Touch

The Getty Villa set attendance records on the last day of their exhibit, the Aztec Pantheon and the Art of Empire. A totally unexpected sight greeted me as I stepped into the main gallery that Monday a few weeks ago. A Mexican American man in a ponytail stood among the throngs of people, his left hand held up and open as in a Christian church. He reached toward the open palm of the 500 year old life-size sculpture of a ghoulish Tzitzimitl. These two were engaged in a silent, still exchange of non-verbal communication across centuries, cultures, as well as animate and inanimate spaces.

This 5' 6" terracotta sculpture was the exhibit's scariest item. Its face is skeletal, with holes in the skull, as if to insert fake hair of some sort. Its ribs are an upside down barrel hanging over what looks like an upside down lotus flower. It's really the liver (the Aztecs believed it the repository of the soul).

The middle aged man, George Ramos of Corona, holds his hand out and bows his head. The tips of his fingers remain six inches from the earthen, long-finger-nailed hand of the Tzitzimitl. Apart from wondering what in the world he was doing, what struck me was the invisible. The story lay in the six inch gap between their fingers.

The sculpture was found a few decades ago in downtown Mexico City in the ruins of the Aztec Templo Mayor. Knowledge of the beliefs, customs, and rituals of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan is largely lost in the embers of the Spanish conquest of the 16th century.

"It holds the energy of something vast," Ramos told me as he lowered his hand. What did he feel, I asked. "A connection. I felt an emptiness, something cavernous." He's part of a group of about 20 people who are members of the Tequihua Foundation in Riverside. Their teacher is here, explaining the art from an indigenous perspective.

Nearby I overheard adults telling kids about the conquest, about the Aztecs nearly defeating the musket-and-horse equipped Spanish soldiers. A few steps away a volume of the Florentine Codex lay open behind plexiglass to a page depicting the main
Aztec gods. Going against policy to replace the Aztec with the Christian, a Spanish priest set about a few decades after the 1521 conquest to document the Aztec world's beliefs and customs from the few elders who still remembered the temples, rituals, and life before the Spanish arrived. It's like a collection of fuzzy Polaroids of that world. None of the volumes of the book had returned to the Western Hemisphere for more than 400 years, until this Getty Villa exhibit.

Now it was in the same room as the last remnants of that Aztec world. It was in the same room as the Tzitzimitl and George Ramos bypassing the book and trying to understand the dead culture through the energy in its art.

There's a strong neo-Indigenist movement in Southern California. Thousands of people practice Aztec dances at various festivals. Some families reject the Spanish and mestizo and embrace the Aztec culture by teaching children the Nahuatl language and the little that's known about the Aztec way of life.

I've wanted to ask someone with these beliefs about human sacrifice and any personal reactions to the practice. Ramos talked to me about how militaries in our modern societies engage in sort of ritual sacrifice. I've heard this before. I told him that the last time I visited the pyramid of the sun in Teotihuacan, outside Mexico City, I thought of the mothers who gave their children to sacrifice to appease the main deity, the water god Tlaloc. And I told George that while I understood that when that's all you know, there's no individualist point of reference, I cannot believe every single mother willingly gave up her child without shedding a tear.

What do you think personally, George, about the rituals that involved this Tzitzimitl? "I have children," he told me, "so I do see it from the perspective of a father." But the relationship in the Aztec world between the givers and takers of life is lost to us and that makes understanding these objects very difficult.

The other image from the exhibit that'll stay with me is the face of a trembling Aztec baby. The image is from a 6' tall, ten-panel folding screen painted about 100 years after the conquest began. The dark images depict the main chapters of the conquest: the meeting of Moctezuma and Hernan Cortes, along with key battles and an accurate portrayal of the mountain ranges of the Valley of Mexico. The baby grabs tightly to his warrior-father's neck, with his mother next to them. All three stand with the backs to the viewer staring at the meeting of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and the doomed Aztec Emperor Moctezuma. The baby's parents are passive viewers as in a parade. The baby's body language reveals a prescient anxiety over what this meeting of two worlds would lead to.

PHOTO CREDITS
Water Vessel with Tlaloc, 1440 - 1469
Culture: Aztec
Medium: Terracotta and pigment
Dimensions: Object: H: 34 x W: 27.9 x Diam: 33.7 cm (13 3/8 x 11 x 13 1/4 in.)
Accession No. VEX.2010.2.55
Object Credit: Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City, Mexico, 10-220302
Repro Credit: CONACULTA-INAH-MEX © foto zabé. Reproduction authorized by the
National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Tzitzimitl (Demon), 1440 - 1469
Culture: Aztec
Medium: Terracotta, stucco, and pigment
Dimensions: Object: H: 176 x W: 80 x D: 50 cm; 150 kg. (69 5/16 x 31 1/2 x 19
11/16 in.; 330.7 lbs.)
Accession No. VEX.2010.2.18
Object Credit: Museo del Templo Mayor, Mexico City, Mexico, 10-264984
Repro Credit: CONACULTA-INAH-MEX © foto zabé. Reproduction authorized by the
National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (General History of
the Things of New Spain), 1575 - 1577
Culture: Mexican
Medium: Watercolor, paper, contemp vellum Spanish binding
Dimensions: Open (approx.): H: 32 x W: 43 cm (12 5/8 x 16 15/16 in.)
Object (above deck, approx.): H: 16 cm (6 5/16 in.)
Closed: H: 32 x W: 22 x D: 5 cm (12 5/8 x 8 11/16 x 1 5/16 in.)
Accession No. VEX.2010.2.28
Object Credit: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy, FI 100 Med.Palat. 218
Repro Credit: Su concessione del Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali. Ã? vietata
ogni ulteriore riproduzione con qualsiasi mezzo.