Monday, January 03, 2005

Aztecs at the Guggenheim Reveals Blinders about Contemporary Civilization

The November 1, 2004 issue of The New Yorker contained Peter Schjeldahl's review of The Aztec Empire at the Guggenheim Museum in NYC. I was struck by a certain blindness in its point of view on the exhibition and what we know about the Aztecs. Last week I had the opportunity to see the show. It is enormous and overwhelming; startling and dazzling, especially the range of topics and approaches.


INLAID STONE: This mask (c. 450 AD) of stone, turquoise, obsidian, and shell was used in rituals at
Teotihuacan, a city that flourished 1,000 years before the Aztecs.
photo: MICHEL ZABÉ/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM (borrowed without permission)


But, back to Peter Schjeldahl, and, as it turns out, to many other reviewers, the human sacrifice that is so important to Aztec religious practice is a zone of human behavior that is both exotic and somehow verboten. Schjeldahl's essay in the New Yorker begins,
"The hypercivilized, unimaginably savage Aztecs made war almost tenderly, wielding wooden swords that were edged with bits of obsidian or flint and, in face-to-face combat, endeavoring not to kill their enemies but, commonly by striking at their legs, to disable and capture them. Later, the captives - thousands of them for the rededication of the Great temple at Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) in 1478 - were led to high platforms, where priests tore out and displayed their still-beating hearts."


and from later in his essay:

"I couldn't shake the thought that most of the show's contents were made with and for eyes that routinely beheld terrible acts, including rites of "autosacrifice" which the Aztecs performed at all their religious ceremonies."

Lets dispense with the first and simplest observation coming now after having seen the exhibition. One would hardly know from the essay that there is anything other than ritualized human sacrifice to the Aztecs. But, the show demonstrates a culture far broader and more powerful. For instance, they had developed a 365 day calendar well before Europeans had figured this out. Though, in honor of all the deities they also maintained a religious calendar of 260 days in parallel. Nor, would you be prepared for the naturalistic sculpture that existed along side the religious formalisms.


Locust - image borrowed from Guggenheim without permission


The written language is only hinted at in the exhibition itself, but for the past fifty years linguists have been constructing a detailed understanding of the language. This is a whole other story of academic blinders, but that for another time.....

Far more disturbing to me about this focus on human sacrifice is the moral blindness that is at the center of this approach to the Aztecs. We have passed through a century in which mass warfare was created and institutionalized. Our new century begins with more mass warefare. In the last twenty years or so we have seen the rise of "precision munitions" and "smart bombs" right alongside the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Africa with nothing more than machetes.

We think nothing of a social, political, and legal infrastructure in which it is considered perfectly normal for 17 and 18 yr olds to join the military machine to be sent off to do the bidding of whatever regime happens to be in power, and for whatever purposes they deem useful. So, it is perfectly accepted as a norm that we "sacrifice" our youth on the altar of "democracy", "national security", "world peace", "religious purity", etc.

Clearly there is something a bit amiss for us to be so horrified by the Aztecs rituals.

posted by Mark Orton at 8:48 PM  

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home