http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/cl-wk-gallery1feb01,0,21648
2.story?coll=cl-lat-homepage

GALLERIES

Revisionist history with an acute vision
‘Mirror’ shows a Europe conquered by invaders from the Americas.

By Cindy Chang
Special to The Times

February 1, 2007

Alternate versions of history have been imagined by writers and artists
alike, but seldom have those fancies been documented so pointedly as in
"The Art of Smoking Mirror."

The show, by the Ecuadorean artist Eduardo Villacis at Bert Green Fine Art,
opens with a map of the Aztec Empire on what appears to be very old
parchment paper.

In some ways, the map is reassuringly familiar. The contours of Mexico are
faithfully represented, and a dotted line traces Christopher Columbus'
voyage from Spain to the New World.

But any similarity to history as we know it ends there. Another dotted line
snakes across the Atlantic Ocean, starting in Mexico and ending up in Rome.
It is labeled "Warlord Itzcoatl (1503)." The continent from which the Niña,
Pinta and Santa Maria set sail is not called Europe but "Amexica — the New
World." Britain is the land of "Quarantined Tribes" and Germany is the
"Barbarian Lands."

Villacis proposes this alternate history in a mock museum exhibit that
documents the conquest of Europe by the Aztecs through an array of fake
artifacts and explanatory captions written in the simplistic, knowing tone
of museumspeak. This is what Mexican schoolchildren might have seen on a
field trip to the local museum had their Aztec ancestors colonized Europe,
instead of the other way around.

In this world, there are no more Christians, leaving modern-day Amexicans
to speculate about what god the natives of "U-rop" might have worshipped.
"Entglitcz" is a lost language and Shakespeare completely forgotten. The
Aztecs are just as cruel in victory as the Europeans were, enslaving the
natives to build new cities on top of the ones they have destroyed.

"Smoking Mirror" — the title is a reference to an Aztec warrior god, as
well as to the mirror-image version of history — opened on Jan. 11.

For Villacis, turning colonial history on its head was an attempt to come
to terms with the deeply ingrained racism of Ecuador, where native Indians
have traditionally been considered second-class citizens. His ancestry is
mostly European, and even as a child, people treated him as if he were
somehow superior to his darker-skinned friends.

"I grew up with this theme that the native culture is oppressed, that
native values, all the things that native culture produced aren't valued.
So I thought, 'What could happen if it were the opposite?' " Villacis said
by telephone from Ecuador, where he is a university professor.

Villacis, whose father is a prominent Ecuadorean poet, lists as many
literary influences as artistic ones, among them the magical realism of
Gabriel García Márquez. Much of his work blends narrative and satirical
elements from literature with drafting techniques from comic books and
illustration.

"Smoking Mirror" originated as a graphic novel, mimicking the museum
exhibit form, with fake historical documents, war weapons and illustrations
supposedly by artists of the time, for Villacis' thesis project at Cal
State Fullerton, where he was a Fulbright scholar. It was first shown at
the Laguna Art Museum in 2001. Villacis is still trying to finish the
graphic novel and hopes to publish it in the United States.

To dramatize Columbus' arrest by Aztec authorities on charges of illegal
immigration and traveling without proper identification, Villacis' "museum"
includes a detention document from that supposed incident, written in a
pseudo-Aztec script.

In pastel and pencil illustrations, Villacis shows pyramids being
constructed over the ruins of the Vatican (circa 1505), the Pope on trial
for heresy in an Aztec court (1507) and a shining new Aztec city dwarfing
what remains of Paris (1522).

Physical "artifacts" also move the Amexican story forward: a priest's
vestments in a glass case, pistols and cannonballs decorated with
fantastical motifs that Aztec craftsmen supposedly made after studying the
weapons brought by Columbus and his crew. (Villacis designed the weapons
himself and asked a sculptor collaborator to realize them in clay.)

The Aztecs' attempts to understand the European culture they are destroying
are as comically uninformed as were those of the conquistadors in Latin
America. Because the examples — Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Christ on the
cross — are intimately familiar to western viewers, the ridiculousness of
the conquerors' interpretations is all the more apparent.

One caption speculates that the European natives worshipped a god named
Henry, due to the inscription "INRI" above the crucified Jesus. Another
notes that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel must have depicted an
orgiastic bacchanal: "The two masculine hands about to touch each other
thus would be part of a larger homosexual scene."

And just as really happened in the New World, Villacis' conquerors abuse
the natives. One illustration shows German slaves used for transportation
in lieu of horses. In several other drawings, the Aztecs marvel at the
Europeans' pale skin and hairy bodies and spread exaggerated rumors about
their strange appearances.

"The large amounts of facial hair of the native men fascinated the public.
Many groups like the Spaniards were said to be so hairy as to have hairy
tongues and ears. There were reports of Italians with hairy pupils," one of
the captions reads.

"The significant question he's asking is, if it were the other way around,
would it be all that different?" gallery director Bert Green said. "The
answer is probably no. People are what they are, and the group in power
tends to define power on their own terms."

weekend@...

*

The Art of Smoking Mirror

What: The Art of Smoking Mirror: Chronicles by Eduardo Villacis

Where: Bert Green Fine Art, 102 W. 5th St., L.A.

When: Noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The artist will be at the
gallery March 17 and 24 to speak about his work.

Price: Free

Info: (213) 624-6212; www.bgfa.us