Editorial Commentary

Abstract

Colonial Mexican art is the most difficult course I teach at University of California, Los Angeles, where I hold a split appointment in art history and Chicana/o and Central American studies. Every artwork and concept I present engages or potentially provokes contested assessments, fraught value judgements, and claims of political bias. It begins with the title of the course itself and extends to other terminology. Should this art be described as colonial, viceregal, or early modern? Were the events of 1519–21, culminating in the fall of Aztec Tenochtitlan to Cortés’s army, a conquest or invasion? How does one ethically teach art created in the service of forced religious conversion and colonization? My thoughts here represent some of my current views on this challenging historical period. At the same time, this editorial commentary is intended to be aspirational, to hold open space for my (and our) thinking to evolve and change.I am inspired by the increasing calls to decolonize and the growing popularity of the topic of decolonizing in talks, conferences, symposia, books, and articles. What does it mean for an art historian to decolonize, especially one working on colonial art? What are our ethical obligations as we study art and material culture that result from imposed European cultural, artistic, and linguistic norms? Does studying colonial art imply approval of colonial rule or sanctioning of the catastrophic events of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries in the Americas? How can a decolonial approach build on the decades of anticolonial scholarship in the field? This short essay examines these difficult questions, surveys some major threads of anticolonial and decolonial thought, considers historical responses to the quandary, and posits possible points of discussion. It builds on the previous Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture commentary by Associate Editor Emily A. Engel, focused on Andean art, “Collaboration and Exchange across the Study of Colonial South American Visual Culture.”1 My thinking is also inspired by my collaboration with Tatiana Flores and Florencia San Martín on our forthcoming coedited volume, Decolonizing Art History,2 and by my work in Chicanx studies. I envision my remarks here as a potential pedagogical tool, one that we may use in discussion with our students and each other as we forge new approaches to the study of colonial art. Is it possible to decolonize the study of colonial art?I understand decolonize to be drawn from “decolonial,” cognizant of “the coloniality of power,” to use Aníbal Quijano’s phrase, the idea that European social order, racial hierarchies, and ways of knowing imposed during the early modern era in the Americas live on and structure the world today.3 To put it another way, coloniality is “the ongoing propagation of knowledge and ideas to foster and cement the interest of the dominant.”4 Decolonial approaches are opposed to colonial ones and seek to upend coloniality. They challenge Eurocentrism and Eurocentric notions of universality; they make visible Foucault’s history of power as they perform what Walter Mignolo has called “epistemic disobedience,” a topic to which I will return. Decolonial approaches have a strong activist arm, rooted in the Indigenous rights movement, a key distinction, as we shall see, in contrast to anticolonial movements. In the words of Rutgers Professor Nelson Maldonado-Torres, the decolonial turn is a response to colonialism’s “radical, longstanding forms of systematic dehumanization.” It is “a project to undo the legacy of coloniality in every aspect of our existence including in knowledge, power, and being.”5Comprehending this body of theory is particularly important for those of us who work on the early modern era, or on what’s variously described as colonial or viceregal art and architecture.6 Our scholarly focus is on material culture created against the backdrop of European exploration, imperialism, and colonization. Maldonado-Torres reminds us that the Renaissance, hailed historically as a great efflorescence of western culture, coexisted with “metaphysical catastrophe”—the emergence of the notion that only some human beings were truly human. Others were deemed less than and therefore fit to be enslaved, killed, stripped of their dignity, culture, and right to self-rule.7 What Europeans think of as an era of great cultural flowering was, for the colonized, a period of violence, disease, demographic decline, and enslavement—the beginnings of “permanent struggle against death.”8 At the same time, though, and as many colonial art historians have demonstrated, the colonial era was, at times, and arguably for a select few, a period of artistic and cultural elaboration among Indigenous, Afro-descendant, mestizo and other mixed-race artists. Recently, in an article published in The Art Bulletin, Columbia Professor Alessandra Russo argued for greater acknowledgment of early modern European appreciation of artworks from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Her analysis, centered on the writings and career of Portuguese artist and art theorist Francisco de Holanda, suggests that a European notion of universality recognized and valued the cultural productions of the Other. Russo’s findings soften critiques of Eurocentrism, providing a more nuanced view.9What would it mean to write a decolonizing history of colonial art? What about an anticolonial art history? How do these approaches compare to and intersect with earlier work done in the field? In this next section I mention several examples of recent