Art review: Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler | Anish Kapoor | Adrian Wiszniewski

Published on Tuesday 29 September 2009 09:44

MOCTEZUMA: AZTEC RULER **** BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON ANISH KAPOOR ** ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON ADRIAN WISZNIEWSKI – NEW WORKS **** ROBERT SANDELSON, LONDON

THE Aztecs were really called the Mexica and Montezuma's name was actually Moctezuma. These are small points, but they illustrate the intention of the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition (inconsistently its full title is Moctezuma, Aztec Ruler) to set the record straight about Moctezuma and his personal world. He has always been seen only through the events of his tragic death as the Spanish Conquistadores overthrew him and destroyed his empire.

The exhibition ends with the story of the Conquest, but before that it gives us real insight into Moctezuma's reign, his people and their remarkable city of Tenochtitlan, built in the middle of a lake. The Spanish razed it and built Mexico City on the site, but with perhaps as many as 200,000 inhabitants and with magnificent temples and public buildings, Tenochtitlan was greater than any European city at the time. One Spanish commentator thought, too, that the palace Moctezuma had built for himself was more magnificent by far than anything comparable in Spain.

A model based on drawings and descriptions suggests that was true. The emperor held court in his palace, received tribute, and dispensed judgment like any great ruler. He also smoked tobacco and drank chocolate. He was an accomplished warrior and warfare was part of Mexica life. Military clans of the Eagle and the Jaguar were the aristocratic elite. They looked superb in feathers, gold ornaments and necklaces of little bells; but with wooden swords like cricket bats with broken glass along the edges and rush shields, these stone-age warriors were little match for the steel and gunpowder of the Europeans. They might have prevailed through courage and sheer numbers, but the Spaniards brought diseases. With no resistance, the Mexica were decimated.

The Mexica were literate. They wrote and illustrated elaborate texts, though the Spanish systematically destroyed them and few survive. They also had a complicated double calendar, in which the lunar and solar cycles interlocked. The two parts came into synch every 52 years and this was the occasion for great ceremonies. Complex sculptures are witnesses both to Moctezuma's coronation in 1503 and to his place in such a ceremony in 1507. An extraordinary ornate stone replica of a pyramid temple is the centrepiece here, placed beneath the dome of the old Reading Room to emphasise how these ceremonies symbolised Moctezuma's own centrality in the worldview that the Mexica calendar articulated. Ceremonially he and other priests dressed up as the gods and some of the most astonishing art works here, in greenstone, turquoise and gold, were part of that costume.

The sculptured images of fearsome gods overlaid with symbolic images and hieroglyphs are more grim than beautiful, but other things here, especially the pots, some personal jewellery and the evidence for warrior and ceremonial costumes show that the Mexica understood beauty. Their pantheon seems confusing and their gods were certainly fearsome, but they were part of a worldview that had at its centre a very reasonable sense of the inherent instability of human life and the fragility of any order we may seek to establish. Propitiating the gods by giving them what they needed was part of the Emperor's job. Human sacrifice conducted for this purpose gave the Mexica a bad name, but was it any worse than the actions of the Inquisition back in Spain?

It also seems to have been the Mexica's sense of life's insecurity that made Moctezuma's response to the Spaniards so fatally ambiguous. As a warrior he enlarged the empire he inherited from his father. This and the habit of sacrificing prisoners taken in war did not endear him to his neighbours. This meant the Spaniards found allies. What happened in the end is unclear. We do not know if Moctezuma was murdered by the Spaniards or by his own disaffected people. There are some chilling pictures here of massacres conducted by the invaders. Some are nearly contemporary and perhaps made by Mexica artists. Others were done much later. Even though they must represent the Spanish view of these events, they are still pretty horrifying. What is creditable is that most of what we do know about the Mexica is because Spanish priests with a sense of responsibility very different from that of their brutal compatriots went to great lengths to try to record the history, culture and language of the Mexica people.

The Mexica called gold "excrement of the gods", or perhaps more colloquially "god's poo". No gods, just poo is the dominant theme of Anish Kapoor's extraordinary exhibition at the Royal Academy. There are works in his more familiar mode, huge distorting mirrors, and coloured shapes that look like piles of spices in a market. There are also two gigantic, freestanding vaginas, one a dark opening to a huge womblike construction of rusted steel, the other sparkling crimson lips opening out of a visceral coil of pipes. Nevertheless, it is poo that dominates. Nothing is actually poo-coloured, but that is the only concession. There is a flatulent cannon (it uses compressed air) that fires great blobs of a sticky substance across the gallery, adding to a slithery pile and splattering it around. There is also an enormous heap of the same substance mounted on tracks that moves through the galleries very slowly. Squeezed through the classical arches, as it emerges taking the shape of this tight orifice, you can imagine what it looks like without my needing to be more specific. But in case you did need to be convinced, a whole gallery is filled with a maze of enormous heaps of what I can only call turds, distinctly human, precisely replicated in extruded cement. Mostly cement-grey, they look fossilised.

Anish Kapoor is not a bad artist by any means, but either he has been carried beyond self-criticism by the momentum of his own success, or else this exhibition is a huge lavatorial joke, a vast Naughty Fido, at the expense of the Academy and the public. The fact that it has been put on apparently without question and that members of the public pay to stand and solemnly contemplate a pile of fossilised turds indicates how far our critical standards have been eroded by the relentless promotion of bad art. It is a war of attrition, and so it is deeply dispiriting to note that the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art has just spent 44,000 on a work by Cathy Wilkes. An artist of quite perfect nullity, she will be forgotten in a decade. The same gallery could not find a fifth of that sum for an early John Bellany drawing that would have been treasured for generations. Perhaps Kapoor is right. We deserve those piles of poo.

Refreshing, then, to go to Cork Street to see Adrian Wiszniewski's latest work at the Robert Sandelson Gallery. Most of the paintings are quite small, all are figurative and several are on a gesso ground, which gives a delicate finish. One picture of bathers seems to be central. Beneath trees and against a landscape, five female figures are gathered around a pool. Two of them are holding towels for two others who are in the water. It is a homage to Czanne, not a pastiche, nor a tired copy, but a painting whose delicate visual poetry is a reminder that Anish Kapoor's poo is the language of despair, the work of an artist who has nothing left to say. The real language of art is not obsolete, however, as Wiszniewski shows us. There are just very few artists around who understand it, still fewer who can deploy it to such effect.

Moctezuma until 24 January; Anish Kapoor until 11 December; Adrian Wiszniewski until 7 October.