The Johnson: A Cool Reception
Truth be told, the Ivy League perpetuates a certain aloofness. If such be needed, support for this claim came when husband Kit and I paid a summer visit to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on the campus of Cornell University. Despite our status as Cornell alumni, I’ve never developed an emotional attachment to the Johnson. I don’t hurry back there, as I do to the Heard Museum, The Frick Collection or Musee Rodin. Those art spaces began as family homes, and they retain the scale of the human body. Not so, the Johnson.
The Johnson opened thirty-five years ago, as a controversial addition to Old Stone Row. The existing buildings on the row–three Second Empire beauties–were crafted from Cayuga bluestone, hewn from the very ridge where they stand. Poured into place with yellowish concrete, the Johnson makes me think that a drunken giant tried to build a packing crate with really big Legos. Actually, the museum is the brainchild of modernist architect I.M. Pei, and it extends a cool welcome at the best of times.
I realized how chilly that welcome can be, when Kit and I passed through the towering glass doors one Saturday morning. A lone woman sat at a circular desk on the far side of the entry hall. We approached, smiled. Her initial greeting was a demand that I surrender my purse. Kit and I exchanged glances. Why? It was too big; it could damage the collection. I had a flashback of holding the same bag in the West Gallery of The Frick–not an institution known for being cavalier about security.
Like a tape recorder on continual replay, the demand was repeated. More glances were exchanged. Ill at ease but acquiescent, I tried to surrender my bag to the woman. She recoiled and refused to touch it, gesturing behind her chair to a wooden box. Presumably, I was to stuff the purse into an open cubby hole in the box, much like a kindergardener might stow a plush rabbit in a classroom toy bin. This was Cornellian reserve (and disdain for personal security) taken to a new low.
The Carroll Collection
Kit returned from locking my purse in the trunk of the car. We made our way, without the assistance of the purse police, to a special exhibition in the lower gallery. “A New World: Pre-Columbian Art from the Carroll Collection” ran from March 29th through June 15th of this year. The complete collection contains four hundred pieces, roughly half of which were on display. With nothing on our agenda until a family reunion in the afternoon, we passed the morning hours by moving from one pristine display case to the next.
The Carroll impressed us more than expected. The artifacts ranged from cylinder stamps to gold breast plates, but figurines and functional pottery made up the bulk of the collection. Assistant curator Andrew Weislogel organized the exhibit by place, period and culture. The periods span more than four millennia, from the Valdivian (circa 2700 BCE) to the Incan (circa 1500 CE). South American cultures are most strongly represented, with the holdings growing thinner for Central America and Mexico. Archeological sites stretch from Nayarit, northwest of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, down the Pacific Coast to the geoglyphic Nazca lines in Peru.
Sci-fi, lawn ornaments and psychedelics
Befitting a serious archeological exhibit, signage for the Nasca/Nazca artifacts made no mention of the lines. If you’re unfamiliar with Nazca lines, ask a young person enamored by anime or video gaming. You’ll discover that these patterns–geometric, zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, abstract–scratched and scored in the rusty gravel of a Peruvian plateau have been transported across a galaxy of youth-oriented products. Or, for an introduction to Nazca iconography, see the summer blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).
Before their incorporation into international pop culture, Nazca lines were enlisted as pseudo-scientific “evidence” for prehistoric human contact with extraterrestrials. They have an important place in the cult classic, Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1968), written by Swiss author, Erick von Daniken. In turn, Daniken’s work is one source for the American film, Stargate (1994) and its two spinoff television series, along with another sci-fi series, Battlestar Galatica (BSG).
I doubt that collectors Dr. Thomas Carroll and Charlotte Jones-Carroll pass the evenings at their charming suburban home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in the exploration of pop culture. For me, however, a working knowledge of these matters is a job requirements. I made contemporary connections aplenty as I looked at one ceramic figurine after another.
Most of my pop culture associations were amusing or at least benign. In the ceramic effigy of a Nazca cat/crop diety, I saw the world-weary features of BSG’s Admiral Bill Adama (played by Edward James Olmos). Three hermaphroditic figurines from Manabi bespoke Spielbergian spacemen. After several centuries, but still fifteen hundred-odd years ago, the folks in Manabi began using molds to make their clay figurines. Their later version of the little guys/girls could have been pre-Columbian garden gnomes.
Less amusing was my association with the slender funnel from Cara/Panzaleo. The upper third of the funnel consists of three figures (Past, Present and Future?), joined at the shoulders like Siamese triplets. An opening in the central figure’s head served as the mouth of the funnel. The small faces have perfectly round, exaggerated occular cavities, as if someone repeatedly pressed the eraser end of a prehistoric pencil into wet clay. The three pairs of hollow eyes called up images of the Gentlemen in “Hush,” an especially eerie episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
Evidently, someone at the Johnson hoped to create a different viewer response to the Cara/Panzaleo funnel. The caption reads, “This elongated conical vessel is crowned by a rather whimsical trio of human figures.” I suppose one person’s warning can be another’s whimsy, but I doubt that the ancient artisan intended fun and games. One possible function of the object was for injecting hallucinogenic enemas. Even today, indigenous South American peoples use psychotropic agents only for serious and potentially dangerous shamanic practices. As for enemas, well, most people just don’t see the humor.
