A consecrated image in a temple, or on a home altar, doesn’t just depict a god; when you engage with it, it is the god, listening to you, looking at you, ready to serve and ready to be served. And as a resident V.I.P., it rates five-star treatment: gourmet meals, couture clothes, baths and foot-rubs on demand and, in the case of portable sculptures and paintings, regular fresh-air outings.
How do we know what makes gods happy? Because they’re like us. They’re pleasure-pusses. They’re moody. They’re conflicted.
They fall in and out of love. They act generous, then are withholding.
They preach peace but are usually armed to the teeth. They embark on big feel-good social projects, like creating the world, then have doubts, regrets, urges to trash their work and start again. We have every reason to approach them with wariness, mixed with love.
Love, ultimately, wins the day in the exhibition “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-Skinned Savior” at the Brooklyn Museum, though it takes a while to radiate its full devotional glow over a show that is gratifyingly large but also dauntingly crowded with ideas and information.
The basics are straightforwardly set out right at the start. Vishnu is one of a trio of male deities, along with Brahma and Shiva, who crown the populous Hindu pantheon. In theory all three are of equal stature, though visually they don’t usually come across that way.
Shiva is an indisputable star, thanks partly to some exceptional luck with branding. The sculptural image of him as a high-stepping dancer has always been, and for very good reason, a hit. Brahma, by contrast, has only the vaguest of visual profiles. There aren’t many images of him, or temples in his honor. His fan base even in India is small; his celebrity, what remains of it, is left over from antique times.
Purely in terms of power, Vishnu is every bit Shiva’s match, though again, appearances can be deceiving. In sculptures and paintings — and I’m simplifying here — Shiva tends to look active, Vishnu passive. Shiva creates new life by stamping up a storm; Vishnu does it by lying down in a milky sea. Even standing still, Shiva looks flexed and sexy, but the earliest images of Vishnu in the show give exactly the opposite impression.
A tiny, time-worn sandstone carving from the fourth century depicts Vishnu as a broad-shouldered, straight-legged figure with feet planted firmly on the ground. He seems to be holding a weapon by his side, though it might as well be a briefcase. This stolid model set the standard. We’re still seeing it in an 11th-century bronze, which finds Vishnu’s at-attention pose only slightly warmed by the presence, in miniature form, of his two doting consorts: the earth goddess Bhu Devi and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. (Both have devotees of their own, as manifestations of a fourth superpower, the great goddess Devi.)
At the same time, this foursquare image of divine authority — sturdy, balanced, preservative — is not the whole Vishnu story. Judeo-Christian tradition has one God. But in Hinduism multiplicity is the name of the spiritual game, and Vishnu has taken full advantage of this by descending to earth in several very different forms.
These forms or incarnations are referred to as avatars. The usual number given is 10, listed chronologically, as if in evolutionary order. He first materialized as a giant fish, then as a tortoise, then a wild boar, then half-human lion. Thereafter he took on fully human forms, as a dwarf named Vamana, a militant Brahmin named Parashurama, a warrior-prince named Rama, and a blue-skinned cowherd-playboy named Krishna.
In each case the avatar arrived to set an example of ethical living or to get the world out of a jam. That certainly was true of the Buddha, who is frequently identified as avatar No. 9. And it will no doubt be true of a final incarnation, which will materialize in the future to give aid and counsel when the terrible age we live in comes to its nasty end.
The whole avatar business is complicated and detailed. Each comes with its own set of stories and images, and the exhibition, conceived by Joan Cummins, curator of Asian art at the museum, as a kind of Vishnu primer, includes material related to all 10. This works fine for the early incarnations, for which there are few illustrations. The giant fish, Matsya, is depicted as a whale asleep on a lotus in carved relief and as Vishnu himself, with a fish tail, in an 18th-century painting, and that’s about it, and it’s enough.
In the cases of the later, hugely popular human avatars, the numbers of stories and corresponding images increase tenfold, and the galleries start to feel seriously overstuffed. Maybe the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, where the show originated, had lots of space to spare. But the material looks cramped in Brooklyn, and no one seems to have had the heart to cut anything out.
Understandably. If you love the sheer, exhilarating muchness of South Asian art you will savor everything here. At the same time, it’s easy to see that what’s plentitude to one eye can be confusion to another. With that in mind, I suggest that viewers new to this art do some editing of their own. After spending time among the early sculptures, several carved from sun-baked sandstone, at the beginning of the show, skip ahead to the sections near the end that focus on two avatars who are also major spiritual heartthrobs, Rama and Krishna.
Rama, hero of the “Ramayana,” is the model of a righteous prince. Wrongly banished from court by his father, he does not protest. Instead, along with his wife, Sita, and brother Lakshmana, he retires to the forest. There the three of them dress in leaves, live on nectar and create a Peaceable Kingdom that Indian artists never tire of painting.
Disaster strikes. Sita is kidnapped by the demon-king Ravana and rescue seems impossible, at least until another hero comes along: the monkey-soldier Hanuman, who flies, moves mountains and commands an army of apes and bears. Heaven-shaking battles ensue. Ravana is defeated; Sita and Rama are reunited; and Hanuman becomes their friend for life. In a watercolor from the late 19th- or 20th-century Bengal, he opens the skin of his chest to reveal the two of them sitting, side by side, in his heart.
If Rama is admired by devotees, Krishna is adored.
For his followers, Krishna is more than an avatar. He is God himself disguised in human forms, first as a precocious baby fond of swings and toys but who, his startled mother discovers, holds the cosmos in his mouth. Then he’s a hip-hopping toddler, then a flute-playing village hunk who has all the local dairymaids on a string. They rhapsodize about him: his dark eyes, his lustrous hair, his flawless blue skin. Swoon.
Why blue, by the way? Maybe because blue is the color of the ocean Vishnu sometimes rests on. Or because the coolness of blue is suited to his laid-back temperament. Or because blue is a color that no one else is, so it makes him extra special. There doesn’t seem to be any single logical reason.
But then logic has nothing to do with love, and love is, in the end, what Krishna — and by extension Vishnu — is mostly about. In some images the love is sensual, erotic: Krishna embraces his lover Radha in a grove; Lakshmi tenderly massages Vishnu’s feet. In others it is religious and devotional. In a 19th-century painting from Rajasthan in the show’s last gallery, two grave-looking temple priests, one holding an offering tray, the other a ceremonial fan, flank an image of Krishna so lovingly garlanded and bejeweled as to be all but abstract, a controlled explosion of jasmine buds and pearls, a wash of stars in a midnight-blue sky.
Once you’ve grasped the idea that love, that saving force, is the show’s true theme and have immersed yourself awhile in that thought, carry it back through the galleries. Look at everything through a lover’s eyes. Confusions may begin to lift. Wariness may begin to ebb. Images that the first time around seemed stiff and cold may start to feel warmed to life by energies coming from you don’t know where.
