[Obsidian Mirror
Tilo Chopin
The peoples of ancient Mexico used polished obsidian mirrors, or tezcatl, as instruments of divination. By gazing into a mirror's smoky depths, sorcerers traveled to the world of gods and ancestors. Obsidian mirrors are an apt metaphor for images of ancient Mexican sites and objects: they reflect the viewer as well as the object.
In 1969, American artist Robert Smithson retraced the travels of writer John Lloyd Stephens, visiting Maya ruins in Chiapas and Yucatn. Although Smithson was traveling through Maya country, he believed he was impersonating the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca, who he claims spoke to him, urging him to discard his guidebook and to make art that would collapse the gulf of time between the modern day and ancient Maya worlds.
Yucatan Mirror Displacements, his resulting art piece, exists as three interrelated but discrete works: the physical placement of the mirrors in the landscape; photographs of the mirrors; and an article in Artforum whose was text modeled after Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843).
Smithson photographed mirrors near Maya ruins, in the jungle, and beside the sea. His images do not show tangible artifacts; rather, they capture the mirrors arranged in the natural elements and as they reflect their surroundings.
Smithson's term "mirror-travel" describes how the reflective surfaces of the mirrors highlight the displacement of time and space. Yet, as Smithson reminds us, art does not truly reflect life. Yucatn is elsewhere.
This exhibition explores representations of Mexican archaeological objects and sites made from the Colonial era to the present.
From the first moments of contact, Mexico's indigenous civilizations evoked in their European conquerors an array of unsettling emotions ranging from fascination to fear. Eradicating populations, destroying monuments, suppressing native religions, and collecting and classifying cultural objects were among the methods used for containing and framing native cultures. Pre-Columbian Mexico, real and imagined, became the subject of innumerable books, treatises, and images. Each iteration assigned new meanings and contributed to the ever-evolving construction of ancient Mexico.
The objects in this exhibition were created over the past five centuries by explorers, archaeologists, and artists who have in one way or another used Mexico's Pre-Columbian past as a vehicle for their journeys. Each object is informed by the time and place in which it was made. None are pure reflections of the sites or artifacts they portray. All produce refractions, slices of an object that cannot be reassembled into a whole. As such, they are all mirrors that displace the time and space of ancient Mexico.
Direct access to the indigenous mentality was broken during the Conquest. After most of the codices were destroyed and the temples were burned, some enlightened friars, suddenly turned anthropologists, tried to restore this legacy, but they could only do so in a hybrid and fragmented way, blending the accounts of native informants with their own conception of reality. The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica were subjected to hypotheses and conjectures that were not always verifiable, as well as esoteric interpretations, forming a hermetic discourse whose decisive keys had been lost. However, in a way that was not always precise, that past was inherent to our makeup. An independent Mexico could not be explained without the myths and legends, the plants and animals, the culinary dishes and use of colors, words, and customs that came from a mysterious previous era. Mexican national identity was created from that dark matter.
It is worth emphasizing that the counterculture gave the past an unusual novelty. Until then, our schooling had referred to pre-Hispanic grandeur as something unalterable and in the past. Thanks to the heralds of psychedelia, from beat writers to rock poets, India, China, Peru, and Mexico were seen as reservoirs of transcendental wisdom capable of altering the present.
Five years later, on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) took up arms in Chiapas to protest the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. While one sector of the country dreamed of acquiring consumer goods from the so-called first world, another lived a nightmare of backwardness and oblivion. The Zapatista movement took up unfulfilled ideals of the Mexican Revolution (such as the inclusion of the dispossessed people in the national project, the communal recovery of land, and the struggle for a direct nonrepresentative democracy) and put the indigenous question on the agenda of modernity, showing that this struggle did not belong to the past, but rather the present.
Eduardo Matos Moctezuma agrees with Octavio Paz that the National Museum of Anthropology was conceived as a temple whose main altar is presided over by two Aztec pieces: the Great Coatlicue and the Piedra del Sol, or Sunstone. This museological sacralization helped post-Revolution administrations proudly celebrate pre-Hispanic relics while ignoring the commitment of Emiliano Zapata and the reality of indigenous peoples.
