DAWN OF THE AMAZON : New Bowers Exhibit Sheds a Little Light on Lesser Known Treasures of the Rain Forest

We watch fascinating footage of jaguars, fantastically plumed birds and insects of untold variety on nature shows. The print media inundate us with figures concerning the rate at which their teeming, canopied home is shrinking. Yet the human beings that occupy the same lands are mentioned only occasionally at best--and the art they produce, almost never.

Until now.

“Everybody talks about the rain forest,” said Adam Mekler, who owns most of the items that make up “Colors of the Dawn/Invisible People: Arts of the Amazon,” opening Friday at Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. “But I can’t tell you how many times I come across people--college professors, doctors and lawyers--who are not even aware that there are people in the rain forest. And why not just call them people? The ‘noble savage’? Why do they call them savage?”

Mekler, reached by phone at his home in Los Angeles, was on a very impassioned roll.

He continued by noting that while hundreds of African, Native American and pre-Columbian art shows have been mounted in the United States and Europe, less than a handful of Amazonian shows of any kind have been staged--and a previous exhibition of Mekler’s collection, at the Fresno Art Museum last year, counts for one of them.

“For some reason, the Amazonian people--I don’t like to call them tribes--are the last people on Earth Western people try to understand,” Mekler said.

“They send anthropologists, but even most anthropologists are uninterested in these objects. You find 400 pages about the tribes and not one photograph of an object.

“What makes human beings different from other beings are the objects they create. When no attention is paid to their objects, the Amazonians are being ignored as people. How they’re presented when they are presented to the world is also disturbing. The titles of books all use words that dehumanize, that depict them as something other than human beings.”

Mekler believes this reflects the way the Amazonian culture is treated.

“The white man treated blacks and North American Indians like that,” he said. “But they still treat the Amazonians like that today . The Amazonians know more about nature than all of us put together, yet they are continually exploited, are thrown off their ancestral lands, and have no voice at all in matters that concern their existence.”

Reports indicate that 73 Yanomami Indians, including three pregnant women, were massacred by wildcat gold miners just last week; almost half the victims were children, at least 10 of whom had been beheaded with machetes. Miners had killed five Yanomami the week before.

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The Fresno show displayed hammocks, cooking utensils, blowguns and even a shrunken head, objects more commonly associated with an ethnographic display.

When Bowers curator Paul Apodaca initially set about to mount a show concentrating specifically on the art of the Amazonian people--for no other reason than that he felt it was a show that needed to be done--he serendipitously became aware of the Fresno show. Mekler subsequently visited Bowers and was, in his own words, “overjoyed” by Apodaca’s proposed non-anthropological focus. He offered additional objects from his home not previously seen. Apodaca also learned of artifacts that had been brought back from the Xingu River tribes of Brazil in the 1960s by the late Saddleback College trustee and ethnographer, John Marshall, and arranged for their donation to the museum; those items round out the exhibition.

Among the more than 150 items to be displayed at Bowers are brilliantly feathered headdresses and masks, ceremonial body costumes, luminous jewelry made from beetle wings, carved wooden benches, and sculptures depicting hunting and birthing scenes. A ceremonial tunic featuring a toucan head and wings on front and back is reputed to have been owned by President Grover Cleveland.

The oldest item in “Colors of the Dawn” dates to 1910, the most recent is from the 1980s. Though mindful of the need for contextual information, Apodaca tried as much as possible to concentrate on the objects’ value as works of art.

“My labels will provide a poetic narrative to transmit some of that information,” Apodaca explained. “I’m not going to set you adrift in the room. But I also don’t want that information to interfere with your ability to look at the art as beautiful, to be struck by the care and the work that’s in it.”

“Colors of the Dawn” includes artworks made by 37 of the more than 60 Amazonian tribes that reside in the rain forests of South America, tribes with such names as Waiwai, Kayapo Kuben Kran Krein, and Txikao. The Amazon basin occupies an area larger than the United States, yet has a population two-thirds that of Santa Ana.

