Maya -- Hidden Worlds Revealed

Huge, but not particularly compelling, this exhibition fills four or five spacious rooms at the Science Museum in St. Paul. Since early childhood, I have had mixed feelings about Science Museum. When I was seven, and the museum was located in a cavernous mansion near the capitol building, a noteworthy and eerie example of Richardsonian Romanesque, visits to the place filled me with apprehension, and, even, horror -- somewhere in the gloomy labyrinth there was a grinning mummy that frightened me. Later, the museum was translated to a building downtown that always seemed to me excessively airy, bright, and cheerful. I seem to recall a great steel iguana at the front entry to that place. Now located on the bluff overlooking Harriet Island, the museum is primarily vertical, a series of cantilevered terraces overhanging a chasm usually filled with shrieking schoolchildren -- this incarnation of the museum is unpleasantly similar to an upscale suburban shopping mall. The Maya exhibition is vexed with the same irritating flaw afflicting the collections-at-large: it's unclear as to whom the exhibits are geared. The presentation of objects is gimmicky -- involving lots of pseudo-high-tech interaction with the exhibits: there are touch-screens, buttons that direct light to various locations in dioramas, electronic Q & A kiosks, mechanical levers that let you scroll through various labels or tug, twist and pull at things. All of this somewhat threadbare wizardry seems designed for precocious sugar-wired nine year olds whose Ritalin hasn't yet slowed them down. But the labels and texts are pedantic, paragraphs of dull, superficial prose that seem to have been written by the political correctness committee of the local DFL. The viewer is swamped by information that is dim-witted, edifying in the most obvious way, and sub-literate -- the prose style resembles a political tract written by a group of well-meanng, suburban High School girls. This approach is completely inimical to the astonishingly savage and sadistic Maya. An early panel, draped with turgid prose, demonstrates the problem: the image is a (poorly made) cast of a famous Yaxchilan stela: a Mayan noblewoman kneels before her Lord and is drawing an abrasive cord liberally spiked with thorns through her tongue; she is depositing her blood on a codex that she will burn to summon a centipede-shaped vision serpent. The image is so astounding that people couldn't quite believe what they were seeing until about thirty years ago when the bas-relief was, more or less, decoded. This exhibit appears in the first room of the show with a long and dull text. The text tells the viewer about the type of textile employed in the woman's huipil but doesn't explain what she is doing with the cord garnished with fish-hook shaped thorns. An amazing, and characteristic, example of Mayan religious practice is reduced to a discourse on women's crafts in the Yucatan. (In fairness to the show, I should note that the image mysteriously re-occurs later in the exhibit in the very last room with a reproduction of the accompanying stela showing the apparition of the vision-serpent. Here the image is explained, although in a boring manner, but by this time, most viewers are so besotted with poorly written text that the people touring the show that I observed paid little or no attention to this jaw-dropping example of Mayan art). The show commences with a nice little slide presentation, something that would have been impressive in 1974 (and typical of the presentations in tertiary level historical national monuments), providing some sense of Mayan mythology. However, the principal objective of the slideshow seems to be to demonstrate the continuity between modern-day Mayan culture and the high civilization that existed in tropical forests between 200 and 800 AD. This is an interesting topic but one that is limited -- of course, there is some ethnic continuity between the modern people living in this area and the ancient civilization; it's about the same continuity that exists between me and my Teutonic forebears squatting in smoky huts in the Black Forest circa 600 A.D. But the Mayan civilization has been defunct for 1200 years and the differences between the Yucatan peasants today and the highly sophisticated, if feral, Lords of the Forest during the classical period is more interesting than any purported similarities. What happened to the high culture? Why did it simply melt away? This is the mystery of the Maya, an issue that the show confuses by focusing on ethnic continuities in the region. (And the show suggests that the modern-day Maya were instrumental in decoding the glyphs on their monuments -- so far as I know this is a complete fiction: I think the main work was done by a Russian linguist, Yuri Knorosev, Tatiana Proskouriakoff and the formidable Linda Schele at the University of Texas.) The exhibit manages to render confusing and unnecessarily arcane the Mayan's great triumph -- their calendar system and astronomical observations. There are some gimmicky mock-ups of burials to suggest how artifacts were found, a number of fantastically gorgeous painted pots (almost all of them from the Peabody Museum collection)and some monumental casts of Mayan stela that are fascinating to view but, paradoxically, in this ocean of text, under-explained. In the final room, we are provided some full-scale replicas of the extraordinary, but now horribly disfigured, murals at Bonampak and there is an excellent talking-head video showing Mary Miller, the world's greatest expert on the images, discussing the art work in appropriately rhapsodic terms. The murals, however, have been censored to not reproduce in any visible manner the absolutely horrific and beautiful (the figures are sinuous and contorted like Michelangelo's late "Slaves") sacrifice scenes from that mural or the terrifyng Uccello-like battle scene. Furthermore, the full-scale reproductions of the Bonampak mural are copies of the Hurst computer graphics reconstructing the now-invisible pictures decomposing in the Chiapas jungle -- the colors in those images are dull and commercial and completely lack the thrilling and complexly translucent pigments that the Mayan craftsmen used. (The impression that you get is that Mayan artists had the same color sense as a commercial sign-painter -- a complete falsification of the mural. Hurst's colors are generated for clarity of reproduction and only approximate and they make sense in the context of the recuperative Bonampak documentation project. But at full-scale in the museum those colors are hideous.) You walk out of the exhibition assured that the Mayans were sort of like us -- that is, good and liberal Democrats. But, of course, the philosophical thrill that you feel when reading a good account of the Maya is that they were nothing like us -- that they represented an entirely different paradigm of what it meant to be human. And this otherness is obscured by the hectoring and tendentious tone of the ubiquitous text that comprises this show.