Responses: Non-Western Monument Art, West African Masks

Art History: Monuments, Masks

The temple complex at Angkor Wat in Cambodia is an excellent example of non-western monumental architecture. What is interesting about Angkor Wat specifically is that its motivation for being built was religious, but it survived a change in religious regime: it was built as a Hindu temple complex, but then later repurposed for Buddhism. Consequently Angkor Wat's meaning has become national rather than religion: it is depicted on the Cambodian national flag, and probably makes a better tourist attraction than Pol Pot's killing fields. However its centrality in Cambodian national representation suggests the chief reason why it was built: not for the glory of the religious figures worshipped there, but for the glory of its patrons.

Likewise the Aztec Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan is a grand religious monument. Unlike Angkor Wat, the Aztec monument is in serious disrepair, but it was originally built for the purposes of large-scale human sacrifice, followed by anthropophagy. None of this is still in evidence today: tourists to present-day Mexico City do not get to see daily re-enactments of still-beating hearts ripped from the chests of sacrificial victims with obsidian knives. The reason for the monument has been posited that the Aztec culture had limited access to protein, with no domesticable livestock save dogs and turkeys: therefore cannibalism seemed the most reasonable option for dietary protein. However, the Templo Mayor demonstrates that sometimes non-western cultures can build monuments to things that any reasonable twenty-first century person (western or non-western) can find repellent. The Aztec temple seems mostly a monument to justify a truly horrific basis of society by calling it the will of bloodthirsty gods.

In some sense, a work like Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not entirely unlike the Aztec Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan -- both did have a fondness for reflective black obsidian after all, but more to the point both are in some way intended to justify grotesque acts of state-sponsored bloodshed. There is no need to indulge in the moral casuistry which asks if U.S. atrocities in Vietnam would have been better or worse if the American soldiers had behaved like Aztecs and eaten their victims afterward. The real point is that large-scale state-sanctioned murder of anyone represents a form of societal trauma, and the artwork steps into the breach to explain it. Angkor Wat has no such justification to perform: instead the two religions that were celebrated on its precincts (Hinduism and Buddhism) preach the essential unreality and misery of all human existence, such that Aztec cannibalism or napalming civilians becomes merely one more colorful patch on the veil of Maya, one more misery of the cycle of samsara that will one day be escaped.