Me being mostly capable of leaving the bathroom by now, we go to the Precolombino Museum today. I wander through it in a bit of a post sickness bug daze, drinking horribly sweet peach juice to try to drum up some energy, and eating crisps for the salt. I look like every soulless traveller I have ever disapproved of.
But through all the light headed aimlessness, something is actually getting through. I am really impressed by the Precolombino Museum.
You may know my feelings on 'pots'. Even before travelling I had been to enough interchangeable museums housing artifacts used by ancient peoples with interchangeable plaques declaring that they, (wherever and whenever 'they' were), used, (shock horror), flints to hunt animals, bowls to drink out of and heavy stones to grind things. 'Pot', say labels, helpfully, beside interchangeable brown pottery, or, in more enlightening moments, 'pot used to drink from'. Faced with such stunning revelations, I need a pot of my own in which to contain my excitement.
I am going to be hunted down and killed by furious archeologists.
But I can't help it. It really leaves me cold.
The Precolombino Museum of Cusco, however, is different. It focuses, not on the usage or simply the existence of artifacts made by the various groups and clans of indigenous people before the rather clamorous advent of Columbus, but on their merit as works of art.
And, given that focus, the artifacts are chosen for their special interest, and the descriptions point out the geometry or the balance of the design on a pot, the peculiar blocky style of wood sculpture in Inca people as opposed to other groups, whose carvings are fine and detailed, rather than stylised. It points out the use of symmetry, and the significance of designs which purposely break it. I am walking through an ancient art gallery and it is captivating.
And the works themselves are genuinely beautiful. There are shell necklaces designed so that the swirl of the shells matches to create an overall swirling impression, almost the way that certain pictures can make wheels look as though they are turning, or horses as though they are moving.
There are delicate wooden pins to hold a woman's shawl together at the front, each one adorned at the head with the delicately portrayed features of a llama, a condor or a puma.
There are vases painted in bright, geometric patterns, still bright today, and varnished to create a beautiful sheen, with one, carefully placed carved head of a condor or a puma, throwing out the symmetry and drawing the eye to it.
These are not just pots. There are things in the displays which take your breath away, which in this day and age might sell for millions, even without their historical value.
Why do we reduce historical artifacts to their basic attributes and uses? Why is it so necessary to ignore the artwork and simply label something by its usage. Would we do that with a Henry Moore sculpture or a Damien Hurst print? Would we caption them 'clay sculpture used in garden decoration' or 'print on canvas probably hung on wall'?
History is fascinating in and of itself. But we so rarely see it portrayed in all its aspects. A pot is a thing to drink from, yes. And it tells us something about a mysterious people. Which is priceless. But it's also a piece of art.
I really enjoy looking at the ancient art displayed in the Precolombino Museum. I believe I learn something about the various groups of indigenous people through the differences in their artistic values. If one prizes geometry above sculpture, one realism above stylism, another prizes representations of the female form, a fourth prefers animals, it tells me as much about them as any historical investigation of what the artifact might have been used for.
Maybe we should be looking differently at pots in museums. Maybe we should be saluting those long ago artists, and admiring their colour and their form.
After all, is there really anyone living who doesn't know that ancient civilisations sometimes drank out of bowls?
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