Polychrome pottery and poor advice
From the figurative works, Kit and I turned to polychrome pottery of the Piartal Period (600 – 1200 CE). I was admiring a compote dish, when an involuntary memory carried me back to the early 1970s in Phoenix, Arizona. In that time and place, I had an adolescent passion for Hohokam pottery. In the memory I was making yet another visit to the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archeological Park. I leaned low to study an intricate geometric design and my long hair brushed the protective glass of the display case.
I came by my interest in anthropology honestly, living in a city where digging up backyard potsherds and spotting petroglyphs on desert mountains were the ordinary stuff of childhood. “Everybody” in Phoenix knew that the canals bringing water from the Salt River to front lawns and cotton fields followed the network laid out by the Hohokam ancestors a thousand years earlier. (This, of course, all happened in the years when water flowed in the Rio Salado and no one had yet conceived of inflatable rubber dams in the riverbed for a fake lake.)
In the fall semester of my senior year of high school, I enrolled in an evening anthropology class at a local community college. The unforgettable instructor was Donald H. Hiser, then the director of the Pueblo Grande Museum. In taking the course, I was only following my aesthetic penchant and intellectual interest. It was a simpler time.
In the contemporary feeding frenzy for admission to elite institutions of higher education, college courses for high school students have taken on new meaning. In What High Schools Don’t Tell You: 300+ Secrets to Make Your Kid Irresistible to Colleges by Senior Year (2007), “educational strategist” Elizabeth Wissner-Gross lists the community college option as Secret 59. It is, she claims without evidence, more prestigious than AP or IB courses.
Wissner-Gross makes the ethically-challenged observation, “I’ve seen high school students who were struggling with AP Biology drop the high school course to ace community college Biology instead” (52). On the off-chance that the college course proves too tough, the student, she argues, is under no obligation to report a poor college grade. Her advice ignores the requirement that students attest to the full and complete truth of their statements on The Common Application for Undergraduate Admission.
Stone clothespins with faces
It would appear that individuals donating collections to university museums are not bound by the requirements for full disclosure that are placed upon college aspirants. Or, if they are, then the members of the public who view their munificence are not privy to the information. The different requirements for disclosure struck me forcefully when I returned for the last time to the artifacts at the beginning of “A New World: Pre-Columbian Art from the Carroll Collection.”
Between pop culture associations for clay figurines and reveries over polychrome pottery, I had returned repeatedly to the first display. I went back so often that Kit gave up accompanying me–which says volumes, if you happen to know my husband. I simply couldn’t get enough of the Valdivian Venuses. In an exhibit rich in beautiful, interesting artifacts, the Venuses were the most exquisite and intriguing of objects. In a room filled with old stuff, they were ancient–almost five thousand years ancient.
The Valdivian Venuses looked like old-fashioned wooden clothespins with etched features, but they were carved from stone. In the pure lines of eyes and mouths, the simple curves of breasts and arms, each one of the half dozen artifacts bound an elemental power. Fertility symbols, fetishes, totems, magick objects of purposes now unknown, the Venuses captured my imagination. I had never seen anything like them, and I wanted one. I didn’t want a reproduction. I wanted a real one.
My shameful, primal greed forced the realization about the disclosure of sources. How could I get one? How did Dr. Thomas Carroll, an economic specialist in South American regional development, and Charlotte Jones-Carroll, a social justice advocate with the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, come by even one Valdivian Venus, let alone half a dozen? Neither the exhibit notes nor the catalog held the answer.
A bit of web-browsing revealed connections to the world of international high finance. Carroll had been a senior officer with the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. Jones-Carroll was a senior officer with the World Bank, and she worked for a decade with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). But, by themselves, those facts don’t explain the Valdivian acquisitions. Among my circle of friends and acquaintances are one former World Bank officer, a handful of USAID people, and many anthropologists and development economists. None have amassed anything like the Carroll Collection.
Let’s face it, the average person can’t wander into a bustling marketplace in Quito, Ecuador, and strike a bargain for authentic five thousand-year old religious objects. The typically curious kid can’t dig them up in the backyard, like Hohokam potsherds in old Phoenix. So how did the Carrolls come by their collection? As of this posting, I have no idea.
However, as an alumna of the university, I hope that the Cornell trustees have a good, honest answer. We are living in the new millennium of transparency in museum acquisitions and repatriation of stolen national treasures. Scandal swirls around Marion True, former curator of the Getty, who has been accused of looting antiquities from Italy and Greece. It’s not science fiction to think that in the not-too-distant future, someone more important than one lone blogger may begin asking prickly questions about the Carroll Collection. When that day comes, the staff of the Johnson may need all of the Ivy League sang froid that they can muster.
Meanwhile, if U C a cute Valdivian knock-off on e-Bay, text me. I’m there.
Cheers,
d.k.b.
Campus Notes 