2008 Woodie Awards
Gallery Roundup: A choice between various degrees of crimes against aesthetics
Menachem Wecker
Issue date: 12/27/04 Section: Arts & Culture
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Arte Monstruoso: Whitewashing the Aztecs
Why the Guggenheim has its facts wrong, again
The Aztec Empire
Oct 15, 2004-Feb 13, 2005
S. R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue (at 89th)
http://www.guggenheim.org/
Close your eyes. Picture an art exhibit from the British Empire. You would expect Constable, Turner and William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs and Thomas Gainsborough-maybe even Hirst and Freud if it was a particularly risqué show-but halfway through the show, you notice a wall with Native American work side by side with Australian Aboriginal art, both flanked by Indian and African statues and Canadian Eskimo art. You might scratch your head and say hey, they are technically part of the British Empire, but how perverse, how illogical, how elitist to throw together the oppressed and the aggressors?
I flatter myself that my readership would recognize the incongruity immediately, and yet, guest curator at the Guggenheim Felipe Solis Olguin hardly knows better. And he should, mind you, as the Director of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia (Mexico City), and allegedly "one of the world's foremost authorities on Aztec art and culture." By stuffing "The Aztec Empire" with work by the Toltecs-whom the Aztecs captured and sacrificed to their gods-and by the Olmecs, who frankly are to the Aztecs what the Druids are to contemporary Britain, Olguin literally mixes apples and oranges, and one wonders what sinister purpose led Olguin to include them at all. Sure the Aztec Empire featured a unique geographical zone, so my comparison to the British Empire show hardly holds true, but the notion of boasting slaves' art in a show attending to their masters seems unusually cruel.
Unusually cruel that is unless you are a fancy academic curator, in which case anything you do is justified.
The story is larger, of course. Most Americans can hardly name any South American cultural empires other than the Aztecs and perhaps the Incas and the Mayans. Perhaps that is why the Metropolitan Museum launched "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries" in 1990. The move of throwing thirty centuries of Mexican art into one gallery space makes up in pretension what it lacks in patronizing sentiment.
Why the Guggenheim has its facts wrong, again
The Aztec Empire
Oct 15, 2004-Feb 13, 2005
S. R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 5th Avenue (at 89th)
http://www.guggenheim.org/
Close your eyes. Picture an art exhibit from the British Empire. You would expect Constable, Turner and William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Stubbs and Thomas Gainsborough-maybe even Hirst and Freud if it was a particularly risqué show-but halfway through the show, you notice a wall with Native American work side by side with Australian Aboriginal art, both flanked by Indian and African statues and Canadian Eskimo art. You might scratch your head and say hey, they are technically part of the British Empire, but how perverse, how illogical, how elitist to throw together the oppressed and the aggressors?
I flatter myself that my readership would recognize the incongruity immediately, and yet, guest curator at the Guggenheim Felipe Solis Olguin hardly knows better. And he should, mind you, as the Director of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia (Mexico City), and allegedly "one of the world's foremost authorities on Aztec art and culture." By stuffing "The Aztec Empire" with work by the Toltecs-whom the Aztecs captured and sacrificed to their gods-and by the Olmecs, who frankly are to the Aztecs what the Druids are to contemporary Britain, Olguin literally mixes apples and oranges, and one wonders what sinister purpose led Olguin to include them at all. Sure the Aztec Empire featured a unique geographical zone, so my comparison to the British Empire show hardly holds true, but the notion of boasting slaves' art in a show attending to their masters seems unusually cruel.
Unusually cruel that is unless you are a fancy academic curator, in which case anything you do is justified.
The story is larger, of course. Most Americans can hardly name any South American cultural empires other than the Aztecs and perhaps the Incas and the Mayans. Perhaps that is why the Metropolitan Museum launched "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries" in 1990. The move of throwing thirty centuries of Mexican art into one gallery space makes up in pretension what it lacks in patronizing sentiment.