and mid-18th centuries. The earlier one is a stylized portrait of an elegant young man dressed in princely robes; the other one shows a gracefully seated woman with ramrod posture, balancing a lamp on her head.

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For the most part, however, it’s easier to warm up to the Tibetan works, which are more stylistically varied than their Nepalese counterparts.

An Eastern Tibetan Wheel of Life, with delicately rendered views of the six realms of rebirth, is a treat for viewers who enjoy narrative detail. Relaxing titans gesture in lordly ways, big-bellied tormented spirits sit around grousing, humans hunt with bows and arrows, and animals roam in a mountainous landscape. (The other two realms are heaven and hell.)

Other works are remarkable because of their startling beauty, such as a 13th-Century brass Buddha from Central Tibet. His sturdily modeled torso, supernatural-style huge earlobes, delicately articulated fingers and toes, and tight blue curls topped by stylized golden flames radiate a blissful aura of serenity.

An 18th-Century painting from Central Tibet and an abstract Tibetan mandala from about 1800 are especially appealing to eyes accustomed to the devices and strategies of contemporary Western art.

In the painting, the colorful central image of the Buddha of infinite life is surrounded by rows and rows of identical miniature buddhas drawn in red. For Buddhists, these pale copies symbolize limitlessness; for the Western viewer of the ‘90s, the lure is the familiar device of serial imagery.

The mandala, a painted design used in esoteric rites to destroy enemies, contains a pulsing combination of curved and straight lines that--as the catalogue entry suggests--”appears to be a source of cosmic energy” even to people uninitiated in Buddhist beliefs.

Surely the weirdest object in the exhibition is a ceremonial bone apron from 14th- or 15th-Century Tibet. (You can see a similar garment on the figure of Chakrasamvara in the painting mentioned above.)

Tiny figures of deities, dancing skeletons and vegetative motifs are carved into a lattice of bones that are probably from human. The apron is mounted on cloth painted with the image of a snake boring its way through skulls or human heads that look remarkably like Homer Simpson.

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Even in era that prides itsself on global consciousness, the curiosity value of Himalayan work remains considerable. In fact, Western interest in Himalayan art--as opposed to Chinese or Indian works--is a rather recent phenomenon.

Visits by foreigners to Nepal were discouraged until the flowering of democracy in the early ‘50s, and Tibet was long imagined by Americans mostly as a Shangri-La, the imaginary enchanted realm of the novel and movie “Lost Horizon.”

Today, Tibet has entered Western consciousness primarily as the abandoned homeland of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual ruler who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 for his nonviolent opposition to dec ades of increasingly harsh Chinese rule.

It’s a pity that a rare opportunity to “visit” two distinctive cultures through their artifacts becomes such a sterile exercise in admiring handsome objects.

No matter how many informative lectures, videos or docent tours the Bowers offers, the lack of cultural context within the exhibition galleries remains a nagging problem.

* “Art of the Himalayas: Treasures From Nepal and Tibet” remains through July 31 at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday; Thursday nights until 9 p.m. Admission: $4.50 adults, $3 senior citizens and students, $1.50 children 5 to 12, free for children under 5.

Tonight: Monks from the Gaden Shartse monastery in Lhasa, Tibet will offer a traditional healing ceremony of prayers, dances and chanting in the museum courtyard at 7 p.m. Admission, including exhibition entry, is $15. Proceeds will aid rebuilding of the monastery. (714) 567-3600.