Art Matters: Why Art?

Why art? Why does it make a difference to us? What is it about the fine craft and its form? 

Form and material were what drew me to art forty years ago, when I was a Princeton undergraduate. A finely formed—without a wheel!— Olmec cup from Las Bocas took my breath away, especially when longtime curator Gillett Griffin of the Art Museum put the work in my hand and it was nearly weightless. This was Art and Archaeology 325, Art of Mesoamerica, at its first class meeting, and questions just bubbled up: how had such a thing survived, and why did it have an almost calligraphic smudge of a black fire cloud on its surface?

And then, at that same first session, something magical happened: Gillett (never known by anything more formal) handed me a necklace of large jade beads, beads the size of tomatillos, and I didn’t hesitate to put it around my neck. The beads took on my body temperature, suddenly feeling one with my skin. 

My introduction to the art of Mesoamerica—roughly Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras— was thus not a search for meaning nor an answer to a question but rather this stunning materiality. I knew next to nothing about the Aztecs or the Maya or the Mixtecs or the Olmec.

Yet the form was not enough, nor the materiality: as I came to see, so many of the works at hand were also rich in meaning, some of it accessible—although I soon realized that the role of the consumer or client, customer or patron that the maker had in mind would not be one I could inhabit—and much of it not. Furthermore, it was clear that works had a biography: they had been made, they had been used, they had been of value for a period, and sometimes of such value that they had been meticulously preserved. But even more powerful to my eyes were works that had been battered early in their lives, intentionally damaged and preserved. 

I had the opportunity to look at some of the objects in the Museum’s collection when I visited Bryan Just’s Dancing into Dreams: Maya Vase Painting of the Ik’ Kingdom. I was thinking about the stunning calligraphic line that runs through the works in the exhibition, where Maya mastery of clay slip line on a continuous curving surface astounds the viewer in its technique, its restlessness, and its confidence: the line refuses to settle into place, a chord that never quite resolves. 

After Dreams, I headed down to the basement level of the Museum, particularly to look at Maya figurines. The medium is limiting, it seems: many are mold-made; others are  designed for stability, yielding static forms. I first turned to a figurine, a captive whose form had mesmerized me when I had selected him for a national exhibition in the 1980s. In the easy line formed along his plump belly, and in the turn of his head away from the orthogonal, the figurine expresses in three dimensions a gesture as lithe and fluid as a brushstroke. 

But nearby, my eye alighted on an old friend, a battered and burned Maya figurine of a bound captive that I had known from Gillett’s class. The object—gruesome enough in itself—had lived the life of the sacrificial victim it had represented. Buried in a tomb or grave, it was not meant for us to see again, but meaning had accrued to it at every stage, from its creation, when the human form was imbued with pain and humiliation, to the actions wreaked upon it, seemingly ending with fire. Yet in the end, the figurine was preserved, meaningful long after its original role had been played. 

I’ve studied the works in the Art Museum for my entire adult life. Their materiality has remained central for me, in my appreciation for the line and the facture and in understanding the value with which the ancient makers imbued particular materials. These works have sustained me in their beauty and have opened windows on the complexity of human existence. But I also know we’ll never have all the answers posed by any Pre-Hispanic work: we will never know the questions they were meant to answer. 

Mary Miller, Class of 1975