A Long-Gone Culture’s Timeless Textiles

Boldly graphic and boldly colorful, the tunics and textile accessories mounted in the Masterpiece in Focus Gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art seem as contemporary as fabrics found in the pages of Architectural Digest. But they are 1,200 years old.

The masterpiece spotlighted here is a tunic decorated in alternating vertical bands of geometric design and solid color. Woven out of camelid fur--camelids include llamas, alpacas, guanacos and vicunas--this piece of clothing would have required six to nine miles of yarn and taken one or more artisans 500 hours to weave on a wide loom.

It is, in the words of Kaye Spilker, the museum’s associate curator of costume and textiles, “a prestige textile” that would have been worn by nobility, clergy or high government officials in ancient Wari (or Huari) culture, which was centered in a mountaintop kingdom in the Andes and ruled most of what is today Peru from 600 to 850.

Last year, when an American dealer put the tunic on the market, Spilker nominated the piece, with its sophisticated juxtapositions of pinks, reds and ochres, for acquisition to the museum’s Collectors Committee. She reports that their reaction was: “It looks so modern!”

Eventually, three members of the committee, Camilla Chandler Frost and Robert and Mary Looker, donated the funds for its purchase. The museum declined to disclose the amount.

Now standing before the tunic mounted on the wall, Spilker says emphatically, “Of course it looks modern--because there were artists back then dealing with the same formal principles of aesthetics as artists today.”

The Wari artists who dyed the yarn and wove the fabric were adept at using “abstraction, stylization and complex color patterning to reduce natural forms to powerful visual signs.”

Around Spilker, other display cases hold a selection of cocoa-leaf pouches, wrapping cloths, headbands, hats and more tunics. She points out that we know what a fully outfitted Wari VIP would have looked like from pottery effigies. He (and most likely it would have been a he) would have had a small, square hat sitting atop his head and held with a string under his chin, and a tunic covering most of his body, including the torso and upper arms. His face would have been tattooed with complementary motifs.

“Together these layers of geometries made the wearer into a walking pattern,” writes Wari expert Rebecca Stone-Miller in the book “To Weave for the Sun.” In public, this clearly signaled importance and official status. According to Stone-Miller, more than 200 Wari tunics are known to be in existence today.

Spilker wanted this particular one both for its excellent condition and its archetypal design. “This design is one of the more typical, maybe worn by a larger class or group of people,” she says, then points out two highly schematized motifs, placed side by side and repeated in the design bands down the cloth.

One is a profile of a head with an eye that is black on one side, white on the other, sitting within a keyhole shape; atop the head is a trapezoidal block of color that represents a hat. But the figure is not only human. Where his mouth would be is a small square containing a backward N. It represents the incisors of a feline, perhaps a jaguar or a puma, revered for its stealth and power. The human-animal combination signifies a magical, possibly a shamanistic being.

The other motif is more abstract. Known as a “stepped fret,” it’s a series of zigzags, perhaps symbolizing a mountain, that turn into a swirl, perhaps symbolizing water or the sea. In fact, the concept of duality or complementary opposites in nature is another theme that scholars see reflected in the textiles.

Our knowledge of Wari society is sparse because it left no written records. However, scholars have the evidence of textile, pottery and burial remains, and have cross-referenced them with what is known about later Inca culture and what the Spaniards wrote of the Andes people. “Erroneous as these chroniclers were,” Spilker acknowledges, “they provided a lot of good information too.”

The city of Wari was 9,000 feet up in the central Andes, and while artifacts have been found there, textiles did not last in the humidity of the highlands. Instead, they have been found in tombs along the long Peruvian desert coast. “The entire coast is drier than the Sahara,” notes Spilker, who has traveled there. Inside tombs, mummies were found wrapped in layers and layers of fabric, preserved by the highly arid conditions.

While we do not know the exact structure of their society, Spilker says, we do know they were very hierarchical, and the clothing they wore, in life as in death, was class-or profession-specific. Textiles were their most valued commodities--they used no money--and were often given as political favors or rewards.

This was a society in which weaving was a universal skill--men and women of every class were expected to learn it. Everyone would have understood the symbolism and the structure of the weavings.

At one spot in the exhibition, Spilker points to a riotously designed patchwork tunic. The work is indeed pieced, but not from scraps. Each small patch was woven individually, some were tied-dyed, and then joined. The intricateness of the weaving and the extra work of creating the patchwork make it a particularly virtuosic piece.

“In a culture where everyone knows how to weave, the only way to do something superior is to do something difficult,” Spilker says. “And everyone would have recognized this as something really difficult.”

While the stepped fret and the feline profile are found in many other pieces in the gallery, there are also representations of other animals important to the Wari, such as birds and camelids, and of a figure called the staff bearer, a man in a running or kneeling position, often with bird-like, clawed toes, holding one or two poles. One pouch in the exhibition shows just the toes, arranged in a pattern, but the reference remains to that figure, Spilker says.

“What this is is a surrogate symbol for the staff bearer,” Spilker explains, “the way the cross is a symbol in Christian icono-graphy--think of all that’s wrapped up in that symbol.” However, the full import of the staff bearer has been lost to us.

The colors on these pieces are remarkably vibrant. The blues were made from indigo, which was obtained through a laborious process involving a plant extract that is colorless until shaken and oxidized. The bright pink came from dried, ground cochineal beetle; a large amount of powdered beetle was required to dye a few ounces of yarn.

For Spilker, the more she knows about how these textiles were made and designed, the more astonishing they are. Western art history, she points out, tends to favor painting over other expressions, but to her, these are also works of art. “I want to show that there was a level of sophistication 1,200 years ago, perhaps as far back as 2,000 years ago,” she says, and “that there were amazing technological achievements, as well as artistic ones, back then.”

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“DRESS CODES: ABSTRACTION IN WARI TEXTILES OF PERU,” LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Dates: Showing indefinitely. Open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, noon-8 p.m.; Friday, noon-9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Prices: Adults, $7; students and seniors, $5; children, $1. Phone: (323) 857-6000.