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.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday February 02, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Gallery exhibition: An article in Thursday's Calendar Weekend on Eduardo Villacis' "The Art of the Smoking Mirror" said the exhibition was first mounted at the Laguna Art Museum in 2001. "Smoking Mirror" was first shown at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.
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 Nina, 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.
