Praeterita

I took this picture in the Portland Art Museum a few weeks ago. These are three terracotta figures made in southern Mexico or central America, some time between 200 BCE and 400 CE. Meso-American art is one of my favourite things to look at in museums. They could not be more different from the sculpture produced in Greece and Rome during the same time period, but to me they are the equal of classical sculpture in their expressiveness. NB: It's probably inaccurate to call them sculptures, because the anonymous craftsmen who created them may have done so for religious reasons. That is, they were creating figures for ritual use, rather than works of art. Though just as in Western art, there's no reason why those should be mutually exclusive. Another thing: having worked on making my own little figures in clay recently, I have a deep appreciation for the skill it takes to make figures like this -- particularly feet and hands!

I've been using the above photo in the Community Memoir/Public Art project as an example of suitable working material. It shows my brother and me in about 1968 or 1969, taking a bath in the only available place in the somewhat primitive miners' home where we lived with our Mum and our Grandparents. The way it would be used in the current project is to write a series of short, one sentence phrases suggested by it, sort of like memory-captions. Patty and I would then select the one that worked best with the photo, and in relation to the photos and texts of the other participants (that is, we don't want all the memories to be the same). But in the last few years I've used fragments from the same photo again and again, at different sizes and resolutions, in prints on paper and artists' books, as I have done with lots of other photos: And in thinking about this process, I thought again of a life-size sculpture I made four years ago based on my memory of bathing in t...

This week's Meditation is on a piece of clay sculpture by an Aztec artist from c. 1450, and the relation between so-called primitive art and the Western tradition.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader