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Yet it is worth doing because some kind of reintroduction, no matter how emblematic, is needed. To most Northeastern Americans -- Protestants, Jews, Irish Catholics -- Mexico is, culturally speaking, an exceedingly remote place. The art of the Mayans and Aztecs was more influential in the U.S. 60 years ago than it is today. Then it was one of the monumental sources of art deco, as a host of works from Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture to the eagle- head gargoyles on Manhattan's Chrysler Building attest. (Even the pylons of the Harbor Bridge in faraway Sydney are based on that universal deco form, the Mayan step pyramid.) What American corporation in the past 20 years would have thought of bringing a Mexican artist to do its murals, as the Rockefellers in New York and the Fords in Detroit brought Rivera? But this relationship soon lapsed: it fell victim in the '50s and '60s to New York's own belief in itself as imperial culture center and its incuriosity about "provincial" cultures. Needless to say, this did not affect the market in pre-Columbian antiquities, still less the appalling rate at which Mexican archaeological sites were and are looted for the North American market. But it virtually guarantees that % one's first impression of Mexican art will be its strangeness, its vexing otherness, its complete originality.
Nevertheless, as Paz points out, this has always been so, right from the moment in the 16th century when the Spanish conquistadors looked down on Mexico City for the first time and saw, in the lakes and pyramids, a complete human world that had nothing to do with their own -- not simple "savages" like Columbus' Indians, but an immense hierarchical city of a quarter of a million people, twice the size of Philip II's Madrid. They were, as Hernan Cortes' chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo wrote, "wonderstruck . . . witnessing things never heard, nor seen, nor even dreamed." The Aztecs, like the Mayans and the Olmecs before them, lived in an isolation more complete than any of the world's other great civilizations': nothing had come into Mexico for 2,000 years, and nothing had gone out. Hence the feeling that any visitor to the sites of ancient Mexico gets -- which is preserved in a diminished form in this show -- that nothing in one's own inherited culture applies to this one.
The note is struck in the Met's foyer by a colossal head of a feathered serpent carved in Tenochtitlan around the year 1500. A stone eating-machine: Would it be possible to have a scarier sculpture than this, with its great recurved fangs that also seem to function as archaic legs, like those of a horseshoe crab, dragging the frightful effigy toward you? Not for nothing did the designers of the movie Alien base their outer-space monsters on Aztec sculpture.