decolonizing or anticolonial scholarship. A preliminary caveat is in order: I only have the space to single out a few authors. Nonetheless, an impressive amount of scholarship has been committed to anticolonial work in the field, providing a backdrop to or path toward decolonizing. The two approaches, along with postcolonialism, are deeply interconnected. Anticolonialism, which grows out of postcolonialism, is dedicated to identifying and analyzing the persistent effects of imperial rule. Decoloniality, as we shall see, is the logical end result of anticolonial practices, “the path to a decolonial future.”10 To be anticolonial is to critique colonialism; arguably, the ultimate goal of decolonizing is the return of stolen Indigenous land to its rightful owners and the dissolution of European imperialist legacies. In other words, “Anti-colonial and decoloniality are intertwined logics.”11As I surveyed the long history of the study of colonial art of the Americas, numerous examples of scholarship surfaced that imply a proto-decolonizing impulse or prescient (if undeveloped) attempt to decolonize art history. I identify these threads below to demonstrate the importance of past anticolonial work and to inspire future development of the arts of the Americas. Given my subfield expertise, I focus on colonial Mexico. For an outstanding article on the Andes, one that foregrounds Indigenous makers, see Cornell Professor Ananda Cohen-Aponte’s recent essay, “Forging a Popular Art History: Indigenismo and the Art of Colonial Peru.”12The rise of the study of colonial art itself may be an early manifestation of what would later become an anticolonial or decolonizing art history. As a subfield, colonial art was a latecomer to Latin American art history, not emerging as a distinct subject in the United States until the years surrounding 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Pre-Columbian art was the first subfield to emerge in the 1920s–1940s, flourishing in the sixties and seventies. Modern art followed, appearing after the Latin American Boom of the sixties and seventies. Although not popular until after 1992, a number of key early initiatives in the study of colonial art took place decades earlier in Spain and Mexico. In 1925, Spanish scholar Diego Angulo assumed the first chair in Hispano-American art at the University of Seville. Initial developments in Mexico dated to the 1930s, inspired by precedents in Seville. In 1936, Manuel Toussaint, a foundational figure in the establishment of Mexican art history, sponsored a chair in the study of colonial art at la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. While the chair at UNAM was founded in imitation of the previous one at the University of Seville, and one could argue that the early study of colonial art in Mexico was modeled on scholarship in Spain, colonial art history in Mexico would follow its own unique development.13Early valorization of colonial art also manifests in the various debates, going back decades and still current today, over nomenclature and style labels. Consideration of Indigenous influences was a concern of Alfred Neumeyer, Harold Wethey, José Moreno Villa, and Diego Angulo in the 1940s, as well as George Kubler in the 1960s, all of whom attempted to identify and analyze Indigenous artists or influences in the art of colonial Mexico. Viewed with a spirit of generosity, these various attempts could be interpreted as prescient forms of decoloniality in their approaches. Such scholarship proceeds from an implicit assumption that the imposition of European cultural and artistic norms was oppressive or problematic, and thus it was dedicated to uncovering, re-identifying, and discovering Indigenous artists and influences. And while there is much to criticize in this earlier scholarship—racialized descriptions, patronizing tone, nomenclature that looks offensive to us today—such scholarship seems to respond to the basic premise of decolonial theory, namely, that “colonialism” is “a fundamental problem.”14 Allow me to cite a more current example of such work: Elena FitzPatrick Sifford's recent article on the first depictions of Africans in Mexican art. In this groundbreaking piece, Sifford FitzPatrick focuses on the presence of Africans in sixteenth-century Indigenous manuscripts in Mexico, even suggesting the possibility of Black-Brown alliances in the face of European oppression in viceregal Mexico City.15 Important contributions by other scholars who work on Afro-descendant cultural traditions in the Americas also come to mind, including work by Cécile Fromont, Natalia Majluf, and the late Linda Rodriguez.16Do the arts have a special role to play in decolonizing projects? What we know of colonial art seems to suggest so. About literature and art, Maldonado Torres writes, they “can also lead to their critical interrogation and to the expression of forms of perceiving, feeling, and imagining that challenge the norm and its hierarchies.” Indeed, visual arts “can seek to legitimate, question, or challenge the general apprehension of Being and the normative forms of time, space, and subjectivity in any given worldview, civilization system, or social order.” He considers art created by colonized subjects “an extension and expression of the embodied subject.