Circular house model, Calima, Colombia, 200 BCE-800 CE, gold. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Alfred C. Glassell Jr.

By James D. Balestrieri

HOUSTON, TEXAS – “Golden Worlds: The Portable Universe of Indigenous Colombia,” now on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is much more than an art exhibition. It’s a gauntlet run, and a gauntlet thrown down that challenges Western notions and practices, not only in art history, but in the disciplines of history, archaeology and anthropology.

For a start, the curators traveled to Colombia, “to immerse ourselves in the social and historical landscapes of ancient artworks” and build “long-term friendships” with “Indigenous leaders of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta,” contemporary shamans whose perception of the “is-ness” of a cultural object requires a shift away from Western aesthetics and an appreciation of interconnectedness over space and time that more closely resembles quantum entanglement than the classical Western divisions between the “being” of things and their “meanings.” As the curators reflect: “One of the most important breakthroughs deriving from these many conversations was the realization that we cannot treat these works as “objects” at all if we are to achieve any kind of meaningful understanding of them. We must understand and honor their potential as subjects – ancestors, messengers, agents; things that continue to build bridges between past and present, us and them and places as far apart as Los Angeles and Colombia” (cat. p. 308).

It’s a formidable task to have undertaken, and its achievement might well upend – and perhaps it should – every future museum presentation of Indigenous cultures.

On seeing photographs of ancient Colombian objects in LACMA’s collection, Mamo Camilo Izquierdo and Jaison Pérez Villafaña, Elder Arhuaco Brothers from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, took months in thought, considering the objects’ origins, making, meaning, their place in the cosmos, their excavation, their journey. Thought, to these shamans, is where creation begins. Things have to be thought about in order to be brought into being. Thought becomes matter through dreams, music, rituals, which are aids to the thoughtfulness that must be achieved before action can be right. By this same token, the thought brings a thing into being, also brings a thing to you. Its existence in your mind is existence.

Votive figure seated on a stool, Muisca, Colombia, 600-1500 CE, gold. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Alfred C. Glassell Jr, against a backdrop of the páramo (tropical high altitude ecosystem) in Colombia. Photograph ©Museum Associates/LACMA by Julia Burtenshaw.

The outcome of Mamo Camilo and Jaison’s “thought-process” was that a museum should be built in Colombia, a sister to LACMA that would offer a kind of mirrored pathway for thought between Colombia and Los Angeles, a way for the objects and people in each place to commune, communicate and co-exist – to breathe and dream together, perhaps.

Once we get away from Western standards of time, being and identity, and their impact on aesthetics; once we attempt to interpret Indigenous objects in light of the systems of thought and belief that gave rise to the creation of those objects in the first place, we encounter the drop-offs and vertiginous climbs that invariably accompany the translation of ideas from language to language. The exhibition takes pains to draw what it can from early Spanish Colonial texts that come with European, Christian agendas and biases, texts that reduced the incredible cultural sophistication of pre-contact Colombia even as conflict – and, even more so, disease – reduced and eradicated whole peoples from the landscape. The scope of linguistic diversity, sophisticated agriculture and animal husbandry, complex systems of social organization that are difficult for our hierarchy-driven societies to understand, and a relationship with the natural world that rests on exchange rather than exploitation are breathtakingly presented in “Golden Worlds.”

Reading the catalog, one gets the sense of the curators having to unlearn as they learn, setting aside Western divisions between thought and feeling, between intellect and emotion, between the human and the natural. And yet, there is also the sensation of something like a sigh of relief, of new bridges being built in a world that seems bent on burning bridges.

Even the presentation of the catalog is innovative. One essay is devoted to understanding birds in Colombian art, not as motifs, but as living creatures. Photographs of beautiful birds, in the wild, as they are today, along with explanations of their roles in Indigenous thought provide counterpoint to the legacies of colonialism and resource exploitation, especially as these pertain to climate change. Objects in the exhibition are superimposed on photographs of the places they came from. Objects that have to be seen as other than objects – subjects, as it were – living, changing, whose making, meaning and story is entwined with and not at all separate from their physicality.

Burial urn with two birds on lid, Colombia, 900-1600 CE, ceramic. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Muñoz Kramer Collection, gift of Camilla Chandler Frost and Stephen and Claudia Muñoz-Kramer. Photograph ©Museum Associates/LACMA.

Our notions of pristine, Edenic landscapes in the Americas are also challenged in the exhibition by the realization that the various peoples of Colombia managed the land with minute care and great respect, enjoying centuries of abundance without despoiling the land and water. Astonishing hillside towns – citadels, really – in the heights of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Maria with terraced, circular dwellings, and plazas, staircases and walkways of hand-hewn and fitted stone connecting everyone to everyone demonstrate a social fluidity that is hard to imagine finding anywhere else in history.

