THE CODEX ITZPAPALOTL

Dore Ashton.

Anthropology, when it became prosaic enough to call itself anthropology, brought a distressing challenge to modern art. In those days, the days before linear; history, it said, art was not Art, but an expression of a whole culture. Pre-Hispanic art, for instance, involved total existence. Its painters and writers spoke of cooking, medicine, trading, worshipping, calendar time, heavenly time—every possible aspect of their lives. The modern artist became unhappily aware of his narrowed prospects and longed to find the rich communal language of ancient: societies. From the late 19th century on, modern artists have performed acts of retrieval, acknowledging the profound human need for spiritual continuity. The modern artist often seeks his touchstone in going back to beginnings. There can be no art without material from the continuum. The most striking inventions are only readable if the familiar is posed within a new context.

Brian Nissen's invention of a modern codex is an act of retrieval that not only revives the ideogram as a rich bearer of meaning, but also opens out to acknowledge the voice that has, in turn, acknowledged other voices. In his reading of Octavio Paz's many—tiered prose poem, Nissen has been inspired to find still other images. Paz's voice, ineffaceable, nonetheless gives way to the flow of other narratives that, fittingly, have no beginnings and no endings. By adopting the traditional pre-Hispanic codex format—the screenfold book—Nissen allows his method of free association to flourish. Free, but not unformed: he has held to a scheme, as did the ancients, and in so doing, has been able to speak of the symbolic obsidian butterfly in various contexts.

The poem that hums beneath the pages of this codex is itself a compendium of histories, images, myths. Paz invokes the mythology of obsidian, with its connotations of soul, mirror, sacrificial knife, and its rumored origins as lightning fallen from the sky, in order to tell still other things. It is an historical poem in that it speaks of a fallen goddess, ravished by history through the Spanish conquest. It is transhistorical in that it speaks in the voice of incantation, toughing upon the eternally renewed grand themes that can only be conveyed in the language of Orpheus that speaks to the eye and ear directly. It speaks the language of metaphor—a language whose very soul is rooted in ideograms and hieroglyphics that must be perennially de-coded.

Nissen is true to the spirit of the poem. His symbols draw upon the timeless prototypes of the pre-Hispanic codices, but they are multivalent. He has not forgotten that in those times, it was often the wind that wrote and painted. His conjunctions of visual and poetic imagery always retain a mystery, for there were many mysteries in the ancient cults. Paz' lament, both temporal and atemporal, is the soul of Nissen's codex. The body is in his images that speak, in the artless way of the pre-Hispanics, of six different aspects of community life in readable sequences: Calendar, Taxonomy, Topography, Mathematics, Orations and Inventories. These six divisions are based on various codices in which the Indians recorded their concept of their world. In Nissen's codex, the reigning

metaphor of the obsidian butterfly gathers up all the others. It commences with the calendar, in which he plays upon the motif of the genesis and formation of insect larvae; moves on to the taxonomic play on classification. Here, the butterfly is instigator of several associations. Nissen weaves in electronic motifs to bring both the sound element (the crackling of insects breaking out of their chrysalises, or the fast play of sparks as obsidian is struck) and the contemporary association available in all ancient motifs. In the third section, topography, he introduces a newspaper clipping in which the name of the village Papalotl, the original shrine of the goddess, is mentioned, and a map. Again, the contemporary is diffused in the ancient, with the imagery compounded, as it is in all subsequent sections leading up to the final image frankly stated in contemporary terms: a butterfly composed of steel nuts and bolts.

Throughout Nissen's codex, there are repeated motifs, metamorphosed, as is the butterfly, to suit the context. There are tools, larvae, wings, masks, symbols of mitosis, hieroglyphs and hints of pre-Hispanic forms such as the short-hand version of stones in old manuscripts, or the representation of feather rugs. These in turn suggest certain modern abstractions. In the accounting section, for instance, there are allusions to the vocabulary of the early 20th century abstractionists, whose symbols were based on metaphors and whose "razed alphabet" is here commemorated. If Nissen introduces common objects, such as the drawing pin, screws, washers, and electronic circuits, it is to rhyme them with images drawn from the past, and to bring them together into a grand continuum. Just as Paz' goddess is at one with her mirror, so the reflections in this compendium of images are at one with time—those times and these.

The astonishing 17th century philosopher Vico believed that men sang before they spoke, and spoke poetry before prose. He understood that in their metaphorical language, "impossible universals", as he called them, shone forth. They were images compounded of seemingly incompatible elements that yet bespoke the world. The artist, the poet, brings together objects and ideas in a single concrete image that can be read by those who know the language. Nissen has paced his codex in such a way that his basic vocabulary enlightens the whole. The images central to Paz' poem—whirlwinds, seeds, fire, leaves, animals, insects, stones— provide Nissen with the materials for his impossible universals. In his suite of prints accompanying the poem, the butterfly emerges with the eyes of an Aztec god, wings marked with the electric circuitry suggesting original fire, and larvae that are like atoms. Yet the whole in its stonelike symmetry, is an allusion to the true Aztec prototypes in paintings and stone. In seeing universals in the shapes of the objects that lie about his studio, Nissen is taking his turn as mythologist and retriever, and, including the record with the music of Paz's voice illuminating his language, and the music imagined by Carles Santos of those times with their Godly insect sound, he has rounded and surrounded his subjects in timelessness.