…” Such art questions the status quo and can lead to “counter-catastrophic creative attitudes.”17Maldonado-Torres singles out for study colonial art in which we detect agency on the part of colonized subjects. Various important examples of this type of scholarship come to mind, such as investigations into the elaboration of Indigenous iconographies or styles in sixteenth-century manuscripts or murals, work on religious art that attempts to discern Native agency, and recent research into materiality.18 One could argue that Afro-descendant Mexican artist Juan Correa, one of the most rigorously studied colonial artists in the Americas, is the type of “embodied subject” that Maldonado-Torres had in mind.19 Arguably, Correa’s inclusion of angelitos of color, a hallmark of his sacred art, as seen in his painting of The Christ Child with Musical Angels of circa 1690s to 1700 (fig. 1), could be understood as an example of an embodied colonial subject questioning normative forms of sacred art, which typically featured only European angelitos, and perhaps even normative notions of the sacred. Such an understanding would enrich what we know of this unique painting, a probable fragment of a larger work and an outstanding example of the late baroque in Mexico.Cohen-Aponte employs a consciously decolonizing approach in her recent groundbreaking article, “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance.”20 It is one of the very first colonial art historical studies to broach decoloniality explicitly. In it she reminds us to consider European art in the Americas as an imposed tradition and not simply in terms of artistic influence—an important contribution to our field. She writes, “By framing the act of artistic exchange as one of reception rather than imposition, we risk reaffirming a discovery-centered approach to artistic production generated under colonial rule.”21 Her caution also brings to mind scholarship that focuses on the originality of art created in the early modern or viceregal Americas, that is, scholarship that goes beyond seeing this art as a reflection of European ideals or influences. I attempted this approach in my recent essay on enconchados, hybrid works that combine oil painting and shell mosaic, a genre that traces back to Asian influences. Recent work has emphasized the novel transformation of these nourishing sources, arguing for the unique status of enconchados as a creation of Mexican colonial artists.22Some of the most exciting work in this vein can be found in Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Ilona Katzew’s magisterial exhibition publications. Her recent catalog on Mexican colonial art, Pinxit Mexici, created in conjunction with the internationally touring exhibition of 2017–18, is foundational for the study of the eighteenth century and establishes the innovation of Mexican painters.23 Her blockbuster casta painting show in 2004 was the first comprehensive exhibition of racial caste paintings. Her accompanying book provided the most extensive documentation to date of these intriguing paintings.24 Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, mounted in 2011–12 at LACMA, was the very first large-scale show to consider Indigenous contributions to Mexican colonial art after the sixteenth century.25As I cite these various examples identifying what I think are proto-decolonizing gestures or anticolonial strategies in the study of colonial Latin American art, I am keenly aware of the ways in which we have failed in this endeavor as art historians. Scholarship that valorizes the Spanish monarchy or Catholic Church in uncritical, wholly positive tones comes to mind, as does work that ignores Native voices and living traditions today. The recent LALVC Dialogues focused on the California missions reacts to this conservative mindset, attempting to articulate a “critical mission studies” that foregrounds Indigenous voices.26 By considering all possible recoverable facts, we present a truer history. This is important even if in the process we come face to face with beautiful artworks used in the name of evil and oppression.These challenges notwithstanding, decolonial theorists remind us of the importance of visual culture, which has the potential to play a special role in decolonizing the humanities. Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusanqui, who has elaborated on her theory of the “sociology of the image,” has argued for the particular power of images to unmask or reveal ideas hidden by official censorship in textual sources. “Words do not signify, but instead conceal,” she writes.27 Public discourse, in her mind, has been converted into “forms of not saying.”28 Images, in contrast, have the potential to reveal: “images have allowed me to discover meanings uncensored by official language.”29 Professor of ethnic studies Laura E. Pérez, writing about contemporary Latina art, makes the following observation, which I easily imagine at work in past centuries: “The arts are among the most valuable laboratories for creating relevant new forms of thoughts often signaled by aesthetic innovations in their own nonverbal form.”30It is the valorization of the visual, as theorized by Rivera Cusanqui, Maldonado-Torres, and Pérez, that inspires my own work on colonial art. I combine their assessment of the particular power of the visual with Mignolo’s idea of epistemic disobedience, mentioned earlier in this essay.31 For me, epistemic disobedience provides a path forward—one that crosses temporal and geographic boundaries. The various strategies of epistemic disobedience allow us to think about colonial and Iberian art in the global world and to bring the tools of the contemporary world to bear on the past.Mignolo elaborates “epistemic disobedience” from postcolonial theorist Gayatrí Chakravorty Spivak’s “epistemic violence,” which was articulated in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”32 According to Spivak (and others, such as Edward Said), the