In 2004, two anthologies were devoted to the relationship of modern poets with the pre-Hispanic legacy: El corazn prestado (The borrowed heart), by Vctor Manuel Mendiola, and Un pasado visible (A visible past), by Gustavo Jimnez Aguirre.
While Octavio Paz forged decisive pathways in the modern discussion of the past, the main link with indigenous writing was Nezahualcoyotl, a fifteenth-century poet who ruled Tetzcoco for 40 years. About 30 of his poems survive. Those words are a portal that does not exhaust its mysteries, a threshold that seems to vanish as we cross it. Is the unprecedented modernity of his ideas true to what he thought? Or has it been reformulated by the whims of his translators and interpreters? We can only guess.
Con quin hablar, qu decir
si no hay nadie en esta casa
y tan slo oigo el gemir del grillo?
Si digo s, si digo no,
a quin digo s, a quin digo no?
De dnde sali este no y este s
y con quin hablo en medio de esta obscuridad?
Quin puso estas palabras sobre el papel?
Por qu se escribe sobre el papel
en vez de escribir sobre la tierra?
Whom to talk to, and what to say,
when there is no one home
and the chirping of the cricket is all I hear?
If I say yes, if I say no,
to whom do I say yes? To whom do I say no?
Where did they come from, this no and this yes,
and whom do I address in the midst of this darkness?
Who put these words to paper?
Why do we write on paper,
and not on the earth?
The obsidian mirror in which Quetzalcoatl saw himself still has duties to fulfill. This essay, written to recreate the dialogue between archaeology and literature, and to pay tribute to one of the greatest champions of that conversation, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, attempts to show that the ancient world, which for centuries was seen as something that had passed and was shuttered, remains open. Time is not stationary. Through archaeology, the origin stones return to us; through literature, they speak to us again.
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A Renaissance polymath whose interests ranged from astronomy to astrology, alchemy and math, Dee advised the queen from the start of her reign in 1558 to the 1570s. As court astrologer and scientific advisor, he advocated for overseas exploration and the establishment of colonies.
Today, the British Museum owns the mirror, which is on display in London alongside two similar circular obsidian mirrors and a rectangular obsidian slab that may be a portable altar, reports Tom Metcalfe for National Geographic. Researchers had previously suspected that the artifacts originated with the Aztecs, and the new study confirms this chemically.
The Aztecs used obsidian for medicinal purposes and viewed its reflective surface as a shield against bad spirits. The volcanic glass was also associated with death, the underworld, and capturing the image and soul of a person.
According to Garry Shaw of the Art Newspaper, Dee may have bought the mirror in Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) in the 1580s. By that time, he was becoming increasingly interested in the occult practices of mediums who supposedly used mirrors and crystal balls to communicate with angels and other supernatural beings.
The use of mirrors in Mesoamerican culture was associated with the idea that they served as portals to a realm that could be seen but not interacted with.[2] Mirrors in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were fashioned from stone and served a number of uses, from the decorative to the divinatory.[3] An ancient tradition among many Mesoamerican cultures was the practice of divination using the surface of a bowl of water as a mirror. At the time of the Spanish conquest this form of divination was still practiced among the Maya, Aztecs and Purpecha.[3] In Mesoamerican art, mirrors are frequently associated with pools of liquid; this liquid was likely to have been water.[4][nb 1]
Early mirrors were fashioned from single pieces of iron ore, polished to produce a highly reflective surface. By the Classic period, mosaic mirrors were being produced from a variety of ores, allowing for the construction of larger mirrors. Mosaic pyrite mirrors were crafted across large parts of Mesoamerica in the Classic period, particularly at Teotihuacan and throughout the Maya region. Pyrite degrades with time to leave little more than a stain on the mirror back by the time it is excavated. This has led to the frequent misidentification of pyrite mirror backs as paint palettes, painted discs or pot lids. By the Postclassic period obsidian mirrors became increasingly common.
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