the times | Wednesday November 10 2021 9
arts
Peru: A Journey
in Time is at the British
Museum, London WC1
(britishmuseum.org)
from Nov 11 to Feb 20monoliths — not to mention an
extraordinary pottery contortionist.
Follow the intricate symbolism and
you’re guided along the paths of
Andean peoples across the centuries.
They develop systems of agriculture
and economies, and build visual and
musical traditions, devising strange
pantheons of gods and the rituals
through which they could try to get in
touch with them. Fairly often, it would
seem, these involve decapitation.
A mysterious series of five carved
wood sculptures of captives bound
about with ropes, from the Moche
culture AD100-800, is one of the most
striking pieces on display. It was found
off the coast of Moche territory on
the Macabi islands and, wonderfully
preserved (having been buried in
guano), had entered the British
Museum collection more than a 100
years ago. It’s believed that ancient
Peruvians sent prisoners to these tiny
Pacific islands to be sacrificed.
The more dreary-looking things,
however, can prove the most
informative. Don’t bypass those
display cases that show bedraggled
strands of knotted string. They are
quipus that, invented in about
AD950, were used for centuries to
record information and carry
it thousands of miles. The
Spanish conquistadors did
not understand this system
of writing. They dismissed the
Incas as illiterate. But in the quipus
we see the complex technology of
a culture that laid the foundation
stones for present-day Peru.
This sense of continuation is one
of the salient features of a show that,
alongside the archaeological record,
focuses on the relevance of pre-
Columbian culture today. The curators
emphasise that ancient practices and
principles are still reflected in Peru’s
culture. This is a landmark exhibition
that challenges and tests our
preconceptions of how a successful
modern society should live.Alongside this musicality there was
his orchestration of the crowds at his
concerts, which were dominated by
young men, who seemingly revelled in
beating the hell out of each other. In
2015 he admitted reckless conduct
after inciting fans to disobey security
at a festival in Chicago.
In 2017 he was convicted of
disorderly conduct after encouraging
fans to rush the stage at a concert
in Arkansas.
His forthcoming album, which one
suspects will be delayed, is called
Utopia. He told an interviewer his
vision of utopia was “a place where we
could just all sit across from each
other and one side stops looking at
the other side and where we all
realise we’re equal. As just humans.
We got buildings, flying cars. Like
everything’s just moving. And as
people, we don’t want nothing from
each other but just to see each other
happy.” He added: “But with that
comes dystopia.”
The film director Robert Rodriguez
interviewed him and said that he felt
pressure to follow up a success and
wondered if Scott did too after
Astroworld was a huge seller. The
rapper said he had a lot of stuff he
wanted to do and was talking about
continuing to engage his fans when he
added: “I don’t feel no pressure, except
to keep the fans alive.”crazy shit” that made him want to
escape the area. “It gave me my edge
— [it made me] who I am right now.”
He had a childhood ambition to be a
wrestler, which according to The New
York Times he later linked to his
ambitions to make his concerts “feel
like it was the WWF”.
He said that “raging and, you know,
having fun and expressing good
feelings is something that I plan on
doing and spreading across the globe.
We don’t like people that just stand —
whether you’re black, white, brown,
green, purple, yellow, blue, we don’t
want you standing around.”
Before all that he started making
music as a teenager and dropped out
of university, to the dismay of his
mother, to pursue it as a career. He got
his break when an engineer who
worked for Kanye West liked what he
was producing and he soon secured a
record deal. The most successful of his
three albums, Astroworld, was named
after a now-closed theme park he
loved as a child.
Some of those he has worked with
have hailed his musicianship. He
wrote a track for Christopher Nolan’s
film Tenet and the director said:
“His insights into the musical and
narrative mechanism [composer]
Ludwig Goransson and I were
building were immediate, insightful
and profound.”
KEVIN MAZUR/MG19/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE MET MUSEUM/VOGUE; ERIKA GOLDRING/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGESBeyond the Inca trail — the
real story of ancient Peru
Cross the Andes and find a treasure trove of art and culture in the
British Museum’s autumn show, writes Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Peru: A Journey in Time
British Museum
{{{{(W
hat do you know
about darkest Peru?
Don’t say Paddington.
Incas and llamas,
condors and cooked
guinea pigs are other hot contenders.
With the first two at least you will
find yourself on more fertile ground.
But if you assume that a big show
about Peru will be largely about
Machu Picchu, prepare to be proved
pretty much entirely wrong.
The historical story that Peru:
A Journey in Time tells begins around
1500BC. It ends in the 16th century
with the arrival of the Spanish
conquistadors. That’s about 3,000
years of pre-Columbian archaeology.
And the Inca empire, for all the
show-stopping splendour of its
mountain citadel, occupied only the
last 150 years of these. Before you
arrive at the little golden figurine of
a llama that, starring on all the
exhibition posters, stands like an
icon for the Incas, you will have
encountered an entire menagerie of
other creatures: fish, white-tailed deer,
thorny oysters, whales, hummingbirds
and jaguars, not to mention a mythical
assortment of fabulous hybrids. You
will have passed through the cultures
of at least a dozen earlier indigenous
peoples: the Chavin, Nasca and
Moche, Paracas, Chimú and Wari
most prominently included.
This is an adventure. At one
moment you might be scrambling the
Andes’ stony flanks to survey vast
contoured stairways of agricultural
terracing. At the next you will find
yourself in the middle of one
of the world’s most arid
deserts, meeting a people
who loved voluptuous
women. They would
model them, naked and
fecund, with genitals exposed.
You can admire the feathered
headdresses of cultures that
lurked under thick forest
canopies. You can breast the stormy
Pacific on fragile reed boats.
In this show some 120 objects, the
greater part coming from the British
Museum’s collection, but more than
40 being rare (and frequently
first-time) loans from Peruvian
museums, come together to build up
a vibrant picture of the cultures that,
without a script-based writing system,
depended on elaborate symbols to
communicate cultural knowledge.
The range is mind-stretching: copper
funerary masks, woven textiles, carved
wooden canoe paddles, great dangling
ear-plates and ceremonial drums;
ceramic vessels moulded into mythical
animals, films of vast geoglyphs
stretching over desert expanses, gold
armlets, model palaces, a ritual cape
with a jaguar-tooth grin; pan pipes
and earplugs and pins made of silver,
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THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM