JOHN ZEAMAN

Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands

Afghanistan

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It’s easy to gloss over the subtitle of the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster Afghanistan exhibit, “Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,” because museums are always promising viewers “rarely seen” or “hidden” treasures.

But this is one case where “hidden” is the literal truth. What you see in this dazzling show of gold and glass and ivory are works that were concealed in trunks during years of war, terror, looting and the intentional destruction of art. This is a country, remember, where bombs and mortars have been exploding since the Russian invasion of 1979 and where, in 2001, two gigantic Buddha statues were dynamited to bits — part of a Taliban program to purge the culture of forbidden images.

Fortunately, back in 1988, officials from the country’s National Museum had secretly stashed more than 20,000 treasures inside the subterranean vaults of the Central Bank of Afghanistan. Most people assumed they were lost, so it was a global event in 2003 when the secret was revealed and the crates were opened. The waves of excitement sent these objects on a tour through Europe and now America.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan gives the art in this show an element of political symbolism. You’re aware that this is art rescued from tyrannical ideas, art that has been at the crux of a fight for freedom.  At the same time, it’s art that that few Americans have the foggiest idea about, art from “archaeological digs” created by and for people dead for thousands of years.

All this might seem to add up to a rather solemn, dutiful experience – looking at pot shards and indecipherable tablets while feeling vague stirrings of patriotism. Fortunately, it’s nothing of the kind. Organized by the National Geographic Society, this is a show with the popular audience in mind. The dark, dramatically lit installation is alluring and mysterious.  It dips into four lost cultures, spotlighting objects that are both beautiful in themselves and evocative of their time and place. Maps, photographs, computer animations and a short documentary film satisfy provide helpful background information.

There is no way to simplify Afghanistan’s history. In the ancient world, the country was three distinct lands: Bactria (northern Afghanistan, Aria (Western Afghanistan) and Arachosia (southern Afghanistan). Over the millennia, it has been conquered by a host of people, including the Median and Persian Empires, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, the Indo-Greeks, Turks, and Mongols. Its predominant religions have alternated between Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam. The legendary Silk Road that passed through it brought a continual influx of goods and cultural ideas.

All this makes for art that confounds expectations and is even pleasantly disorienting. The oldest pieces date to 2000 B.C., and include a fragment of a gold bowl that was found intact in 1966 near the Oxus River. Unfortunately, the farmers who came upon it chopped it up with an ax to divide the gold. But the imagery survives, included that of bearded bulls, a popular motif in Mesopotamian art.

Capitals from Corinthian columns and classically sculpted stone faces might make you feel like you’ve dropped downstairs into the Met’s Greek and Roman Galleries.  These pieces are from Ai Khanum, a Hellenistic colony founded by Alexander in 327 B.C. before he led his armies toward India.  The city had the traditional Greek amphitheater and gymnasium, but, as a computer animation shows, it retained the grand, palatial style of the region’s previous rulers, the Persians.

From excavations at ancient Begram, a once-major stop on the Silk Road (now a village north of present-day Kabul), come some of the most startling objects in the exhibit.  All are from two sealed rooms that archaeologists believe might have been a merchant’s storehouse.  If so, he was dealing in luxury goods.  Many are ivory, such as the voluptuous woman standing on a fantastic crocodile creature, which was carved from a single tusk in a distinctly Indian style.

From these same rooms come colorful Roman glass vessels like the yellow-and-blue flask in the shape of a fish and a painted beaker showing figures harvesting dates done in such a relaxed style and in such bright colors that you can’t help being reminded of those glasses kids bring home from fast-food restaurants.

No one held power for long in Afghanistan and Bactria was overrun by invading nomads in about 145 B.C. Historians refer to this as a dark age, because the nomads seemed to bring little culture to replace that of the Greeks or the Persians. Ironically, these peoples are the focus of the fourth, and most glittering section of the exhibit, which evokes six nomadic tombs in which the bodies were laid out wearing gold jewelry and ornaments.

