Contacting the Ancients

The difference between size and scale is the difference between physical autonomy, which is fixed, and imaginative relationships, which are malleable and elastic. Size is in your hand, measured with a ruler; scale is in your head, measured with a tangle of psychological and emotional relativities.

Nothing in the exhibition “Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past” is more than about 30 inches tall, but time and again these earthenware figures loom large in scale. In a quietly astounding representation of a seated couple, the gentle resting of his hand on her shoulder and her hand on his knee resonates with years of casual intimacy. The swelling, tumescent figure of a ferocious standing warrior is nearly phallic in its overall upright form, suggesting a particularly male brand of aggressiveness. The intense stare of a seated, cross-legged chieftain holding a ball between his chest-high hands exudes such a sense of focused concentration that it gives the unexplained game he’s playing an outsize gravitas.

The show, which opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is the first to survey a group of interrelated Mesoamerican cultures that, collectively speaking, are far less widely known than the Olmec, Mayan, Aztec or other major civilizations that predate the conquest of North America by Europeans. Neither monumental in form (like Olmec art) nor elegantly sophisticated (like Mayan art), the art of ancient West Mexico has never been the object of wide public attention. Indeed, its excavation and study have only been undertaken in fits and starts over the last hundred years, and scholarly attention has been concentrated just in the last few decades.

Our general lack of familiarity with the ancient ceramic art presented in this show means that it’s one of those rare tabula rasa sorts of opportunities: You can arrive at this particular blank slate with fresh eyes. It’s almost like getting in on the ground level of an emerging field of artistic study. Large and well-organized, with more than 200 often exceptional examples on view, the survey is likely to stand for quite some time as the definitive museum survey.

The objects come from the inland and coastal region spreading northwest and southwest of modern Guadalajara, in the states known today as Nayarit, Jalisco and Colima, and they date from the thousand years between (approximately) 200 BC and AD 800. We’re not talking about one major civilization that endured over a large area for many centuries, and that produced a coherent and contained repertoire of forms. Indeed, identifying the welter of small societies and stylistic variations in ancient ceramic sculptures and vessels that flourished in the region can leave you reeling.

The Lagunillas “A” style, the Comala style from Colima and the Ixtlan del Rio style, to name just three of the archeologists’ many designations here, all take a good bit of effort for amateurs and newcomers to sort out. What’s impossible to miss, though, is the visual acuity of so much of this art. As with a vessel composed of two small, potbellied dogs dancing playfully together on hind legs, it can even be endearing in the extreme.

Produced by preliterate societies, the art of ancient West Mexico is invested with the kind of deeply embedded social significance that, today, is like a puzzle waiting to be decoded. Sometimes it’s easy to figure out.

Take the decoration of bowls, jars and other vessels with ceramic fruit, shellfish, animals and birds. Celebrating sustenance and foodstuffs in the design of vessels that are used to serve it is a practice common to most every time and place. Even when you encounter a vessel ringed with pillow-like shapes that, at first glance, appear to be abstract, a second look reveals them to be stylized descriptions of roasted maguey leaves, which look very much like those still encountered in Mexican markets today.

The sleek stylization of many of these representations is another matter, though. The idealization feels essentialist, as if conscientiously straining to capture the fundamental nature of a bird’s “parrotness,” say, or a ripe vegetable’s “squashness.” The patterned, symmetrical repetitions that characterize many of these designs speak of deeply invested cyclical awareness--perhaps the seasons of planting and harvesting, the regular migratory patterns of animals, the festivals and rituals of agrarian life. Nature looms large.

Sometimes, the idealization is leavened with a surprising, almost eccentric specificity. A reddish earthenware vessel in the form of a snarling pregnant dog, for example, reflects one rather particular aspect of nature’s unending rhythms.

However endearing these vessels might be, it’s the sculptural figures that deliver the show’s knockout punches. Elaborately decorated warrior figures--standing, seated, sometimes crouching with weapon at the ready--are rendered with a sense of scale that gives their relatively small size an inescapable sense of monumentality. The exalted place occupied by warriors in the social hierarchy of ancient West Mexico seems inescapable.

Still, none of the sculptures are more captivating than a sizable group of marriage pairs--so-called because they are presumed to represent the ritualized union between husband and wife. Rituals are critical to social continuity in any era, and ancient West Mexican art has been tied to a variety of rites of passage--puberty, courtship, shamanistic healing, death. For the cycles of life, the bond between man and woman is central, and the powerful pairs of marriage figures in this show are often amazingly tender visions of spiritual union.

Regardless of style, subject or form, however, one element stands out above all else. Most of the compelling objects that have been assembled for the exhibition were excavated from burial tombs and shafts, where they were interred with the dead. When you look at them, death as a living force looks back at you. What more fundamental feature of traditional Mexican life, pre- or post-conquest, could be imagined?

The show was organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, but LACMA--the only other stop--is a perfect venue for it, if only because so many superlative examples have been borrowed from LACMA’s own holdings. (The museum’s Proctor Stafford Collection is a treasure trove.) Whatever its independent merits, this is also an exhibition with the virtue of providing pleasurable and informative context for an important segment of LACMA’s permanent collection.

* “Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archaeology of the Unknown Past,” LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-6000, through March 29. Closed Wednesdays.