subaltern, defined as former colonial subjects, are othered and silenced by Eurocentric discourse. The danger of this discourse is that it’s cloaked as universalizing. Mignolo’s call for epistemic disobedience is particularly useful in this situation. Epistemic disobedience encourages us to question the universalizing claims of Eurocentrism. It fosters intellectual rebellion against accepted discourse about the Renaissance.33 Which histories are authorized and who is empowered to narrate them? Personally, I find it helpful to unsettle art historical assumptions that some art is of higher quality than others, or that we should respect national or chronological borders. It frees me to use Chicanx studies to think about the colonial period and to bring the tools of investigating the past, such as archival work or iconography, to contemporary art. It is this approach to art history, one that dares to inquire into art history’s history, its discourse, its hidden biases and agendas, that I believe in, and that I believe has the power to transform not just the academy, but our everyday lives. And it’s this approach that I bring to my mentoring at the graduate and undergraduate levels. At UCLA I am fortunate to have advised (or co-advised) eleven dissertations, with ten more in process at the moment, as well as more than thirty undergraduate honors theses, including a number by students who went on to graduate work elsewhere.I have left to the end a discussion of one of the most important and most challenging articles on decoloniality, Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.”34 The goal of their essay is to critique metaphorical uses of the verb decolonize in order to assert the primary objective of decolonization in the context of settler colonialism—nothing short of “the repatriation of land.”35 Their argument is provocative because it argues that metaphorical uses of the term, as in, I imagine, art history, help foster “a set of evasions” designed to assuage “settler guilt” and ensure “settler futurity.”36 In fact, they liken the use of decolonize as a metaphor to appropriation of Native culture.37 The danger of using the term metaphorically or loosely to suggest or include more general forms of oppression is that it permits “a set of evasions” or “move[s] to innocence” that distract from the necessity of returning stolen land.38 Their insistence on the return of Indigenous lands and their identification of strategies of evasion give me pause. Are art historical attempts to recover and recognize Indigenous art, particularly during the colonial period, fancy ways of “playing Indian,” to borrow the authors’ words?39 What about the continuity, rupture, and development of Indigenous visual traditions or art that issues from rebellion or resistance?I also find useful and thought-provoking Tuck and Yang’s distinction between anticolonial and decolonizing frameworks. They clearly establish the former’s roots in postcolonialism: “anti-colonial critique often celebrates empowered postcolonial subjects who seize denied privileges from the metropole.” While a capacious understanding of these various approaches interprets anticolonial strategies as moving toward the decolonial, they note that neither anti- nor postcolonial strategies are designed to “undo settler colonialism,” but instead function “to remake it and subvert it.”40These are concerns worth discussing, returning to, and debating. How can art history center Native voices? How can we connect the aims of our scholarship to our actions in daily life? For me, I look outside of art history for inspiration, to ethnic studies. UC Berkeley Professor Laura E. Pérez reminds me that so far, the traditional tools of art history have not been a useful way to decolonize. To extrapolate from her observations about contemporary Latina art,41 Eurocentric perspectives work well for European art, but do they work for colonial? In fact, colonial art is uniquely poised to interrogate and critique Eurocentric perspectives in art history. Another Chicana theorist, Emma Pérez, writing about creating new Chicana-centered social histories, reminds us that when recovering subjugated histories we should be cautious about replicating, copying, and duplicating western models and tools.42 For me, decolonization remains a goal, a process, something to support and work toward. Anticolonial outlooks can function as “the path to a decolonial future,”43 but the key difference between these two is important to remember: decoloniality centers on Indigeneity.As I look at past and recent scholarship, my impression is that the subfield of colonial art history is poised for major changes. I am inspired by scholarship that attempts to center Indigenous voices and identify the agency of past viewers and creators. Scholars whose work discerns and documents influences from the Americas traveling back to transform Europe, a strategy inspired by postcolonialism, those who look for the global nature of colonial cultural production or suggest the originality of New World artistic practices, are all engaged in important anticolonial work, steps on the path toward decolonizing. One could even position debates over terminology—viceregal, colonial, early modern—in this realm. The same applies to debate over the legacies of postcolonialism or attempts to describe an anticolonial approach. Admittedly, it is difficult to separate out anticolonial from decolonial, concepts that exist on a continuum because of their intertwined goals. Is there more work to do? Unequivocally, yes. But the early steps are there, leading us toward new paths in the study of colonial art.