Paris/Mexico Remix Deluxe

In the 1860s, as civil war raged in North America, French interests led by Napolean III embarked on a curious political adventure in Mexico. At least as we learn of it from Manet's famous painting, this episode ended badly from the French point of view. That is, the European potentate Napolean appointed to rule Mexico (Austrian archduke Maximilian) was executed by firing squad.

Beneath the wings of this auspicious sign, I offer you the following foray in trans-Atlantic communication. "Come on, Old Ken," I hear you prodding, "there must be some greater motivation for pairing Parisian wallpaper (such as we see above) with the great ruins of Teotihuacan (such as appears in the photograph below)!" Well, such is the magic of the remix; the familiar is defamiliarized, the usual made strange, but the down-right-weird stays weird.



But, before we fling ourselves into the mix, the obligatory backstory: Old Ken was just in Paris and found himself staying near his old haunts in the Quartier Latin; near the Pantheon, the Jardin des Plantes (topic of a future blog, rest assured), and many other fine sites. It was there, in the quaint Hôtel des Grandes Ecoles, that I encountered the wallpaper you see photographed here. A ballooning adventure? Attacks against balloons? Lovers 'a courting? The merry shepherd? What is going on here?



As if these questions were not enough, our last posting brought the happy gift of some startling footage from the nicebirdrox.com South America correspondent, the Famous Anthropologist. So, without further ado, let us take the lead of the wallpaper itself—let us combine its playful juxtapositions with our correspondent's narrative:



"Last Monday, still reeling from my Palm Sunday trip to the Basilica of
Guadalupe, I headed out on a half hour bus ride out of Mexico City to visit the archaeological ruins of Teotihuacan. This particular city was destroyed circa 800 AD, but it remained a sacred site for centuries that followed. The Aztecs, for example, told the conquering Spaniards that they visited the ruins, and they also made revival-style copies of artifacts from the site, brought its pottery back to their capital of Tenochtitlan (where Mexico City is today).



"Anyhoo, after wandering from the southern (?) entrance of the site up the Avenue of the Dead, and ascending the Pyramid of the Sun, and checking out tourist watercolorists at work in the patio of the Palace of the Quetzal-Butterfly, I headed to one of the more maligned sculptures at the site: a massive boulder in front of the Pyramid of the Moon, rather crudely carved with the visage of a goddess. Now, said goddess has a deep hole carved in her head, and a friend of mine has argued that this statue was something like a christmast tree stand: hole being used to hold the trunk of amassive tree dragged in for certain rituals (this kind of ritual is found throughout Mesoamerica, and one can still see it performed for tourists on the hour in front of the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City).



"In any case, crudely carved as the statue is, the light has to be perfect to actually get some shadow effects for the carving to be visible. What luck, the light was perfect, so I hopped up on the possible dance platform in front of the statue to snap some shots.



"Only then did I realize that said goddess was the focus of some sort of ritual. It started with all of the 9 or so pilgrims facing the stone, hands pressing a wrapped cloth bundle to its surface (perhaps the bundles had Cuzco stones inside?). I was a bit distant to hear anything. Then they turned to face the Pyramid of the Moon, bundles in hand in various positions, supplicating something."

It is hard for someone of Old Ken's cast of mind not to do a little bit of speculating in cases like this. And it seems to me that our Parisian wallpaper and our Mexican ritual pose some similar interpretive questions. That is, where does the "story" start and end? What parts count—what bits are essential to our understanding—and what aspects are more accidental? Can all of it be meaningful? Or, more cynically, is it all meaningless? Now certainly, the enigmatic wallpaper—with its provision of just enough formal and scenic continuity to induce us to believe that there is (or should be) intelligible connections between its disparate parts—is hardly on the level of the Mexican ruins. But might we not visualize our own efforts to coax some meaningful insight from its elusive form through the odd prostrations of our pilgrims before their massy, inscrutable god?