These gold pieces – including clasps, hair ornaments, brooches, plates, sheaths, belts and tiny coin-like amulets called bracteates – are inlaid with turquoise and garnets and are crafted with surprising delicacy. They are laid out on black velvet in patterns that replicate how they were found on the bodies, creating a tomb-like atmosphere. The highlight of this section is a fantastic crown cut out of gold leaf and decorated with rosettes and dangling roundels.

The crown provides the last of the exhibit’s multicultural mysteries: crowns of this type have been found in tombs in the Silla Kingdom in Korea dating to the fifth and sixth century A.D.

 

 

Easter Island

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Easter Island

 

When European ships landed on remote Easter Island in the 1770s, they found a puzzling situation. Hundreds of colossal stone heads stood like sentinels on the stark, treeless landscape. But the impoverished, listless tribe that lived there seemed incapable of such an engineering and artistic accomplishment. And how had the stones—some weighing 50 tons —been levered into upright positions when there were no large trees from which to fashion the beams?

The mystery, and the haunting faces of the statues, seemed to capture the Western imagination. There were theories about lost races and wildly improbable sea voyages from as far away as Egypt, not to mention visitors from outer space.

When modern archaeology finally cracked the puzzle, the answer was the most obvious one. The statues were built by the ancestors of the island’s present-day residents.

A dark story emerged – about an ancient people who had developed an advanced culture with art and writing, but who had squandered their resources and spiraled down to a primitive, sustenance-level existence. Instead of a mystery, Easter Island became an environmental cautionary tale.

The art continues to exert its pull, however.

For Westerners, Easter Island’s moai, as the statues are called, are the quintessential images of Oceania, and facsimiles of their long, blank-eyed faces pop up everywhere from Hollywood movies to Polynesian-style restaurants. Seeing the real thing is a little more challenging.

Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited places in the world, and almost all of the 900 or so moai remain planted on its shores. A few were spirited away in the 19th century, however, and one is visiting New York right now.

It’s small by moai standards – only about 4 feet high compared to an average of 13 feet – but it looks plenty big inside a Metropolitan Museum gallery, where it’s the centerpiece of “Splendid Isolation: The Art of Easter Island.” The head’s a classic, with the characteristically low forehead, long ski-jump nose, lantern jaw and elongated ear lobes – the latter an Easter Island custom until the missionaries discouraged it in the late 1800s.

“Splendid Isolation” is basically one big object and about 50 little ones. The Easter Islanders – who call themselves and their island Rapa Nui – seemed to work the two extremes of artistic scale, monumental and hand-held. Big or small, however, everything the Rapa Nui made was a vessel for some kind of supernatural spirit. The moai, for example, represent ancestral chiefs who had godlike powers. Hand-carved birdman figures represent Makemake, the most powerful of the island’s gods.

Geographically, the island is a triangular land mass, about twice the size of Manhattan, formed by three now-extinct volcanoes. It lies in the southeast Pacific Ocean about 1,400 miles from the coast of Chile, of which it is now a province. The Polynesian peoples who settled it came from the Central Pacific (the vicinity of Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa) and made their way to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Tahiti beginning more than 2,000 years ago. They were the most accomplished sailors of the ancient world, able to cross more than a thousand miles of ocean in their double-hulled sailing canoes.

Easter Island, the last one to be reached, is believed to have been settled by one or two boatloads of these people about A.D. 400. The island’s population remained in the hundreds until about 1100, just about the time they started to make their monumental statuary. By 1600 there were about 6,000 people.

The growing population provided ample labor for the construction of moai, but also increased pressure on the island’s limited natural resources. Around this time, weapons begin showing up in the strata of archaeological digs and thinning pollen deposits document the disappearance of the island’s once lush forest.

