Ritual art - The life of the images
Before looking into contemporary Huichol art, it is worth asking ourselves why ritual art is produced. This is not obvious. We know that in many Amerindian societies, for example in the Amazon there is little interest in fixing ritual images, so there is very little visual art, although many poetic images are reflected in ritual texts.
In Mesoamerica, plastic production is huge. There is even talk of a horror vacui that impels the artist to fill the surfaces with figurations of all kinds. The fact is that in some societies art is ritually necessary and in others it is not. For some reason, in this region of the Great Nayar art is important and the ritual processes are expressed and capture or freeze those moments that are the culmination of the rituals.
The Huichol Ritual Art is: life and death in a single instant of incandescence
Native American art is a fundamental part of the efforts made by each people to create the world once again. Cosmogony requires a continuous ritual effort, especially in regard to the practice of sacrifices and the search for visions. But the creation of the world that is achieved, for example through visions, is never final. Although reaching it is complicated, all creation is unstable and ephemeral. It is, as Octavio Paz said in poetry, "life and death in a single instant of incandescence" (1994: 164). Thus the ritual seems to be incoherent in the paradox of wanting to grant a certain duration to the instant useless desire, because any attempt to stabilize the visions is relative and in the background is condemned to failure.
As concretors, the artist and the ceremonial specialist participate in the cosmogony, but they never produce finished works, nor definitive ones. The stable, the fixed, the finished work are possible, and the becoming is always more important than the being.
Mesoamerican art is, therefore, an art of transformation. In his essay on the subject Octavio Paz says of the pre-Hispanic world that has a "religious pantheon governed by the principle of metamorphosis: the universe is time, time is movement and movement is change, ballet of masked gods who dance the terrible pantomine of the creation and destruction of worlds and men "(2006 - 1977: 81).
The aesthetics of Mesoamerican art does not avoid the paradox: it seeks it. The ritual context is the key to understanding this situation, because it allows us to understand the coexistence of contradictory intentions. Huichol art, as we shall see, participates in this paradoxical condition; For example, figures - arrows, jícaras, wooden statues and other materials - express the desire to stabilize the experiences of vision seekers. In addition: the pieces that are produced in the ritual context are not inert objects on which the creator can decide at will. In fact they are not even objects. Behind the arrows, the jicaras, the worsted tables and other works of ritual art almost invariably meet the alter egos of the ritual specialists, with whom the mara'kame can interact and relate in multiple ways. These doubles often show the hierarchy of deities, understood as initiated beings of the highest rank. So the images have life and power. That is why ritual art also assumes another intention: to force images to remain still, a task that is often complicated, so that they often end up being closed and hidden.
The Huichol society produces an enormous amount of ritual images. There is a pictorial tide (Bilderflut) wixarika: they mostly carry backpacks with images and wear clothes with multicolored embroidery; Many of them sell art and crafts with designs full of symbols.
