Getting in Touch With the Spirit World : Review: The works in ‘Nagual in the Garden’ are frankly artificial. Try telling that to your subjective mind.

It’s uncommon to encounter an exhibition like “Nagual in the Garden” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Subtitled “Fantastic Animals in Mexican Ceramics,” the show includes some 150 works that would delight a child--wonderful chimerical beasties and enchanting monsters in colorful clay. At the same moment, the show poses so many of art’s fundamental issues as to give poet, philosopher or historian plenty to chew on.

The ensemble and its 150-page catalog were put together by curator Lenore Hoag Mulryan. Both mainly represent the holdings of Mexican potter, painter and collector Jorge Wilmot. In 1957, he settled in the little village of Tonala near Guadalajara, where he established a ceramic factory and a museum dedicated to Mexican arts. Wilmot was attracted to the location because of its long status at a center for ceramics. We are not talking decades here. Folks have been potting around Tonala since about 2300 BC.

Since those ancient days, Mexican ceramic artists have made naguales. They are believed to be animal tricksters or spirit guides that hide in mysterious misted gorges and sneak into villages at night to do mischief.

According to an Aztec creation myth, the god Quetzalcoatl had to journey to the land of the dead to find precious bones he needed to make the new people of his nation. His inner voice and guide on this perilous venture was one of the naguales. Thus, if the representations of these creatures look merely cute or bizarre to us, we’re not getting the whole picture. Naguales represented powerful emanations of the spirit world.

The earliest on view here date from between AD 200 and 500. Among them is a horned toad who looks quizzical and a bat-eared dog who appears perfectly delighted that he has a head at both ends of his body.

To modern eyes, the most basic and striking thing about such works is the way they fuse two contradictory readings. On one hand, they don’t really look at all like living things. Forms are reduced to shapes that emerge naturally from the act of throwing a pot. They are cylindrical, tubular, concave and whatnot. Anatomical characteristics like snouts, ears, claws and paws are simplified to convey just enough visual data to identify the subject. Small surface details like fur and skin are painted on as decorative patterns of dots. In short, the actual object is heavily stylized and frankly artificial.

Yet, at the same instant the objective brain recognizes all this, the subjective mind has the eerie feeling these things are alive. A particularly striking instance is an effigy of a little dog curled up asleep. It stirs exactly the same feelings of affection as looking at your pet puppy at rest, even as it clearly remains a handmade object.

The message then is that the person who made this thing was someone with the power to take inert clay and invest it with a living spirit, someone who functions as a link between worlds in exactly the same way as the naguales. From this emerges the definition of the artist as shaman and of the making of art itself as a basic to the human quest for understanding.

The people of Tonala clearly did not understand what was happening when calamity descended on them in 1530. It came in the form of the renegade conquistador Nuno de Guzman, said to be the most ruthless of the Spanish invaders. He simply subjugated the people through the superior power of his army. But the event was so devastating to the Tonaltecans that they turned it into myth. It was said that St. James appeared on a white horse in the sky, magically mangling and maiming the native forces without touching or killing them.

The event became a common motif in the new ceramic art that grew from colonization along with new naguales like the Austrian eagle and the Spanish lion. Aristocratic Spaniards brought in Hispano-Moresque pottery that influenced the locals and fostered a new hybrid style.

Typical colonial works on view include large urn-like vessels. They combine the energy of flexed muscles with delicate, ornate floral patterning and restrained color in earth tones. Tonaltecan potters seem to us to satirize their conquerors in caricatured versions of European motifs. The Spanish either read them differently or were too full of themselves to notice because such work became highly valued in the luxury trade.

Thus we see a primal art transformed into its more familiar guise as object de luxe for the carriage trade, baubles intended to flatter the taste of the rich and powerful, enhancing their prestige. If the potters of the nagual felt oppressed by all this, it doesn’t show in these elegant works.

It does appear by hindsight as Mexico, step by step, escaped the yoke of foreign rule. After the revolution, in the 1920s and ‘30s, the government celebrated Mexico’s great tradition of indigenous art. The influences of the past merged into simpler and more direct forms, an authentic folk style. The nagual became a kind of celebratory bestiary of national symbolism. Predatory imperial eagles became humble-but-proud roosters. Kingly lions fused into dogs and cats.

The feast day of the awesome St. James is turned inside out and celebrated to this day as Los Tastoanes, the dance of the conquest. Now, however, the conqueror is Mexico, and St. James is mocked in effigy. Among the liveliest works here are grotesque masks--some from Nayarit--used in the fiesta. They depict men with pig’s snouts, snake mouths, reptile noses and deer’s antlers.

Folk artists became independent creators or entrepreneurs like Wilmot. Almost ironically, the objects from his workshop look like an updated throwback to the elegance of the colonial period. Bold forms of iguana, ibis, lion and snake are once again decorated with intricate patterns, the whole subsumed in shining gold or transparent glazes. The effect is richly ornate, and objects seem designed to harmonize with the decor of mansions.

The difference is that today native artisans profit from such works and practice on their own as wildly as suits them. A noted contemporary like Candelario Medrano started as a toy maker and graduated to a master of the nagual, making hilarious images like women who ride horses that have the faces of husbands.

Recent earthenware figures from Michoacan combine primal power with folk humor and sophisticated understanding. There are monster mermen, a sympathetic devil with his baby, a laughing kangaroo-lion sitting on a snake, and a two-headed yellow dog that bears a marked resemblance to the one made almost 2,000 years ago. Some things don’t change much.

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“NAGUAL IN THE GARDEN,” UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 405 Hilgard Ave. Dates: Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., Thursdays until 9 p.m. Through Nov. 17. Prices: $5; $3 for senior citizens and non-UCLA students. Phone: (310) 825-4361.