Without wood, the islanders had no way of making ladders or scaffolds, nor of moving and erecting their statues. When statues fell over they couldn’t even lever them back up again. New boats were out of the question, as were wood frame houses. The society went into a sharp decline, the condition in which the Europeans found it in the late 1700s.

Like most moai, the one at the Metropolitan Museum is made from a compressed volcanic stone called tuff. It was originally part of a figure that stood roughly 8 feet high. Its pitted surface, weathered by centuries of wind and rain, was originally smoothly polished.

The wood sculptures in the exhibit further testify to a highly inventive and refined sculptural tradition. Pieces take the form of long and short dance paddles, male and female figures, birdmen, lizard men, and crouching figures of various human and animal parts.

Compare the chunky monumentality of a moai with the gracefully sinuous form of a birdman figure. The birdman, about a foot in height, has a conical human body and the menacing head of a long-beaked bird. The birdman religion involved an egg-hunting ritual that is like something out of today’s reality TV. Contestants, or their athletic stand-ins, had to descend a 1,000-foot cliff, swim to a tiny islet offshore, and be the first to find an egg of the sooty tern. The prize was the leadership of the island.

Spirit-of-the-dead statues, also called ribbed figures because of their bulging rib cages, are portrayed with concave postures and demonic faces. Feminine figures are only slightly more attractive—hipless and flat-breasted, with plank-like bodies and strong masculine features, including goatees. Naturalistic male figures lack the heroic physiques of their Western equivalents, with large, childlike heads and protruding bellies.

Polynesian art inspired the European surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s. Andre Breton called Easter Island the “modern Athens of Oceania.” Artist Max Ernst painted birdman images and human figures with the heads of moai. You can even see something of the moai texture in Alberto Giacometti’s lumpy sculptures.

What they had to admire was the utter originality. Although it shares the same roots as other Polynesian art, Easter Island art is out there on its own. The inhabitants’ isolation was their undoing, but it also created a thousand-year-long experiment in what happens when art evolves with no outside influences.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

2002

 

Japanese Tea Ceremony

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Tea may be only a drink in the West, a mildly stimulating alternative to coffee, but in the East, and particularly in Japan, there’s tea and then there’s Tea. The one with a capital T is the tea ceremony, a centuries-old ritual that has profoundly influenced Japanese art, culture, and spiritual life.

In the traditional tea ceremony, every act and object has profound significance – from the style of garden path leading to the teahouse, to the design of the teahouse and all the utensils, to the precise actions and gestures of the tea master and the guests.

Its roots are in Zen Buddhism, and in practice it is like an extended meditation. But it’s also an art form, strictly choreographed and calling upon the talents of architects, designers, painters, and ceramists. The aesthetic foundation of today’s tea ceremony was laid down in the latter part of the 16th century by the great tea master Sen Rikyu, who stressed Zen-like simplicity and Samurai directness, a style the Japanese call wabi.

But what happens when the tea ceremony – which is all about tradition and rules – meets the freewheeling world of contemporary art? Does the practice require 16th century tea bowls and iron kettles, or can there be modern interpretations?

These questions are at the heart of “The New Way of Tea,” a joint exhibit at the Asia Society and Japan Society that tries to build a bridge between traditional forms and the more experimental styles of the modern and post-modern periods. It has seven tea ceremony spaces or “houses,” utensils, and vessels by a variety of contemporary designers, and will feature regular tea ceremony demonstrations throughout the show.

In Part 1 at the Japan Society, the base line of tradition is established in a charming, full-size reproduction of a 1647 teahouse. The original, Konnichi-an, sits on the grounds of Urasenke, a school of tea in Kyoto. About the size of a backyard shed, the sloped-roof, bamboo structure has a mere 191 square centimeters of floor space – room for only 1 1/2 rice-straw tatami mats – the bare minimum needed to properly do the ceremony.

