Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Mississippian
11th-century, 12th-century, 13th-century, 14th-century, 15th-century
Collinsville, IL: 30 Ramey Street
90%
Cahokia Mounds. c1050-1350
It's a fabulously American thing that one of the great wonders in this country (we could quibble as to whether it's a great wonder "of" this country) is right off I-55 in crumbly Collinsville, Illinois, stuck between the river and the cornfields, spitting distance from a monstrous dump heap, cut-through by a main road, flanked by bombed-out strip malls, Mexican food trucks, urban sprawl, and a sore-thumb NASCAR arena named for a tech company that has contracts with the US military. Maybe all of this modern stuff, if it survives the next 1000 years, will have the same effect on future tourists as the Cahokia Mounds have on us today: when we walk through this erstwhile urban landscape we intuit, at however huge a remove, how it was that the Mississippians who made these bumps of land felt in space, what their worlds were and how they shaped and were shaped by them. This is, fundamentally, what aesthetic experience is: to gain a vicarious sense of what it would be like to have been someone whose life and mind are miles and millennia distant from your own. You don't need to have read anything about how the Mississippians organized their society to stand at the top of the highest mound at Cahokia, look out at the swaths of flatness that separate the sudden peaks of earth, and know beyond doubt that these were a people who hewed to the ground but longed for the sky. (2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
56%
Carved Figuring. c1100. Carved quartz
This object seems pedestrian until you notice its subtle torquing. Very slightly, it leans to its left but shoulders forward at its right, such that there's an almost indiscernible bit of spiral movement coursing through. This makes it feel more like a "sculpture" (in an ahistorical sense) than a purely totemic object, which I think is to its artistic benefit. However, I'm not sure that the Mississippians were the best plastic artists, perhaps because they spent too much time shaping their lived surroundings to both developing expertise in the nonpurposive shaping of things. The head's to big for the body, the inarticulateness of the arms and legs is a shame, the incisions aren't very integrated with the overall movement of the body. (Point of interest: I was once told by a former museum employee that this guy's hiding a schlong underneath that lotus position, and that the museum used to display him elevated above a mirror so that you could see his stuff. Shame they've stopped doing this.) (2025)