ART REVIEW : Peruvian Power, Moche Magic in ‘Sipan’

Civilizations come and go. It’s as if nature were experimenting with humankind, trying to get the unruly species organized at last. Most of her tinkerings fail, their monuments crumble like Ozymandius in the desert. The curious present rediscovers this rubble, sifts through it and occasionally unearths treasure as dazzling as that revealed in the exhibition “Royal Tombs of Sipan.”

On view at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the show unveils a trove of ferociously sumptuous objects in gold, silver and copper all discovered in the past six years in three ancient tombs of Peru’s Moche people.

Attention was called to the tombs in 1987 when the art market was suddenly flooded with a king’s ransom in Pre-Columbian objects looted by grave robbers from an ancient pyramid complex at Sipan. This alerted archeologist Walter Alva, who directs the Bruning Archeological Museum at nearby Lambayque. Maybe there was more to be found on the site, magical objects that, this time, could be scientifically unearthed to enrich scholarship and culture instead of sheer greed. He set to work digging and contacted his Moche-expert colleague Christopher Donnan, who directs the Fowler Museum.

Their finds resulted in this exhibition and its user-friendly catalogue. Before settling permanently at the Bruning Museum, the show will tour museums in Houston, New York, Detroit and Washington.

The Moche, precursors of the more famous Inca, inhabited fertile valleys along a 250-mile stretch of Peru’s north coast, where they flourished for some nine centuries beginning in AD 100. Scholars aren’t quite sure what happened to them.

They seemed to have it all--smart farming, homogeneous communities of as many as 10,000 souls clustered around pyramid complexes of painted plaster, shining in the sun. The largest was nearly the size of Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza. The Moche had no written language, but their impressive range of artistic expression largely made up for it. They were such good artists they made Toby-like jugs that were virtual portraits. A facial type emerges. Hard, prominent eyes, aquiline noses with fleshy tips and proud, tight lips.

You could look all day at the ceramics that introduce the Moche, but one piece in particular hints at the main course of powerful ceremonial regalia--a bowl depicting workers blowing with air tubes into a furnace to make the fire hot enough to melt metal. The Moche were so resourceful they developed an electroplating system without any mechanical technology. This method of making copper and silver indistinguishable from gold gilding contributed mightily to the barbaric opulence of trappings worn by the Moche warriors and priests.

These reveal the acute aesthetic intelligence of Moche artists in moving from realistic portraiture to decorative stylization and symbolism. You really don’t want to mess with the squat little man turning into a great cat. You cannot take your eyes from the hypnotic attraction of a miniature warrior in jointed gold with a headdress three times the size of his tiny body. You wonder at the import of a scepter topped with an architectural model with battle clubs making up the balustrade and chimerical beasts fornicating on the roof.

The ensemble is a connoisseur’s dream ranging from simple trapezoidal body decorations to ear ornaments the size of saucers, beads as big as billiard balls, nose ornaments that look like false mustaches, backflaps (metal ornaments that hang from the back of the belt) with tinkling beads and an array of ceremonial daggers and hatchets. These were used to dispatch Moche war captives in dignified fashion.

Apparently Moche wars were fought less to gain turf, more to prove individual valor and catch prisoners for sacrifice. The unhappy losers had their throats slit, their blood drained into goblets quaffed by the victors. The Moche regarded this act as a religious ritual.

Objects on view suggest proof of the symbolic and metaphysical intent of the blood ritual. The most compellingly mysterious is a flat gold headdress shaped somewhere between a crescent, stylized ax or abstracted fountain. Regarded fixedly, it begins to look like a three-dimensional dome with two arched tunnels cut through it. It’s as illusionistically convincing as a work of modern Light and Space art. It joins a growing body of evidence that the ancients knew more about the workings of the universe than previously imagined.

A more obvious symbol is one of several giant necklaces on view. Its filigreed beads depict a creature that is at once man and spider. Spiders are also echoed in the image of the Decapitator. This ominous character is depicted standing in ritual posture, a dagger in one hand, a severed head in the other. He was long thought to be a deity but thanks to Donnan’s research, we now know he was more.

During his research the archeologist began to suspect that the Decapitator was a real person. His hypothesis proved true when the final, largest and most elaborate tomb yielded a body surrounded by all the trappings of the Decapitator. He stands represented by a mannequin as the finale of the exhibition. A mysterious gold dome hovers over his helmet; in one hand he holds a scepter. Luckily for tender modern sensibilities, the severed head has been omitted.

Only the rarest of visitors to this stunning exhibition would wish to live in ancient Moche Peru. Civilizations always prefer their own barbarisms. But artists who visit the galleries will have their usual attack of envy at the dense expressive authenticity of this art. On evidence such work can only be made in a place where the individual is in close touch with himself, nature, his culture and beliefs. In an urban world that isolates us from all of them, we have to get very lucky to make art with this kind of power.

* UCLA, Fowler Museum of Cultural History, through Jan. 2, open daily, noon to 5 p.m., Monday and Thursday to 8 p.m. Admission to “Royal Tombs of Sipan” is $5, free Mondays from 5 to 8 p.m. (310) 206-9161.