OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY

‘The past is never dead: its not even past’

-William Faulkner-

This project began with conversations I had with Octavio Paz in which I had mentioned my interest in pre-Columbian codices, and especially their symbiotic relation to drawing and writing, and that I had already made some conjectured versions based on their screen-fold format. I asked Octavio if he would be willing to collaborate on a codex, and he suggested that a poem of his — the Obsidian Butterfly — would be a perfect vehicle. In the poem the goddess declares ‘Images spring from my body’ and what better than to make these images visible. Make them manifest. This wonderful prose poem is a lament by the goddess Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly. Her song tells of her demise, her cult eclipsed by the arrival of a new religion. She is both a warrior goddess and goddess of childbirth, and is represented as a butterfly with jaguar claws - a curious incarnation of vivacity and violence. Traces of her presence still exist. I found out that some women in northern Mexico are accustomed to put a piece of obsidian under their tongue when giving birth to protect their babies from deformities, though they have no idea where this superstition originates. The myths associated with obsidian — black volcanic glass — come from two sources. Polished obsidian served as mirrors and was believed to be the soul crystallized into rock, and artfully split obsidian was used for arrowheads and sacrificial knives.

This butterfly-goddess, has its origins in a nocturnal species, - Rothschildia Orizaba of the family Saturniidae. Metamorphosed into the goddess Itzpapálotl ( itztili-obsidian, y papálotl - butterfly) it is also known as the ‘butterfly of four mirrors’ in reference to the transparent areas of the wings, which are triangular and evoke the shape of arrowheads. The codex took form as a visual complement to the poem, juxtaposing ancient and contemporary signs and symbols, and Octavio made a special recording of the poem that was published together with the codex. Using the formats of different codices I developed a number of icons and images, which I felt needed to be explored in different media. So I began to develop them, first in sculpture, and then in painting and collage and reliefs.

The question of what art was, what it is, and what it will become is one of the great themes that motivates the art of today. Is there such a thing as progress in art? Certainly visual idioms come and go, and art concerns itself with expressing and relating present to past. Even the concept of Art is quite recent in our history of image making. We may talk of progress in the history of ideas but neither art, emotions, nor our sense of wonder are subject to progress, even though they may be motivated by quite different events. Art mutates, interpreting, sublimating and expressing the world around it. Our vision of the past shines through the tinted lens of translation, sometimes in sharp focus, but more often blurred. Its original context escapes us and although we are enveloped by it’s light, we are barely able to distinguish the things it illuminates.

‘The past is a foreign country’ wrote L.P.Hartley, certainly a very modern sentiment. The ancients made no such distinction between past and present. The past was something actual. Working around the theme of the Obsidian Butterfly was an evocation of past and present, and the way one filters into the other in unexpected ways. I found parts of car batteries corresponding to images of the rain god Tlaloc, and insect limbs manifesting themselves in computer circuit boards. Dozing early one morning I was thinking about the images of Itzpapalotl that are carved on the columns of the Butterfly temple in the ruins of Teotihuacan. Each butterfly has two obsidian circles embedded in its wings. I had just started to work on large, butterfly shaped collages, and it occurred to me that these circles of black obsidian glass could reappear as the black vinyl circles of long playing records. That morning I rushed out to our nearest secondhand record store, and asked the man there for some 80 or 100 records. He kept insisting on finding out what kind of music I wanted, and then became quite uptight when I said I didn’t care as long as the labels were brightly colored. Then he got pretty annoyed, saying that one doesn’t buy records that way, you have to know what kind of music you like and so on. I was obliged to explain what I needed them for in order to calm him down. Anyway, eventually the records were incorporated into many of the works and I loved the idea that they had irretrievable sounds and messages embedded in them. Secret sounds. Mute oracles.

The works woven around this theme were shown at the Tamayo museum in Mexico City. I wanted Octavio’s recitation of the poem he had recorded to be a presence in the exhibition, and so I decided to choreograph a dance sequence to accompany it together with music specially composed by Carles Santos. This was performed at regular intervals for the duration of the exhibition. The dance, to Paz’s recitation and Santos’s minimalist composition of layered voices, was an arrangement of poses dissolving into other poses by four dancers forming symmetrical insect shapes, while on a platform above them a contortionist wound and unwound his body in slow motion.

The exhibition was in a way a visual interpretation and a physical manifestation of Paz’s poem. A commingling of text and context, out of time and re-invented into the present. When Paz first visited the exhibition, he was delighted and told me that he was struck by it not being a just a collection of works around the poem, but as the poem, an organic whole, a single work.

Brian Nissen