Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection Gift at the Walters Art Museum is a collection of 135 artworks that spans a massive time frame from 1200 B.C. to A.D. 1530 (when the Spanish arrived), as well as the three major geo-political regions of Mesoamerica, Central America and Andean South America.
Because of this, there is some difficulty in wrapping the mind around their contemporaneous social context, which is obscured even further by the equally massive geographic area they were collected from.
The Walters Museum helps the viewer out with a number of helpful graphical representations indicating the geographical positions of the relevant civilizations, accompanied by a large timeline charting their rise and fall.
Almost all precipitously stop existing with the depressingly destructive arrival of the Spanish and Catholicism.
A helpfully devastating statistic is that in Central America, 90 percent of the population at the time of Spanish arrival was killed by European-borne diseases.
In another effort to break down the stubborn walls of temporality, the Walters provides a collection of scents and textures from materials that were probably encountered in the day of a life of a person in that era/region, e.g. cocoa beans, llama wool, jade, etc.
The exhibition starts with a quick word about John Bourne, a native of L.A. and noted explorer of South America.
His first trip into the jungles of southern Mexico was in 1945. He immediately followed this up with another in 1946 with Carl Frey and photographer Giles Healey, the trio being the first non-Mayans to see the magnificent frescoes of Bonampak (some compare it to the Sistine Chapel) that depicts battle scenes, public rituals and politics in bold, vibrant colors.
The exhibition space itself is dark, gifting the assorted ceramics a secret glow, while overhead a breathy ghostly flute can be heard.
This is later revealed to be an extract of the recordings made by Bourne during his travels.
Bourne took advantage of the existing technologies, namely the camera and tape recorder, to beat back the corrosive influences of Europe, going so far as to put the electric generator for the tape recorder in a pit covered in leaves to ensure less of an adulteration of the light-footed flute recordings that are unique to each village he passed through.
The exhibit cobbles together a window into these incredibly complex and sophisticated societies, which is an achievement. Despite the wealth of material on display there is still a palpable feeling of loss, especially in light of all the written material burned in the zealous fires of the Spanish Missionaries in the name of God, or the ceremonial jewelry melted and reformed into ingots in the name of the King. Seeds of later formed roots of the tendency to unfairly shunt these civilizations into a forgettable box, forever inferior to the Greeks and Romans.
This is simply criminal based on the panorama of the magnificent sampling of ceramics, metallurgy and textile artworks in the Exhibition.
Many of the statues provide insight into cultural life. A repeating theme is the ceremonial ball game played throughout Mesoamerica, shown by both men and women outfitted in padding. This was just one part of the elaborate culture of pageantry that played an essential role in religious life, and is still observed today in the transferred weight given to Easter and Christmas.
On occasion some statues even veer to the abstract. This is best observed in the golden ornaments worn by Shamans in Central America that depict their spirit animals.
The Walters Art Museum is also home to one of this country's foremost restoration laboratories.
In equally fascinating displays, several supposed artworks said to belong to a certain era, are thoroughly dissected, and sometimes shown to be fraudulent remixes from a hodgepodge of eras.
A looped video midway through showed a MICA student painfully recreating a ceramic figure. The end product, despite the attention towards detail, isn't an exact reproduction; however, the observed differences proved to be equally as educational.
It ends a bit thinner in the Andes than where it began, but leaves a tantalizing promise of yet another fascinating dip, particularly when it shows the abstract geometrical textiles made by the Wari weavers. Or the principle of "Eco-zones," where cities in drier regions relied on products from their wetter cousins and visa versa.
Exploring Art of the Ancient Americas: The John Bourne Collection Gift is an intriguing historical exhibition that will be shown from Feb. 12th to Sunday May 20th 2012, from Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00 a.m. - 5.00 p.m. As it is the primary exhibition being shown, it is not free, though with a student I.D. it only amounts to a few dollars per person.
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