Amazonian tribes are led by a chief, who does not issue orders, but rather makes suggestions, and a shaman. The shaman has immense knowledge concerning the medicinal value of plants, and through the use of hallucinogenic drugs and the donning of ceremonial garb, is believed to communicate with spirits, heal the sick and encourage successful harvests and hunts.

Many of the objects, though beautiful, are primarily ceremonial. A kunnana , for instance, is a plaited plaque covered with the feathers of the macaw and parrot; an example with a double-headed jaguar design was spangled at its center with large black dots. “Those are ants, big ant heads,” Apodaca explained. “Fire ants are stuck through the middle, then stuck on you so they bite. It’s a test during the transition into adulthood.” The initiate cannot cry out while being bitten; the kunnana is afterward paraded as a trophy for courage.

But Apodaca said that it would be a mistake born of Western cultural prejudice to approach all of the objects as having ritualistic or symbolic meaning.

“A Waiwai artist was asked why his tribe uses green beetle wings to make earrings,” Apodaca recounted. “ ‘Because they’re beautiful,’ was his answer. What else would an artist say?” The beetles provide a perfect example of how the Amazonians find beauty where we don’t, he said.

Apodaca also spoke about looking at something and, because of cultural differences, not being able to see it. One of the costumes provided a striking example. It looked like a giant inverted rattan ice cream cone, with little woven appendages and filled with hairy ice cream, from the tapered end of which dangled twine and what appeared to be a fishing fly.

“You look at this and you wonder what it is,” Apodaca said. “But as soon as I tell you, you will see it.” It was an anteater. Obviously.

Mekler, 52, began collecting antiquities as a child growing up in Israel, where, he noted, “if you walk with your eyes (focused) on the ground instead of the sky there, you find plenty.” As a child, he read a great deal of adventure fiction and travel books. He taught music and art history at Mt. St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles in the 1960s, then ran the Mekler Gallery, also in Los Angeles, for 20 years until forced to close it due to illness. He is a pianist with two recordings to his credit who continues to perform.

Mekler saw a PBS television program in the 1970s about an Amazonian tribe and immediately became fascinated by the headdresses. He bought his first two objects, made by the Bororo and Kayapo tribes, soon after at a local ethnological art show. He obtained the bulk of his Amazonian acquisitions--400 works--”by accident.”

“Nobody collects (these pieces); nobody wanted them,” Mekler said. “These objects were just sitting. People had them in their attics, stuff brought to them in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Many people gave me things--they couldn’t get rid of them!”

Amazingly, Mekler obtained none of his Amazonian collection in the Amazon. In fact, though he owns more than 200 volumes on the subject and says he’s done enough research to fill several Ph.D. dissertations, he’s never even been to the Amazon. He said that the reason goes beyond the expense and physical difficulty of reaching the tribes.

“We carry germs--chicken pox, flu, measles--we are immune; they are not,” he explained. “They are being decimated (by our diseases) at an incredible rate. Cholera came over the Andes from Peru and decimated a whole bunch of Yanomami four years ago. Now, AIDS is affecting tribespeople in the Eastern Amazon through contact with settlers in Brazil.

“It is responsible not to get to them.”

Mekler wrote and designed the catalogue for the Fresno show--it’s also available at the Bowers--and the London-based publisher Thames Hudson recently signed a contract with him to compile the first comprehensive book on Amazonian art for release in fall, 1994.

Prefatory material in the catalogue notes that the population of the Amazon people has dwindled from 3 to 5 million at the turn of the century to 200,000 today, with less than 100,000 able to continue living their traditional lifestyle. Some tribes now number few than a dozen members, and Mekler believes that within a decade the traditional cultures will no longer exist.

“All that survives any civilization is the art, the literature and the music,” he said. “There is a great mythology but no written language, and unless the music is recorded, that will die out too.

“Apparently, I have one of the largest collections of Amazonian art in the Western Hemisphere. In a way, I feel I am preserving a whole civilization. But with all good intentions, I feel it is too late.”