Art
Mysteries
John McEwen
If you like mysteries go and see the photographs of Peruvian ground drawings at the ICA (till 2 May). No more peculiar vestige of an ancient culture can exist than these huge scraped-out triangles and quadrangles, straight lines of up to ten kilometres in length, spirals, figures of humans and identifiable species of birds, animals, flowers and Insects which decorate the contours of the tablelands at the foot of the Cordillera 400 kilometres south of Lima. Here for the last thirty years a German scientist, Maria Reiche, has devoted herself to their research. The exhibition presents her results to date.
She has sought the answers to three questions: when, why and how were they done? Dr Paul Kosok, who in 1939 became the first scientist to discover the drawings, witnessed the sun setting exactly down one of the straight lines on a solstice day and Maria Reiche, as his successor, has vindicated his subsequent claim that the drawings constitute 'the largest astronomy book in the
She has, in addition, established their approximate date, 500 BC—l300 AD, and Probable authorship, by members of the moon-worshipping Paracas/Nazca culture and, since sun lines exist as well, the later dynasty of the Incas. And recently she appears to have discovered the technique of
their measuring, which may in the end solve the puzzle of the drawings and the intellectual capacities of the so-called illiterates who traced them, in their entirety.
But that is not all. Time is running out. The region was till the last few years the driest on earth. Its brown surface, littered with dark oxidised stones, is much darker than the yellow soil it covers and of such delicacy that even a footprint can leave an immemorial mark, continually sifted clean by the wind and never washed away by rain. This was why the site was chosen in the first place.
Today it rains more because of the pollution of the atmosphere, and the growing use of cars in the vicinity leaves an ever denser maze of tracks which will eventually obliterate all but the most obliquely placed figures. Scientists, inquisitive artists and travellers will soon be followed by tourists. Maria Reiche is herself old. If one aspect of art is to encourage contemplation then there is plenty to meditate on here.
Giorgio de Chirico will be eighty-eight on 10 July. He still has an apartment on the Piazza di Spagna, he still paints (and sculpts) and he still feels that the curators, the critics and all the other 'modernists' who extol his early metaphysical paintings at the expense of everything he has done since the end of the First World War are pretentious asses. And why should he not know best ? He painted the pictures. More than that, he was there. He sat through those lugubriously self-conscious Saturdays at Apollinaire's; he watched Breton sip champagne and damn the bourgeoisie; and he suffered the indignity of being enshrined alongside Carra and Morandi at the Venice Biennale of 1948 by the critic Longhi. Longhi! Who thirty years before had sarcastically dismissed what he now pleased to immortalise.
It is easy to understand why di Chirico turned his back on all this spivvery and concentrated on perfecting his technique in the manner of the old masters of the golden age of painting in pictures which often depict Arcadia itself. 'Technique' derived from the Greek word for art, 'techne'. And di Chirico is, of course, Greek. But sadly the spivs were right, as his latest exhibition of recent paintings (and sculptures) at Wildenstein (till 27 April) continues obstinately to demonstrate.
The technique may be superb—Chirico once said that if Titian were alive today the only materials he would consider buying in a paintshop would be paper and charcoal--but the images are depressingly and wilfully unchanged. Copies often, and this is saddest of all, of the work of his brilliant early period. He does not care: 'Vision Metaphysique de New York' done last year, 'Metaphysical Interior' from 1917, only a hole or two displaced and the roofs of the buildings seen through the window altered.
It is as if he has forptten why he ever got angry at all. And the critics go on criticising, the speculators speculating.
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