In stark contrast with this charming rustic building are two contemporary settings. One, by industrial designer Toshiyuki Kita, is the barest of abstractions, 12 black-lacquered beams forming the skeleton of a cube. Transparent, empty of furnishings save for a small cluster of utensils, this is Zen simplicity carried to its ultimate conclusion. Architect Masayuki Kurokawa’s design is sort of the opposite – all furniture and no room. Drawing on the Japanese love of translucent rice-paper panels, he made a boxy table-and-chair set that is illuminated from within – a kind of miniature house with glowing windows. This setup, made for a less ascetic branch of the tea practice that permits sitting at a table, will be used for tea demonstrations at the Japan Society.

The tools of the tea ceremony can be found within the teahouses, and in an elegant, dramatically lit installation by Masayuki. Here are hefty iron kettles and the attachable rings used to lift them when hot, baskets for charcoal made from woven wisteria vines, brightly colored lacquer containers for holding the green powdered tea, slender long-handled tea scoops and short-handled whisks for whipping up the drink. (The tea used in the ceremony is not the brewed variety, but a frothy, bright green, bitter drink.)

The tea-making equipment is mostly from two periods, the Momoyama (late 16th century) and the contemporary (the last 25 years). The earliest piece is a beautifully elongated Crane-neck vase from the Chinese Ming dynasty (14th to 15th century), representative of the refined style of tea ceremony pieces before Sen Ryuku. (Sen, by the way, attained such fame that the Emperor Hideyoshi, a devotee of Tea, considered it an affront, and forced him to commit ritual suicide).

That the wabi aesthetic is alive and well is evident from three tea bowls by a modern master of tea ceramics, Kichizaemon Raku XV. (Only one bowl is used in the ceremony, as all the participants – usually four – drink from the same one.) Kichizaemon’s earthenware bowls – with allusive names like “Winter Rabbit” and “Lunar Waves,” have that rough, even flawed appearance favored by tea masters. Lopsided, decorated with seemingly random designs, they exemplify the intentionally “artless” aesthetic felt to be harmonious with nature.

Common to the displays at both galleries are pieces from a suite of fusuma (sliding door) paintings by Hiroshi Senju, an award winner at the 1995 Venice Biennale. In one, Hiroshi lets the paint and ink run down the translucent paper – abstract expressionist style – to create a waterfall effect.

Modern approaches are given free rein at the Asia Society display, where the first thing visitors encounter is a tunnel of rice paper, which designer Atsushi Kitagawara has used to suggest another aspect of the tea ceremony – the mood-setting garden pathway to the teahouse. (The garden is sprinkled with water to create a pure and dewy effect.) Another mood-setting device of the traditional tea ceremony is the small, low entryway that compels visitors to stoop over or crawl in, instilling a sense of humility. That feature has been retained in the “Long Abode” teahouse by the late Ikko Tanaka, and those who participate in Asia Society’s demonstrations will have a chance to try it out. It has walls made of thin tree trunks, the bark still on, and lashed together stockade-style. Inside is a long cherry wood table and appropriately rough-hewn implements.

Takashi Sugimoto’s tearoom has a traditional shape, with the entrance alcove and the low entry, but its walls and floors are made entirely of salvaged panels of decorative ironwork carefully welded together. The different patterns of the metal cast interesting textile-like patterns on the floor.

Some of the tea equipment here is boldly modern, such as the scoops with the wavy handles and the psychedelic colors, or the set of containers by Hiroshi Kojitani, which carry the idea of imperfection into the glass medium. Vessels look as if they might be on the verge of returning to the molten state.

If you visit the shows, you should try to take advantage of the tea demonstrations. No amount of looking can convey the spirit of this practice, which is more than merely enjoying a cup of tea in a stylized manner. Like the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion, it’s about purification, community, and becoming one with the spiritual element, whether God or nature. Its etiquette can seem rigid and overly meticulous, but it is really about simplicity and economy of movement, and when the ceremony is performed by an experienced master, it is a thing of beauty.

 

Japan Society, NYC

2002