MEXICO | ARTS & CULTURE
A Mexican museum reflects a culture's idea of death
A foot in the grave, and loving it: Mexico views death as a parallel -- and lively -- reality.
AGUASCALIENTES, Mexico -- The house of the dead awaits your arrival.
Just off the courtyard of a former Carmelite convent here, half a dozen clay sculptures of the dark Aztec underworld lord Mictlantecuhtli fix you with voracious grins and hollow eyes. In a next-door gallery, scores of miniature skeletons strum instruments, cavort in beery fiestas and enlace their bony limbs in fervid lovemaking.
If the mood at Mexico's 2-month-old National Museum of Death feels more celebratory than sepulchral, that's hardly surprising. Although most Western cultures tend to treat death with fear and loathing, Mexicans prefer to embrace it.
In Mexico and other Latin American cultures, death isn't merely a depressing curtain-closer but rather a passage into a kind of parallel reality whose inhabitants enjoy the same pleasures and suffer many of the same tribulations as the living. Mexico's spiritual iconography and its folklore, expressed in popular festivities such as the Day of the Dead, bear witness to a fixation that extends back into the dream-time, centuries before the Spanish conquistadors' arrival.
"For the Mexican, it [death] is very natural, as natural as to be born. It's not a tragedy," says Octavio Bajonero Gil, 67, one of the country's most esteemed graphic artists, who donated 1,500 death-related art and artisanal objects to the Autonomous University of this midsize city, spurring it to create the museum this summer.
Bajonero's collection now fills six galleries of an elegantly restored 17th century convent in this city's historic center, about a six-hour drive northwest of Mexico City. The museum's holdings, which were assembled by Bajonero over 50 years, encompass pre-Columbian sculpture and pottery, reproductions of ancient Indian codices depicting human sacrifices, colonial-era artworks, hundreds of whimsical skeletons and toys made by artisans.
In an adjoining modern building that connects with the convent through a tranquil plaza, visitors inside a red-tinted exhibition hall ponder the satirical calaveras (skulls) of master engraver José Guadalupe Posada and works by other Mexican masters such as Manuel Manilla, Francisco Toledo and Leonel Maciel. Others linger over a bronze death mask of President Benito Juárez and a traditional Tzompantli skull fashioned from Coke-bottle labels.
Today, Chinese factories crank out plastic knockoffs of many of these items. But every object in the museum was made "by Mexican hands," says Jorge Heliodor García Navarro, the institution's director general, and there is at least one piece from every state in Mexico plus the Federal District (Mexico City).
Organized and operated by the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, the museum is "like tutti-frutti, a collage of everything," García says. This inspired mishmash of fine art, historical artifact and popular craft, grouped around a common theme, is unusual in the hierarchical world of Mexican museum curatorship, García says, and it reflects the pervasiveness of the memento mori as a central trope of Mexican culture.
"Many foreigners ask: How can there be skeleton boxers or skeletons drinking? Isn't it a lack of respect?" García says. "For a Mexican, it's not. It's part of our reality. We share this, all us human beings."
An early fascination A gentle, jovial man with a full head of white hair and the long, graceful hands of a concert pianist, Bajonero says his fascination with death began when he was only 2 years old and his father died of a heart attack, at age 38. He can remember being intrigued by his mother's ritual devotions to her late husband and having a growing interest in "the ceremonies of death."
"In this case, the theme chose me," Bajonero says at his art- and book-crammed home in a blue-collar Mexico City neighborhood.
While he was studying at the National School of Plastic Arts at the National Autonomous University in San Carlos, he began acquiring death-themed objects, often while traveling to far-flung parts of the republic.
Rummaging through flea markets, he found fantastic, one-of-a-kind pieces. A sculpture of Cihuateotl, the fearsome-looking symbol of Indian women who died in childbirth. A skeleton carousel from Oaxaca. Nahuatl masks. A ceramic clay banquet of skeletal Mexican Revolution soldiers, hoisting their rifles toward their leader, Pancho Villa. A 19th century, life-size wooden carving of a dead child, tenderly rendered. Wooden crosses depicting souls foundering in purgatory. A beautiful sculpture of the Virgin of the Good Death, who gently cradles a human skull in one hand.
Many of these objects are no longer being made, and the generational know-how that shaped them is steadily being lost too, Bajonero says. "There are types of artisans that have disappeared. The mentality of the people has changed because many people have gone to the United States [to work], and when they return, they don't like these traditional things."
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