Gold. We are attracted to it, to its beauty, to its value as wealth. Gold – often looted gold and gold we have forced people to mine and extract for us around the world – underpins the very notion of economy in the West. Indeed, “Golden Worlds” has to be seen in light of the brutal Spanish conquest of the Americas, and in the lust for gold and other natural resources that precipitated and perpetuated it. To imagine, as the exhibition asks us to imagine, objects shorn from their spiritual qualities – taken from their homes, as the shamans might say – weighed and melted, hoarded and bartered, studied and cataloged (in fortunate instances), restored to a semblance of the original impulse that led to their creation, imparts a feeling of balance, of restitution and rest.

Gold might be the reason why visitors attend “Golden Worlds.” But the exhibition itself deliberately calls into question – undermines, you might say – our Western understanding of the meaning and value of gold. To us, the “Circular House Model,” from the Calima Region, as well as the similar “Rectangular House” (not pictured), created circa 100 BCE-800 CE, are marvels of craftsmanship fashioned in a precious material, artworks. To the artist or artists who created them, they were, almost certainly, none of those things. To them, they were microcosms of the dwellings and ceremonial meeting houses – sometimes referred to as malocas – which, in their turn, are microcosms of the universe. Yet even this separation falls short. It’s the ending of the word microcosm (“-cosm”) that offers some insight. “-Cosm,” standing for cosmos, is the operative idea here. The “model” – a word meaning a replica or prototype, often small – falls short of the Indigenous belief that the model, the maloca, and the universe are one, that the micro is the macro, and vice versa. A ceremony in a maloca isn’t a play, a symbol, it is the creation, development and future of the universe. In Western spirituality, the mystery of transubstantiation is perhaps as close as we come.

The tunjos of the Muisca people, whose skill in metalwork was unsurpassed in the Americas, offer yet another example of an aesthetics and a spirituality that is at odds with Western art historical traditions. Tunjos are small, raw, simple representations of people, often buried or deposited in lakes and caves. Because they were made of tumbaga, a mix of gold and copper – that mingle the male, generative, yellow of the sun with the female, natal red of the moon at certain times – Spanish colonials saw them as of lesser value. Because the gold figures were raw and simple, Western art history has, in the past, classified them as lesser in artistic value. Yet, “Many tunjos show evidence of having been created at the same time, then placed together within a ceramic container and buried. This grouping of figurines creates a compositional community of cosmic, political and social relationships. The community of golden figures may very well be the counterpart to the community of the visible world” (cat. pp. 89-90). “Tripod Offering Bowl with Votive Figures (‘Tunjos’) and Emeralds,” 800-1600 CE with birds and figures enfolding the figures and emeralds, seems like an offering of plenitude – gold and emeralds – back to the very earth from which the gold and emeralds came. Everything is cyclical, separating, for a time, into discrete things – figurines, flowers, birds, people – then flowing back into an ever-creating current of thought.

Basket-Carrier (“Canastero”) with incised body ornamentation (detail), Calima, Colombia, 1000 BCE-100 CE, ceramic. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Muñoz Kramer Collection, gift of Stephen and Claudia Muñoz-Kramer and Camilla Chandler Frost. Photograph ©Museum Associates/LACMA.

Indeed, in a strange irony and coda to the ideas in the exhibition, the Spanish conquerors, thinking they had taken those things that were most sacred to the Indigenous peoples of Colombia when they took their golden objects, as well as anything with precious stones, often overlooked precisely those items that contained the greatest spiritual meaning to the community – textiles and feathers, and objects that combined these, worn from generations of reverence and ritual use.

I have written in these pages that I believe we human beings are all always making art, that perception is an art-making act. Having had the chance to travel in these Golden Worlds, I would amend that to say that we, who are ourselves works of art, are all always making art. To perceive is to make art, yes, but it is also a universe-making act – and that each perception creates a new universe, or, at least, a new bridge to the universe, one that we can carry within us or share with the world.

“Golden Worlds: The Portable Universe of Indigenous Colombia” is a collaboration between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museo del Oro of Banco de la Republica, Bogotâ. In addition to many never-before-seen works from these collections, significant pieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art round out the exhibition. It will be on view at the MFA, Houston, through April 16.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is at 10001 Bissonnet. For information, 713-639-7300 or www.mfah.org.

Pectoral with face, Calima, Colombia, 200 BCE-1300 CE, gold. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Alfred C. Glassell Jr.